that is, binary releases of software are covered by copyright also, not just source code. If this were not the case, I could see that copyright would be inadequate IP protection.
You're right, I did in fact misstate things while I wrote that particular statement. But of course I am and have been aware that "software" does enjoy copyright protections. Earlier, I was trying to goad the "dude" into explaining to me why a copyright is inherently better for the software industry than a patent. It would have been fun to watch him struggle, because the fact is you need both copyright and patent protections.
The patent protects the functionality of the software, among other things. That's why if you're into cloning known applications, attaching viral hippy licenses to what you've created, and then giving it away for free, you're against software patents. They are very real, very legal obstacles to your pulling that kind of crap at the expense of the original inventors.
Copyright has nothing to do with anything. The copyright and licensing restrictions are what makes it a crime to illegally duplicate and distribute the software. You seriously don't see the difference? It's stealing the actual software (copyrights) vs. stealing the functionality of the software (patents). If the article discussed software piracy, then software copyrights would have far more to do with this. Whoops!
So back to this question: What is wrong with trying to make certain free software that already infringes on legitimate patents more compliant--either through getting the blessing of patent holders or removing the infringing elements? Because that's now on the long list of things that RMS is against.
You've got to do better than that. I'm aware of copyrights. But this conversation, the article posting, and--fuck--pretty much everything everyone has been talking about has related to software patents. Read my original post, read the article, and just exercise some common sense. We're not talking about copyrighted source code, jackass. But thanks a ton for mentioning something that has nothing to do with anything. Hey, you know what? Trademarks constitute intellectual property, too. Let's talk about that for a while. "Coca Cola." Discuss.
Why shouldn't software be patentable? Because it's a patent on math, the fundamental language of the universe.
Sorry, Donald in Mathmagic Land, but your appeal to grandiose concepts has no place in this. You just argued absolutely nothing, and got modded up for it. Everything in the universe can be reduced to simpler elements that by themselves seem to defy property labels. Why have drug patents, when we're just talking about molecular interactions in the human body? Hey, why have patents on a new anything, anyway, when all we're talking about is how a bunch of atoms interact with other atoms?
You see how useless that is? It's just the same slippery slope idealistic nonsense that short-sighted beard-and-glasses wonks like Stallman pretend has some merit.
I admit it's a weird setup, but it's a carry-over from my days of playing games with the computer arrow keys, before mice for gaming were commonplace. Everything else for twitch gaming just feels too weird. So imagine this on a typical keyboard:
Forward - Up Arrow Key Back - Down Arrow Key Left - Left Arrow Key Right - Right Arrow Key Left Strafe - Right Control Key Right Strafe - Keypad 0 (Insert) Key Jump - Right Shift Crouch - Enter Key Weapon/Action - Delete Key Weapon/Action - End Weapon/Action - Page Down...
You get the idea. And the mouse in the left hand is used for aiming and firing. I'm quite tall with long fingers and big man-hands, so straddling the arrow keys with my right palm and using my right thumb and pinky finger to strafe really isn't too hard. It feels natural to me, and works pretty well. My Quake 2fort5 skills are legendary to this day.;)
Is this the best that./ can do to debate this issue?
him being opposed to software patents, not "intellectual property"
So according to you, RMS believes that a software inventor has intellectual property, but should have no right to legally protect it? And you actually believe that sums up his position? Give Stallman a little more credit than that. I said he was wrong about this particular issue, and that he views it in terms of absolutes. But you'd rather just insult the guy. According to you, he's fucking stupid. Dude.
That's just ignorant. Patents aren't meant to make inventors money in the first place. All a patent does is legally estop others from profiting from an inventor's idea.
I am right-handed but play FPS games with the mouse in my left hand. It's not hard, it's just a learned behavior. It must have taken me about 20 minutes to get used to it. So is that what you're lamenting? That you have to spend a little bit of extra time getting comfortable with something? Oh boo hoo, cry me a river. You lefties make me sick.
Wait, did you say no left-handed guns? Well easy there, lefty. Let's not get excited here. How about a drink, on me?
No, RMS is right about this only if you have no interest in profiting from the things you create, ever, or in benefiting from technological innovations in general.
The one thing RMS does--his one useful function--is to appropriate good legal arguments and twist them into idealized rhetoric commensurate with his own agenda. In that respect, he's an ideal advocate and leader. But look what just happened here. Look beyond the years of./ zombie mind control that have taught you to accept what this walking beard-and-glasses says without question. Read the article carefully and look what RMS just did: He was on a roll, pointing out that OSDL can undermine a future prior art-based legal defense to patent infringement. He gives some great reasons why, chief among them that judges tend to be dismissive of prior art that was already considered when a patent was granted. Worse, when the patent is granted, prior art is interpreted weakly. So far, so good!
But then he goes on to decry efforts to actually make free software that already infringes upon good, valid patents more compliant. Say what? Let's not forget here that idealism is not a legal argument, and that certain free software projects of dubious legality are already in danger of having the rug pulled out from under them by legitimate patent holders. Should that happen, it would irreparably harm Stallman's movement.
I'm just baffled. Why would helping to ensure a future for free software as a legal product be all that bad, unless you really believe deep down that it's impossible to have good, free software out there that doesn't steal from others?
Then Stallman drops the bombshell: he doesn't believe a software developer should have any right to protect its intellectual property in the first place. Whoops! And with one fell statement, Stallman alienates those he is trying to appeal to. He polarizes. The IBM's, the Microsofts of the world see that it's not that Stallman wants to help them realize a tenable software patent system that works for everyone. No, he would rather no system existed at all--even though some random guy who creates an innovative way of searching XML files has just as much a right to patent his idea as Edison did the light bulb. Is this reaching across the aisle? RMS has just told us all in no uncertain terms that he doesn't believe in compromise. And we will all suffer him for it.
You make some great points. We're all different, of course, but the idealistic view is that college really is and should be more than just a white collar trade school--that students should be there because they want to learn, and that there is some ineffable aspect to the college experience that a student misses out on by zooming through the coursework. At the very least, a more prolonged collegiate experience where this kid could have socialized with people who are actually in his age group would have given him some valuable interpersonal and communication skills. And I'm not saying you've got to have the "Animal House" experience when you're at college, but a tiny bit of alcohol-fueled creative mischief might have done this kid wonders.
The article is scarce on details, but let me just imagine what he is instead:
A socially awkward freak, propped up by overbearing parents living vicariously through him and hell-bent on forcing more and more responsibility upon him; he's uncomfortable talking to others about anything that doesn't involve the course material, or his long-term academic goals; physically small, a wallflower who was absolutely oblivious to the strange looks he got from classmates...
No thanks. I wouldn't put a kid through something like that, not a son who I loved and cared for. I look at these so-called child geniuses, pressed into action by their weirdo money-obsessed parents, and I just think "tsk, tsk." This poor kid just rocketed through what could have been a very fun and rewarding collegiate experience, and time will prove out how lacking his life will be as a consequence.
One of you is vehemently arguing oranges...ORANGES! The other is scolding you for not using apples.
Just give up fighting and let the LaTex nerds have their due. You've got to understand that they firmly believe that their software is ideal for every single possible application out there, instead of just good for a few specific things (i.e. Tex with math formulas is amazing).
Me? It kind of creeps me out to embed symbols in text that's going to be put to a page, because it takes me back to the dark days of using Perfect Writer. WYSIWYG writing is an absolute godsend for me, but I certainly don't use it for everything. I'm a published fiction writer myself, and these days I use FreeMind for fiction writing. I find that it really helps to take me from the brainstorming phases to the first key pages pretty easily. It's an invaluable tool for any kind of writer, and it can be whatever you want it to be--an outlining tool, a planning aid, etc. You might want to check it out.:)
No, we're all evil. The bad ones are just the ones who get caught. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a fist full of client's trust money and a hot tip on a horse.
Anyways, I finished law school in just two years (it's usually a 3-year program) and thought I was pretty hot shit. I've got nothing on this kid though.
Your only hope would be to find a non-CardBus PCMCIA card on eBay, assuming they were even made, or else just replace the hard drive with something roomier. Assuming you can handle any potential size limitations in the laptop's BIOS, option 2 would really be your best bet. You would then have something that you could install in any future laptop you get.
I'm always baffled by the contention that Gentoo "teaches you Linux." In a time when most hardware is automatically detected by the kernel and automatically configured by the distro (including Gentoo, if you set it up that way), there really isn't nearly as much necessary config file editing as there used to be. Are you talking about trying to learn where your program and configuration files are on your root partition? Well, emerging something surely won't help you there. Could you mean the installer teaches you Linux? Because all you're basically doing is un-tarring a stage tarball, chrooting, and then making mild modifications to a few files. And regardless, you're (hopefully) just typing in what you were instructed to type, when you were instructed to type it. Then you're done. How could that have taught you a thing?
I don't want to be reductive here, but Gentoo is really just a platform for building programs from source code and then managing those programs after they are built. There's no mystery to it--most of the other distros install binaries that were compiled on other computers but that work perfectly well on yours. The only thing that is even mildly instructive about Gentoo is that you have an often extremely limited ability to control how you want your own binaries to be built by changing USE flags and compiler optimizations. But that's not going to teach you much in the end: Sure, that one application you just emerged has "jpeg", "png", and "tiff" USE flags. But you know, that's probably because it's an ACDsee-clone image viewing app. And one the program is installed, what then? You just use it the same way you would on an Ubuntu machine.
I guess what I'm saying is that Ubuntu and Gentoo really aren't that different from each other, and your learning experience with Linux is in no way diminished or enhanced based on the distribution you use. Besides, once you emerge gdm and gnome and make your wallpaper a picture of a bunch of multiracial people getting naked or holding their hands and singing kumbayah, you're pretty much there already.;-)
And yes, before your panties get in a bunch, I am a Gentoo user, mostly because I like how it's basically Slackware with a package management system...(sorry Patrick!)
I've been using Linux for at least 14 years, running all kinds of distros ranging from the Slackware 3.x series to Red Hat to Mandrake to Debian to you name it.
I've been using Gentoo since the 2005.0 release (over a year), and I've been incredibly happy with it--it's fast as hell and solid as a rock. But I can tell you that being able to use and administrate a Linux box does not adequately prepare you for installing Gentoo for the first time, and maybe not even the second or third time. In fact, your prior Linux knowledge can even be a weakness: If you are a person who is in the habit of skimming page after page of instructions and just "winging it" using what you already know, then you will not be able to install Gentoo. It sounds like that's exactly what happened to the author, and as others have pointed out, he just gave up rather than solve the problems he was having. He didn't even bother to search forums.gentoo.org, which is by far the best resource for Gentoo-related problems around.
I did get a chuckle when the author tried to establish his Linux cred for the purpose of trying to make Gentoo seem like this obtuse, impossible-to-install piece of garbage. It sounds like the author's level of expertise extends no further than being able to *install* a bunch of Linux distributions, which hardly counts for much these days. In the past couple of years, installing certain Linux distros has become the easiest thing about Linux. It's gotten to the point where you basically just decide on a partitioning scheme and the installer does everything else, including all of the configuration. It's idiot proof. I've honestly had more drama trying to install Windows variants on weird hardware than I've had trying to install Linux.
This guy failed because Gentoo has a different philosophy than many other Linux distributions. The emphasis was never on pandering to users who want the installation to be easy--it's on making using and administrating your computer as easy as possible. The "installer" has always consisted of you sitting there manually copying over files before you chroot into/mnt/gentoo, then waiting literally days before you had X11 and an office suite and window manager installed. But Gentoo users will be the first to tell you that you only have to install once, then the pain is over.
Portage is great, but there are other Gentoo features that to me are just as interesting. For instance, if you're a developer, and you want to do something really out there such as install 12 different Java compilers on the same Gentoo install, you certainly can. On other distributions, your odds of running into dependency or environment variable problems would be pretty high. But with Gentoo, you can just eselect which Java 1.4 or 1.5 compiler you want to use to compile something, on the fly, and your 12 different Java installs can live happily on the same box. *That's* the kind of thing that Gentoo helps you do. If you're new to Linux, welcome! We're glad you came. But you might want to shy away from one of the most notoriously difficult to install distributions for now, unless your sole aim is to write a trite article about how difficult it was to install.
Personal anecdote:
I was recently faced with the choice of upgrading the libc, compiler, and X server (i.e. basically everything) on my main box to major newer versions. I decided it would actually be faster and more hassle-free to just nuke my root partition and install Gentoo 2006.1. It was a breeze, mostly because stage 1 and stage 2 installs appear to have been done away with in the newest release--you have no choice but to do a stage 3 install like a weinie.
It was simple for another reason, also. I had some common sense. If you're installing a new flavor of Linux on the same machine, the same hardware where you have already installed Linux before, you would have to be crazy not to recycle your xorg.conf,/etc/profile,/etc/fstab, etc. files. I guess tha
No, but you're close. "Zero day" is a term of art in the warez and virus writing communities. Here it just means that the exploit was released the same day as information about the vulnerability.
Well, I shouldn't have to point *this* out, you arrogant asshole, but my point was simply that you need broadband to use this, and that that might pose a problem to some people. That's not an argument, genius, that's an observation.
Nevertheless, you chose to wipe the Cheetos dust off of your deformed paws so that you could peck out a pithy reply to my innocent observation. Your answer (and indeed everyone else's answer to this ) was that it just couldn't possibly be true that someone could own a console system *without* a broadband connection. Surely I must just be a liar or a crazy person, what with my merely observing that that could be an issue. One guy even offered up that this couldn't possibly be a problem for others because he himself had a broadband connection in his living room, as though his personal circumstances have anything to do with anything.
Your own claim is that this could never be a problem because "gamers have a 'broadband attach rate' that's higher than the general population," whatever that's supposed to mean. You offer no evidence, no citations to your made-up statistical hunch--nothing. You have nothing to offer us except for this completely unfounded assumption that nobody exists on this planet who has *just* a console system, or could even own a PS3 without also being a broadband subscriber, such that wanting to run this software but being unable to would be an issue for them. I suppose everyone in every country also owns their own personal computer, too, to go along with their own broadband connection? Welcome to Delusion.
The one thing you seemed to intimate that isn't just totally ridiculous is this: The financial barrier to entry for the PS3 is going to make it a high-tech toy only for the privileged--that is, people who could probably afford broadband anyway. But even then, I just stated that point a lot better than you did anyway, huh? I shouldn't have to point this out, but statistics show that that's the case.
Was that an intended pun? The Cell processor will soon be processing cellular structures. Yay!
Seriously, does *everyone* network their console? Because that's usually how these distributed clients work--they download whatever information they need, go to work on it, and then upload the results. So apparently this is only for people who have connected their PS3 to the internet in some fashion? We're not exactly at the point where everybody around can plug a cat-5 cable into something to get broadband, so it seems that this distributed application is only for a subset of PS3 users. Kind of a shame.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because Microsoft's been sued so much, words that sound close to "judicial" are creeping into their docs ;)
Misspelled, hollow agreement with Stallman's idealism -- +5 Insightful
Divergent opinions that question Stallman's absolutism -- -1, Troll
You're right, I did in fact misstate things while I wrote that particular statement. But of course I am and have been aware that "software" does enjoy copyright protections. Earlier, I was trying to goad the "dude" into explaining to me why a copyright is inherently better for the software industry than a patent. It would have been fun to watch him struggle, because the fact is you need both copyright and patent protections.
The patent protects the functionality of the software, among other things. That's why if you're into cloning known applications, attaching viral hippy licenses to what you've created, and then giving it away for free, you're against software patents. They are very real, very legal obstacles to your pulling that kind of crap at the expense of the original inventors.
Copyright has nothing to do with anything. The copyright and licensing restrictions are what makes it a crime to illegally duplicate and distribute the software. You seriously don't see the difference? It's stealing the actual software (copyrights) vs. stealing the functionality of the software (patents). If the article discussed software piracy, then software copyrights would have far more to do with this. Whoops!
So back to this question: What is wrong with trying to make certain free software that already infringes on legitimate patents more compliant--either through getting the blessing of patent holders or removing the infringing elements? Because that's now on the long list of things that RMS is against.
You've got to do better than that. I'm aware of copyrights. But this conversation, the article posting, and--fuck--pretty much everything everyone has been talking about has related to software patents. Read my original post, read the article, and just exercise some common sense. We're not talking about copyrighted source code, jackass. But thanks a ton for mentioning something that has nothing to do with anything. Hey, you know what? Trademarks constitute intellectual property, too. Let's talk about that for a while. "Coca Cola." Discuss.
in case you need parts later!
Sorry, Donald in Mathmagic Land, but your appeal to grandiose concepts has no place in this. You just argued absolutely nothing, and got modded up for it. Everything in the universe can be reduced to simpler elements that by themselves seem to defy property labels. Why have drug patents, when we're just talking about molecular interactions in the human body? Hey, why have patents on a new anything, anyway, when all we're talking about is how a bunch of atoms interact with other atoms?
You see how useless that is? It's just the same slippery slope idealistic nonsense that short-sighted beard-and-glasses wonks like Stallman pretend has some merit.
I admit it's a weird setup, but it's a carry-over from my days of playing games with the computer arrow keys, before mice for gaming were commonplace. Everything else for twitch gaming just feels too weird. So imagine this on a typical keyboard:
;)
Forward - Up Arrow Key
Back - Down Arrow Key
Left - Left Arrow Key
Right - Right Arrow Key
Left Strafe - Right Control Key
Right Strafe - Keypad 0 (Insert) Key
Jump - Right Shift
Crouch - Enter Key
Weapon/Action - Delete Key
Weapon/Action - End
Weapon/Action - Page Down...
You get the idea. And the mouse in the left hand is used for aiming and firing. I'm quite tall with long fingers and big man-hands, so straddling the arrow keys with my right palm and using my right thumb and pinky finger to strafe really isn't too hard. It feels natural to me, and works pretty well. My Quake 2fort5 skills are legendary to this day.
So according to you, RMS believes that a software inventor has intellectual property, but should have no right to legally protect it? And you actually believe that sums up his position? Give Stallman a little more credit than that. I said he was wrong about this particular issue, and that he views it in terms of absolutes. But you'd rather just insult the guy. According to you, he's fucking stupid. Dude.
Yeah that is a strange metric to use. So I guess this is smaller than a bread box?
That's just ignorant. Patents aren't meant to make inventors money in the first place. All a patent does is legally estop others from profiting from an inventor's idea.
I am right-handed but play FPS games with the mouse in my left hand. It's not hard, it's just a learned behavior. It must have taken me about 20 minutes to get used to it. So is that what you're lamenting? That you have to spend a little bit of extra time getting comfortable with something? Oh boo hoo, cry me a river. You lefties make me sick.
Wait, did you say no left-handed guns? Well easy there, lefty. Let's not get excited here. How about a drink, on me?
I split the difference and weep for the Presidency.
Disclaimer: IAAL, but not a patent lawyer.
./ zombie mind control that have taught you to accept what this walking beard-and-glasses says without question. Read the article carefully and look what RMS just did: He was on a roll, pointing out that OSDL can undermine a future prior art-based legal defense to patent infringement. He gives some great reasons why, chief among them that judges tend to be dismissive of prior art that was already considered when a patent was granted. Worse, when the patent is granted, prior art is interpreted weakly. So far, so good!
No, RMS is right about this only if you have no interest in profiting from the things you create, ever, or in benefiting from technological innovations in general.
The one thing RMS does--his one useful function--is to appropriate good legal arguments and twist them into idealized rhetoric commensurate with his own agenda. In that respect, he's an ideal advocate and leader. But look what just happened here. Look beyond the years of
But then he goes on to decry efforts to actually make free software that already infringes upon good, valid patents more compliant. Say what? Let's not forget here that idealism is not a legal argument, and that certain free software projects of dubious legality are already in danger of having the rug pulled out from under them by legitimate patent holders. Should that happen, it would irreparably harm Stallman's movement.
I'm just baffled. Why would helping to ensure a future for free software as a legal product be all that bad, unless you really believe deep down that it's impossible to have good, free software out there that doesn't steal from others?
Then Stallman drops the bombshell: he doesn't believe a software developer should have any right to protect its intellectual property in the first place. Whoops! And with one fell statement, Stallman alienates those he is trying to appeal to. He polarizes. The IBM's, the Microsofts of the world see that it's not that Stallman wants to help them realize a tenable software patent system that works for everyone. No, he would rather no system existed at all--even though some random guy who creates an innovative way of searching XML files has just as much a right to patent his idea as Edison did the light bulb. Is this reaching across the aisle? RMS has just told us all in no uncertain terms that he doesn't believe in compromise. And we will all suffer him for it.
You make some great points. We're all different, of course, but the idealistic view is that college really is and should be more than just a white collar trade school--that students should be there because they want to learn, and that there is some ineffable aspect to the college experience that a student misses out on by zooming through the coursework. At the very least, a more prolonged collegiate experience where this kid could have socialized with people who are actually in his age group would have given him some valuable interpersonal and communication skills. And I'm not saying you've got to have the "Animal House" experience when you're at college, but a tiny bit of alcohol-fueled creative mischief might have done this kid wonders.
The article is scarce on details, but let me just imagine what he is instead:
A socially awkward freak, propped up by overbearing parents living vicariously through him and hell-bent on forcing more and more responsibility upon him; he's uncomfortable talking to others about anything that doesn't involve the course material, or his long-term academic goals; physically small, a wallflower who was absolutely oblivious to the strange looks he got from classmates...
No thanks. I wouldn't put a kid through something like that, not a son who I loved and cared for. I look at these so-called child geniuses, pressed into action by their weirdo money-obsessed parents, and I just think "tsk, tsk." This poor kid just rocketed through what could have been a very fun and rewarding collegiate experience, and time will prove out how lacking his life will be as a consequence.
One of you is vehemently arguing oranges...ORANGES! The other is scolding you for not using apples.
:)
Just give up fighting and let the LaTex nerds have their due. You've got to understand that they firmly believe that their software is ideal for every single possible application out there, instead of just good for a few specific things (i.e. Tex with math formulas is amazing).
Me? It kind of creeps me out to embed symbols in text that's going to be put to a page, because it takes me back to the dark days of using Perfect Writer. WYSIWYG writing is an absolute godsend for me, but I certainly don't use it for everything. I'm a published fiction writer myself, and these days I use FreeMind for fiction writing. I find that it really helps to take me from the brainstorming phases to the first key pages pretty easily. It's an invaluable tool for any kind of writer, and it can be whatever you want it to be--an outlining tool, a planning aid, etc. You might want to check it out.
No, we're all evil. The bad ones are just the ones who get caught. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a fist full of client's trust money and a hot tip on a horse.
Anyways, I finished law school in just two years (it's usually a 3-year program) and thought I was pretty hot shit. I've got nothing on this kid though.
Your only hope would be to find a non-CardBus PCMCIA card on eBay, assuming they were even made, or else just replace the hard drive with something roomier. Assuming you can handle any potential size limitations in the laptop's BIOS, option 2 would really be your best bet. You would then have something that you could install in any future laptop you get.
They'll just screw up their Gentoo installations and then write all these articles about it.
I'm always baffled by the contention that Gentoo "teaches you Linux." In a time when most hardware is automatically detected by the kernel and automatically configured by the distro (including Gentoo, if you set it up that way), there really isn't nearly as much necessary config file editing as there used to be. Are you talking about trying to learn where your program and configuration files are on your root partition? Well, emerging something surely won't help you there. Could you mean the installer teaches you Linux? Because all you're basically doing is un-tarring a stage tarball, chrooting, and then making mild modifications to a few files. And regardless, you're (hopefully) just typing in what you were instructed to type, when you were instructed to type it. Then you're done. How could that have taught you a thing?
;-)
I don't want to be reductive here, but Gentoo is really just a platform for building programs from source code and then managing those programs after they are built. There's no mystery to it--most of the other distros install binaries that were compiled on other computers but that work perfectly well on yours. The only thing that is even mildly instructive about Gentoo is that you have an often extremely limited ability to control how you want your own binaries to be built by changing USE flags and compiler optimizations. But that's not going to teach you much in the end: Sure, that one application you just emerged has "jpeg", "png", and "tiff" USE flags. But you know, that's probably because it's an ACDsee-clone image viewing app. And one the program is installed, what then? You just use it the same way you would on an Ubuntu machine.
I guess what I'm saying is that Ubuntu and Gentoo really aren't that different from each other, and your learning experience with Linux is in no way diminished or enhanced based on the distribution you use. Besides, once you emerge gdm and gnome and make your wallpaper a picture of a bunch of multiracial people getting naked or holding their hands and singing kumbayah, you're pretty much there already.
And yes, before your panties get in a bunch, I am a Gentoo user, mostly because I like how it's basically Slackware with a package management system...(sorry Patrick!)
Almost did a spit-take @ fair-trade coffee houses
This AC is a genius!
I've been using Linux for at least 14 years, running all kinds of distros ranging from the Slackware 3.x series to Red Hat to Mandrake to Debian to you name it.
/mnt/gentoo, then waiting literally days before you had X11 and an office suite and window manager installed. But Gentoo users will be the first to tell you that you only have to install once, then the pain is over.
/etc/profile, /etc/fstab, etc. files. I guess tha
I've been using Gentoo since the 2005.0 release (over a year), and I've been incredibly happy with it--it's fast as hell and solid as a rock. But I can tell you that being able to use and administrate a Linux box does not adequately prepare you for installing Gentoo for the first time, and maybe not even the second or third time. In fact, your prior Linux knowledge can even be a weakness: If you are a person who is in the habit of skimming page after page of instructions and just "winging it" using what you already know, then you will not be able to install Gentoo. It sounds like that's exactly what happened to the author, and as others have pointed out, he just gave up rather than solve the problems he was having. He didn't even bother to search forums.gentoo.org, which is by far the best resource for Gentoo-related problems around.
I did get a chuckle when the author tried to establish his Linux cred for the purpose of trying to make Gentoo seem like this obtuse, impossible-to-install piece of garbage. It sounds like the author's level of expertise extends no further than being able to *install* a bunch of Linux distributions, which hardly counts for much these days. In the past couple of years, installing certain Linux distros has become the easiest thing about Linux. It's gotten to the point where you basically just decide on a partitioning scheme and the installer does everything else, including all of the configuration. It's idiot proof. I've honestly had more drama trying to install Windows variants on weird hardware than I've had trying to install Linux.
This guy failed because Gentoo has a different philosophy than many other Linux distributions. The emphasis was never on pandering to users who want the installation to be easy--it's on making using and administrating your computer as easy as possible. The "installer" has always consisted of you sitting there manually copying over files before you chroot into
Portage is great, but there are other Gentoo features that to me are just as interesting. For instance, if you're a developer, and you want to do something really out there such as install 12 different Java compilers on the same Gentoo install, you certainly can. On other distributions, your odds of running into dependency or environment variable problems would be pretty high. But with Gentoo, you can just eselect which Java 1.4 or 1.5 compiler you want to use to compile something, on the fly, and your 12 different Java installs can live happily on the same box. *That's* the kind of thing that Gentoo helps you do. If you're new to Linux, welcome! We're glad you came. But you might want to shy away from one of the most notoriously difficult to install distributions for now, unless your sole aim is to write a trite article about how difficult it was to install.
Personal anecdote:
I was recently faced with the choice of upgrading the libc, compiler, and X server (i.e. basically everything) on my main box to major newer versions. I decided it would actually be faster and more hassle-free to just nuke my root partition and install Gentoo 2006.1. It was a breeze, mostly because stage 1 and stage 2 installs appear to have been done away with in the newest release--you have no choice but to do a stage 3 install like a weinie.
It was simple for another reason, also. I had some common sense. If you're installing a new flavor of Linux on the same machine, the same hardware where you have already installed Linux before, you would have to be crazy not to recycle your xorg.conf,
Just ask Valerie Plame.
No, but you're close. "Zero day" is a term of art in the warez and virus writing communities. Here it just means that the exploit was released the same day as information about the vulnerability.
Well, I shouldn't have to point *this* out, you arrogant asshole, but my point was simply that you need broadband to use this, and that that might pose a problem to some people. That's not an argument, genius, that's an observation.
Nevertheless, you chose to wipe the Cheetos dust off of your deformed paws so that you could peck out a pithy reply to my innocent observation. Your answer (and indeed everyone else's answer to this ) was that it just couldn't possibly be true that someone could own a console system *without* a broadband connection. Surely I must just be a liar or a crazy person, what with my merely observing that that could be an issue. One guy even offered up that this couldn't possibly be a problem for others because he himself had a broadband connection in his living room, as though his personal circumstances have anything to do with anything.
Your own claim is that this could never be a problem because "gamers have a 'broadband attach rate' that's higher than the general population," whatever that's supposed to mean. You offer no evidence, no citations to your made-up statistical hunch--nothing. You have nothing to offer us except for this completely unfounded assumption that nobody exists on this planet who has *just* a console system, or could even own a PS3 without also being a broadband subscriber, such that wanting to run this software but being unable to would be an issue for them. I suppose everyone in every country also owns their own personal computer, too, to go along with their own broadband connection? Welcome to Delusion.
The one thing you seemed to intimate that isn't just totally ridiculous is this: The financial barrier to entry for the PS3 is going to make it a high-tech toy only for the privileged--that is, people who could probably afford broadband anyway. But even then, I just stated that point a lot better than you did anyway, huh? I shouldn't have to point this out, but statistics show that that's the case.
Was that an intended pun? The Cell processor will soon be processing cellular structures. Yay!
Seriously, does *everyone* network their console? Because that's usually how these distributed clients work--they download whatever information they need, go to work on it, and then upload the results. So apparently this is only for people who have connected their PS3 to the internet in some fashion? We're not exactly at the point where everybody around can plug a cat-5 cable into something to get broadband, so it seems that this distributed application is only for a subset of PS3 users. Kind of a shame.