Posts by theOtherJT

Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 3

Re: PCs fading away...

@No Quarter

Yeah, but the thing they invented was HDCP and then just nailed it on top of the existing DVI standard. I'm not paying for that, I didn't want it in the first place.

Right tool. Right job.

Windows 10 IoT Core is a long way short of full Windows comparable to Windows Embedded rather than efforts like Windows 8.1 with Bing intended to run on very cheap hardware. So don't go getting excited about the chance to cook up a fleet of very cheap Raspberry Pi PC replacements.

But... I already did. I just put Debian on them. Works like a charm. Runs a bunch of kiosk machines in the cafe.

Investigatory Powers Bill: Spooks willingly entering the light?

Truth in fiction...

The attitude of GCHQ* has always been beautifully summed up for me by a quote from Judi Dench's M in Casino Royale

Who the hell do they think they are? I report to the Prime Minister and even he's smart enough not to ask me what we do. Have you ever seen such a bunch of self-righteous, arse-covering prigs? They don't care what we do; they care what we get photographed doing.

The first time I heard that I genuinely laughed out loud, because it seemed like such a perfect assessment of both how the security services have always treated those who are supposed to oversee them, and the CYA attitude of the ones supposedly providing the oversight.

*Yes, I know, different agency, but I reckon it stands for all TLAs

Microsoft sneaks onto Android while Android sneaks onto Windows

Re: Microsoft's biggest enemy: Microsoft

I do know a few people who work for Microsoft, both full time and as contractors, and the one thing they have all said at some point is "The company is so huge no one ever seems really sure who's actually making the decisions for the $PRODUCT team." Which kinda leaves the impression that perhaps whoever that is supposed to be got lost in the bureaucracy somewhere and as a matter of fact, nobody is.

Microsoft's biggest enemy: Microsoft

The whole WinPho thing has turned into such an epic own goal, and after such a promising start, too.

I mean, here we are with Microsoft being all "Hey we built these really good native apps for Android! Use our stuff on your existing phone!" and that's great, well done Microsoft, you should have done that years ago - but answer me this: If you can build excellent native office/skype/whatever apps for Android, how come you couldn't do that for Windows Phone?

Seriously, how did you fuck that one up? It's like admitting that you've screwed up the WinPho development API so badly that it's easier to write your client software for someone else's platform than it is to use your own - despite the fact that the developers of Office for WinPho should be better placed than _anyone_ to get the very, very best out of the underlying OS.

Raspberry Pi celebrates fourth birthday with fruity version 3

Re: Whichever way you slice it

Well, sure, for your purposes, but it rather depends what you're going to do with it. Mine's very useful, but then I don't even have a monitor attached to it. It exists to be a DNLA server and something I can reliably SSH into when I'm not at home.

Google human-like robot brushes off beating by puny human – this is how Skynet starts

Re: Battletech...

Yes it is. This one:

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Atlas_(BattleMech)

Tied with the Daishi/Dire Wolf for the 100 tons of "Fuck this shit I'm just going to run away from it" crown.

Latest in Apple v FBI public squabble over iPhone crack demand

Re: What does Snowden know?

Quite possibly they do, but they're not going to be lending that to small fish like the FBI. The NSA isn't exactly known for playing well with others, and the longer they can pretend they don't have something, the longer they can keep using it with impunity to serve their own interests - whatever they may be.

Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph

Re: Wake me up

El Reg, this is a genuine request to set up a poll to see if there are correlations! It's not 'big data', it's barely 'modest data', but could be a bit of fun.

I would most definitely fill such a poll in, because I too would find the result interesting!

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

I'm not sure what's new here.

So it's achieved an impressive MPG number but it's hardly a family saloon is it? Clearly it's getting most of that number by being super light and having no power.

The hydrogen fuel cell feels like a bit of a gimick in this case. Possibly the ultra-capacitor regeneration thing is good tech, but surely they'd be better selling that to someone who already makes a regenerative hybrid to fit to an existing car.

I know the Top Gear lot went on about it quite often, and it has the advantage of sounding much cooler than batteries (which we all know are terrible right now) but I really don't see hydrogen fuel cells catching on.

If I had to place bets, I'd go with "hybrid battery/super-capacitor but full electric" cars being the long term future, with the appropriate scaling in Nuclear power to feed them.

Terrified robots will take middle class jobs? Look in a mirror

Re: It's not about jobs, it's about income...

This is the rub. People don't fear "Losing their jobs" - in fact, it's something we're all looking forward to. A day comes when I get to retire and stop having to work 8 to 10 hours a day. That's going to be a good day. But in the world we live in, it's a day I can only realize once I've saved up a huge quantity of capital to tide me over my "unproductive" years.

In theory one could use the increased productivity of our highly automated age to improve society as a whole, but that has never been what happened. Once agriculture was good enough to mean that everyone didn't have to be a hunter-gatherer or not eat, it didn't lead to farmers working less hard. In fact, it led to farmers working more hard to support a non-working "noble" class that could never have existed before.

The "Middle" class emerged from the industrial revolution in the same way. Instead of the extra productivity going to everyone, the people at the bottom worked just as hard - or harder - and a few more people got pushed upwards into a much nicer existence where they worked less hard, or not at all.

We now have an elite financial and political class who seem to do even less than the noble families of a few hundred years ago. A rising tide does not, in this case, lift all ships...

The world doesn't have to work this way. We could divvy up our resources - particularly our time - differently. We could throw money into training people to do the jobs that aren't (yet) automated, to make up for the loss of the ones that are rather than "enhancing shareholder value" but we don't do that. Personally I don't see any way that doesn't lead to bloodshed within the next 50 or so years, and all I can hope is I'm cold in the ground before it happens.

Re: Holy Grail Team Terrain for Virtual Exploitation and/or Exploration

...that was like reading something that's been back and forth through Google translate half a dozen times.

FBI iPhone unlock order reaction: Trump, Rubio say no to Apple. EFF and Twitter say yes

Re: Why is this possible?

And on current iOS devices with the newer processor, that would appear to be the case. This has only been raised here because it's a 5C and doesn't have the levels of security that the 5S and onwards have.

I'm actually impressed that Apple bothered to bake a hardware security solution into their current chips. It looks a bit like they might have seen this one coming.

Re: What the law says...

and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.

Which by my - admittedly non-professional IANAL reading - basically says "as long as that writ is lawful" which Apple are going to argue this one isn't.

FBI iPhone brouhaha sparks Apple Store protest in San Francisco

Re: Hmmm, oddly reasonable

The problem isn't so much that the request is obviously unreasonable in terms of the scope of the provided software, or the effort required on Apple's part to produce it. The problem was actually rather neatly summed up by representative Ted Lieu

"This FBI court order, by compelling a private sector company to write new software, is essentially making that company an arm of law-enforcement, [] This court order also begs the question: Where does this kind of coercion stop? Can the government force Facebook to create software that provides analytic data on who is likely to be a criminal? Can the government force Google to provide the names of all people who searched for the term ISIL? Can the government force Amazon to write software that identifies who might be suspicious based on the books they ordered?"*

Firstly: If the court has the authority to order Apple to create software, where does that authority stop? Without clearly defined bounds it looks remarkably like indentured servitude, and that's definitely not on.

Secondly: If the court can give such an order on no stronger grounds than that Apple manufactured the device in the first place, that's tantamount to saying that Apple are legally responsible for providing access to the content of the device.

The second one in particular is a very dangerous proposition. Is Google legally responsible for handing over the content of your gmail account? Should Microsoft be responsible for handing over the content of your sharepoint? It would seem that this court believes that they are, and that has very dangerous implications for both all future business operations that ever handle user data, and of course the privacy of end users.

*Shamelessly stolen from this article.

Google to snatch control of Android updates from mobe makers – analyst

Re: They'll still do something wrong here

I'm not sure they do. Apple successfully bullied the carriers into doing what was best for Apple, and Google certainly has enough money to do the same, all it needs is a compelling product. Perhaps they think that now Android is mature enough to be that product.

The landscape is changing. People are far less prepared to put up with carrier lock-in than they were even 5 years ago and it looks like Google thinks that they can start pushing both the carriers and the handset manufacturers on the playing field a little.

All-American Apple challenges US gov call for iOS 'backdoor'

Re: Ticking Timebomb Scenario

The circumstances of the case aren't really the issue. It doesn't matter what is at stake in terms of saving lives or protecting people, it's a matter of the precedent set about what a court can and cannot demand a company do.

Even if it were the case that complying with this order save a million lives, it would still be questionable to comply with it because it's accepting that the court has the authority to order them to do something which might actually be technically impossible.

Assume for the moment that the device actually _can't_ be forced open, then what? Imagine that the encryption key is stored in a small block of Read Write memory on a chip that's otherwise Read only - the only way to get at it is to compromise the ROM part - which means you'll have to replace the chip, because the software on that chip can't be rewritten. Replace the chip and you lose the key, which puts you back where you started.

Apple would simply not be able to comply with that order, but if they comply with this one they're accepting that were such a case to arise the court would have the authority to compel them to do so - and what would that mean? It makes no sense that the court can order them to do something that they physically can't, but if they accept that they built the device and are therefore responsible for getting data off the device - which would seem to be the key premise in this case - they'd have to accept the same responsibility for this hypothetical future device.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from that is that such a device would be illegal to build, and that's taking us into a place that we really shouldn't go.

Good thing this dev quit. I'd have fired him. Out of a cannon. Into the sun

Let me guess, that last one was an academic?

There's something about academics and amusingly ancient versions of Fortran. Well, they would be amusing, but when they show up in your office with a Fortran IDE on floppy disk and want it installed on the managed desktops it stops being amusing really quickly.

iPhones clock-blocked and crocked by setting date to Jan 1, 1970

No excuse for this.

I love the people trying to defend this one with "Well, we never thought anyone would do that? Why would anyone do that?"

I'm sorry, you give an end user the ability to enter a value into ANYTHING you fucking sanitize that value before saving it somewhere. Users are untrustworthy bastards who will deliberately break things!

When asked 'What's a .CNT file?' there's a polite way to answer

A few from my RT mail queue:

I always particularly enjoy the ones with no data in the message body.

Subject: "Unable to open excel file"

Body:

Attachment: "${FILENAME}.pdf"

IT: "That isn't an excel file."

User: "I didn't realize there were other kinds!"

Subject: "Can't send any email."

Body: to anyone. Not even the help address.

IT: "..."

User: "Oh. It's working now."

Subject: "Is the server down?"

Body:

IT: "Can you please be a little more specific? We run a large number of services. What is it exactly that you're currently unable to do?"

User: "I don't know. It's down. I can't get at any of my files or anything."

IT: "Ok, I think the best thing is for me to come and see you. Can you please tell me which office you're in?"

User: "Oh, I'm at home today."

IT: "Ah, so the problem is with our remote access portal. Are you getting any error messages? It seems to be working from here."

User: "What's that? I just took the PC from my desk home with me last night and now nothing works."

Getting a grip on Puppet: A guide for beginners

Useful but limiting

I've got about 1000 nodes running puppet here, and it is handy as a way to easily get packages on and off and do simple configuration, but for 90% of services there comes a point where you end up just creating a puppet File resource to deliver a bash script and then an Exec resource to run it, because the native ruby-like manifest language is such a bloody pain to actually write complex conditionals in.

For sale: One 236-bed nuclear bunker

Re: preserving government

I had the misfortune to work on digitising the catalogue at my local library around the turn of the millennium. This involved actually pulling everything off the shelves and making sure it matched what it said it was in the card catalogue before updating the computer records.

One of the things I turned up at the time was a published collection of "survivability statistics" from the late 70s that it seemed everyone had forgotten about. Made for quite frightening reading. I seem to recall that given the high population density of the UK and locations of various "likely targets" the estimates were for about 98% casualties over the first year in the even of a "limited" (which they defined as "Not deliberately targeting population centres") nuclear attack. The initial casualties from the explosions/radiation weren't even the big numbers. What they expected to kill most people was starvation and disease after the national infrastructure broke down over the course of the first year.

You're thinking of Vault 69...

BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide

Re: Well we are no doubt minutes for a socital collapse here

With the internet at my house cut off, I don't have anything better to do. I don't have a mohawk right now, but I can supply my own leathers. I mean, it's this, or stay at work, right?

Rooting your Android phone? Google’s rumbled you again

Re: This is not...

Indeed. But they didn't buy, they took out a lifetime lease. They only thought they bought because they didn't read the terms of the contract carefully enough. It's a bit like the difference between buying freehold and buying leasehold.

Stop the music! Booby-trapped song carjacked vehicles – security prof

Translation:

"A firewall is not going to do it, the architecture is too complex and cost really counts to these guys"

"A firewall would totally do it, but they much prefer profit margin to building safe products."

...which has always been par for the course with auto makers.

Squeeze the banana to log into this office Wi-Fi

Would probably be illegal here.

We have to have people sign for guest wifi accounts. We have to have a persons name attached to every account so we know where to direct the police should they ever request the peeping tom, sorry, "Security" information we're required to collect on everyone who uses our network. I'm told that after a long and expensive process our lawyers decided that we were probably liable to prosecution if we didn't, so anonymous access had to go :(

Gov must hire 'thousands' of techies to rescue failing projects

Re: Nope

I'm sure that's not in line with current best-practice for synergistic personnel solutions in the modern workplace. I understood what you meant, for a start.

Pentagon fastens lasers to military drones to zap missiles out of the skies

And the "drone" part helps how exactly?

"In 2012, the US Department of Defense cancelled its Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed [...] Now the Pentagon is investigating how to build the laser technology onto smaller drones that can loiter over a target for a long time"

And if they couldn't get it to fit in a 747 what the actual shit makes them think it's worth wasting the time trying THE EXACT SAME THING on something only a fraction of the size?

Bigger than Safe Harbor: Microsoft prez vows to take down US gov in data protection lawsuit

Picking their principles

I'm very happy Microsoft are standing up and saying "No" to what are on the face requests of decidedly iffy legal standing to hand over data about non-US citizens held on non-US soil. On the other hand their stance with the Win10 data collection has been... less principled... to say the least.

One has to wonder why it is they've taken a stand on this particular issue. They obviously don't care about the sanctity of their users privacy or they wouldn't be so keen to collect so much data on them, and that being the case they must be doing this for other reasons. After all, no company - especially one as large as Microsoft - does anything that it doesn't expect to benefit from in some form or another. If this isn't about protecting our data from unwanted scrutiny, then what data is this about?

I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one.

UK govt: No, really, we're not banning cryptography

Exercise in futility.

I'm going to keep posting my responses like this every time they talk about intercepting terrorist communications.

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Key: thisremainspossible

Microsoft herds biz users to Windows 10 by denying support for Win 7 and 8 on new CPUs

Re: So here's how you get around it

...and of course, add to that the fact that the machines we have now are SO FAST that there's no point updating them. I'm still getting by perfectly well on a desktop that's 7 years old in my office, because nothing I do there requires it to be any faster. Sure, one day it will pack up and I'll need a new one, but I have no need to update, and as long as I don't need to I'm keeping accounts happy by not requesting budget for it.

Re: Does anybody else think...

I'm sure they can. They just don't want to.

Re: Let me see if I'm getting this right...

Yeah, but CPU's don't really require drivers. This is what I'm confused by. The CPU needs to be able to run the OS kernel long before any drivers are loaded, so the only thing they could withhold access to is extensions like SSE, MMX etc, which one might well argue we don't actually care about most of the time, seeing as the ones we already have are quite adequate. If it's an x86 CPU, it's an x86 CPU... unless they've managed to get the CPU manufacturers to start making x86 CPU's that lie about what they can actually do when polled by the mechanism that Win7 and older use to determine what CPU they're running on.

Let me see if I'm getting this right...

What they're saying is that because Windows 7 was engineered for older CPUs it requires various compatibility type stuff for newer ones, which MS will no longer be providing.

Now, if they're talking about things like SSE* and other extensions to the x86 (or x86_64) spec, that's fine. New stuff is invented, old OS doesn't know it exists, so won't use it - but that shouldn't stop the old OS from running, surely? It just means you don't get access to all the new shiny that the CPU can provide.

Unless they're pushing a version check into Win7 that checks what kind of CPU it's running on and then flat refuses to work unless it's a known good (in which case, don't install that particular update) the only way I can see them preventing Win7 from running on _any_ CPU that supports the x86_64 standard is for them to get the chip manufacturers to change the way the chip reports it's capabilities.

I have to assume that very early in the boot process Windows tries to determine what the CPU is capable of by running some instructions, and if it doesn't get answers it likes it'll stall with "Unsupported architecture" or similar.

So, for this to work, despite being x86_64 capable, at that point these new CPU's say "Sorry I don't know what you want from me. I'm an x86_64_Forced_Upgrade" at which point Win7 will go "Well, as far as I can tell this isn't an x86 compatible CPU, so I give up"?

*Whatever version of that we're on by now

After-dinner Mint? Stylish desktop finale released as last of the 17 line

Re: Linux & Games

Part of the problem is fear on the part of AAA game title publishers that encouraging native Linux ports will lead to rampant piracy. A lot of them seem uncomfortable with the idea that you, as the customer, might actually have access to the filesystem in your PC and as one of those weird "Linux people" might know enough about computers to circumvent their copy protection mechanism. These are people who are much happier with the idea of a PC as an appliance (hence the direction of Windows As A Service and as little access to the hardware as possible) and would much rather everyone only released for consoles.

Fortunately, Valve have seen straight through this nonsense and have enough standing as a publisher in their own right these days to carry a lot of high quality games with them. We can but hope that they will continue to do so.

My only problem was the installer

Which when I tried to install Mint over Christmas was inexplicably missing the ability to do MD raid or LVM. I imagine most won't notice, but it was a bit of a pain having to drop to a shell and do it all by hand. Clearly the tools are there, seeing as... well... I was able to drop to a shell and do it by hand :/

Murderous necrophiliac kangaroo briefly wins nation's heart

It's almost as if you can't apply human values to animals...

Cartoons lied to us I say!

2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone ... Nah, we're messing with you

Re: No one really cares what their OS is.

Actually, my desktop runs Debian, but that's by the by. Unless you work in a technical field, or are just a massive nerd (and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm with Wil Wheaton on that one) there's no reason why you should know or care what your OS is, is all I'm saying.

No one really cares what their OS is.

I mean, normal people. Not people like us commentards.

No, really, they don't care. They shouldn't have to care. Computers, tablets, smartphones - these things are tools. They do a job (all right, many jobs) and they should be judged on how well they do that. The software stack matters WAY more than the OS does in terms of getting the job done, and that's all about the user experience. How hard was it to make it do what you wanted. That's what people care about, and Linux isn't always great at that.

Maybe there are good ideological reasons for Linux (and FOSS in general) being better than Windows or OSX, but they're still going to take a back seat to "getting the job done" in any real situation. Once you have to live in the real world with deadlines and deliverables and release targets and all that shit, then ideological purity goes straight back in the the bottom of the wardrobe along with the bong you have left over from college as a cute reminder of how "free" you used to be.

Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. I think it's a perfectly acceptable Desktop operating system FOR ME because it does all the things I want it to do, and it does them no worse than any other OS. I like the fact that it allows me to get a bit more up close and personal with my hardware and start tinkering with things too, but lets be honest here, normal people don't want to do that either. Normal people have better things to do with their lunch hours than benchmark different filesystem configurations and see if they can improve the iops performance on their NAS.

Certainly Linux could be better, but then basically everything could be better. If these "Year of linux on the..." arguments spur anyone into improving little bits of the user experience here and there then that's great, but I don't really feel the need to get too excited about it.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

Re: Power Supply Work

As for prolonged power supply work, never heard of a generator?

Yup. We were reliably informed that it was totally capable of supplying enough juice to run the entire building, never mind the entire server room for the 2 days that the mains would be off due to works in the street.

I'm told you could hear the bang it made when they flipped it over and let it take up the load from nearly a mile away.

Re: I find this one a bit difficult to believe

I have seen what happens when the standard Molex power connectors used for old IDE drives, which should not be reversible, are reversed nonetheless.

Wow. How much brute force and ignorance was required to get one of those in backwards? They're hard enough to connect the right way around!

Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

If you can run mathematics forwards, but not backwards, then you're violating determinism.

Well, ok, but running backwards black holes are spewing matter into the universe from beyond their event horizon all the time. I don't see why that's any more weird than things just suddenly coming into existence with no obvious cause. All we're really saying is that on the other side of that... thing... there's something we know bugger all about because we can't measure it in any way. That might equally apply to the event horizon of a black hole, or the surface of space-time itself as far as I can tell - but then I'm not a theoretical physicist.

Re: Would you like another dimension with that, sir!

If Information is lost then you can throw out determinism. You'd have effect without cause because the cause

Don't we already have that tho? We have no idea where these particle pairs come from in the first place - they just seem to spontaneously spring into existence. We don't know why radioactive substances decay when they do either. We can do some statistical analysis on them and say that "well, in X amount of time half of it will be gone" but we can't say which half, or why it will be that half not the other, it just... happens.

I thought determinism was already a pretty much abandoned concept at this point. Some events do appear to be genuinely random.

BBC risks wrath of android rights activists with Robot Wars reboot

Re: High Tech? Nope just will it burn

The thing is with the rules being what they are (weight limit of 100Kg, no explosives, fire/plasma throwing, or projectile weapons on the grounds of them being far too dangerous) robot wars ended up pretty much a solved problem. You mount a big gas-ram under a flippy thing and just throw the opposition around. There's no need for it to get higher tech. That level of tech was already basically unbeatable.

Beware the terrorist drones! For they are coming! Pass new laws!

Re: aircraft

My point isn't that an aircraft will be downed. I expect a modern engine to ingest a drone without causing the aircraft to crash.

My point is that such an event quickly gets people on board the side of a government hoping for sweeping new powers.

I agree completely. IIRC they test jet engines by firing frozen turkeys into them out of an air-cannon* I don't see any little commercial sized drone doing more damage than that. You've correctly identified the problem: People are idiots :(

*If that's not true, please don't correct me it'll shatter a hilarious mental image I've had for years!

Re: Don't mention the war!!!

How do you legislate against these?

I'm pretty sure that's already going to be illegal. I have no idea what specific law applies, but I believe there is such a thing as "Conspiracy to cause explosions" which sounds like it would cover it.

Re: aircraft

it's getting to the point where consumer gadgets in the hands of these same people might eventually cause the equivalent of a bird strike

Which planes can take. Bird strikes are a thing we know happens. Not a lot of crashes because of bird strikes

at which point expect everyone to go nuts and the government to get what they want.

And here you nail the crux of the problem. People are idiots :(

Terrorism is easy...

...which is why I remain utterly unconvinced that it exists, at least in the form we're having blasted at us by the government all the time.

If there really were organized cells of secret agent grade terrorists out there - as opposed to a tiny handful of disaffected radicals with delusions of martyrdom - we'd be seeing hundreds of deaths a week, but as it stands large scale attacks like occurred in Paris last year are crazy, astonishingly rare.

Oh, and did those people use sophisticated technological solutions to kill people? No. They bought some cheap assault weapons and shot up some crowded places. That's trivial to do. Basically any idiot can do that, and even that involved actually getting hold of guns, which is at least moderately hard this side of the pond. Think how much damage you could do simply by deliberately driving a few cars off of motorway bridges into the traffic below. That's a guaranteed death toll - not to mention the economic damage done by closing the motorways - and all you need to pull that off is a copy of autotrader and 500 quid for a 15 year old banger.

Seriously, terrorism is easy. Given that we don't have bodies piling up in the streets practically daily, we clearly don't need more laws to protect ourselves from people who might do those sorts of things because either they don't exist, or the laws we have are already sufficient to catch them before they kill anyone the vast majority of the time.

Rejoice, Penguinistas, Linux 4.4 is upon us

Re: "Until you don't need to pull up the command line..."

I agree with you that if you are at any point forced to use a CLI on a desktop operating system, then one cannot consider that operating system fit for purpose. See my feelings on the Windows 8 way of administrating Secure wireless connections for example.

Where I disagree is that "Linux" is in that state. These aren't "Linux" problems. They're "Linux distribution" problems. There's plenty of good GUI tools to manage a Linux desktop, it's just a matter of if your distribution actually ships them, which frequently they don't. That leads to instant frustration on the part of a regular end user, who quite reasonably expects to be able to do these things without first delving into the package manager and installing another tool.

"Linux" is ready for the desktop. It's been ready for a while. The holdup is getting that one magic distribution that includes everything that anyone might conceivably want and in such a way as it's not overwhelming. We don't have that yet.