Posts by apostleofregister

Windows 10: A sysadmin speaks his brains – and says MEH

Well, I think those chains look really sexy on you, and they contrast really well with the walls and bars!

Skipping 9, I can't stop laughing.

WinXP = good, Vista = bad, Win7 = good, Win8 = bad, Win9 = good, Win10 = bad.

Just when hope was around the corner they lost count and skipped the good one! ;)

Re: This says it all really

Mint is lovely. Come the day Win8.1 is no longer supported I'm feeling confident (for the first time in 15 years) that there will be a shift in Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market, and the main stumbling block to attracting more users to Linux will finally be overcome, game devs will have a big enough target audience to aim their sights on Linux! :D

Who can argue with an OS that gives you these freedoms set in legal stone:

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Re: This says it all really

I'd like to formally extend your welcome to the Free and Open Source Software community! :) GNU+Linux isn't just for ultra-nerds anymore, and I can honestly say that after the minor adjustment period as I found alternative programs to the proprietary ones I used in Windows I've never looked back. No forced updates, no waiting for updates before you can login and actually use your computer, almost no risk of a virus (15 years and counting and I still haven't ever had one turn up in a scan), absolutely no cost, I can give my friends copies without being an outlaw, I can customize my working environment with a fairly long list of different desktop managers and make most of them look almost however I want them to with no extra overhead (In Windows I had to install 3rd party theming programs and they eat up system resources like RAM and CPU cycles), no need to surf around the web to get all my programs separately as they're already in a repository so I can just pick them out of a list in a category and install as many programs as I like at once, when I do update my programs get updated along with my operating system unless I mark them not to be upgraded for some reason, and I don't even have to just get used to some corporate committee's idea of what my User Interface should look like and how it should work, it's all how I choose it to be because it's MY home, where I work and play and have my being. So welcome, and be free and take your ambrosia here friend! P.S. Don't use Ubuntu, it's the only one to do it but they have this creepy "send everything you search for to Amazon" thing going on by default. Linux Mint is really comfortable without any customizations at all and is basically Ubuntu minus the creepy feature, and although it does have some binary blobs in the kernel you need not worry about that until you're familiar enough with Linux to swap it for a fully free kernel (it isn't hard anyhow).

Re: This says it all really

Do they have an option for data to be encrypted such that they are unable to access it even for recovery purposes? If that's a feature they've introduced then they've won my respect and to some extent my trust. Otherwise I don't see how Google and Apple being just as bad is an argument in Microsoft's favour since they're not the only options besides Windows. GNU+Linux is just as easy to install and use these days and with the exception of the odd program like Photoshop there are perfectly good (often better) alternatives. Not only that but in most cases a fully-free distro with no proprietary code at all, not even binary blobs (firmware mostly) in the kernel, works out of the box. I'm rocking a pretty new i74790k quad core with a NVIDIA GTX 970 and it works with no proprietary software at all. I do install the proprietary NVIDIA driver on this machine though because it does work better with high-end games, but for most people's needs it's not necessary. But I digress. If you want peace of mind and software freedom that can't just be taken away whenever the vendor decides they want to, go with GNU+Linux. :)

Microsoft eyes slice of Raspberry Pi with free Windows 10 sprinkled on top

Re: With Microsoft nothing is free

"And this is different to numerous FOSS derived packages how?"

It isn't different if you're using something that's FOSS derived but is packaged with proprietary components. However, with the huge wealth of completely FOSS options there's absolutely no need to use "FOSS derived" packages, just use FOSS packages.

Personally I only ever use or write FOSS software unless there's no other option. I can manage as a programmer to profit because like most programmers I'm selling my labour rather than the software itself. I do however make one exception to be strong beliefs and that's computer games, because other than for major companies who have the resources to profit from free software sales (it can be done) there's really no way to make a living making games without being able to sell the software. Personally as I move towards developing games I'm going to go with writing my own license that allows temporary inclusion of the code in temporarily proprietary works, in other words a free software license that gives games developers a grace period in which to make money on software sales without compromising their devotion to the spirit of free software. There are probably licenses like that already so I'll research first, but licenses are in a sense a kind of program that runs on the operating system of our legal framework. Unlike the GPL my license would be free software itself, however it would have an exception to prevent re-licensing of software already licensed under the original licenses terms.