+100 Whuffie for you

Lord Ender said:

Then Linux would be as simple as installing the minimalist distro, then doing "apt-get install smartphone-system" for a distro customized for smartphones, or "media-system" for a distro customized for mediacenter PCs, etc.

I think this would be a superior option to having many completely independent distributions, and it would allow for faster innovation and easier support.

Every time I read one of these posts I'm reminded of this scene in the movie "Enemy of the State":

Miltary muscle: Can we get a feature scan of the guy with him?
Tech: No, he's smart, he never looks up.
Miltary muscle: So?
Tech: The satellite is 155 miles above the Earth. It can only look straight down.
Miltary muscle: That's a bit limited, isn't it?
Tech: [Sarcastically] Well, maybe you should design a better one.
Miltary muscle: Maybe I will.

The problem with your proposal is that it's not that simple. Smartphone system A may rely on kernel features that are incompatible with smartphone system B or maybe only on architecture C or when used with optional sub-package D of version E.

The people who design the kernel and the distributions aren't lacking in intelligence or ambition and please understand, I'm not saying that can't have some great insight that will work for a large number of people, but I am saying that the thing you've described doesn't sound new or innovative, it sounds naive.

On a side and only barely related note, Ender's Game may be my favorite novel of all time.

1. 0
2. 1
3. Profit?

--
The dwarves know how to make gold.

I'm assuming that their argument(not that I agree with it) would be that it is inter national waters, not inter personal . If you are operating under the authority of a recognized nation, they won't mess with you, otherwise you are a pirate. I believe it's always been legal to pursue pirates (with said pirates (I assume) being identified by some means other than parrots, peg legs, and Jolly Rogers)

According to Director of Communications Martin Oops, he is not...

my sarcasm's sniPod is playing the head shot theme song right now.

Not only objectionable, but completely impractical. What kind of sniper would want to draw attention to his location by playing a theme song?

the odds that the normal looking white guy on your other side is going to mug you are probably significantly higher

I'm sorry, but you just derailed your entire argument. In an effort to prove that the average person lacks sufficient knowledge to truly be prudent, you created a "probable" statistic based on what - the desire that reality be the opposite of what someone "less intelligent/knowledgeable" than you would reason it to be?

If the a lack of a Creative Commons license for linux.com content doesn't lead you to avoid the website, their efforts to indoctrinate you certainly will...

In other news, Count Aral and his Betan wife, Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan,
announced today that they are expecting their first child, a baby boy.
Rather than using a uterine replicator, the young heir, who will be third
in line to the Barrayan throne, is being gestated naturally, as is the
custom on his father's homeworld of Barrayar. Everyone here at WRMHL,
"the heart of Escobar" wishes them the best, and a safe and healthy pregnancy.
Now, onto sports, where the Komarran Raiders played the Jackson Whole
Splicers in a deadly game of...

For those who don't know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Vorkosigan

keyword or positional?

There's another aspect to the "untrained" programmer/sysadmin/technical guy that I think needs to be addressed and you've just touched on it.

People who do well at "IT Stuff" without formal training are often people who like to dig into the details of how things work. They are always asking questions like: "Where does the data for that come from?", "How is that implemented, and that, and the thing underneath that?" A lot of them have written some assembler, if for no other reason than to figure out how a computer really works. They've installed Linux from scratch and maybe they've modified the kernel to add a system call, again, just because. They've played around with bootloaders, they've screwed around with device drivers, basically, if it has components, they've probably taken it apart and replaced some of them with their own.

And because of this, these people understand that there is no such thing as magic in the IT industry. If something is reading a data file, then somewhere there is something that lays out the data format. If two processes are communicating, then there are only so many ways they might be doing so, and depending on the platform and the context, they can usually narrow it down to one or two. And for some of these guys, the most fun they ever have, is when they are placed in front of a new environment/technology and they are able to intuit its details based on their understanding of a computer's primitives.

What is interesting, is that a lot of people who do have CS degrees have no interest in learning this way. Some of it is due to the formalized nature of their educational patterns, some of it is just pragmatism. And it's not really a bad thing, because if it wasn't so, there wouldn't be a lot of room or need for the informally trained professional. (Plus, there are things that the informally trained professional just isn't typically as good at)