Anyone want the publishing rights to my new 7 book fantasy series:

1. Henry Peters and The Philanthropist's Stain
2. Henry Peters and The Hamper of Secretions
3. Henry Peters and The Pensioner of Azerbajan
4. Henry Peters and The Goblin of Fear
5. Henry Peters and The Ordinance of Galaxians
6. Henry Peters and The Half Footprints
7. Henry Peters and The Deadly Heroes

Sonny, you really are wasting your time with the abuse you are levelling at me - I'm not going to repeat what I said to you in my last response in "Cue The Trolls" because it's all contained in there - read it or don't read it, the choice is yours.

But take the advice of an old man - any high ground you may think you have in any argument will be removed as soon as you resort to abuse and bad language - and when arguing with someone like myself, who is entirely capable of communicating clearly & succinctly in a calm fashion, I will consider that as a victory to me.

Huh? Who mentioned Opera?

Actually, a back door is deliberately created to allow specific people to come into the system - like a known account name with a known password. Just because you know the back door is there doesn't mean you can use it if you don't know the user and password.

A vulnerability tends to be as a result of poor design or a software bug - and not usually placed deliberately.

That's a clear distinction...

Hey, it's the man with the BRG (Big Rage Gun),

According to your post in "Cue The Trolls" on July 30th, you said and I quote:

Don't you wonder why people with the money are working on BSD based Macs instead of Linux? Wake up. How many mechanics get told to build a smelter when their ratchet is defective? None. They find another ratchet. I too have decided to use a different tool that doesn't require me to keep building smelters.

I took that to mean that you'd already left Linux far behind but here you are, once again, telling us how much you don't like it. What are you, some kind of masochist?

Sonny, if you do not like Linux then go ahead and use something else. It clearly stresses you out very much, I can imagine big red bulbous veins standing out in your neck as I type, and the last thing any of us hippie sandal-wearers want is to be responsible for someone with a BRG accidentallly turning it on himself and ending up with a coronary.

Agreed. Someone in Slashdot needs to read up on the differences between "vulnerability" and "back door".

I just buy the CD, rip it myself, put the CD on a shelf as it's own backup, copy the rips onto a portable hard disk and put the hard disk in my coat pocket.

I can access my music anywhere, not just where there's an Internet connection.

....so looking forward to using MATE when it's finished compiling some time in 2014. :-)

If I cared to fuck around with it all the time I would have no problem with Linux. You don't spend 15 years in and around Unix environments and not be able to fix them. I'm just sick and fucking tired of having to fix them all the time.

Sometimes I do also, but that's not because Linux, Unix, Windows, etc. are crap but because I'm at an age where I feel like doing something else to earn money. Big difference.

Linux stuff is mostly done by younger guys (MOSTLY... I don't give a rats ass if you're offended by that if you're in the minority) who don't bother to thoroughly test or are on projects lacking enough testers, and often drop code without telling anyone or testing beyond their agile addled unit test that they built because they had a good idea in a dream last night.

That's not my experience. I turned 50 this year (no, it's not a problem for me whatsoever) and the demand for my skills appears to be higher than ever - and whilst I enjoy technically training kids and younger people, I don't do very much of that these days because there are so very few to train. Computer science still seems to be an "uncool" subject to them meaning that old guys like me have plenty of work to do still.

All well and good because they don't make a living doing their socially consciousnesses open source thing... since they don't feel the impact except their annoyance over complaints of their flakey code breaking something somewhere.

I have no idea what you are talking about here. You seem to be a very angry person, go for a quick walk round the block, come back and wipe the spittle of your screen, think a bit more about sentence construction, then try explaining this to me again.

However, you seem to be trying to goad me over Open Source so I'll say this one thing in the hope it answers that unintelligible jumble of words above - Open Source is a great thing but programmers have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. So whether they program for free or for salary is entirely down to their personal choice and not for an old guy like me to judge. End of.

Meanwhile others have to spend hours figuring out what library is missing, or rebuilding the box because your rpm fucktard bullshit dependencies wants to delete kde because you try to back out a flakey package that is holding back a needed upgrade in another tool. Enterprise Redhat? Dude? Yeah been there done that. Won't ever touch another rpm distro ever again. EVER.

Again, not my experience. Developers I've sysadmined for in the past don't seem to have your pent up rage issues and just drop me an email saying "I need library x or package y installed". It's my job to get it on there so it's what they need, and since I usually get it right they don't need to worry how I got it on there.

And you are also exaggerating greatly, I'm afraid. "Dependency hell" is so last decade, package management has improved no end since then - sure, there's still a problem occasionally but usually fixable by someone patient, with the right skills and a lot less pent up rage than you.

By and large people are all right, but you exhibit one thing I just fucking hate in the Linux community: the overwhelming smugness and unthinking condescension of many that if someone has had it with the frustration of working with a pseudo stable desktop that they must not be technically proficient.

Sonny, I've spent 30 years fixing computers, I'm really good at it, and occasionally I come across youngsters like you that are jealous because I can fix things better than they can or earn twice their salary. But the fact is I never forget that I got as good as I am because I went and asked questions from great people who were prepared to explain stuff to me - it's that humility that means when people come to me asking a question, I do my best to help them also. I really do not care whether you believe that or not, I've seen your type a lot and I get even more pleasure knowing that I've still been able to respond politely and decently back to you despite your continued rage and the abuse you're throwing at me.

Look dipshit (not nice being insulted is it... sorry if you're an asperger victim and don't realize you're being insulting... actually no, no I'm not sorry) ... so look dipshit, some people just have more productive things to do with their time than futz with something that should just work.

You're over-estimating yourself. I could have passed you in the street this morning and wouldn't know it. I don't need to call you a name because you're anonymous, a raging person sat on a keyboard somewhere else on this globe. Insults only matter from people I know and care about, I have no idea who you are and care even less.

dude I program on a Unix system.

Are you sure? I mean, all that pent up rage and stuff. Do you have the patience it takes to write, compile and debug programs?

I've written load balanced multiprocessing apps to handle and transform tens of thousands of records per second, done low level shite, even done assembly language.

How very nice for you. You sound very young and very immature, ace programmer aside, and I bet your boss has additional overheads for a new computer screen for you every couple of weeks because you sound like the sort of person that puts his fist through one when stuff doesn't go your way. You seem to forget, I've sysadmined for programmers and some of the real genius ones have never learnt the social graces or maturity. Seen you primadonna programmers many times...

I know my way or how to ask the right questions... I don't want to anymore.

Oh dear, now you sound like you are five years old.

When someone says they're tired of the mess, instead of living in denial, maybe it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

I'm in the UK, I drink tea. And there you are, some more free ammunition for your BRG (Big Rage Gun).

Don't you wonder why people keep making jokes about "the year of the Linux desktop?"

Nope. It doesn't bother me. I have great Linux skills, there's a big demand for my skills and I make good money selling those skills. At home, I use a bit of Linux and a bit of Windows, I'm in a few Linux User Groups where nicely behaved, intelligent people who need help with Linux come to me and I try to help them (and they sometimes help me also). I also spend a lot of time fixing PCs of friends and family, it may come as a shock to you that if they hand me a busted Windows PC they don't get back a working Linux PC, they get back a working Windows PC. I'm a firm believer in empowerment, they know best what they want to use.

Don't you wonder why people with the money are working on BSD based Macs instead of Linux?

Nope, not one bit. Macs mainly exist because iPhones are very popular, but in order to develop on iPhones you have to buy a Mac in order to get the SDKs. As far as I'm concerned that makes it a closed user group that I don't have one iota of interest in infiltrating.

Besides which, there's no point my learning OS X because it will be dead in less than two years. It was one of Jobs' babies, but now he's passed on Apple aren't interested in OS X or Mac hardware because it makes nowhere near the margins that iOS and iPhones/iPads do for them. They'll just open up the iOS SDKs to other OSes and charge a whole heap of money for them.

Take it from an old man, you're too late to the OS X party, any skills you learn now will be useless with two years.

Wake up. How many mechanics get told to build a smelter when their ratchet is defective? None. They find another ratchet. I too have decided to use a different tool that doesn't require me to keep building smelters.

You crave acceptance. You need someone looking over your shoulder constantly telling you what a wonderful person you are and what a great job you were doing. I know this because you're expecting me to tell you that your choice is wrong and to throw abuse at you. But I won't do that. I don't know you from Adam, I've given you some good advice but now go knock yourself out, use what works for you.

You need to separate out these two concepts - I stepped in to respond to several incorrect statements you made, statements that you have still not adequately explained in this response. But that's it, I could care less who you are and what OS or tools you use.

A very valid point and of course they did a similar (and related) thing by using DirectX to fragment the commercial PC games market to boost X-Box and X-Box games sales.

I have never heard a convincing technical explanation as to why the DirectX 10 API was impossible for them to provide on Windows XP but by making it Vista only they managed to make it doubly difficult for PC games companies at a point when Windows XP was the most used OS in the world.

Incidentally, I actually don't think it's a bad thing because the PC games market was stale and being flooded with poor quality console ports and it seems to have kicked off a much more vibrant indie games market now - harking back to the days of the Golden Age Of Computing with lone programmers and small dev teams knocking out great games for ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s, Commodore Amigas, etc.
 

I'd also add that Linux is usually free from cost and hard disk space is very cheap - so there's nothing to stop you running one distro that is entirely untainted by proprietary software and another for proprietary software and Steam gaming.

If you had to buy Linux twice over then it would be worth discussing, but otherwise this is a non-issue and simply down to personal choice.

And I apologise.

In 30 years of computing experience I've never once felt the need to own one single Apple product so cannot comment on Apple, but I have used both Linux and Windows a lot.

And I should have stated that there are also some excellent Windows people out there who also give great support in forums, especially to someone like me who knows Windows a lot less than he knows Linux.

You are in a circular argument unfortunately.

He suggested Red Hat Linux in a response to the guy clearly having problems maintaining Linux himself. Yes, Red Hat Linux is not free but that's also because a degree of support from Red Hat comes in that cost, meaning that the end user's need to support Linux himself or herself is lessened.

The other alternative is you use a free equivalent like Fedora and be prepared to look after a lot of it yourself - despite the great people that dwell in Linux forums everywhere who invariably will help you out with any issue if you speak nicely to them.

In such a case Linux may therefore not be suitable for him. But please do bear in mind that even using Windows or OS X, you would also need to pay for support from Microsoft or Apple if you needed it.

And I have given Gates a bunch of money in the past, and don't have a problem with that. With Windows 8, next time I do buy a new system, I hate to admit it but I'll be forced to buy Apple. After Jobs, Bill Gates looks like a sweetheart to me... but Ballmer has fucked MS right up and W8 is a monkey's abortion. It looks like a stable Unity. But stable shit or unstable shit, they're still shit.

Nobody forces you to use Apple (or Linux or Windows) and the fact that you need to resort to expletives to get your point across in no way offends me but does lead me to conclude that you yourself are trolling. But I will bite...

I program on Linux, specifically on a Linux VM guest on a Windows 7 host. Everything else I use Windows. I have had Windows 7 since it came out. Yes I've had to re-install it twice. But I've had to nuke half a dozen or more instances of Linux in the same time. Sure I could have kept them if I wanted to spend hours fucking around when things stopped working, but even with the amount of time it takes, it is easier and faster to blow it away and rebuild.

Just because you state later on that you used Slackware in the 90s does not automatically make you a Linux expert. I cannot comment on Windows 7 because I've only just recently started using it over XP. I can tell you with having used XP since about 2005, I have had to do full reinstalls on some occasions because if it gets to a problem with, say, registry corruption, then there comes a point where you can do nothing else than a full reinstall if an earlier system restore also fails.

Using Linux since the mid-90s also, I have had to rebuild Linux systems much less than Windows ones. However, much of the reason for that is my expertise in Linux is better than in Windows, I can predict some bad events that might happen on Linux and make provisions for it - for example, if I compile a new kernel and it panics, I usually have the option of booting back into the old kernel or from a boot disk. Yes, I've had some pretty horrific library dependency issues in the past (but please bear in mind I'm a fiddler with Linux who regularly tries out new software), sometimes I've been able to fix without a rebuild, once or twice I've given up trying to fix it and doing a rebuild.

None of the above proves that Linux is better or worse than Windows and I know some very knowledgeable Windows sysadmins who could probably fix issues where I have done a full rebuild on Windows.

In other words your comments make no sense without that baseline definition of how well you know each operating system - something you in the past have felt the need to rebuild to fix maybe something that I could fix without rebuilding. Simply down to knowledge and ability, nothing more.

After the past week rebuilding my dev environment (this time moving it from a physical box where the video kept locking up the interface) I have vowed never use anything but a VM for Linux ever again as it is easier to clone that once it is installed to save the headache of rebuilding.

What you have said above is actually common sense and regularly used in organisations and homes across the world - have you never heard of "development" and "production" environments where you test software on a development server until you are happy with it to the point where you can put it into production with minimal risk of it causing problems? And if you don't physically have enough hardware to do that then running VMs to develop in is the next best option.

You really are stating something that sounds to you like a revelation but is already widely in practice. And as someone who regularly sysadmins, I would certainly challenge any developer who didn't understand the concept of building their stuff in a development environment first.

As much as Linux fanboys like to claim Linux is more stable, well it might just be as a server, but no way for a desktop.

That is a wildly sweeping statement that could be applied to any operating system. The main difference between any server and desktop computer is that a server will usually have only one or a few specific tasks to perform (file sharing, mail server, web server, etc.) and might not even have any need to run any GUI environment. Not to mention that the software on a server is likely to remain reasonably static, maybe one or two upgrades a year for software updates or security fixes.

A desktop computer is never going to be static. The user is going to be fiddling with it constantly, installing and de-installing software regularly, and a fair proportion of computer instabilities happen because of bad drivers - graphics drivers are particularly prone to instability due to their complexity and a desktop computer is inevitably going to be running a GUI and therefore graphics drivers.

My final point on this is that a server failure is generally a bigger issue than a desktop failure - even the way I administer my desktops is always inherent with some risks when I try out new or beta software, something I would never do on an important production server.

This is coming as a former ardent Linux fanboy who got his first Slackware distro in the 90s. Right around now in my life, I just want the fucking thing to work and not have to fuck around with it all the fucking time to keep it that way.

This bit I will ignore. You started off by trolling, made some at least interesting points in the middle then dropped back to expletives and trolling at the end.

Conclusion: Despite the positive modding, you are still trolling.

I'm old enough to remember "The Golden Age Of Computing" during the 1980s, and one of the the best things that happened then was programmers being forced to come up with neat techniques to squeeze that little bit more out of what were essentially very restricted and limited home computers.

The fact that the world is going back to "apps" and the fact that PC gaming is moving back into the Indie world does mean a partial return to that Golden Age where it's no longer the case that the likes of Electronic Arts and a few other big companies have a stranglehold.

So I do hope they stick with the model As and Bs for a few years yet - to give people the chance to program them, work with the limitations and to see how far they can push its capabilities.