Fair enough. I'll file that away in case I find myself looking for a new distro.

I still hold that I would still be a novice if I hadn't made that step and installed a source-based distro, as I have no professional requirements in the understanding-Linux department, and my fortran work doesn't require much knowledge of anything other than arcane syntax. :)

About portage: except for recent kde-3.5 fiascos, portage has been pretty damn stable since I installed in early 08. I've also found it to be rare that I have to compile those obnoxious packages (no oo.org on my machine though)- the worst is probably xulrunner + mozilla-firefox for those minor version bumps.

Your condescension is annoying. Have you actually read the Gentoo handbook?

I decided to install Gentoo two years ago, after using Fedora for quite some time and Ubuntu before that. (I have had no formal Linux/sysadmin training, and my degree is in aero engineering- not comp sci.) In the course of that first Gentoo install, so much about how a modern Linux system functions made sense to me that didn't before. Of course there's nothing stopping me from learning all that with another distro- but the Gentoo install showed me how it all (grub, parted, lvm, filesystems, kernel config, manual network config, syslog, X, kde, mysql, iptables, apache, etc, etc) fits together to achieve the goal of a usable system.

Once I was introduced to that framework, I could begin to make that crucial step when I stopped searching forums for the right commands to paste into xterm, and instead sought an understanding by reading official documentation and manpages.

To more directly answer your questions: yes, of course I could never go beyond `emerge some_package` and not reap any of the benefits of using a source-based distro (aside from walls of gcc output text that you think I wear as a badge of pride). But since the above framework was cemented in my head, the door to tinkering was placed within easy reach; this is true whether it be as simple as manually configuring some sysadmin-type function like apcupsd, or as complicated as editing kde 3.5 source code in a local overlay to achieve some crazy idea of usability that popped in my head.

Basically, don't knock it till you try it. Learning about what makes Linux tick from a textbook or some presentation is far inferior IMO to struggling with it on your own.

And definitely please don't berate those of us who are simply enthusiastic about teaching ourselves about random Linux nonsense and don't care about your distro wars or whatever.

New project:

mkdir ~/proj/$NEWPROJECT

Work on project:

cd ~/proj/$WHATEVER ; vi $SOMEFILE

Tasklist:

ls -ltr ls -ltcr

Effectiveness: Crap.

You must be from München.

I'm from Munich, and I call it Sodium.

Of course, ads never made anything free in the first place, you are still paying but indirectly. Marketing budget for clothing, movies, games, etc. are gigantic and factored into the price. In addition, ads are displayed all around us, whether or not we care about the product. The long term consequence of adblocking is that no one will pay for ads at which point they will simply go away. I don't have a problem with this.

There's hundreds of machines, technologies, chemicals and medicines you implicitly rely on every day to save what required backbreaking labor in centuries past. I'm sure no pill is going to be able to completely replace exercise anyway.

The chemical name is Natrium. Clearly English is wrong.

 

>>>Washington Times. Its the newspaper equivalent of Fox News.

That's a nice opinion, but it doesn't explain why we should ignore the article the Times printed You committed an Ad Hominem Fallacy. Example: "Paula says the umpire made the correct call, but this can't be true, because Paula is a liar." Assuming the premise is correct, that Paula's observation is probably a lie, the umpire may nonetheless have made the right call. Likewise Washington Times' article may still be a worthy article, and you've failed to explain why it isn't.

Someone else wrote:

>>>what's wrong with surfing porn at work?

Same thing that's objectionable about hanging a bikini calendar in your office. Some women find this objectionable and will file a lawsuit about "creating an unfriendly workplace" or some such. Therefore both the calendar and the porn are verboten. Of course it's not just women. Back in the days of Wang computers I saw a lot of jokes pasted to bulletin boards about male coworkers or husbands, and the size of the their Wangs.

Getting back to the article, it sounds like it was a more serious problem than just one or two visits to a site:
- "One foundation employee...during a three-week period in June 2008, the worker perused hundreds of pornographic Web sites" (bored from lack-of-work perhaps?)
- "Another employee in a different case was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography."
- "Another employee who stored nude images of herself on her computer told investigators she mistakenly had downloaded the pictures."
- "The foundation is hardly the only government agency to be embarrassed... The inspector general for the SEC noted in a report last fall that it had recently conducted three investigations into employees who misused government computers to view pornography."

The remarkable thing is the lack of punishment. The first two employees merely got a 2-week suspension without pay. Oh no. Horror. The woman received mandatory counseling, and the senior exec who surfed 300+ days apparently got no punishment - just an early retirement. If I did this on my private job I'd get FIRED. I should forget private engineering and instead study public policy to land myself a nice cushy job in government.

Definitely agreed. We used that book for our Aerospace Dynamics class, which was taught by none other than Robert Nelson himself. Great professor; I'm lucky to have been taught by him in several courses and as a research advisor.

I'm a just-graduated aerospace engineer from Notre Dame. For our senior design project, we build uav's... well, really RC planes. Everything had to be constructed from scratch, except for the electronics (motor/battery/GPS/receiver/etc). This year's goal was to have a mothership-daughtership configuration where the daughtership would detach mid-flight and maneuver on its own. Believe me, it's loads of fun to build everything from scratch, but it is a lot of work. And I definitely think it is doable by anyone, not just aerospace engineering majors.

Here was my team's plane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW68B3DnNWA

If you're interested in actually constructing the structure by yourself, I'd definitely suggest picked up a book on model airplane construction. Hobby shop dudes are also a big help, just go in and throw some ideas out and most hobby store owners will be very enthusiastic. And, if you're _really_ interested, I'd suggest Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach by Daniel Raymer. Link: http://www.aiaa.org/content.cfm?pageid=360&id=1396

Oh, also, flying a model aircraft requires a hell of a lot of skill- we get the awesome dudes down at the South Bend RC Plane Club to fly ours.