Install scripts, mostly dev stuff. Apache, mysql, postgres. There's a nice default gui. If there is another debian + openbox + web dev install scripts distro that I am unaware of, or if you've got your own custom debian image, then maybe this isn't that useful.

Probably if dpkg works for you, you aren't their target audience.

How quickly you accelerate is almost certainly going to be the biggest factor in fuel efficiency. There are optimizations beyond that, though, as you point out. I adjusted the way I drive after reading this article about hypermilers.

If you drive carefully, you can get mileage that exceeds EPA estimates. If you don't drive carefully, you're probably not saving a lot of travel time, and your mileage is pretty much going to be terrible. You don't need to be Speed Racer every time you sit behind a wheel. Eventually market forces will limit that ability to the privileged class anyway, but until then you're pretty much a douche for speeding.

The test should be redesigned, but you all are missing the consequences. You only have so much power in your gas tank, and F = ma means that you really only have a couple good options for improving MPG. There's a limit to how much you can reduce the mass, so manufacturers will start limiting the rate that you can accelerate at. If you have driven a Prius, you know what I am talking about.

Personally, I'm not in a hurry, and I figure time spent accelerating is probably going to be a small component of total travel time. The rest of you should be aware of what you're asking for.

Unless the company in question is a consultancy itself, there should not be a conflict of interest. Nor is there any justification for restrictive covenants. To my mind, that is nothing more than a power play, and as a contractor I am in an equal bargaining position.

You seemingly don't understand the purpose of employees vs contractors. You get to spread a number of costs out among your employees. Contract negotiation is a pain in the butt, among other things. Also, when I am setting my rates, I pass on any expenses due to down time, or employee training, or materials, directly on to the customer, with markup. There's no free lunch.

Finally, while it is theoretically possible to schedule your time to be able to take on multiple contracts at once, there is a lot of overhead in task-switching. You're not an employee any more, you're a business entity, so that means that you also need to be HR, an accountant, a lawyer, and a salesman, or employ people to do these things for you. It is possible to wear all of those hats and juggle three or more contracts, but it is far from easy.

Lies.

If it's a product, then I own it after I have paid for it, and can do with it as I please.

If you are instead insisting on ownership of the *idea* and not a specific representation thereof, as copyright does, then this is an artificial, novel, and harmful construction.

I might add, you have no idea what socialism is, and the 'free market' types generally don't like government-enforced monopolies.

"Lingua Franca"

No need to bring up Aramaic when we have a perfectly good term for the concept.

Right, because there's some sort of profit motive here that we should be serving. Some guy's business is going to get ahold of this and that will make all of us (shareholders) rich, rich, rich!

Let's point out that there are slightly bigger barriers to entry in the space exploration market than in the internet market. And if there's one thing in the world that isn't going to get smaller and more efficient with time, it's a gravity well. At least until we develop a space elevator. So the market is guaranteed to be in control of a few large players -- most likely only one -- and make most of its money off of government agents. The cynical part of me suggests that this is exactly the role that Musk wants to inhabit.

For any industry, the amount of competition is directly proportional to the cost to enter the market. Space exploration is at about the level where billionaires and people with the net worth of a small country can play around with it. More or less on the public dime. So, just like the internet.

I'll skip the discussion of what exactly there is in space to make money off of. Without the possibility of competition, a large profit potential would just make things worse.

It's not because we want it to be difficult. It's that we want it to be useful. If you keep on bumping up your feature count, you will eventually get to a point where what you have done is create a bad programming language (all programming languages are bad programming languages, but it goes double for GUI-based ones).

Programming is more or less the ultimate tool for telling a computer what to do. It is also more or less directly opposed to simplicity. Linux is optimized for utility. You can use it to create a simple interface to the computer, at which point we generally stop calling it Linux, but you cannot simultaneously optimize in two opposite directions. You cannot build a computer appliance using the tools contained within that appliance.

Designing interfaces is all about managing complexity. Most linux distributions opt for more complexity/utility rather than less. There is some complexity for complexity's sake, and some complexity for historical reasons, but utility is the driving force. And Linux users will get very upset at anything that detracts from that utility, as seen in (among other flamewars) the Wayland vs X11 debates.

In the morning, I love the smell of loving the smell of loving the smell of recursion.

I think to be recursive, your verbs need to refer to themselves. You know? I know that you know. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know what I'm talking about.

I am loving that I am loving that I am loving the smell of recursion in the sentence.

Okay, I think I'm done for now.

Do you think that I'm done?

When working with designs meant for screen printing, the original artwork was done in RGB, then a team would separate the color channels (in Photoshop), one channel per ink to be used. They could technically do CMYK directly, but it didn't look good for a wide variety of purposes -- you can imagine a flat-filled cartoon character would be pretty much impossible. It would look a bit like comic book halftoning, probably. The shop would use that when they wanted to print Thomas Kincaide-esque sweatshirts for grannies. They would also use additional channels for things that weren't colors, like adhesive (for foil, usually) and clear inks.

I don't imagine that having more than three or four color channels is a new thing, or difficult to deal with. I would imagine even the prosumer technology would allow you to choose between various rendering intents. Probably the color separation is handled at the driver or device level, but TIFF, PDF, and DCS 2.0 (??) should handle extra channels natively.

A few more details on screen printing for those who might care: The actual screen printing process was not computer-controlled as a rule. The smaller shops I worked at printed a transparency which was transferred onto the screen by a photographic process, but the large one had a computer-controlled airjet "printer" that would knock out the design. Usually they would do a few samples by hand, to work out what ink and screen combination to use (different mesh sizes and ink thicknesses produce slightly different effects), and adjust finer details like when you would "flash" the shirt. That is, hitting it with a very high powered xenon lamp for a few seconds to dry the ink, before applying a new layer. You could do some interesting painterly effects with wet-on-wet ink; you can also make a hell of a mess that way. Flashing also tends to affect the color somewhat, especially for temperature-sensitive inks. After you get a few good samples, you send them off to the client as a proof. Then you would set up your automatic press for a run of a couple hundred. Color balance was something that the press operator kept an eye on after that point. After printing, the shirts are sent through a 400 degree open oven on a conveyor belt, for perhaps 10-20 seconds, to cure the ink.

Very fun job, the ink is messy as hell. I would still be doing it, but working with computers pays better.

There comes a point where there is no readily identifiable "best" strategy. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in either direction. Perhaps one persons says, "the rule of thumb that holds for the common case, doesn't apply here." Perhaps there are valid differences about what goal to optimize for -- it is a law of the universe that you can't optimize in all directions at once.

At some point the only way to decide the issue one way is to fork the code and see what becomes popular. As an outsider, you don't really have a good perspective on whether this is justifiable. Clearly the magic code factory has stopped for the moment, but coding efforts are probably stalled more often than not. I started on a new project a few weeks ago, and I don't expect to be doing anything but refactoring and bug fixes for several weeks to come. And if I decided that it was just as much trouble to start over with a bare set of classes and do things the way I think they should have been done the first time, are you going to call me out on it? Is there any better proof of the viability of that strategy but in the execution? Perhaps this will be a better performing or more feature-ful product, and perhaps not, but if the only thing learned from the experience is that "doing it this way turned out to be a bad idea," that still counts as a win in my book.

A failure is something you don't learn anything from.

Lastly, as counterproductive as a fork may be, it's nowhere near as hard to merge changes as it would be if the guy had just started a whole new project. Which is the biggest reason to cry foul over Canonical's development efforts.

To expand on a couple points:

Some distros make it more or less easy to install rights-restricted software, like the stuff you need to play mp3s or DVDs. Neither Fedora/RHEL nor Debian allow nonfree software in their repos, but it's generally a fairly painless process to add a repo that does.

Ubuntu will, IIRC, ask you during the install process if you want to install such things, and Linux Mint comes with the media codecs by default. For other distributions you should research this issue.

Fedora and Ubuntu are the "big" distros, more or less, although Mageia seems to be climbing up DistroWatch lately. I had written off that project as dead when its Corporate Overlord bit the dust, but it's probably worth checking out. I hope I may say with enough accuracy that it is of similar quality to OpenSuse.

Fedora and Ubuntu have the biggest corporate backing and are likely to represent the most polished experiences. Ubuntu has its own way of doing things, most notably they have implemented at least two desktop environments (Unity and UNR) and their own startup process. Startup tends to be one of those big differences between distributions, but it's something you can safely ignore as a n00b user.

Fedora and Ubuntu use incompatible packaging systems, which tends to be irrelevant for a couple of reasons that aren't worth going over here. Generally you should figure that [a] any distro that is described as being derived from any other distro is package-compatible, and [b] it's very uncommon to need to install a package outside of your distribution's package management tools. We don't download software off websites, pretty much everything that you would ever want to install comes in the box.

It's hard to come up with too many more big important differences between these things, really. Desktop environments make a pretty big difference. Distros, not so much, especially among the big players.

Oh, and I forgot to mention. If you ever want to give yourself a real education in Linux, try Linux From Scratch. You'll probably even survive the experience. By contrast, slackware will be a friendly and trivial introduction, and Gentoo... ...sorry, my Gentoo joke is still compiling :(

It's much easier for you to specify your needs as there are hundreds of distros and packages that can be combined. To a first approximation pretty much all linux packages are available for all distributions.

Beyond that, most linux distributions are based off some other distribution. The description of Kubuntu as "Ubuntu, but with the KDE desktop environment" is perfectly descriptive.

So what distinguishes one distro from another? Besides what comes installed by default, the most significant difference is how those packages got there.

Debian is probably the distribution that the greatest number of other distributions are based on. It has a very very long testing cycle; it takes packages years to get into Debian's stable branch. Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable, and a shit-ton of things are based on Ubuntu, including Linux Mint.

Red Hat produces the next biggest family of linuxes. Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are more or less analogous to Debian unstable and stable, respectively, but I don't think very many people are dumb enough to try and base a distro on Fedora. CentOS is RHEL with the logo removed, and Scientific Linux is also based on RHEL.

Next up we have Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, and Suse.

I was going to put a joke about Gentoo here, but it's taking a while to compile. Gentoo is a rolling-release distro where most of the packages that you use are compiled on and for your machine. You mention gcc, this is related, but you will probably not ever use it directly. Compiling packages yourself can make them run faster, but it can take a long time.

Arch is a well-documented, rolling release distribution. I'm not sure what else to say about them honestly, but "well-documented" is one of the highest compliments I'm aware of.

Slackware is the oldest and most "unixy" of the distributions. It uses an old bootloader, old unix-style boot scripts, and by default boots to a text terminal. You should use Slackware if you want to retreat into a cave for five years, to emerge with a profound knowledge of unix, a full beard, and a solid opinion on whether emacs or vi(m) is the best text editor. I'm pretty sure these things are highly marketable. No, really.

Suse hasn't failed yet. The last time I checked, they had a wonderful, polished experience, and great admin/configuration tools. I have no idea why they don't have more users, except that there's already a shit-ton of options.

It's probably fair to say that Debian stable, RHEL, and any derivatives will have the longest testing cycle, and fewest updates in any given span of time. There are many more distributions for more specialized purposes, such as BackTrack for pen testing, Puppy for small installations, Bodhi for those seeking Enlightenment. You may have to figure out what you need on your own there.

Whew! Let's take a break for a minute.

All right. So with all that in mind, you can install, as previously mentioned, pretty much all the same stuff on any and every distro.

Here is a guide on desktop environments. If you're a n00b, you're probably going to want one of those.

We also have another guide for more experienced users, or those on resource-constrained systems, that covers some of the more popular window managers. Because sometimes 2GB of gnome libraries gets a bit old. For the truly adventurous, this post covers 30 Window Managers in 30 Days.

Honestly, there's really a pretty limited amount of advice that one can give about using any particular distro. They're all substantially similar. Without any specific information about what you want to use, a recommendation becomes, well, exactly what you were complaining about. "Use XYZ because it has ABC." Ask a vague question, get a vague answer. You're probably not going to be able to boil things down to a simple or unambiguous choice anyway, but you're not going to go too badly wrong by just picking something and using it.

I like Debian. Linux Mint Debian Edition is a good option, although I am using Crunchbang on my netbook. The latter is based on Debian stable.

Stability is the kind of virtue that you appreciate most in its absence. After an enthusiastic period of Fedora and Ubuntu use, I from time to time experienced issues with packages and drivers breaking on updates. These were usually resolvable, and forced a certain amount of CLI-foo on me, but there's only so many times one wants to wrangle with things that worked just fine yesterday.

Stability means having outdated versions of packages; you miss out on the new features as well as the new bugs. However, it's also pretty trivial to install packages from unstable if you really need them, and if all else fails you can compile from source (which is usually a painless process).

Ubuntu was certainly far less buggy than Fedora, and I certainly don't mind all you guys being Debian beta testers ;) but my choice of OS is going to be heavily informed by whichever one has the longest testing cycle.

Ted Stevens eviscerated Ted Stevens.

He should have stuck to bringing home pork. He didn't get to be the longest-serving Republican senator because he was bad at his job. Sarah Palin on the other hand... ...yeah okay maybe there's a pattern here.