Well, no money goes to the police directly,(save donations ofcourse) police get money from the city. However, when you get traffic tickets (not parking tickets) Most of that money goes to the state or to the courts not the city our county that you committed the infraction in.

Yeah, that sucks. $25 ticket for forgetting my car inspection, then another $79 for costs.

EDIT: My new theory is that I forgot Daganev is a moderator, and I'm arguing in a thread with him, and that we don't actually have an autocensor. Poo.



I can't click over to the gnome radio button, and I'm not sure how else to do it. Also, is it normal for Ubuntu to boot into root without asking for a password when you load in recovery mode? I could have sworn I pwed it, and that Ubuntu was picky about giving straight up root access to anyone unless you tweaked it.

Yeah, it is. Ubuntu and a lot of distros give you root access when you boot into recovery mode. The reason for this is simplicity; booting a multiuser system takes further steps, and the less a system does when booting, the more stable and fast it is, generally speaking. This is a security liability, but if you expect malicious people to have physical access to your computer, you should be encrypting your data anyway.

This is true.

The only protection against physical attacks is full-disk data encryption. Even deleting your files won't help protect them from being recovered, unless you 'shred' them by overwriting their space with noise several times (Most software of the kind does 30 iterations of printing white noise to disk, in order to make the information truly unreadable).

I could always put it in a BlendTec. I'm not sure you can read data from dust particles.

Regardless, I just want to make it work. Reinstalling would probably be the easiest way, if I can figure out how; I can have it back up and running fine in half an hour or so.

Basic school/low-end office computers cost as low as 6 thousand pesos. Business computers usually cost 20 thousand pesos up.



I would have to check on that. Our office assistant canvassed that price for our office computers 8 months ago. We had to purchase original windows.

But, ah yes... you know the's a much cheaper alternative. Windows 95 costs 7,000 pesos. I dont think its fair for most people living in a comparatively poor country to use a technology more than 10 years off...

And even it its 15K, it is still higher than a normal goverment employee's salary.

Well, if your /home is a different partition you can just slip in the install disk, wipe your root partition, and go for it. Check df(1): it should show something like:

Stop talking crap. Even Microsoft Office 2003 is bloated to hell - I have a "stripped back" version that is a whole 73mb zipped and 104mb installed and includes Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint - I am more than willing to bet that for 99% of users they wouldn't know the difference between this version and the "full" bloated version.

The Linux kernel does everything the Windows one does. Arguably more.

The difference is, the Linux kernel will fit in a floppy disk, along with drivers for lots of common devices, a CLI shell and basic GNU tools. A full-featured distribution for web, mail, bittorrent and IM use will fit in a business card-sized CD. The Windows NT 5 kernel won't fit in the former, and an installation of Windows XP Home without any applications won't fit in the latter.

Since nobody seems to be addressing Joel's article directly, I'll go over the salient points.



Disk space is increasing all the time. The only drawback right now is that portable storage formats have been way behind the curve, but that's changing. Sooner or later Flash Stick or whatever replacement for DVD-R will come out.



So basically, bloated software is software that includes everything, for other needs. You may not need the outline feature or bibliography feature of Microsoft Word, for instance, but some people need it. These features aren't there for every single user's benefit.

It would be like complaining about Lusternia having skill trees and more archetypes. OMG, Lusternia is bloatware, let's remove aetherspace, free up some memory.

Having installed Word myself, I know that you can choose what to install and what to ignore. So they do try to make it easy for you.

What kind of computer do you got for 6,000 pesos, that is $120~ US, and that will get you a motherboard here, and not a very good one.

That isn't what complaining about "bloat" is about.

For example, lets compare two *very* similar bittorrent clients (in terms of functionality) to each other - uTorrent and Azureus. uTorrent is 600kb and has 99% of the same functions that Azureus has whilst still remaining cpu and memory efficient. Azureus on the other hand consumes a huge amount of cpu and system memory because of its reliance on Java.



This is what most people refer to in regards to bloat - and because Azureus uses java, there is NO real limit on its memory and cpu consumption. When sharing large numbers of files with Azureus, it is not uncommon for your memory usage to hit over the 512mb mark (while uTorrent is still under 10mb). Yes, this could be more precisely termed under "resource hog" but it is slow and bloaty nonetheless.

Worth to note, you can get a pretty decent used pc for cheap, i.e. three years old, that will still run what you need.

At Phred:

Except he makes a series of wrong assumptions.

First, size does not equate featureness. The size of my Windows folder right now is 1.7 GB. As I stated, you can fit a Linux distribution that does a hell of a lot more than Windows does out of the box in 50MB - That's over 20 times smaller.

Second, bloatware does hurt users. 1.7 GB is next to nothing on a modern computer, but a low-end box just a few years ago would have a HD of what, 10 GB? That's 10% of the user's hard drive that, from the user's point of view, essentially does nothing but browse the web and play media files. Not everyone has brand spanking new hardware.

Thirdly, Excel might be taking up less space in terms of cash, but it's continuously taking more space in terms of pictures of your family, videos you'd like to get to watch some time, and documents you need to email before Friday afternoon.

And finally, where did he get that data? Did he consider shared libraries installed with Office, or just the size of the binary? Using just the binary's size as a measure can be very deceptive. firefox.exe takes up 7 MB, but a full installation of Firefox takes up 20 MB.

Software with lots of features isn't bad, but software that is unnecessarily big is; just because a binary is huge doesn't mean all of it is usefl. And then there's the flipside of the 80/20 rule: Bloated software packages end up with features that only a minute minority ever use. Emacs is huge and bloated,

Microsoft's business model consists of selling the same product, over and over and over again, to users. Every so many years they have to release a 'new' version, with even more features. Most of those features are just bloat. They're just creeping featurism. Most users had exactly what they needed out of a word processor in Word 97, but Microsoft keeps releasing versions of Word because they need it to sell it all over again. They need new 'features' to get a critical mass of users to buy, after which everyone else has to switch because they break compatibility with previous versions, pushing people to buy more software.

Microsoft's bloat makes lots and lots of computers to be thrown away, or to sit gathering dust, because they can't run the latest Microsoft crap. Funny enough, they can run the very latest versions of Linux, as long as you turn off memory and resource-intensive features, of which there aren't many - Most of them, in fact, are eye-candy.

Then there's the fact that lots of Microsoft products are just bloated, expensive bug fixes for older Microsoft products. What, exactly, did Windows 98 do that Windows 95 didn't? Let's ask Wikipedia:

Your still ignoring the fallacy of the 80/20 rule. Each person wants different features.

Joel actually worked at Microsoft, he helped create VBA, then worked at other companies. He's definitely not a Microsoft apologist, but at least I trust his opinion on software, as I've been learning from his books. I have not seen you yet back up your views with quotes from noted software experts regarding things such as bloatware or Microsoft's inferior products.

You stuff still sounds more like an Internet meme parroted by the Linux fans. I'd be more willing to argue about it if you stuff didn't sound like the "typical whiny programmer" Joel kind of made fun of. I'd like to see you back up your opinions with stuff from software engineers who have had to work on these items.

Aiakon, the whole web site of Joel contains a lot of stuff that can "pwn" common memes. He actually mentions some stuff that Verithrax might be talking about, such as the law of leaky abstractions (which might do more to explain the "bloatware" Arsanil talked about--but that's a problem with abstraction layers, not software size). I strongly recommend reading his site sometime.

I never said anything about the 80/20 law. The 80/20 law is a fallacy. I said that there is a subset of features that nobody, except a very specific niche market, ever, ever uses in most software packages that are 'bloated'. Also, it seems you get all your information on software development from this one guy who used to be an MS developer, which hardly makes you knowledgeable about the subject.

And I don't see what's 'pwning' or revolutionary about his 'law of leaky abstractions'. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Hell, systems which abstract complexity away poorly are generally shunned in the Unix world. There's a reason Unix coders don't use IDEs designed to hide the code; there's a reason FOSS projects are rarely written in C++ even though GCC implements it (Namely, we either go for bust with systems that abstract away almost everything physical, like Python or Perl, or we use C anyway, because C is Good Enough ™). It seems to me Microsoft is more at fault for making abstraction layers that both leak horribly and are hard to fix when they do (Visual Basic and ASP.NET are simple examples, there. Then there's the horridness that is COM, and the fact that they broke CSS miserably, and the way they raped Kerberos...) than F/OSS developers, who tend to rely on much more frugal development tools and still manage to ship faster than Microsoft.

No, but I'm providing quoted knowledge. I also mentioned In Search of Stupidity which is by another author, and I'll see if I can bring up other authors if this debate continues. My only point is that you should try to back up some of these arguments with some expert knowledge and wisdom.

Although the leaky abstractions affect things like Perl and especially Ruby nowadays.

Perl and Ruby are absolutely freaking rock solid compared to Visual Basic and ASP, though.

"On Liberty" is John Stuart Mill. A very good book! John Locke argued for tolerence of religious differences, but only for those religions that are Christian ("Letter Concerning Toleration" - 1689).