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My preference is to use only the bootloader for the OS I'm booting, as opposed to a "boot manager" that presents a menu of OS's. I avoid using chaining techniques the way something like GRUB does. And I don't use MBR's if I don't have to. Disklabels alone will suffice. So the stick contains only an OS-specific bootloader and the OS, usually just a kernel with embedded ramdisk or a loadable kernel module containing a filesystem and userland. I keep it very simple.

This works well for me with PC's. Would this work with today's x86 Macs?

Maybe he works for a company that sells software priced at over $100?

I have no doubt such companies have employees, or contractors, who not only monitor message boards on behalf of the company, but who post comments on them in a deliberate attempt to influence discussions in ways favorable to the company's interests. Whether they are effective is another question. But they are trying.

Younger readers should be aware of this as they are the ones being targetted.

Perhaps it's not that a majority of users are convinced price equates to quality control so much as a majority are aggressively manipulated in terms of what information about software they are exposed to.

If you are really serious about taking a stand on this bill, then the most impact will achieved by going to the source of it, not Congress... unless you have more to offer Congress' incumbents and the nation's economy than the industry source does.

They are a very important constituent.

If a large number of consumers stopped purchasing a certain entertainment company's products for one day, would it have a noticeable impact on their revenues? How about a week? A month?

The industry claims it's losing business to pirates. While it's probably true to some extent, it is speculative and nearly impossible to measure accurately. How many of the consumers of pirated content were never consumers of paid content to begin with?

The products this industry sells are not life necessities.

In summary, a branded entertainment "hunger strike" by actual existing, paid customers. This would cause real loss. And, if it's a noticeable loss, it would send a very strong message.

Good luck.

Understood.

But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?

It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome.

And the reason they have removed this operator?

Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.

I write small, simple shell functions using a single busybox-like binary that do the same things as Perl modules. I store the shell functions in a local repository and load/unload them as needed. I make "programs" by combining different functions.

Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.

And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results.

Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately.

The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".

We know where Google stands on this.

Let's see what happens.

It's actually a very small job.

The hard part I guess is learning to do things with the shell and UNIX utilities instead of Perl. And simplifying what you do and how you do it.

If you choose to do complex things and do them in complex ways, or you can only see complex solutions where simple solutions exist, I guess a module-powered scripting language like Perl becomes irresistable and using the UNIX base utilities becomes a prohibitively painful exercise.

I want to learn Perl. But I just cannot find the motivation because I never need more than what UNIX gives me.

If what you're using works for you there's little reason to switch. I have had certain consraints in how I use computers that motivated me to explore different alternatives that "do more with less". But as users demand smaller devices and more portability I'm beginning to wonder if these "unconventional" alternatives are not generally useful for others besides me.

Not only do I divorce the OS from the hardware, but I separate the OS from my personal data. Unless I have both wholly residing in RAM (which I find generally faster than HDD or USB/SD), they are not on the same media. As much as possible I try to make the OS read-only and the media used for data (e.g. RAM for short-term data storage or HDD for long-term data storage) read-write. Perhaps there are parallels to certain object file formats and their separation of code and data.

I've also thought a lot about and experimented with the use of separate, simplified, fast-booting OS's for different purposes. I am forced to use different OS's to perform certain tasks. But the popular all-purpose OS's are huge and often I only need a small fraction of their functionality.

What if we did not think in all or nothing terms about OS functionality? What if some OS's were small and only limited-purpose?

Rebooting is the slow step. But these limited-purpose OS's, being small and simple, can be very robust and responsive once booted.

The smaller the kernel and userland, the more RAM I have for storage.

Sean Parker is ridiculously overfunded.

I don't want the Apple OS. Remove it completely from the hardware, make the firmware more friendly to non-Apple OS, then I'll buy more Apple hardware.

Other than NetBSD, I was not aware it's "easy" to run other OS's on Apple hardware. Knowing Apple, I'm still not sure I believe it.

But I will investigate. Thanks for the FYI.

You seem to be suggesting that Google's new demographic will never become more tech savvy or at least not "any time soon".

That's an interesting view.

I'm just a bit more optimistic.

Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time.

It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else.

Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision.

But time will tell who is the wiser.

So if I compile a busybox-like crunched binary with a variety of "do one thing well" UNIX utilities, including sh itself, and then I write a shell function that only calls this single binary it its various incantations and uses pipes and temporary files residing on tmpfs or mfs (instead of reading entire files into memory the way perl does), and this binary used like this can do all that Perl can do, why should I use Perl?

That's my question.

A comment like Joe's really surprises me. Time and again I see brilliant coders who for whatever reason cannot see the path to making their own live USB/SD sticks.

But there's a better solution than beagle's suggestion.

Sell hardware that has no bundled OS. Sell different OS's on removable media (e.g. memsticks). Or users can create their own OS memsticks.

Apple is primarily a hardware company, as evidenced by the value they place on their design team and design patents, and where they derive the lion's share of their revenue.

If I could buy Apple hardware without it being tied to Apple's OS's, I would be willing to pay Apple hardware prices more frequently.