I think you miss the point of this article. This guy is talking about what Windows users feel about Linux, and you make a sarcastic comment about how easy it is to type something on the command line that accomplishes what you want.
Here's a challenge for you: try using your Linux box without ever opening a terminal window. We all know that command line junkies who have memorized every command and parameter and have some shell scripting knowledge can do anything in a single command, but your non-Linux friends (you do have some of those, right?) will not want to learn that. I've spent a year or so on that challenge, and I think I've managed to ditch the command line almost entirely, except to remotely administrate headless machines.
I have non-Linux friends who use my computer regularly, and 99.9% of the time, they have no problem. The websites they use work properly, even those based on Flash or Java. They have no problem finding the applications they want to use. In short, there is no discernible difference to them between using a Linux desktop and a Windows desktop.
But that 0.1% of the time still embarrasses me. When a friend is visiting and can't use my computer to do what they expect, I cringe, because my computer somehow seems inferior to theirs. Sure, I can pull up a dozen forums and mess around in a terminal to try and solve that particular issue. And, in fact, Windows has a myriad of issues that require the same sort of hacking.
But Linux has to be that much better. It won't do that it's an equal to Windows, because that leaves no incentive to switch and try something new. But if it's better, not just in terms of abstract things like being Free, or community-supported, etc., then my visiting friend says, "Hey, what's this fancy desktop you're running? Maybe instead of cleaning up my Windows machine for me, you could install this Linux thing instead."
Basically, these annoying newbs are a source of two very important things: users who may be willing to try something new if you're willing to spend some time showing them around, and a source of income. A friend of mine once said that geeks should be grateful for stupid users, because it's their stupidity that puts food on our table. And as aggravating as those newbs can be, it's nice to get paid to solve their problems.
...and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
QFE. You've just summed up all problems in the IT industry in one sentence.
I can see why the CRTC is doing this, and it's not like pushing the CBC website is any worse than Microsoft making MSN the default search, home page, and RSS headline source.
Of course, that doesn't make it a good idea. Are we really so afraid that Canadian artists will suddenly start to suck if we don't guarantee them an audience? In the age of YouTube, Google and Facebook, you're an idiot if you can't find yourself an audience and a way to pass the hat around.
We don't need the CRTC. CBC could easily be a privately funded corporation instead of wasting tons of tax money every year, and arts funding could be done the way it has been done for centuries, by guilds of artists receiving funding from those interested in the arts, and through public performance.
I learned this naming scheme from a job I had in the late 90's. Nouns that begin with a particular letter is specific enough to give good names, yet general enough that you shouldn't run out any time soon. Personally, I use the letter K.
krikkit - a reference from the HHGTTG
kosmo - after Kosmo Kramer from Seinfeld. Kramer has not yet been assigned
kevlar - the firewall
kipling - a cute little O2. In UserFriendly, the AI is an O2, and is often portrayed as being rather artistic.
kang - a (now dead) laptop
kodos - its replacement (don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!)
It was difficult to choose names at first, and I refused to accept names that started with 'kn' as it was a cop-out. I named a Macbook 'knowledge' at one point, but I hated the name. Now, I don't think I could buy enough computers to exhaust all my ideas.
While it's not a lot of money, I think the more important detail is that Mozilla is backing OGG. When Mozilla backed PNG, many websites started replacing their old patent-encumbered GIFs with PNGs, and even IE started to support PNG format.
While I agree that Theora is far from complete, OGG does not imply Theora. Theora is simply a free codec that can be stuffed in an OGG container. Once again, Mozilla opens the door to web developers who believe in open standards, and certainly there are development teams who will loathe their MP3s and replace them with unecumbered OGG/Vorbis. Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
This can only be a Good Thing. Small shops that don't want to mess around with licensing fees will have a good alternative to use for streaming audio (and later video). More importantly, those streams can be saved by customers for later use. Proprietary solutions to streaming audio/video usually cripple the player in such a way that the end user can't save the file (Flash for instance).
Mozilla is one of the heavy hitters, IMO. Their financial support and commitment to Open Standards have been a thorn in Microsoft's side since Netscape was released. Way to go Mozilla!
...and that the developer is a consultant. This entire article tries to portray a developer as a person who costs nothing when he's not coding. This, of course, is only the case for independent consultants. Having been one for a few years, management has always been of the opinion that I am easily replaceable, and that the only time I'm working is when I am writing code.
I've observed full-time developers during this time, too. Since actually writing code doesn't always take up their entire day, they spend time writing redundant documentation in different formats, attending meetings with people that have ridiculous expectations, and generally screwing around while the consultants work. That costs a lot of money as well, but sure, blame the hardware and the consultant.
As a consultant, I would always put forward a hardware solution if it were the correct one. But it usually isn't. The problems I've fixed in my consulting time are usually the same: the all-star full-time developer they hired isn't as good as they thought he was. Applications weren't responding slowly, they were crashing randomly, and occasionally corrupting data in the process. I don't know of any hardware that would fix this problem.
Cost-wise, this company spent upwards of $200,000 on this developer. They spent four years trying to fix his broken code. I spent 4 months cleaning up his broken code, and made considerable progress, and still managed to add some key new features. My take in these 4 months? About $13,000.
So yes, there are over-priced developers out there. But I earn my salt, and I don't charge that much. Certainly, I've not fixed a problem to date that would have been easily fixed by buying new hardware.
Not that I believe investing in education is bad, but passing it off as an economic stimulus is disingenuous.
Whatever he has to say to get it past the sheeple. I've felt for a long time that the USA has taken far too long to make broadband Internet available to the population at large. So maybe it won't stimulate the economy overnight, but a generation of kids that finally get a proper technology education is bound to have some effect in the future.
I'm not sure how I feel about the general idea, if a machine has a backdoor and they can manage to connect to it also then in a way I feel they should just temporarily patch it for the user and inform the user at absolute worse although I'm not sure this is ideal- what if they patch some security researcher's honey pot for instance!
In general I think there's a lot of apathy involved on the part of the owners of the zombie computers. Plus of course a tendency to get reinfected. I guess rummaging through people's private data could be justified by claiming it's in plain view. The police could argue that no special enforcement powers are required to break into these computers, as they have already been compromised. I dislike invasions of privacy by law enforcement at least as much as you, but what you've said sounds like a reasonable use of investigative power. Maybe people will get smart and start encrypting their private data.
I've run into a number of bad contracts and have been unable to afford a lawyer, and was willing to accept pretty much anything just to get working again. All of the flaws you mention are things that have come back to bite me in the ass (well, except for the asking slashdot part).
I've learned that keeping any rights to commercially developed software is unlikely unless you have some kind of weight in the business community. Learning what that really means sucks hard, and that's why I believe that Free Software is ultimately better -- it's not produced in software sweatshops, where the true genius will never get compensated, either in ego, or in money for the full value of their work. Of course, that's why I no longer work in IT. There's plenty of money someplace else, and you'll be treated like a person and not some code creating machine.
Most of TFA's criticisms of Linux assume that the lack of standardization is a problem. I say that this is the level of customization Linux users have come to expect.
One of the key features in Windows is that the graphical shell is basically hard-wired into the operating system. While this allows for the GUI consistency that the author seems to value most of all, the GNU/Linux architecture was never meant to do so. The result is great flexibility in how the machine's state is presented to the operator. The price, of course, is that any number of graphical libraries end up being used to write programs.
I like the idea that a distribution encompasses a large amount of software that can be installed from a single vendor. While this requires that software may need to be installed from many repositories, in practice it is not difficult to find a repository with the software that is needed. Package management is handled differently, because it achieves greater flexibility and security. It's the very idea that you must go to a vendor and download an executable that installs the package that Linux intends to avoid. Instead, the vendor provides a crypto signature that identifies their packages, and a repository to download them from. This way, the vendor's signature can be verified before installation, and no arbitrary privileged code is executed, as the package manager is invoked for installation. The package manager program can be monitored for changes to ensure that the installation procedure is always the same. This is not the case for most Windows installers (though MSI files are better than an EXE). Any software obtained through a repository will be automatically updated as the vendor provides new releases. While core Windows functionality may be checked regularly, each installed program must provide its own automatic update process rather than using the system updater. Having a single system updater is superior architecture since it minimizes the amount of privileged code that much execute.
The graphical/multimedia desktop is undoubtedly more complicated as there are competing design philosophies. While the general concept of one-click execution is present in even the most basic window managers (TWM, WindowMaker, BlackBox, etc.), other window managers attempt to provide a more unified interface to the system. On the other extreme, there is KDE, which provides many integrated services (such as audio extraction from CD) directly into the windowing system. Middle-of-the road desktop philosophies such as GNOME provide graphical and VFS consistency, but the same audio extraction task requires the installation of a separate program. In the end, however, every one of these environments can be quickly customized to provide efficient graphical shortcuts to any software that is installed. In most cases, the vendor's package will provide these shortcuts, and they can be placed in the "Start" menu, on the desktop, or in a quick-launch style configuration on the taskbar. There's really no difference in the end result, nor is there any appreciable difference in effort involved.
While there's some truth to TFA's criticism of the competing audio subsystems, in practice there's not really any issue. PulseAudio, included in Ubuntu 8, provides a unified interface to both ALSA and the legacy OSS driver, allowing for simultaneous use of the audio driver by both ALSA and OSS apps. Again, a simple one-time configuration, and the application is still launched with a single click.
TFA complains about the need to kill the X server should it crash. In practice, it's only buggy video drivers that will cause that to happen. Fair enough, I've seen Windows Vista successfully reload a crashed video driver. Still, anything prior to that version of Windows would require an entire system restart in this situation. Simply restarting X is preferable to the entire system restart.
Finally, there's some discussion about things that make binary-only development for GNU/Linux annoying. Of course, you could look at it the oth
An alternate protocol could conceivably improve on this by applying flow control to the aggregate throughput for the whole "bundle" of connections, rather than each connection individually.
Or you could just do flow control at the firewall where it's intended to be done. I find it works quite well, keeping latency of other protocols low even though the number of bittorrent connections dominates the total number of active TCP connections.
I was unable to order this "dry pair". I got mixed messages from TELUS. The local phone agent told me that, yes, this service was available, but only if my DSL was through TELUS. The business DSL person told me that this was not possible at all.
Agreed. I don't think they've made a single decision in favor of consumers in the last decade. TELUS has also been granted many favors by the CRTC, all of which reinforce their monopoly position out west.
Specifically, their requirement that all downstream DSL connections be associated with a local phone number (provided only by TELUS) is nothing more than a money grab that prevents me from having a single network connection into my house. I don't want to give TELUS money, but the CRTC's inaction in many such cases forces me to fund the big monopoly in addition to the local ISP that actually provides what I want at a reasonable price.
The distinction between intelligence and sentience is an important one. IMO, the idea of an incredibly intelligent, yet totally autonomous machine seems most likely to me. As others have pointed out, consciousness may well be an emergent property of our biological system, but there's no guarantee that an equally complex machine would have the same emergent property.
The intelligence that machine exhibits, however, is really just the sum total of all the programmers who have worked on it. Great feats of information processing can be done, and correlations beyond the ability of even a think-tank to form can be made with reasonable accuracy. Machines, however, are unable to make "irrational" decisions, or decisions with inadequate data, or decisions based on ethics or compassion. Certainly, it is unlikely that a machine would ever "notice" that it has been ordered to self-destruct.
The closest thing to allowing the machine to "make up its mind" is to allow for it to choose randomly, but then you're bound by the law of probability, and the machine is not allowed to keep making the correct decision, since probability states that other decisions are equally likely. We're still a long way (and I doubt we'll ever get there) from machines that truly make decisions independently of its human programmers and operators.
Can anyone think of a place that would fall into these two categories?
Things that are given little attention are those really difficult parts that tend to be done by very few people. Off the top of my head, crypto implementations are understood by few and someone who knew what they were doing could possibly hide something in there. These crypto libraries are used by the kernel in many places, so the heavy use requirement is also met. Of course, I imagine that only very trusted people are allowed to touch such code. However, I still recall this nasty Ubuntu vulnerability. I was extremely glad that my critical servers are on BSD.
Why should I care if Linux allows me to do the same things once I learn how to use it and a bunch of new programs? Where's the incentive? There are tens of millions of Windows users thinking the same thing.
Heh, and if you check out my journal recently, you'll see I started along those same lines. I've blown away Windows a dozen times (once since then), and every time it's for the same reason: Linux does everything I need it to and runs noticeably faster, on everything. I especially like the 100ms knocked off my ping time on WoW. Windows is a horrible, horrible resource hog, even on my fancy 64-bit desktop.
I spent time researching and optimizing the Vista system, turned off UAC so that it was more like XP (when will Windows implement sudo like every other desktop OS?) etc. etc., so don't tell me I didn't set it up properly. Linux is simply faster.
Installing WINE correctly on your Linux machine will allow you to install Windows applications by simply double-clicking on setup.exe. Almost any desktop application not running.NET will work, and many games work right out of the box (Blizzard titles are especially compatible). But, of course, no one knows this, and will continue on the "new software everywhere" rant. Run IE on Linux if you want, geez. Microsoft's attempt to obfuscate.NET so that it won't run reliably on non-Windows boxes will fail as badly as their attempt to prevent DX9 titles from running under WINE.
But, why should I? I like Apple software, I'm accustomed to using it.
Because unless you're some kind of magical fanboi, you will suffer the same problem every Mac user I've known has ever faced: you can't troubleshoot your own hardware, and taking your machine into Apple costs time and money. Admittedly, they do at least fix it. Every OS has its foibles, and Linux's foibles cost the least for the greatest return, IMHO.
In the end, however, these OS religious wars are pathetic. The compatibility between OSes is at an all-time high, but the proprietary vendors hold onto their proprietary natures like two dogs fighting over a steak. Linux offers a common x86 platform that both Apple and Microsoft could remain binary compatible with, and new software could easily be linked with WINElib to run on all three platforms with nearly no change.
To me, Apple is the Obama and Microsoft is the McCain in this world. People may claim that the third-party vote is stupid and pointless, but neither candidate has a position that is substantially different than the other, nor will the third-party candidate run as a rep or a dem on idealogical grounds. The third-party candidate may not ever win, but he can take away enough votes from the partisan crowd to skew the results.
It seems to me that it would be better to OCR everything and contract the proof-reading to the Chinese firm. The wide variation of writing styles and letter forms may make 100% accuracy of OCR impossible for this task, but starting from OCR should reduce the task, shouldn't it?
and my cap is supposedly 20gig of transfer (up/down no longer matters. yay!). I've gone over a couple of times, but no one's ever bothered me. These are pretty soft caps, and only once has an ISP attempted to charge extra for the bandwidth, when my roommate left a torrent running full upload for 10 days straight.
As opposed to you calling me "selfish," "greedy," and "bigoted?"
No, these were logical deductions following from the fact that you felt that denying a child education were permissible under some circumstances, as education could be too expensive. "Bleeding heart" is a colloquial term specifically used to add a certain connotation to an argument, an actual ad hominem fallacy.
I suppose not, but the fact that people view him as a hero in times of severe economic disparity should tell you that something is wrong with your beliefs. The only reason that governments redistribute wealth is because those who have it have proven throughout history that they will use it to persecute those who don't have it. That's not "competition" in the sense that Smith meant it, and actually acts against the Free Market, by devaluing the views of most of the population.
The "bleeding heart" label is a nice touch. It adds an ad hominem flavor to your argument that's so typical of American bigotry.
Actually, if someone deals with the unwashed masses regularly, it might be a good idea to learn some manners and/or diplomacy. There's no excuse for being an asshole, not even being ridiculously intelligent and having to deal with real idiots. Everyone has stress in their lives, and it's like geniuses can't be bothered to deal with it gracefully. Quietly ignoring the "it works, thanks" e-mail saves just as much time, without alienating the person with his first response.
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So how is the tax enforced then? You only need a license if you receive content from RTE? Or is it going to be on a subscription basis?
Yup, my head just exploded from the complexity.
I think you miss the point of this article. This guy is talking about what Windows users feel about Linux, and you make a sarcastic comment about how easy it is to type something on the command line that accomplishes what you want.
Here's a challenge for you: try using your Linux box without ever opening a terminal window. We all know that command line junkies who have memorized every command and parameter and have some shell scripting knowledge can do anything in a single command, but your non-Linux friends (you do have some of those, right?) will not want to learn that. I've spent a year or so on that challenge, and I think I've managed to ditch the command line almost entirely, except to remotely administrate headless machines.
I have non-Linux friends who use my computer regularly, and 99.9% of the time, they have no problem. The websites they use work properly, even those based on Flash or Java. They have no problem finding the applications they want to use. In short, there is no discernible difference to them between using a Linux desktop and a Windows desktop.
But that 0.1% of the time still embarrasses me. When a friend is visiting and can't use my computer to do what they expect, I cringe, because my computer somehow seems inferior to theirs. Sure, I can pull up a dozen forums and mess around in a terminal to try and solve that particular issue. And, in fact, Windows has a myriad of issues that require the same sort of hacking.
But Linux has to be that much better. It won't do that it's an equal to Windows, because that leaves no incentive to switch and try something new. But if it's better, not just in terms of abstract things like being Free, or community-supported, etc., then my visiting friend says, "Hey, what's this fancy desktop you're running? Maybe instead of cleaning up my Windows machine for me, you could install this Linux thing instead."
Basically, these annoying newbs are a source of two very important things: users who may be willing to try something new if you're willing to spend some time showing them around, and a source of income. A friend of mine once said that geeks should be grateful for stupid users, because it's their stupidity that puts food on our table. And as aggravating as those newbs can be, it's nice to get paid to solve their problems.
...and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
QFE. You've just summed up all problems in the IT industry in one sentence.
I can see why the CRTC is doing this, and it's not like pushing the CBC website is any worse than Microsoft making MSN the default search, home page, and RSS headline source.
Of course, that doesn't make it a good idea. Are we really so afraid that Canadian artists will suddenly start to suck if we don't guarantee them an audience? In the age of YouTube, Google and Facebook, you're an idiot if you can't find yourself an audience and a way to pass the hat around.
We don't need the CRTC. CBC could easily be a privately funded corporation instead of wasting tons of tax money every year, and arts funding could be done the way it has been done for centuries, by guilds of artists receiving funding from those interested in the arts, and through public performance.
I learned this naming scheme from a job I had in the late 90's. Nouns that begin with a particular letter is specific enough to give good names, yet general enough that you shouldn't run out any time soon. Personally, I use the letter K.
It was difficult to choose names at first, and I refused to accept names that started with 'kn' as it was a cop-out. I named a Macbook 'knowledge' at one point, but I hated the name. Now, I don't think I could buy enough computers to exhaust all my ideas.
Actually, he doesn't smell as bad as you'd think.
While it's not a lot of money, I think the more important detail is that Mozilla is backing OGG. When Mozilla backed PNG, many websites started replacing their old patent-encumbered GIFs with PNGs, and even IE started to support PNG format.
While I agree that Theora is far from complete, OGG does not imply Theora. Theora is simply a free codec that can be stuffed in an OGG container. Once again, Mozilla opens the door to web developers who believe in open standards, and certainly there are development teams who will loathe their MP3s and replace them with unecumbered OGG/Vorbis. Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
This can only be a Good Thing. Small shops that don't want to mess around with licensing fees will have a good alternative to use for streaming audio (and later video). More importantly, those streams can be saved by customers for later use. Proprietary solutions to streaming audio/video usually cripple the player in such a way that the end user can't save the file (Flash for instance).
Mozilla is one of the heavy hitters, IMO. Their financial support and commitment to Open Standards have been a thorn in Microsoft's side since Netscape was released. Way to go Mozilla!
Java performs just fine for jobs for which it is appropriate. It's just not the right tool for many jobs. Writing it correctly helps a lot too.
...and that the developer is a consultant. This entire article tries to portray a developer as a person who costs nothing when he's not coding. This, of course, is only the case for independent consultants. Having been one for a few years, management has always been of the opinion that I am easily replaceable, and that the only time I'm working is when I am writing code.
I've observed full-time developers during this time, too. Since actually writing code doesn't always take up their entire day, they spend time writing redundant documentation in different formats, attending meetings with people that have ridiculous expectations, and generally screwing around while the consultants work. That costs a lot of money as well, but sure, blame the hardware and the consultant.
As a consultant, I would always put forward a hardware solution if it were the correct one. But it usually isn't. The problems I've fixed in my consulting time are usually the same: the all-star full-time developer they hired isn't as good as they thought he was. Applications weren't responding slowly, they were crashing randomly, and occasionally corrupting data in the process. I don't know of any hardware that would fix this problem.
Cost-wise, this company spent upwards of $200,000 on this developer. They spent four years trying to fix his broken code. I spent 4 months cleaning up his broken code, and made considerable progress, and still managed to add some key new features. My take in these 4 months? About $13,000.
So yes, there are over-priced developers out there. But I earn my salt, and I don't charge that much. Certainly, I've not fixed a problem to date that would have been easily fixed by buying new hardware.
Not that I believe investing in education is bad, but passing it off as an economic stimulus is disingenuous.
Whatever he has to say to get it past the sheeple. I've felt for a long time that the USA has taken far too long to make broadband Internet available to the population at large. So maybe it won't stimulate the economy overnight, but a generation of kids that finally get a proper technology education is bound to have some effect in the future.
I'm not sure how I feel about the general idea, if a machine has a backdoor and they can manage to connect to it also then in a way I feel they should just temporarily patch it for the user and inform the user at absolute worse although I'm not sure this is ideal- what if they patch some security researcher's honey pot for instance!
In general I think there's a lot of apathy involved on the part of the owners of the zombie computers. Plus of course a tendency to get reinfected. I guess rummaging through people's private data could be justified by claiming it's in plain view. The police could argue that no special enforcement powers are required to break into these computers, as they have already been compromised. I dislike invasions of privacy by law enforcement at least as much as you, but what you've said sounds like a reasonable use of investigative power. Maybe people will get smart and start encrypting their private data.
I've run into a number of bad contracts and have been unable to afford a lawyer, and was willing to accept pretty much anything just to get working again. All of the flaws you mention are things that have come back to bite me in the ass (well, except for the asking slashdot part).
I've learned that keeping any rights to commercially developed software is unlikely unless you have some kind of weight in the business community. Learning what that really means sucks hard, and that's why I believe that Free Software is ultimately better -- it's not produced in software sweatshops, where the true genius will never get compensated, either in ego, or in money for the full value of their work. Of course, that's why I no longer work in IT. There's plenty of money someplace else, and you'll be treated like a person and not some code creating machine.
Most of TFA's criticisms of Linux assume that the lack of standardization is a problem. I say that this is the level of customization Linux users have come to expect.
One of the key features in Windows is that the graphical shell is basically hard-wired into the operating system. While this allows for the GUI consistency that the author seems to value most of all, the GNU/Linux architecture was never meant to do so. The result is great flexibility in how the machine's state is presented to the operator. The price, of course, is that any number of graphical libraries end up being used to write programs.
I like the idea that a distribution encompasses a large amount of software that can be installed from a single vendor. While this requires that software may need to be installed from many repositories, in practice it is not difficult to find a repository with the software that is needed. Package management is handled differently, because it achieves greater flexibility and security. It's the very idea that you must go to a vendor and download an executable that installs the package that Linux intends to avoid. Instead, the vendor provides a crypto signature that identifies their packages, and a repository to download them from. This way, the vendor's signature can be verified before installation, and no arbitrary privileged code is executed, as the package manager is invoked for installation. The package manager program can be monitored for changes to ensure that the installation procedure is always the same. This is not the case for most Windows installers (though MSI files are better than an EXE). Any software obtained through a repository will be automatically updated as the vendor provides new releases. While core Windows functionality may be checked regularly, each installed program must provide its own automatic update process rather than using the system updater. Having a single system updater is superior architecture since it minimizes the amount of privileged code that much execute.
The graphical/multimedia desktop is undoubtedly more complicated as there are competing design philosophies. While the general concept of one-click execution is present in even the most basic window managers (TWM, WindowMaker, BlackBox, etc.), other window managers attempt to provide a more unified interface to the system. On the other extreme, there is KDE, which provides many integrated services (such as audio extraction from CD) directly into the windowing system. Middle-of-the road desktop philosophies such as GNOME provide graphical and VFS consistency, but the same audio extraction task requires the installation of a separate program. In the end, however, every one of these environments can be quickly customized to provide efficient graphical shortcuts to any software that is installed. In most cases, the vendor's package will provide these shortcuts, and they can be placed in the "Start" menu, on the desktop, or in a quick-launch style configuration on the taskbar. There's really no difference in the end result, nor is there any appreciable difference in effort involved.
While there's some truth to TFA's criticism of the competing audio subsystems, in practice there's not really any issue. PulseAudio, included in Ubuntu 8, provides a unified interface to both ALSA and the legacy OSS driver, allowing for simultaneous use of the audio driver by both ALSA and OSS apps. Again, a simple one-time configuration, and the application is still launched with a single click.
TFA complains about the need to kill the X server should it crash. In practice, it's only buggy video drivers that will cause that to happen. Fair enough, I've seen Windows Vista successfully reload a crashed video driver. Still, anything prior to that version of Windows would require an entire system restart in this situation. Simply restarting X is preferable to the entire system restart.
Finally, there's some discussion about things that make binary-only development for GNU/Linux annoying. Of course, you could look at it the oth
An alternate protocol could conceivably improve on this by applying flow control to the aggregate throughput for the whole "bundle" of connections, rather than each connection individually.
Or you could just do flow control at the firewall where it's intended to be done. I find it works quite well, keeping latency of other protocols low even though the number of bittorrent connections dominates the total number of active TCP connections.
I was unable to order this "dry pair". I got mixed messages from TELUS. The local phone agent told me that, yes, this service was available, but only if my DSL was through TELUS. The business DSL person told me that this was not possible at all.
Agreed. I don't think they've made a single decision in favor of consumers in the last decade. TELUS has also been granted many favors by the CRTC, all of which reinforce their monopoly position out west.
Specifically, their requirement that all downstream DSL connections be associated with a local phone number (provided only by TELUS) is nothing more than a money grab that prevents me from having a single network connection into my house. I don't want to give TELUS money, but the CRTC's inaction in many such cases forces me to fund the big monopoly in addition to the local ISP that actually provides what I want at a reasonable price.
The distinction between intelligence and sentience is an important one. IMO, the idea of an incredibly intelligent, yet totally autonomous machine seems most likely to me. As others have pointed out, consciousness may well be an emergent property of our biological system, but there's no guarantee that an equally complex machine would have the same emergent property.
The intelligence that machine exhibits, however, is really just the sum total of all the programmers who have worked on it. Great feats of information processing can be done, and correlations beyond the ability of even a think-tank to form can be made with reasonable accuracy. Machines, however, are unable to make "irrational" decisions, or decisions with inadequate data, or decisions based on ethics or compassion. Certainly, it is unlikely that a machine would ever "notice" that it has been ordered to self-destruct.
The closest thing to allowing the machine to "make up its mind" is to allow for it to choose randomly, but then you're bound by the law of probability, and the machine is not allowed to keep making the correct decision, since probability states that other decisions are equally likely. We're still a long way (and I doubt we'll ever get there) from machines that truly make decisions independently of its human programmers and operators.
TFA mentions that patches for MPlayer to use VDPAU on Linux are already available. Hopefully Xine follows shortly.
Can anyone think of a place that would fall into these two categories?
Things that are given little attention are those really difficult parts that tend to be done by very few people. Off the top of my head, crypto implementations are understood by few and someone who knew what they were doing could possibly hide something in there. These crypto libraries are used by the kernel in many places, so the heavy use requirement is also met. Of course, I imagine that only very trusted people are allowed to touch such code. However, I still recall this nasty Ubuntu vulnerability. I was extremely glad that my critical servers are on BSD.
Why should I care if Linux allows me to do the same things once I learn how to use it and a bunch of new programs? Where's the incentive? There are tens of millions of Windows users thinking the same thing.
Heh, and if you check out my journal recently, you'll see I started along those same lines. I've blown away Windows a dozen times (once since then), and every time it's for the same reason: Linux does everything I need it to and runs noticeably faster, on everything. I especially like the 100ms knocked off my ping time on WoW. Windows is a horrible, horrible resource hog, even on my fancy 64-bit desktop.
I spent time researching and optimizing the Vista system, turned off UAC so that it was more like XP (when will Windows implement sudo like every other desktop OS?) etc. etc., so don't tell me I didn't set it up properly. Linux is simply faster.
Installing WINE correctly on your Linux machine will allow you to install Windows applications by simply double-clicking on setup.exe. Almost any desktop application not running .NET will work, and many games work right out of the box (Blizzard titles are especially compatible). But, of course, no one knows this, and will continue on the "new software everywhere" rant. Run IE on Linux if you want, geez. Microsoft's attempt to obfuscate .NET so that it won't run reliably on non-Windows boxes will fail as badly as their attempt to prevent DX9 titles from running under WINE.
But, why should I? I like Apple software, I'm accustomed to using it.
Because unless you're some kind of magical fanboi, you will suffer the same problem every Mac user I've known has ever faced: you can't troubleshoot your own hardware, and taking your machine into Apple costs time and money. Admittedly, they do at least fix it. Every OS has its foibles, and Linux's foibles cost the least for the greatest return, IMHO.
In the end, however, these OS religious wars are pathetic. The compatibility between OSes is at an all-time high, but the proprietary vendors hold onto their proprietary natures like two dogs fighting over a steak. Linux offers a common x86 platform that both Apple and Microsoft could remain binary compatible with, and new software could easily be linked with WINElib to run on all three platforms with nearly no change.
To me, Apple is the Obama and Microsoft is the McCain in this world. People may claim that the third-party vote is stupid and pointless, but neither candidate has a position that is substantially different than the other, nor will the third-party candidate run as a rep or a dem on idealogical grounds. The third-party candidate may not ever win, but he can take away enough votes from the partisan crowd to skew the results.
It seems to me that it would be better to OCR everything and contract the proof-reading to the Chinese firm. The wide variation of writing styles and letter forms may make 100% accuracy of OCR impossible for this task, but starting from OCR should reduce the task, shouldn't it?
and my cap is supposedly 20gig of transfer (up/down no longer matters. yay!). I've gone over a couple of times, but no one's ever bothered me. These are pretty soft caps, and only once has an ISP attempted to charge extra for the bandwidth, when my roommate left a torrent running full upload for 10 days straight.
As opposed to you calling me "selfish," "greedy," and "bigoted?"
No, these were logical deductions following from the fact that you felt that denying a child education were permissible under some circumstances, as education could be too expensive. "Bleeding heart" is a colloquial term specifically used to add a certain connotation to an argument, an actual ad hominem fallacy.
Robin Hood was not an altruist.
I suppose not, but the fact that people view him as a hero in times of severe economic disparity should tell you that something is wrong with your beliefs. The only reason that governments redistribute wealth is because those who have it have proven throughout history that they will use it to persecute those who don't have it. That's not "competition" in the sense that Smith meant it, and actually acts against the Free Market, by devaluing the views of most of the population.
The "bleeding heart" label is a nice touch. It adds an ad hominem flavor to your argument that's so typical of American bigotry.
Actually, if someone deals with the unwashed masses regularly, it might be a good idea to learn some manners and/or diplomacy. There's no excuse for being an asshole, not even being ridiculously intelligent and having to deal with real idiots. Everyone has stress in their lives, and it's like geniuses can't be bothered to deal with it gracefully. Quietly ignoring the "it works, thanks" e-mail saves just as much time, without alienating the person with his first response.