Last time I checked you buy Apple because Your Mileage WON'T Vary. If you wanted a product where it may not work as advertised all the time you could buy just about anything else.
The big thing Apple (and its fans) push is that Apple products are solid, predictable, and, "just work." After forking up the cash for an Apple product a consumer isn't going to want to hear, "Oh, by the way, what we just told you was a load of crap, it may not just work, may not work predictably, and may not be generally "solid."
Kubuntu's arguably more polished on the backend considering they tend to spend more time fixing packages that may cause issues than inserting eye-candy.
Compiz itself is a Gnome-friendly project. If you want better KDE integration, talk to Compiz, the Kubuntu team does what it can. KNetworkManager's just a front-end to the same NetworkManager that Ubuntu uses, so if you're talking about the network itself not working that's another matter. I've also heard wicd is nice for wireless but KNetworkManager's always been pleasant for me.
KDE 4.1 has no hooplah, just solid. As a personal note note related to KDE 4.1 nVidia's drivers blow hard for quite a few things from Firefox to KDE 4 lately and I'd recommend against them if at all possible.
If there's that much of an issue though there's loads, and loads of community documentation available for getting even the strangest setups working. As a hint, I'd also recommend checking out the gentoo wiki as IMHO they've got some awesome documentation on a lot of stuff, just replace "emerge" with "sudo apt-get install" and you're usually good to go.
There are things to be polished, but it gets better all the time. But then, if you've got a "serious hassle" using Kubuntu try out some of the other distros, they may have better default combinations that work better for you...which gets us back to the wonderfulness of Linux as a tool. If you don't like what you've got you are free to change any and every aspect, including the distro, until you are satisfied.
But like I said before, that's just me, I could be wrong.
I don't understand why does someone need to prove a security vulnerability by releasing the tool?
Good question.
By releasing this tool he will make it available for anyone with bad intentions to implement it.
Erm...exactly. If that couldn't happen then there'd be no "real" motivation to fix it now would there?
Weeks later we will have issues all over the place because we did not teach our grandparents to enable the checkbox in gmail;
If your grandparents have no critical thinking skills that's their problem. If they had no idea what this "https" thing was maybe they should have taken twenty seconds to look it up. Mine did.
So, really, who benefits of the release of this tool?
Everyone. The black hats, the white hats, and by making a companies either fix their shit or lose money even little people me and you win.
Or it all goes terribly wrong and it's the end of the world as we know it. One of those.
I'm sure we could both come up with plenty of anecdotes about 'hacking' either OS and why one is better than the other.
You probably could, except for the fact that you're going on about desktops. If you don't like Gnome with Ubuntu you can feel free to "sudo apt-get install kde" and rock your socks. Or Fluxbox. Or GNUstep. Or Enlightenment. Or whatever else you want until you are satisfied.
You don't like OS X's desktop environment? Tough shit.
For me, I use the right tool for the right job.
Quite admirable. Most Linux users agree with you...they just happen to think that Linux is the best tool for the job.
All that I would say is that when a 'hack' is required for Ubuntu, I usually have to go and edit some config files by hand (such as xorg.conf) and play around at the command line (such as installing VMWare Tools).
If you're messing around with VMWare I think it's more than a little unfair to complain about the command line. That'd be like a foreman complaining about visiting the site. At a certain level of mastery it's expected to get dirty lest you forget all the hard work it took to get there.
Well, I've got one bumper sticker and I put it there because I think it's hilarious. It says simply, "Where are we going and why I am in this handbasket?"
The sad thing is that there's a very, very small number of people around here who actually get the joke.
Regardless of your feelings about people broadcasting their views (which, IMO, while it could be done more tastefully at least people are raising awareness in some way of issues they deem important) you've gotta give it to some of them, there's some damned creative ones driving around. My personal favorite has been, "Well, at least the war on the environment is going well."
We already have it, it's called VideoLAN. It's located at videolan.org. It's not the prettiest in the world, but then if you're looking at the interface instead of your movie I suggest you get some better movies.
Plays absolutely everything out of the box. If I don't feel like messing around with codecs and just want to watch video, "sudo apt-get install vlc." Done.
For audio I'm a KDE guy so I'm a fan of amaroK. Quite simply I haven't found a better music player. I'm sure some tastes will differ, but I find I'm far from alone on this one.
But yeah, I think Linux in general has the whole "multimedia" thing figured out. I'd like some better audio support but then again I've only had a problem once in over a decade of use with a wide variety of systems. To the curious, it was a Turtle Beach card. However, I understand other people have audio show-stoppers though.
You know there was a time when I honestly would still want to buy the DVD/BluRay/whatever's hip just because I, like a lot of people deep down I suspect, actually enjoy getting a little box with a disk in it. It's "nifty."
And then I started seeing EXACTLY what was described. Commercials, overlong menu entries, and other such things that my standalone DVD players fumble over.
In all seriousness this is the EXACT reason I stopped watching television. If it's good, I'll either wait for it on DVD so I can watch the show all at once with no commercials and a high-quality hardcopy of sorts or I'll just download it if I can't wait that long. Now I'm getting commercials in my movies. Guess what I and every other even HALFWAY technology-enabled movie fan starts doing.
Even better, thanks to nice front-ends and other tools like k9copy and DVD Shrink a lot of times it's point-and-click easy to set up a movie to rip and then watch at my convenience. I can even show family members how to do this that aren't technically inclined. If I'm really, REALLY paranoid about the MPAA/RIAA I'll just buy the disk (or rent it) and rip it myself.
All of this just because they gave me the ONE thing I didn't want: commercials. If they realy wanted more money I would've paid more almost without question. Now I can't avoid it and it's at the same price...that means no sales from me or anyone I know.
Good for you, but people like you - and me and the rest of the people here - aren't "normal". Grandma won't know what the hell to do (besides call you). She might even think "those evil hackers" "got her".
A little paranoia is a good thing. If the person can't be bothered to make certain they want to visit a potentially untrusted "SSL-encrypted" site maybe they shouldn't be using the Internet for what they're wanting to do.
I don't know about you, but my grandmother has no problem doing this kind of stuff. My grandmother-by-law does. One uses the Internet regularly, the other uses the postal system and brick-and-mortar stores. It's not the end of the world if a "grandma" as you put it doesn't use the Internet.
Maybe we should worry more about you and me than "grandma."
Um, not sure what the problem is. KDE 4 allows you to put icons on your desktop. Even better it goes beyond the functionality of KDE 3 in this respect since you could make several containers in different areas of your desktop and put different icons in each one, thereby giving you even more spatial control cleanly and efficiently.
What can't you do for KDE 4.x that you can do in KDE 3.x that's a show-stopper for you?
I've gotta agree with the parent here, you really don't realize quite how broken the traditional "start menu" design is until you either A)start loading a LOT of software in there or B)you start using an application launcher.
On the Windows box at work I installed Launchy, removed nearly every option from the start menu to make it as streamlined as possible on the odd occasion I DO need to use it and have been running that way for months. For a little extra sanity I made three folders on the desktop to group up applications that aren't in the start menu (like a Resonate Central Dispatch application). I've clicked on the folders less than ten times in three months. I've clicked on the start menu exactly twice.
Once you even halfway know what you want to access on a system there's no need to rely on a cumbersome piece of design like a start menu.
For KDE 3.x there's Katapult. For Gnome there's Gnome-Do. For KDE 4.x there's Krunner (or whatever it's called, just hit Alt-F2). Learn them and love them.
Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.
The key difference is that Linux itself is usable to at least some people, a DE just makes it usable by a lot more people. Conversely Vista isn't usable by anyone, Aero just makes it obvious to a lot more people.;)
Yeah, try out VLC (VideoLAN). If that doesn't work, use Linux. I have no problems playing anything using the DVD libraries (like libdvdread and so forth) and Mplayer-based players (Kaffeine).
Probably because while there are roughly analogous classes on either primary side all the classes are unique. It's not like WoW where there's a very small pool of them, you have a much wider pool of classes which all interact differently, the only classes reacting exactly the same being within your own race.
Compare this to WoW. Take Warriors, for instance. Warriors are the same whether they're Horde or Alliance. What do we have in WAR? Nothing like it, the closest would be the Paladin/Shaman prior to Burning Crusade.
If you're talking about people bitching about their class not owning everything I think you're focusing a bit too much. That's not exclusive to WAR, that's a gamer thing. That's not something that can really BE fixed when you have different playstyles directly competing with each other.
However, whereas in WoW you've got a very black-and-white performance of classes (such as, shamans rock but paladins suck, or some other such view that's popular) in WAR you have many, MANY unique classes which will all work differently from each other, ensuring more chaos (which is good). For instance, "My Bright Mage sucks against the Goblin Shaman, but it's pretty good against that Chosen, and I'm not really sure how it does against the Riflemen." Already you're FORCING people to have to see the bigger picture. While you can't "fix" a gamer's desire to have the "right" playstyle that can kill everything else, this isn't a bad approach to get one step closer.
But that's just my opinion. You asked how I thought it was interesting, I don't ask you or anyone else to agree with it.
Those are the primaries. To my understanding (though, like everyone, I could be wrong. If so please let me know) while you had two major "factions," the thing was that each sub-race, in Warhammer-spirit, was really "on its own." You and your Dwarf friends don't like those Human pricks? Go over and STOMP their asses...who cares if you're both on the side of Order, they're Humans! They're not Dwarves! They can't be trusted and must die!
That was the kind of thing I thought was really interesting, the self-sustainability of each race. Without a home city for each it's going to look like a carbon copy of WoW regardless of what PvP changes they make...and that's very, very bad.
I had the same problem with their DSL service (which I do NOT recommend, by the way). You mention Linux and immediately they clam up. Makes it rather hard for me to recommend Verizon at all when they won't troubleshoot THEIR hardware because of MY software. To me, that makes zero sense.
I understand if they determine the problem to be my software. No worries, it's something they don't support, I'll work on it myself. But it's freakin stupid to tell a customer that you won't bother checking your own lines (especially when they're obviously broken...in this particular case their own modem wouldn't even pick up the line) when the problem is way before the customer's box.
They honestly, seriously, tried to tell me that, "Linux doesn't support DSL." Yeah, I laughed at the guy pretty good for trying to feed me such a line. Even Comcast didn't try that with me, just mentioned that they wouldn't be able to run their software on my system and I'd have to set it up on the box myself.
He who controls the source, controls the industry.
In this case they don't control shit other than a phone. What an arrogant prick...and here I was actually thinking about getting a Nokia phone this year, silly me. Guess I can tell my friends and family they can cross Nokia off their lists since I won't help them with it.
Because that's how science works and the news doesn't like science? I dunno, I'm with you, they should probably wait until they know for sure what happened.
I also have to agree. In my case it's cost of repairs and maintenance. I've got a '93 Saturn SL that's paid off and my friends and family never see why I bother doing maintenance on her instead of, "just buying a new car," like they do (and being perpetually in debt, like they are). I put it down to cost of maintenance versus car payment AND potential maintenance.
Even after swapping the motor, rims, power steering pump, clutch, using high grade oil (I love the Royal Purple), harmonic balancer, and occasionally something out of the ordinary (exhaust system), it's still fantastically cheaper than running out and dropping money on a brand new car that's still not going to run as well, as long, or even have the same fuel efficiency as my SL (for those interested, unless I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic or nail the hell out of it I get about 28mpg in the city and about 38~40mpg on the highway).
But then, my wife and I are into taking care of things we have instead of just replacing them first and asking questions later. It might also explain why we tend to have a lot less debt than most people we know.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, it's not exactly all peaches and cream in California.
Of course not, that'd be Georgia.
The difference being that that building was reinforced concrete stack, which is essentially monolithic.
If the building was monolithic, would that explain how it induced F.E.A.R. in people?
So um... YMMV?
Last time I checked you buy Apple because Your Mileage WON'T Vary. If you wanted a product where it may not work as advertised all the time you could buy just about anything else.
The big thing Apple (and its fans) push is that Apple products are solid, predictable, and, "just work." After forking up the cash for an Apple product a consumer isn't going to want to hear, "Oh, by the way, what we just told you was a load of crap, it may not just work, may not work predictably, and may not be generally "solid."
But hey, your mileage may vary.
All Perl needs is a shiny new catch phrase... Perl on Rails? CloudPerl? Extreme Perl? Perl#?
How about "Perl Necklace?"
Kubuntu's arguably more polished on the backend considering they tend to spend more time fixing packages that may cause issues than inserting eye-candy.
Compiz itself is a Gnome-friendly project. If you want better KDE integration, talk to Compiz, the Kubuntu team does what it can. KNetworkManager's just a front-end to the same NetworkManager that Ubuntu uses, so if you're talking about the network itself not working that's another matter. I've also heard wicd is nice for wireless but KNetworkManager's always been pleasant for me.
KDE 4.1 has no hooplah, just solid. As a personal note note related to KDE 4.1 nVidia's drivers blow hard for quite a few things from Firefox to KDE 4 lately and I'd recommend against them if at all possible.
If there's that much of an issue though there's loads, and loads of community documentation available for getting even the strangest setups working. As a hint, I'd also recommend checking out the gentoo wiki as IMHO they've got some awesome documentation on a lot of stuff, just replace "emerge" with "sudo apt-get install" and you're usually good to go.
There are things to be polished, but it gets better all the time. But then, if you've got a "serious hassle" using Kubuntu try out some of the other distros, they may have better default combinations that work better for you...which gets us back to the wonderfulness of Linux as a tool. If you don't like what you've got you are free to change any and every aspect, including the distro, until you are satisfied.
But like I said before, that's just me, I could be wrong.
I don't understand why does someone need to prove a security vulnerability by releasing the tool?
Good question.
By releasing this tool he will make it available for anyone with bad intentions to implement it.
Erm...exactly. If that couldn't happen then there'd be no "real" motivation to fix it now would there?
Weeks later we will have issues all over the place because we did not teach our grandparents to enable the checkbox in gmail;
If your grandparents have no critical thinking skills that's their problem. If they had no idea what this "https" thing was maybe they should have taken twenty seconds to look it up. Mine did.
So, really, who benefits of the release of this tool?
Everyone. The black hats, the white hats, and by making a companies either fix their shit or lose money even little people me and you win.
Or it all goes terribly wrong and it's the end of the world as we know it. One of those.
Whoosh!
I'm sure we could both come up with plenty of anecdotes about 'hacking' either OS and why one is better than the other.
You probably could, except for the fact that you're going on about desktops. If you don't like Gnome with Ubuntu you can feel free to "sudo apt-get install kde" and rock your socks. Or Fluxbox. Or GNUstep. Or Enlightenment. Or whatever else you want until you are satisfied.
You don't like OS X's desktop environment? Tough shit.
For me, I use the right tool for the right job.
Quite admirable. Most Linux users agree with you...they just happen to think that Linux is the best tool for the job.
All that I would say is that when a 'hack' is required for Ubuntu, I usually have to go and edit some config files by hand (such as xorg.conf) and play around at the command line (such as installing VMWare Tools).
If you're messing around with VMWare I think it's more than a little unfair to complain about the command line. That'd be like a foreman complaining about visiting the site. At a certain level of mastery it's expected to get dirty lest you forget all the hard work it took to get there.
But that's just me. I could be wrong.
Well, I've got one bumper sticker and I put it there because I think it's hilarious. It says simply, "Where are we going and why I am in this handbasket?"
The sad thing is that there's a very, very small number of people around here who actually get the joke.
Regardless of your feelings about people broadcasting their views (which, IMO, while it could be done more tastefully at least people are raising awareness in some way of issues they deem important) you've gotta give it to some of them, there's some damned creative ones driving around. My personal favorite has been, "Well, at least the war on the environment is going well."
We already have it, it's called VideoLAN. It's located at videolan.org. It's not the prettiest in the world, but then if you're looking at the interface instead of your movie I suggest you get some better movies.
Plays absolutely everything out of the box. If I don't feel like messing around with codecs and just want to watch video, "sudo apt-get install vlc." Done.
For audio I'm a KDE guy so I'm a fan of amaroK. Quite simply I haven't found a better music player. I'm sure some tastes will differ, but I find I'm far from alone on this one.
But yeah, I think Linux in general has the whole "multimedia" thing figured out. I'd like some better audio support but then again I've only had a problem once in over a decade of use with a wide variety of systems. To the curious, it was a Turtle Beach card. However, I understand other people have audio show-stoppers though.
You know there was a time when I honestly would still want to buy the DVD/BluRay/whatever's hip just because I, like a lot of people deep down I suspect, actually enjoy getting a little box with a disk in it. It's "nifty."
And then I started seeing EXACTLY what was described. Commercials, overlong menu entries, and other such things that my standalone DVD players fumble over.
In all seriousness this is the EXACT reason I stopped watching television. If it's good, I'll either wait for it on DVD so I can watch the show all at once with no commercials and a high-quality hardcopy of sorts or I'll just download it if I can't wait that long. Now I'm getting commercials in my movies. Guess what I and every other even HALFWAY technology-enabled movie fan starts doing.
Even better, thanks to nice front-ends and other tools like k9copy and DVD Shrink a lot of times it's point-and-click easy to set up a movie to rip and then watch at my convenience. I can even show family members how to do this that aren't technically inclined. If I'm really, REALLY paranoid about the MPAA/RIAA I'll just buy the disk (or rent it) and rip it myself.
All of this just because they gave me the ONE thing I didn't want: commercials. If they realy wanted more money I would've paid more almost without question. Now I can't avoid it and it's at the same price...that means no sales from me or anyone I know.
Good for you, but people like you - and me and the rest of the people here - aren't "normal". Grandma won't know what the hell to do (besides call you). She might even think "those evil hackers" "got her".
A little paranoia is a good thing. If the person can't be bothered to make certain they want to visit a potentially untrusted "SSL-encrypted" site maybe they shouldn't be using the Internet for what they're wanting to do.
I don't know about you, but my grandmother has no problem doing this kind of stuff. My grandmother-by-law does. One uses the Internet regularly, the other uses the postal system and brick-and-mortar stores. It's not the end of the world if a "grandma" as you put it doesn't use the Internet.
Maybe we should worry more about you and me than "grandma."
Um, not sure what the problem is. KDE 4 allows you to put icons on your desktop. Even better it goes beyond the functionality of KDE 3 in this respect since you could make several containers in different areas of your desktop and put different icons in each one, thereby giving you even more spatial control cleanly and efficiently.
What can't you do for KDE 4.x that you can do in KDE 3.x that's a show-stopper for you?
I've gotta agree with the parent here, you really don't realize quite how broken the traditional "start menu" design is until you either A)start loading a LOT of software in there or B)you start using an application launcher.
On the Windows box at work I installed Launchy, removed nearly every option from the start menu to make it as streamlined as possible on the odd occasion I DO need to use it and have been running that way for months. For a little extra sanity I made three folders on the desktop to group up applications that aren't in the start menu (like a Resonate Central Dispatch application). I've clicked on the folders less than ten times in three months. I've clicked on the start menu exactly twice.
Once you even halfway know what you want to access on a system there's no need to rely on a cumbersome piece of design like a start menu.
For KDE 3.x there's Katapult. For Gnome there's Gnome-Do. For KDE 4.x there's Krunner (or whatever it's called, just hit Alt-F2). Learn them and love them.
Linux itself with no DE is not usable to an average person, and so is Aero without the rest of Vista.
The key difference is that Linux itself is usable to at least some people, a DE just makes it usable by a lot more people. Conversely Vista isn't usable by anyone, Aero just makes it obvious to a lot more people. ;)
Yeah, try out VLC (VideoLAN). If that doesn't work, use Linux. I have no problems playing anything using the DVD libraries (like libdvdread and so forth) and Mplayer-based players (Kaffeine).
Science is a lie sent by liberals to kill us!
But seriously the way the administration treats scientific pursuit you'd think we were at war with it.
Um, my dog runs pretty fast.
I bet a Gnu runs faster.
Probably because while there are roughly analogous classes on either primary side all the classes are unique. It's not like WoW where there's a very small pool of them, you have a much wider pool of classes which all interact differently, the only classes reacting exactly the same being within your own race.
Compare this to WoW. Take Warriors, for instance. Warriors are the same whether they're Horde or Alliance. What do we have in WAR? Nothing like it, the closest would be the Paladin/Shaman prior to Burning Crusade.
If you're talking about people bitching about their class not owning everything I think you're focusing a bit too much. That's not exclusive to WAR, that's a gamer thing. That's not something that can really BE fixed when you have different playstyles directly competing with each other.
However, whereas in WoW you've got a very black-and-white performance of classes (such as, shamans rock but paladins suck, or some other such view that's popular) in WAR you have many, MANY unique classes which will all work differently from each other, ensuring more chaos (which is good). For instance, "My Bright Mage sucks against the Goblin Shaman, but it's pretty good against that Chosen, and I'm not really sure how it does against the Riflemen." Already you're FORCING people to have to see the bigger picture. While you can't "fix" a gamer's desire to have the "right" playstyle that can kill everything else, this isn't a bad approach to get one step closer.
But that's just my opinion. You asked how I thought it was interesting, I don't ask you or anyone else to agree with it.
Those are the primaries. To my understanding (though, like everyone, I could be wrong. If so please let me know) while you had two major "factions," the thing was that each sub-race, in Warhammer-spirit, was really "on its own." You and your Dwarf friends don't like those Human pricks? Go over and STOMP their asses...who cares if you're both on the side of Order, they're Humans! They're not Dwarves! They can't be trusted and must die!
That was the kind of thing I thought was really interesting, the self-sustainability of each race. Without a home city for each it's going to look like a carbon copy of WoW regardless of what PvP changes they make...and that's very, very bad.
I had the same problem with their DSL service (which I do NOT recommend, by the way). You mention Linux and immediately they clam up. Makes it rather hard for me to recommend Verizon at all when they won't troubleshoot THEIR hardware because of MY software. To me, that makes zero sense.
I understand if they determine the problem to be my software. No worries, it's something they don't support, I'll work on it myself. But it's freakin stupid to tell a customer that you won't bother checking your own lines (especially when they're obviously broken...in this particular case their own modem wouldn't even pick up the line) when the problem is way before the customer's box.
They honestly, seriously, tried to tell me that, "Linux doesn't support DSL." Yeah, I laughed at the guy pretty good for trying to feed me such a line. Even Comcast didn't try that with me, just mentioned that they wouldn't be able to run their software on my system and I'd have to set it up on the box myself.
He who controls the source, controls the industry.
In this case they don't control shit other than a phone. What an arrogant prick...and here I was actually thinking about getting a Nokia phone this year, silly me. Guess I can tell my friends and family they can cross Nokia off their lists since I won't help them with it.
Because that's how science works and the news doesn't like science? I dunno, I'm with you, they should probably wait until they know for sure what happened.
I also have to agree. In my case it's cost of repairs and maintenance. I've got a '93 Saturn SL that's paid off and my friends and family never see why I bother doing maintenance on her instead of, "just buying a new car," like they do (and being perpetually in debt, like they are). I put it down to cost of maintenance versus car payment AND potential maintenance.
Even after swapping the motor, rims, power steering pump, clutch, using high grade oil (I love the Royal Purple), harmonic balancer, and occasionally something out of the ordinary (exhaust system), it's still fantastically cheaper than running out and dropping money on a brand new car that's still not going to run as well, as long, or even have the same fuel efficiency as my SL (for those interested, unless I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic or nail the hell out of it I get about 28mpg in the city and about 38~40mpg on the highway).
But then, my wife and I are into taking care of things we have instead of just replacing them first and asking questions later. It might also explain why we tend to have a lot less debt than most people we know.
Quite true. Either that, or the King of time with his personal bodyguard of 300 years will fight gloriously at the mountain pass of fate.