I agree with all your points. So why do people resist when I give them Ubuntu and offer to install it for them? Even after using it, and finding that it does all they need, people flock back to pirated XP that they know contains malware right there on the install disc. Why? Because conformity is a very hard thing to overcome. Things like the broadcast flag and other DRM type shenanigans may give a few people an incentive to pause and look at what is going on, but alas.. not many. The WGA did it for me, and I am very happy with Linux. But the reality is that of all the people who use a digital recorder of one kind or another, most use Tivo and counterparts, the cable company's own box, or a DVD recorder. Only a tiny number use a PC based PVR even if it is the most flexible option. Although hopefully a few more HTPC web sites will bring this up when discussing software to use for the job.
Amen. Personally I'm all for touch technology that incorporates a mildly painful electric jolt for those greasy bastards that can't keep their fingers off my monitor. I wonder if there is a market for an IR beam based sensor that would sound an alarm or that spark of electricity buzz sound every time something got within about a centimeter of the screen. Harmless, but enough to dissuade the screen groping gits who leave fingerprints all over LCD monitors. Although a laser to cut the offending digit and cauterize the incision would be good too.
"I'm looking forward to installing this weekend."
I truly wish you good luck. Thanks. It should be fun judging by some of the problems I've seen mentioned. I got a new driver to put it on anyway, so if there are major problems, I can just swap it out for F8 again, and wait until F10 comes out.
I've finally given up after 4 tries.
For some reason it insists on trying to install itself back onto the DVD.
I even redownloaded the ISO, reburned to CD and DVD, all to no avail.I have never encountered anything like this before, and am now convinced it's 'not ready for prime time' yet. Where's the fun in a smooth install;-) Out of curiosity, were you using a rewriter to install from? I had problems with F7 and 8 not liking my DVD writer, and failing before the graphic install.
I'll just stick with my comfortable Kubuntu setup. Have fun. Good thing Fedora isn't the only distro.
"(Except for bits about the installation, the review is actually quite positive.)"
I must have read a different article (whupps, sorry, it's slashdot, I know I'm not supposed to RTFA, backsliding again, I suppose)
the first page was complaints about the installer, a paragraph or two that's positive about the performance, and then a complaint that you have to buy the enterprise edition for support, because you can't buy support for Fedora...
Didn't do much for me as a review of the new Fedora, and it certainly didn't seem like the rest was "Positive". Yes.. I think you did read a different article. The complaints about installing as a second distro on the same computer took the bulk of the first page, The remainder being about the fact that Fedora is not supported by Red Hat. True enough, but then Red Hat is a corporate distro, and Fedora is a bleeding edge test bed/community distro, so two different markets.
The second page was about F9 detecting his hardware, including the Wifi, and the ease of installing stuff. And minor complaint about previous problems with the add/remove app being slow, which is now gone. The replacement will not be worth using for a few days at least, because the repositories will be hammered into the ground with people updating. If the preview live CD is anything to go by, it will be very fast once things have quietened down. I'm looking forward to installing this weekend.
Imagine what Fedora 9 would have done to UbuntuDupe's hard drive!! Shhhhh!! He would have to change his user name on some other forum to UbuntuMacFedoraDupe only to run out of space for his user name and and have to make a forum himself to complain about it. And then one to complain about the complaint forum.
This will not happen until the Linux Kernel has native support for an install mechanism where by I can double click on a single file and have it install a whole program including notifying and automatically installing programs it is dependent upon. Already done. Its called package management. Not in the kernel, but it doesn't need to be.
I have the same rule. Windows is for stuff I can't run in Linux, like certain games.
Since I implemented this policy, however, I have booted into windows.. three times in a year and a half. Guess I didn't need those games as much as I thought I did:) Similar thing happened to me. Although I didn't bother with the rules. I cobbled together a Linux box out of leftovers from past upgrades, so slow processor, slow video card, 40 gig hard drive etc, and a freshly rebuilt Windows XP box with my games on it. I switched between them with a KVM, so no problem having both working at once if I need them to.
Within a few months, I found I was using the Windows box a couple of times a month, even though it was much faster than the rough and ready system I had Linux on, and I didn't feel like playing the games I had on it. A bit later, I decided to recycle the Windows box. I built a new Linux box, and Haven't looked back since. Now the Windows box is my HTPC/print server, as I'm going to get the most out of that XP license and the Linux box is used for my main computing tasks.
This is one of the things that pisses me off about Linux. 50 tools to do the same - damn - job. I can't count the number of new users I've encountered who get confused on what they need to use or can't accomplish an objective simply because the information they were given was written for program X but they only now learned to use tool Y. Think of how frustrated they are when they finally learn to use tool X but then someone tells them, "oh. You should be using tool Z!" Which is nothing in comparison to what happens when someone puts the TV remote back out of line with the edge of the table.
The point is this: take a modern, state-of-the-art hard drive full of Gutenberg-style vanilla ASCII e-books. Then take a generic used cheap-ass paperback book. Lock them both in a room for 50 years. Which one will still be readable at the end?
It's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway.
IF the electronics and bearings survive, and IF the platters don't get bit-rot, in 50 years there still won't be a computer capable of running and reading that hard drive. You might have to build one yourself from 50-year-old open standards and schematics.
Sure, you could copy your data to new media every few years. Make redundant copies in case one is lost or fried. Keep them in separate places. Don't type "rm -rf *" at the wrong time (or anything like that). In a few years? Do it again. And again. And again. Got to keep up with technology, right? It's a lot of work. So what happens if a mouse gets into the locked room at some time over that 50 years. Or the roof leaks and the room gets damp enough to allow fungus to grow on the paper? By by book. I've had several books in my collection fall victim to time and paper going bad with age and damp, or from rodents taking a shine to the spine. Pet rats can be quite destructive and are masters of stealth gnawing. And I don't have any 50 year old books.
And while you can decide to store the hypothetical book on a single physical device in one format, isn't that limiting things a bit? Why not store it on the net instead? Imagine shelves of books zooming around from one library server to another. Even if one library is flooded or burnt to the ground, the other copies can be infinitely reproduced. Especially with something as simple as ASCII. so long as people can read, ASCII will be sufficient. It's pure data, so the media is irrelevant. Check out the book and you can have it in any of the common formats of the day. No problem with changing format, as converters can be made that will do it on the fly. Even OOXML eventually. No limit on copies, so no problem with it being checked out by someone else.
Getting copied to new formats and onto new media all the time is what will preserve the book for the next few generations. A book is just text, so it can be recopied and reformatted without any deterioration. Add graphics, and you complicate things, but as you said ASCII, this isn't a problem.
In reality, the tactile experience is as much part of the pleasure of reading as anything else. So for some, quite possibly the majority, paper books will never die. But there are situations where e books are a distinct advantage. Service engineers carrying around lots of manuals and schematics is a bad idea, heavy, bulky, and not the most confidence inspiring sight, yet a tech with a gadget not much bigger than a PDA is ok. Students with bags full of text books is a recipe for back ache in later life. An e book reader and all of the text books reproduced electronically is a much better option. . And a search function in a reference book is pretty useful too.
Cheap and good e book readers getting popular opens up the idea of self publishing for close to zero cost to a huge number of authors who would never have been able to get published by conventional means. And think of all the disposable print media. No more acres of trees cut down so that we can read a newspaper once and then discard it..
Paper and digital books can exist in the same universe at the same time. Why should we have to choose? They both have good and bad points.
I would say it has more to do with not wanting to tread in a stinking pile of shit. Wuss! Try the same event from the perspective of a wheelchair user.
I'm pretty sure the only reason the pricing is different is due to the storage factor. I've suspected for quite sometime that Microsoft basically gives away XP & MS Works with Dell computers and now that the price of hardware is dropping, they're going to have to. Works is a real piece of work, FYI... my signature heavily applies to that software in this case. So how do you explain the same configuration, Windows on a 12 gig model and Linux on the 20 gig being sold outside Australia with no price difference. Even New Zealand seems to be getting them for the same price. It can't be that the retailers are voluntarily taking a hit on the wholesale price, and refusing to mark the Linux version up. Even PC World, the UK's number one seller of over priced junk and rip off extended warranties is advertising the Linux model at the moment at the going price for the 900. And they are certainly not big Linux fans.
Microsoft's crafty plotting, importer greed, or honest mistake, who knows. But I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing is dismissed as an oversight in a few days time.
Except that I regularly get printed catalogs for HP, with ~$400 laptops on it. Combine with coupons or the occasional $50-100 off you get on their website (also on Dell's) and you can sure as hell buy a Vista laptop for $300 or thereabouts. You might even get free shipping. I've noticed Dell tends to do that sort of thing early in the week, and then more rarely on Saturdays and Sundays, probably because that's when they get the majority of their sales. In the retail industry, many companies have loss leaders. Either end of line products, or overstocks that they want to get rid of quickly, or cheaper models they can afford to flog off in the hope of generating brand recognition. Nothing new there. I just bought a new media player for about a third of the usual price because it was last year's model and the company wanted to sell them quickly for a low profit. A special deal is not the same thing as a regular full price stock item, and the fact that you can find a bargain does not alter the fact that a laptop capable of running Vista at a reasonable level is going to be expensive, even if Microsoft give the OS away for free.
Have you seen Maemo on one of the Nokia N series internet tablets? Works pretty well on a small low resolution screen. Which is what I'm using to type this post.
Portable Firefox with spell checker, flash and adblock. Plenty of apps can be ported from Linux source code instead of having to write them from scratch. not too bad for a four inch screen.
Well.. Off the top of my head, Sound cards, video cards, SATA interfaces, CD and DVD drives, floppy drives, memory interfaces, mother board chipsets, processors, keyboards, mice, network cards, monitors, video cards, MP3 players, TV tuner cards, printers, scanners, temperature and fan speed monitoring sensors on motherboards, and many more devices. Linux is already more functional on first boot than Windows has ever been. It doesn't support all models from all suppliers, but nothing does, so pointing out a specific brand and model is not going to fly as a criticism. When I install Fedora 9 next month, the only drivers I need to install are my video card and perhaps my printer, although even that was already in the CUPS driver list with F8. Everything else is already in place and automatically detected. Not to mention support for common systems like mass storage which allow the use of USB keys, MP3 players, card readers, cameras, external hard drive caddies etc.
Not wireless drivers,
Correction.. Not ALL wifi drivers. Ask the FCC or whatever the local equivalent is. A Wifi card is a radio transmitter Thus is bound by strict regulations. 100% Open source drivers for a wifi card basically allow the informed user to muck around with a radio transmitter, which depending on the band, is illegal. Change the law, and Wifi could be universally supported within a very short time, instead of just some chip sets. Much of it already is. Otherwise there would be no way for the Eee to connect to a wireless hub, or for my N800 to connect to the Internet, which would be pretty awkward for a wireless Internet tablet.
not graphics cards properly,
No? Then how come my Nvidia card works flawlessly under Fedora. And has since I put it in my Linux box. Even the thermal sensor works and displays in Gkrellm's (Linux system monitor) sensor display. It's currently running at 53 degrees centigrade in case you are interested. 3D acceleration is also functioning perfectly, so I can play NWN under Wine or via the Linux client, And any Linux game that needs 3D features works well. Compiz Fusion also works very well, which it couldn't without the Nvidia drivers being installed. ATI is also in the process of releasing open drivers for some of it's cards, and Intel have had their cards supported for years with open drivers. Nvidia will very likely follow if they can work around the complications of the various IP restrictions in their drivers.
does bluetooth work right,
Yes. Plug and play. In my experience, easier than Windows. No driver to install, no software to install. It "just works". So I only have to plug my bluetooth dongle into any USB port and I can transfer files across effortlessly from my PDA or from my N800. I can also use my bluetooth GPS module with Fedora and my N800, but in the case of Fedora, it is a bit redundant as it's a desktop, and unless my home gets caught up in a tornado, it is unlikely to be changing location. In Fedora 9 I can also synchronize my Palm via bluetooth out of the box even with a live CD, so minimal functionality. Can Windows do that? Windows can't even recognize my Palm without me installing the drivers and an application to handle the PDA, and XP home needs extra software to share the Internet connection with my palm after a complicated set up procedure.
how about mobile phone access beyond seeing it as a mass storage device?
No idea. I don't have a mobile. Although I can't see any compelling reason why not. Some phones use Linux right now, and with the various Linux based phones in development at the moment, there will be more likelihood of support. Bluetooth has recently got a support boost and more bluetooth features are being activated.
Linux needs similar support from many many companies before you can make a statement like this.
Linux already HAS support from many companies. Apart from corner case s
Opensource drivers, especially open documentation is far far better. And running is better than crawling, but you have to do some of the latter before you can do the former.
Closed drivers at first, but when the market is sufficiently important, open drivers can be pushed for. Dell stated some time ago, that they would take closed drivers when there was nothing else, but open drivers were preferable. Preferable to Dell means thousands of units a week, so the hardware manufacturers tend to listen to Dell's preferences.
It's clear that if Bill Gates could just get the H-1b caps lifted, the best and brightest from around the world could come to the US and be paid $100k straight out of college to save Microsoft.
Anyone who was around during the dot-com era remembers how it was H-1b limits that caused the crash of that wonderful era. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Ahh.. so not people over investing in any idea that came along, no matter how outlandish it was, just because some of these ideas might pay off in a big way?
No, it doesn't. I fact, it is a already a huge advantage that she did not have to install Ubuntu (Note: It's not that installing Windows is easier, but people do not install Windows, they buy computers with Windows on them. This is a real problem that no amount of whining about the unfairness of it all will make go away.) Now, imagine if she had the wrong wireless chipset; 0/12 points right there, instantly. Except getting a pre installed Linux box is getting easier these days. So the statement that people don't usually install an OS is much more accurate. Installing and setting everything up is not as difficult as it used to be. Especially on Ubuntu, so while your point is still valid, it isn't as much of a deal breaker as it used to be for an unsupported beginner.
Why would they need a physical keypad? Is it hard to use the touchscreen? Not when sitting at a desk or in a coffee house or something, But when riding in the back of a taxi, on a train or standing in a tube train and replying to an email, in a word...yes.
Physical keypads have the advantage in speed and precision. A well designed thumb pad is going to beat a touch keyboard every time. Plus, lots of people who use a crackberry as a business tool will be very sensitive to any change in the use. It doesn't matter if it is better or not, different is undesirable.
Personally, I prefer the Graffiti input that Palm use/used for text input on a PDA sized device. Easier than squinting at a tiny keyboard, and more accurate than the handwriting recognition system others use. I can write reasonably fast and accurately, and I did use it as my main means of using email for about a month. But in comparison to a real keyboard, forget it.
Even though he knows his charges are completely bogus, he feels he has to bring them anyway because something he considers "competition" has appeared in his rear-view mirror.
It's more like the side-view mirror. If they are in your rear view mirror, they are still behind you. In the side-view mirror, they're probably starting to overtake you. But in a rear view mirror, objects may be closer than they appear....
How is that different from games? With games, the minimum requirements often will give you a very reduced version of the game. A network card isn't in the requirements, but you don't get to play online if you don't have one. That's quite a significant part of many games. Which is pretty much like saying that getting shot in the head is not much worse than getting shot in the heart. But both should be avoided for a long and healthy life.
Both are wrong. Both are marketing spec. So both should be corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
I must have read a different article (whupps, sorry, it's slashdot, I know I'm not supposed to RTFA, backsliding again, I suppose)
the first page was complaints about the installer, a paragraph or two that's positive about the performance, and then a complaint that you have to buy the enterprise edition for support, because you can't buy support for Fedora...
Didn't do much for me as a review of the new Fedora, and it certainly didn't seem like the rest was "Positive". Yes.. I think you did read a different article. The complaints about installing as a second distro on the same computer took the bulk of the first page, The remainder being about the fact that Fedora is not supported by Red Hat. True enough, but then Red Hat is a corporate distro, and Fedora is a bleeding edge test bed/community distro, so two different markets.
The second page was about F9 detecting his hardware, including the Wifi, and the ease of installing stuff. And minor complaint about previous problems with the add/remove app being slow, which is now gone. The replacement will not be worth using for a few days at least, because the repositories will be hammered into the ground with people updating. If the preview live CD is anything to go by, it will be very fast once things have quietened down. I'm looking forward to installing this weekend.
Since I implemented this policy, however, I have booted into windows
Within a few months, I found I was using the Windows box a couple of times a month, even though it was much faster than the rough and ready system I had Linux on, and I didn't feel like playing the games I had on it.
A bit later, I decided to recycle the Windows box. I built a new Linux box, and Haven't looked back since. Now the Windows box is my HTPC/print server, as I'm going to get the most out of that XP license and the Linux box is used for my main computing tasks.
You forgot Blood Rayne. Video game move, directed by Uwe Boll, still beyond shitty.
It's a rhetorical question, but I'll answer it anyway.
IF the electronics and bearings survive, and IF the platters don't get bit-rot, in 50 years there still won't be a computer capable of running and reading that hard drive. You might have to build one yourself from 50-year-old open standards and schematics.
Sure, you could copy your data to new media every few years. Make redundant copies in case one is lost or fried. Keep them in separate places. Don't type "rm -rf *" at the wrong time (or anything like that). In a few years? Do it again. And again. And again. Got to keep up with technology, right? It's a lot of work. So what happens if a mouse gets into the locked room at some time over that 50 years. Or the roof leaks and the room gets damp enough to allow fungus to grow on the paper? By by book. I've had several books in my collection fall victim to time and paper going bad with age and damp, or from rodents taking a shine to the spine. Pet rats can be quite destructive and are masters of stealth gnawing. And I don't have any 50 year old books.
And while you can decide to store the hypothetical book on a single physical device in one format, isn't that limiting things a bit? Why not store it on the net instead? Imagine shelves of books zooming around from one library server to another. Even if one library is flooded or burnt to the ground, the other copies can be infinitely reproduced. Especially with something as simple as ASCII. so long as people can read, ASCII will be sufficient. It's pure data, so the media is irrelevant. Check out the book and you can have it in any of the common formats of the day. No problem with changing format, as converters can be made that will do it on the fly. Even OOXML eventually. No limit on copies, so no problem with it being checked out by someone else.
Getting copied to new formats and onto new media all the time is what will preserve the book for the next few generations. A book is just text, so it can be recopied and reformatted without any deterioration. Add graphics, and you complicate things, but as you said ASCII, this isn't a problem.
In reality, the tactile experience is as much part of the pleasure of reading as anything else. So for some, quite possibly the majority, paper books will never die. But there are situations where e books are a distinct advantage. Service engineers carrying around lots of manuals and schematics is a bad idea, heavy, bulky, and not the most confidence inspiring sight, yet a tech with a gadget not much bigger than a PDA is ok. Students with bags full of text books is a recipe for back ache in later life. An e book reader and all of the text books reproduced electronically is a much better option. . And a search function in a reference book is pretty useful too.
Cheap and good e book readers getting popular opens up the idea of self publishing for close to zero cost to a huge number of authors who would never have been able to get published by conventional means. And think of all the disposable print media. No more acres of trees cut down so that we can read a newspaper once and then discard it..
Paper and digital books can exist in the same universe at the same time. Why should we have to choose? They both have good and bad points.
Microsoft's crafty plotting, importer greed, or honest mistake, who knows. But I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing is dismissed as an oversight in a few days time.
Have you seen Maemo on one of the Nokia N series internet tablets? Works pretty well on a small low resolution screen. Which is what I'm using to type this post.
Portable Firefox with spell checker, flash and adblock. Plenty of apps can be ported from Linux source code instead of having to write them from scratch. not too bad for a four inch screen.
Funny!!! that was dead on what I was feeling this morning. LAst time I felt like this I was trying to stop smoking.
Most hardware? Which hardware is "most".
Well.. Off the top of my head, Sound cards, video cards, SATA interfaces, CD and DVD drives, floppy drives, memory interfaces, mother board chipsets, processors, keyboards, mice, network cards, monitors, video cards, MP3 players, TV tuner cards, printers, scanners, temperature and fan speed monitoring sensors on motherboards, and many more devices. Linux is already more functional on first boot than Windows has ever been. It doesn't support all models from all suppliers, but nothing does, so pointing out a specific brand and model is not going to fly as a criticism. When I install Fedora 9 next month, the only drivers I need to install are my video card and perhaps my printer, although even that was already in the CUPS driver list with F8. Everything else is already in place and automatically detected. Not to mention support for common systems like mass storage which allow the use of USB keys, MP3 players, card readers, cameras, external hard drive caddies etc.
Not wireless drivers,
Correction.. Not ALL wifi drivers. Ask the FCC or whatever the local equivalent is. A Wifi card is a radio transmitter Thus is bound by strict regulations. 100% Open source drivers for a wifi card basically allow the informed user to muck around with a radio transmitter, which depending on the band, is illegal. Change the law, and Wifi could be universally supported within a very short time, instead of just some chip sets. Much of it already is. Otherwise there would be no way for the Eee to connect to a wireless hub, or for my N800 to connect to the Internet, which would be pretty awkward for a wireless Internet tablet.
not graphics cards properly,
No? Then how come my Nvidia card works flawlessly under Fedora. And has since I put it in my Linux box. Even the thermal sensor works and displays in Gkrellm's (Linux system monitor) sensor display. It's currently running at 53 degrees centigrade in case you are interested. 3D acceleration is also functioning perfectly, so I can play NWN under Wine or via the Linux client, And any Linux game that needs 3D features works well. Compiz Fusion also works very well, which it couldn't without the Nvidia drivers being installed. ATI is also in the process of releasing open drivers for some of it's cards, and Intel have had their cards supported for years with open drivers. Nvidia will very likely follow if they can work around the complications of the various IP restrictions in their drivers.
does bluetooth work right,
Yes. Plug and play. In my experience, easier than Windows. No driver to install, no software to install. It "just works". So I only have to plug my bluetooth dongle into any USB port and I can transfer files across effortlessly from my PDA or from my N800. I can also use my bluetooth GPS module with Fedora and my N800, but in the case of Fedora, it is a bit redundant as it's a desktop, and unless my home gets caught up in a tornado, it is unlikely to be changing location.
In Fedora 9 I can also synchronize my Palm via bluetooth out of the box even with a live CD, so minimal functionality. Can Windows do that? Windows can't even recognize my Palm without me installing the drivers and an application to handle the PDA, and XP home needs extra software to share the Internet connection with my palm after a complicated set up procedure.
how about mobile phone access beyond seeing it as a mass storage device?
No idea. I don't have a mobile. Although I can't see any compelling reason why not. Some phones use Linux right now, and with the various Linux based phones in development at the moment, there will be more likelihood of support. Bluetooth has recently got a support boost and more bluetooth features are being activated.
Linux needs similar support from many many companies before you can make a statement like this.
Linux already HAS support from many companies. Apart from corner case s
Opensource drivers, especially open documentation is far far better. And running is better than crawling, but you have to do some of the latter before you can do the former.
Closed drivers at first, but when the market is sufficiently important, open drivers can be pushed for. Dell stated some time ago, that they would take closed drivers when there was nothing else, but open drivers were preferable. Preferable to Dell means thousands of units a week, so the hardware manufacturers tend to listen to Dell's preferences.
Anyone who was around during the dot-com era remembers how it was H-1b limits that caused the crash of that wonderful era. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Ahh.. so not people over investing in any idea that came along, no matter how outlandish it was, just because some of these ideas might pay off in a big way?
Physical keypads have the advantage in speed and precision. A well designed thumb pad is going to beat a touch keyboard every time. Plus, lots of people who use a crackberry as a business tool will be very sensitive to any change in the use. It doesn't matter if it is better or not, different is undesirable.
Personally, I prefer the Graffiti input that Palm use/used for text input on a PDA sized device. Easier than squinting at a tiny keyboard, and more accurate than the handwriting recognition system others use. I can write reasonably fast and accurately, and I did use it as my main means of using email for about a month. But in comparison to a real keyboard, forget it.
I vote WGA. The process that gave me the final push to move to Linux.
Both are wrong. Both are marketing spec. So both should be corrected.