Actually, written English hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages. It's the pronunciation the one that's changed a lot, and that's why us non-native English speakers are sometimes baffled by the incoherence of the English spelling.
I'm not saying "x OS is easy to use". I'm saying there's not such thing as "ease of use". It's not an argument about how easy it is for *me* to use Linux, it's an argument about how easy or hard is to get used to something new, especially if you're a non-techie.
To put an example, my grandfather was used to Windows 3.11. He had AutoCAD for his tailoring business, and it was wonderful. It did everything he needed, and his productivity was excellent. He was used to it. My father came in one day and replaced his old 486 with a new PC and put Windows XP on it. My grandfather went crazy, he didn't understand a thing. He was so used to 3.11 that XP's "user-friendliness" meant nothing to him. It took a couple of months till he could finally get used to XP.
Another example, and a much more radical one: My translation teacher was telling us the other day about the days when she worked with a manual typewriter. She was really good at it. But then there came the PC and the graphical word processors--she also went crazy. She wasn't used to typing straight without manually breaking the lines! This also took a certain amount of learning time.
How many people are there that actually used something other than 9x based Windows OS? I was raised with DOS, my first GUI experience was with the old Mac OS, then I passed through Windows XP and ended up today in Linux. I'm used to figuring how things might work in different systems. Most people aren't. Most people were introduced to computers in the 9x or NT era, and don't know anything else. How can you expect them to find something completely different to what they're used to "easy to use"?
I'm not saying people should move to Linux. I'm just countering the "ease of use" argument. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
Linux has a steep learning curve ...only if you come from another OS. No OS is inherently hard or easy to use--you just need to get used to it. I'll agree, there are people that have an easier time getting used to something new (I'll include myself in that group, it only took me two days to do on Linux everything I did on Windows, and a week to nuke my XP partition), but it doesn't mean Linux is hard to use per se. It's not what you're used to it, that's all. Hell, if I had to go back to XP and have to hunt on Google to find a piece of software I need, instead of using Ubuntu's Add/Remove or Synaptic, or SUSE's YaST, I would be bothered. I would also be bothered if things didn't work like in the GNOME desktop I'm used to. Of course, *I* have an easy time adapting myself (and, besides, I always enjoy trying out new stuff), which doesn't mean *you* have to have an equally easy time. I'm tired of people bashing Linux "non-user-friendlyness". It's just that you're not used to it. It's not a crime, but it's not a reason to bash it as unfriendly, either.
But try to compare the difficulty of providing an operative system capable of working under a single set of hardware against one capable of working under any type of hardware. It's impossible to try to tie Linux with a single set of hardware--its very nature as an open system disallows that.
The only thing that can be done about it is expect that OEM Linux vendors provide hardware that has flawless support. Other than that, there's partial responsibility on the end user to buy extra hardware or peripherals that are supported (which helps to rule out those hardware makers that aren't prone to release their specifications). A comparison with Apple's business model is, effectively, an oranges to Apples comparison;)
And just to be sure, it isn't about catching up to Windows any more, it is about catching up to Mac OS X. It just works, it's simple yet powerful, it's a full Unix, it looks nice, the desktop effects are very useful and accessible, and drivers install easily. Ah! But you're ignoring the fact that Apple sells its OS preinstalled in its own hardware. Do you have any idea how much advantage does that provide in terms of drivers?
So if I duplicate your computer or your cannabis, and then "share" them with my friends, would you still object? You can duplicate my cannabis? Where can I meet you, bro?
Honestly, of all the mp3s you have downloaded over the past decade, how many would you have actually bought had you not found them on Napster or Kazaa or what-have-you? I can frankly say absolutely none, considering my tastes in music go far beyond what my local stores, or even iTunes, have to offer to me.
It doesn't work like that. History is not just a concatenation of events, we're long past that paradigm already. Instead, we talk about an interpretation of historical events--heuristics.
The "modern" way of teaching history is by showing different points of view of different authors when talking about a determinate event or period of time. And if I have a history professor, he better well damn have an opinion on the subject, which would show at least a bit of commitment on his side. However, he should be able to get the students to distinguish between his opinion and that of the other historians. The more points of view on the matter the student learns to distinguish, the better.
3. Use thicker strings (stop being a pansy, it'll stop hurting after awhile) As a bass player (well, a sort of wannabe bass player, if you get my vibe;D), I must say that every time I grab a guitar my fingers start hurting due to the strings being _too_ freaking thin.
I'm particularly interested about this little article here in that last link (November 11):
Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... " Slightly reminiscent of a particularly infamous quote...:D
Yeah, that's true. My native tongue is Spanish, I'm studying English translation, and I have a decent knowledge of Japanese (my idea is to also study Japanese translation in the future). I've also studied (though not without a certain degree of displeasure) French and Latin. Out of those five languages, Japanese is my favorite one, mainly due to the musicality of its sounding. And yeah, it's highly contextual--so highly that many sentences in a common Japanese dialog would sound outright stupid without a proper contextual translation.
That's the main reason why I believe western dubs of Japanese anime suck so much. Japanese has very, very different "conventions", which pushes storyboard writers towards building up scenes that sound very awkward in English or any other western language, even with a decent enough translation and good voice acting.
...for a machine, under the current paradigms (that is, no true artificial intelligence) to properly translate something. Translation is not an exact science, and you can't expect to get a decent translation by just having a word-per-word approach. Heck, not even a sentence-per-sentence or paragraph-per-paragraph approach would ever be enough. Translation requires deep social knowledge--you need to know what you are translating, from whom you are translating, for whom you are translating... that is, you need to enclose your translation in a sociological context. No machine can ever wish to do that without artificial intelligence. It's hard enough as it is to get a human being to understand that word-per-word translation is stupid--imagine telling that to your CPU core.
Seriously! That's about the one of the most closed-minded, stupidest ideas around these days. So it's not acceptable for me to jerk off at some piece of animated porn anymore because I'm an adult now. It doesn't fit with the "rules of society".
Please. That's almost as closed-minded as the bastards who despise gay marriages. Let everyone have their sexual preferences, let anyone jerk off at whatever they want. Heck, if you want to jerk off while reading math equations, by all means do so. That doesn't make you any weirder, or any less of a "man" or "person".
Slashdot Mirror
Yay! Let's do the preemptive war on them, too!
</sarcasm>
Actually, written English hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages. It's the pronunciation the one that's changed a lot, and that's why us non-native English speakers are sometimes baffled by the incoherence of the English spelling.
More like El Lobo. He's already trolling on this article.
I'm not saying "x OS is easy to use". I'm saying there's not such thing as "ease of use". It's not an argument about how easy it is for *me* to use Linux, it's an argument about how easy or hard is to get used to something new, especially if you're a non-techie.
To put an example, my grandfather was used to Windows 3.11. He had AutoCAD for his tailoring business, and it was wonderful. It did everything he needed, and his productivity was excellent. He was used to it. My father came in one day and replaced his old 486 with a new PC and put Windows XP on it. My grandfather went crazy, he didn't understand a thing. He was so used to 3.11 that XP's "user-friendliness" meant nothing to him. It took a couple of months till he could finally get used to XP.
Another example, and a much more radical one: My translation teacher was telling us the other day about the days when she worked with a manual typewriter. She was really good at it. But then there came the PC and the graphical word processors--she also went crazy. She wasn't used to typing straight without manually breaking the lines! This also took a certain amount of learning time.
How many people are there that actually used something other than 9x based Windows OS? I was raised with DOS, my first GUI experience was with the old Mac OS, then I passed through Windows XP and ended up today in Linux. I'm used to figuring how things might work in different systems. Most people aren't. Most people were introduced to computers in the 9x or NT era, and don't know anything else. How can you expect them to find something completely different to what they're used to "easy to use"?
I'm not saying people should move to Linux. I'm just countering the "ease of use" argument. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.
...Netcraft confirms it.
Yeah, because Aero is not Vista's most loudly trumpeted feature.
Oh, wait...
But try to compare the difficulty of providing an operative system capable of working under a single set of hardware against one capable of working under any type of hardware. It's impossible to try to tie Linux with a single set of hardware--its very nature as an open system disallows that.
;)
The only thing that can be done about it is expect that OEM Linux vendors provide hardware that has flawless support. Other than that, there's partial responsibility on the end user to buy extra hardware or peripherals that are supported (which helps to rule out those hardware makers that aren't prone to release their specifications). A comparison with Apple's business model is, effectively, an oranges to Apples comparison
People don't know what a fucking OS is. How the hell do you expect them to choose?
It doesn't work like that. History is not just a concatenation of events, we're long past that paradigm already. Instead, we talk about an interpretation of historical events--heuristics. The "modern" way of teaching history is by showing different points of view of different authors when talking about a determinate event or period of time. And if I have a history professor, he better well damn have an opinion on the subject, which would show at least a bit of commitment on his side. However, he should be able to get the students to distinguish between his opinion and that of the other historians. The more points of view on the matter the student learns to distinguish, the better.
Great, you douchebag moderator, awesome job.
I'm sure you mean finlandés :P
How can you expect people to know what Linux is when they can't tell an OS from a PC?
Yeah, that's true. My native tongue is Spanish, I'm studying English translation, and I have a decent knowledge of Japanese (my idea is to also study Japanese translation in the future). I've also studied (though not without a certain degree of displeasure) French and Latin. Out of those five languages, Japanese is my favorite one, mainly due to the musicality of its sounding. And yeah, it's highly contextual--so highly that many sentences in a common Japanese dialog would sound outright stupid without a proper contextual translation.
That's the main reason why I believe western dubs of Japanese anime suck so much. Japanese has very, very different "conventions", which pushes storyboard writers towards building up scenes that sound very awkward in English or any other western language, even with a decent enough translation and good voice acting.
...for a machine, under the current paradigms (that is, no true artificial intelligence) to properly translate something. Translation is not an exact science, and you can't expect to get a decent translation by just having a word-per-word approach. Heck, not even a sentence-per-sentence or paragraph-per-paragraph approach would ever be enough. Translation requires deep social knowledge--you need to know what you are translating, from whom you are translating, for whom you are translating... that is, you need to enclose your translation in a sociological context. No machine can ever wish to do that without artificial intelligence. It's hard enough as it is to get a human being to understand that word-per-word translation is stupid--imagine telling that to your CPU core.
;)
Disclaimer: I'm a translation student myself
Thanks to that, people like me (translators, though I'm still in the making) will still find a job in the foreseeable future :D
In my experience, the Windows command line (and the DOS commands in general) is kind of clunky. Not to mention the fact that backslashes suck.
Yeah! There is no such thing as bash scripts in the Linux world! Oh wait...
You dismissed arousal by anything other than people as a "juvenile" attitude. Which is what I dismissed as closed-minded.
Seriously! That's about the one of the most closed-minded, stupidest ideas around these days. So it's not acceptable for me to jerk off at some piece of animated porn anymore because I'm an adult now. It doesn't fit with the "rules of society".
Please. That's almost as closed-minded as the bastards who despise gay marriages. Let everyone have their sexual preferences, let anyone jerk off at whatever they want. Heck, if you want to jerk off while reading math equations, by all means do so. That doesn't make you any weirder, or any less of a "man" or "person".