define low-end machine. I define a low-end machine as a computer that has 512 mb of ram or so and a computer with that much ram can't run vista very well at all, unless you call booting in 10 minutes fast.
Its impossible for DRM to work as long as the customer can still watch the video. DRM is basically me sending an encrypted text file to you, then sending you the key and then trying to prevent you from seeing the contents of the text file, its a flawed concept. Sure, it might work for a little while, but sooner or later it will be broken.
biggest problem is that if all the hardware out there is in the form of consoles then there is nothing but consoles for all of those enterprising individuals who love to tinker with software and hardware(read pirates). you would quickly see people jail breaking, as it were, their consoles with additional hardware or software upgrades to use the systems as the end user wants, not how Sony/MS/Nintendo wants.
of course, only the evil pirates ever want to tinker with stuff. No one ever likes to tinker with stuff unless they want to break the law obviously
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.
Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.
Yeah, there's not.
I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.
Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g.,/dev/sda instead of/dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.
It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.
It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.
You do realize you could have just installed gparted and formatted it with that?, Aunt Tilly (if there was an option for nautilus to format) could have clicked on the wrong drive and reformatted her hard drive(I also doubt Aunt Tilly would attempt something like this anyways). Also, instead of bitching about it, maybe you could email the developers for missing features like this, thats how open source improvees.
One SIGNIFICANT subset of the industry where open source is not the default way to develop software: Industries where the user interface matters. Think about how many times you've heard the phrase "As easy to use as Linux".
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
There is a lot of empirical evidence to refute this. Customers DO NOT want choice. One of the big complaints about Linux is that people have to choose between Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Kubuntu, Fedora, LFS, Gentoo, etc. Or maybe FreeBSD or NetBSD. And on top of that, Gnome or KDE or something else. When faced with too many choices, the reaction amongst most humans is give up. One of the reasons Ubuntu has been so successful is that (unlike, say, Slackware) you don't have to go through and choose which programs and window manager/desktop system you want.
I suppose then we should make only one type of car per manufacturer so the consumer doesn't get confused, or one computer per manufacturer
Lets ban all GPS enabled cell phones then because there might be a small threat in making a bomb unlike any other device because you know, its impossible to make a bomb without a cell phone. "Those who compromise liberty for a little security deserve neither security or liberty" - Ben Franklin
How about you get cancer or aids or something and then I'll sue you for supposdly pirating music and I win because you can't respond being in the hospital and all and you owe me tons of money. How would that make you feel?
while Linux remains something that non-nerds are not even sure how to pronounce, and what's the spin on Slashdot? "OS X and Linux are chipping away at Microsoft's market share!"
...and none of them are listed in this article. Most of these are lame rehashes of old stuff that just isn't important. How about stuff like flash not crashing on me every two minutes?
Maybe you should talk to Adobe about that one, considerring they are the only ones that can fix it
A IM client that doesn't freeze on file transfers with native MSN clients (I've tried several and they just don't work),
I have never had this happen with me on pidgin
some real compatibility with MS Office (the locked excel sheet for travel expenses breaks every time and I have to unlock it to actually make it work), fix the dual screen setup so that it actually works, that the side buttons on my mouse would work without hacking xorg.conf, all the ways WINE fails me and so on. I don't care that there's plenty choices, I just want at least one choice that works...
you do realize WINE is not guarranteed to work with anything right?
The main problem with buying a PC game is that you're pretty much stuck with it.
What I mean by this is: if you buy a game for a console, you can be assured that if it turns out to be a bag of shit, you can take it back to where you bought it and either get store credit or just exchange it for something else.
What stores allow this for console games? because I don't know of any
Girls are all about negotiation and making everyone feel happy that they got something. That's why we use "wishy washy" language... It's so it doesn't sound like we're being a bitch about it, and that we listen and care about what others' opinions are.
Its pointless to use wishy washy language in this situation because it won't help anyone. Sometimes you _have_ to be a "bitch" about stuff in order to get something done, otherwise nothing will get done at all and it won't help anyone
girlspeak translation: Get off the damn computer and pay attention to me when I'm around. It's damn rude to have someone over and then leave them to entertain themselves so you can go play a video game. Homework or a few minutes of e-mail, not a big deal... Wasting four hours on a video game because you need to "relax"... It gives a clear message: I'm not wanted. And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
See the thing is, unless she _actually_ gets pissed at him instead of saying "I wish you spend less time on wow", he won't know. You can't expect every guy to completely understand every word that she says, it just doesn't work that way. She needs to explain it to him in more frank terms, not wishy-washy words
If they had alot better documentation included with the laptop the return rate wouldn't be as high. For example, a common question on the forums is how to install limewire on these machines, if they included a booklet on how to install limewire, then the return rate might be sightly lower
Slashdot Mirror
define low-end machine. I define a low-end machine as a computer that has 512 mb of ram or so and a computer with that much ram can't run vista very well at all, unless you call booting in 10 minutes fast.
Its impossible for DRM to work as long as the customer can still watch the video. DRM is basically me sending an encrypted text file to you, then sending you the key and then trying to prevent you from seeing the contents of the text file, its a flawed concept. Sure, it might work for a little while, but sooner or later it will be broken.
biggest problem is that if all the hardware out there is in the form of consoles then there is nothing but consoles for all of those enterprising individuals who love to tinker with software and hardware(read pirates). you would quickly see people jail breaking, as it were, their consoles with additional hardware or software upgrades to use the systems as the end user wants, not how Sony/MS/Nintendo wants.
of course, only the evil pirates ever want to tinker with stuff. No one ever likes to tinker with stuff unless they want to break the law obviously
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.
Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.
Yeah, there's not.
I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.
Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g., /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.
It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.
It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.
You do realize you could have just installed gparted and formatted it with that?, Aunt Tilly (if there was an option for nautilus to format) could have clicked on the wrong drive and reformatted her hard drive(I also doubt Aunt Tilly would attempt something like this anyways). Also, instead of bitching about it, maybe you could email the developers for missing features like this, thats how open source improvees.
Is this "Please give me a bail out because I can't figure out how to compete" week on slashdot?
One SIGNIFICANT subset of the industry where open source is not the default way to develop software: Industries where the user interface matters. Think about how many times you've heard the phrase "As easy to use as Linux".
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
There is a lot of empirical evidence to refute this. Customers DO NOT want choice. One of the big complaints about Linux is that people have to choose between Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Kubuntu, Fedora, LFS, Gentoo, etc. Or maybe FreeBSD or NetBSD. And on top of that, Gnome or KDE or something else. When faced with too many choices, the reaction amongst most humans is give up. One of the reasons Ubuntu has been so successful is that (unlike, say, Slackware) you don't have to go through and choose which programs and window manager/desktop system you want.
I suppose then we should make only one type of car per manufacturer so the consumer doesn't get confused, or one computer per manufacturer
Sorry for self-replying, but I forgot to add that we should ban all electronics because they can be used to make a bomb
Lets ban all GPS enabled cell phones then because there might be a small threat in making a bomb unlike any other device because you know, its impossible to make a bomb without a cell phone. "Those who compromise liberty for a little security deserve neither security or liberty" - Ben Franklin
How about you get cancer or aids or something and then I'll sue you for supposdly pirating music and I win because you can't respond being in the hospital and all and you owe me tons of money. How would that make you feel?
2. What should I do instead of using font tags?
unless I'm mistaken, you can use CSS to control fonts, but I haven't done much web design in awhile
while Linux remains something that non-nerds are not even sure how to pronounce, and what's the spin on Slashdot? "OS X and Linux are chipping away at Microsoft's market share!"
Linux != ubuntu by the way
There is too much theory to learn in order to write a simple program in java that confuses people compared to C
...and none of them are listed in this article. Most of these are lame rehashes of old stuff that just isn't important. How about stuff like flash not crashing on me every two minutes?
Maybe you should talk to Adobe about that one, considerring they are the only ones that can fix it
A IM client that doesn't freeze on file transfers with native MSN clients (I've tried several and they just don't work),
I have never had this happen with me on pidgin
some real compatibility with MS Office (the locked excel sheet for travel expenses breaks every time and I have to unlock it to actually make it work), fix the dual screen setup so that it actually works, that the side buttons on my mouse would work without hacking xorg.conf, all the ways WINE fails me and so on. I don't care that there's plenty choices, I just want at least one choice that works...
you do realize WINE is not guarranteed to work with anything right?
In the sense that there is little originality, and it seems anything added to linux has to have occurred in another operating system.
and window and OSX are both completely original and have never copied a feature from a different os?, give me a break
The main problem with buying a PC game is that you're pretty much stuck with it.
What I mean by this is: if you buy a game for a console, you can be assured that if it turns out to be a bag of shit, you can take it back to where you bought it and either get store credit or just exchange it for something else.
What stores allow this for console games? because I don't know of any
Girls are all about negotiation and making everyone feel happy that they got something. That's why we use "wishy washy" language... It's so it doesn't sound like we're being a bitch about it, and that we listen and care about what others' opinions are.
Its pointless to use wishy washy language in this situation because it won't help anyone. Sometimes you _have_ to be a "bitch" about stuff in order to get something done, otherwise nothing will get done at all and it won't help anyone
you mean writing good software isn't art?
if you can't find it you've got nobody to blame but the person you see in the mirror every morning.
But that guy is mean to me :(
girlspeak translation: Get off the damn computer and pay attention to me when I'm around. It's damn rude to have someone over and then leave them to entertain themselves so you can go play a video game. Homework or a few minutes of e-mail, not a big deal... Wasting four hours on a video game because you need to "relax"... It gives a clear message: I'm not wanted. And when it's my boyfriend doing that, then it's elevate to not only aren't I wanted, but that I'm less attractive than a hunk of circuits and plastic. So yeah, most girls are going to be rightly pissed about that!
See the thing is, unless she _actually_ gets pissed at him instead of saying "I wish you spend less time on wow", he won't know. You can't expect every guy to completely understand every word that she says, it just doesn't work that way. She needs to explain it to him in more frank terms, not wishy-washy words
next thing, hunters shoot deer when they are alive
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
If they had alot better documentation included with the laptop the return rate wouldn't be as high. For example, a common question on the forums is how to install limewire on these machines, if they included a booklet on how to install limewire, then the return rate might be sightly lower
Or you could just drive at the speeeding limit, thats such an amazing idea isn't it?
The GPL wouldn't be nessecary in a world without copyright.
You are running a graphical web browser on a server?, does anyone see something wrong with this picture?