I've had to use it to force time syncs on bootup and to make applications that didn't automount shares behave. Bottom line: The GUI didn't have what I needed to fix an issue at hand but the scripting language did.
Um. Never had to use AppleScript to fix someone's problem now have you? It was tarted up and pass offed as a "language" but a one-liner is a one-liner is one-liner....
I have an iPod Nano which has never been linked to iTunes. Amarok saw that it was "uninitialized" then offered to do this for me. I've had zero trouble managing the contents of the player with Amarok. It even synced album art for me. Before saying things like "of course" you may want to spend a few minutes googling so you'll at least know what you're talking about. Incidentally, Amarok will do a thing iTunes won't: export music from the player.
I have no idea what it will be like on OS X but it is perfectly well integrated on KDE 3.5.x and not ugly at all.
Clark's Third Law states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If the psychotic alien is super advanced enough then he might as well be a god. But this all rides on context. The psycho alien may be nothing more than a disgruntled bookkeeper in his own existence.
I do propose one test for this that will work in many but not all circumstances. If it is possible for us to learn how the alien can do the things that he does then he becomes less godlike in our eyes. Many indigenous cultures who first encounter more technologically advanced cultures take them as godlike but this never lasts very long.
I've had it do ogg -> mp3 and didn't find the wait all that terrible. And this is only remotely a problem for people who are constantly changing the music on their players AND have slow computers. Any machine made in the last three years will transcode flac or vorbis to mp3 with a time penalty per track of 20 seconds or less. I have a 2.4 Ghz P-IV that transcodes a typical 4 minute track from flac to mp3 in less than 30. I do it twice a month tops so I'm going to cheerfully chuck any music I like into my collection and not worry about the format especially since I can do any number of other things while the player syncs.
Windows gets a leg up in that the manufacturer does all that work for you and sees to it "those problems cannot exist". They are even taking generic drivers and form fitting them to the little customizations and buttons they added then delivering it to you as an integrated hw/sw combination. General Linux installers have to do the best they can in dealing with thousands of minor variations in hardware laptop manufacturers love to create. I've loaded up my share of Windows laptops from scratch then had to go hunt drivers and it is almost always trickier than a desktop.
If I really had the hots for a Linux laptop I'd buy it from a vendor that supplies them. There ARE a few and they too should do that work so you don't have to. Or at least, I'd do a lot of reading to be sure I'm not getting a difficult model if loading myself.
The nice thing about livecds is that you can least see how much will be supported without effort on your part and passing if enough things don't work off the bat.
I'm not sure why power management functions are so hard to get right.
They touch every subsytem and driver and have to preserve the running state of hardware, applications, and have to be able to deal with situations like the network being disconnected.
People skipped 2000 because of game and a small amount of consumer hardware compatibility. That and MS didn't really market it to consumers as it was intended as the "business os" to replace NT4. In many ways, 2000 was the finest OS MS ever put out. It could be cut down very small and it was fast and efficient and relatively simple to admin. In contexts where I deal with Windows, I still miss it.
Quite a few people held out on going to XP for awhile because it took more hardware to get the same speed 2000 could get although that differential was nowhere near as obscene as the difference between XP and Vista.
The much maligned Intel drivers support the necessary infrastructure properly and even the almost as maligned ATI drivers are better at it. I solved the problem for myself by just doing away with the eyecandy (I do this on Windows systems too). I never noticed that it made windows open, close, and minimize and so forth any better. It just looks really cool when it works and I just disable PulseAudio and use dmix. That little step isn't any worse than some of the things I've had to do get Windows boxes working.
As for FOSS being especially deserving of venom, I spend more of my time than I want to think about helping Windows and Mac users with their issues in my day job. Winmodems and some AC'97 chipsets are especially cute to deal with. They can even be cuter to deal with than video drivers in Linux. But then Windows is the epitome of polish now isn't it? And those driver vendors have no blame now do they?
Yeah there are things about some FOSS software that suck. You know what? Windows can and does suck at least as badly and nobody is making you use anything.
Just like people hurling venom at Vista should hurl it at NVidia/Creative/etc instead? Yup, I can definitely see people making that error being marked as troll/flamebait on/.
How is that an error? Vista's main problem these days is being a pig rather than being crashy. Sure it runs more or less acceptably if you have one of the spendier ATI or NVidia cards, a newer SATA drive, and 4GB of ram. The cute thing is that XP flies on a machine that chugs along with Vista.
As for Linux drivers, in-tree drivers mostly Just Work. I see little reason to withhold the necessary specs to create a driver even if the vendor doesn't want to open source the one they already have. Come to think of it, NVidia is problematical there too.
So I have to take an active role in finishing the operating system I am supposed to be productive on?
Well if it wouldn't bother you terribly. It's called "community". Now nobody expects patches from non-coders but I've submitted bugreports (now that is a "bugreport" not an expletive or insult ridden "flame". There is a difference.) to various projects and actually seen fixes not so long after.
I'm going to kick myself for responding to someone like you but the compositor problem is an Nvidia issue. NVidia has long had problems properly implementing the RENDER X extension. They claim to have fixed it in the latest version of their driver (heard that before) but it came out too late for Intrepid. If you're going to hurl venom then at least have enough clue to hurl it at the correct targets.
It does basically the same things Flash does but won't have the platform support of flash. The only remotely valid thing I've seen out of you is that you find it a tad easier to develop for (on Windows). The bottom line is this is meant to kick both non-Windows and Adobe in the nuts. Any other attributes it has are strictly secondary.
I don't think "Can't use most of the sites that employ Silverlight" is a "random criteria" in the least. It'll sorta work on non-MS and "work best" on MS. SSDD and we've all watched MS do this before.
apt-get install moonlight Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Couldn't find package moonlight
Even if that did work, I have severe doubts about Moonlight working with J. Random Silverlight site. Moonlight is likely to Silverlight what Gnash is to Flash: a 75% percent solution that isn't really practical but allows MS to tick off "Cross Platform" on the feature list and they damn well did it on purpose.
Have you ever actually tried to get a Windows installation to work without the benefit of the proprietary driver discs?
Slipstreaming DriverPacks into the install disc doesn't completely take that pain away but it helps considerably. I've had absolutely horrible times with new SATA controllers and DriverPacks REALLY helps with that one but even so I did have one machine that absolutely refused to load until I made the disc and dragged out the USB floppy drive that XP likes (and it only likes certain older ones). The other one that will absolutely kill you is the drivers for some WinModems. They may not work in Linux but even finding the correct driver for a lot of them is hell in Windows too. More than once, I've had the OEM modem installer fail to work and then have to hunt and hunt before I find an out of the way dusty generic version of the driver that does.
Well over 98% of our incoming mail traffic is spam. If I did nothing about this, email here wouldn't be useful at all. Trying to bury our legitimate business in a sea of penis enlargement ads is reason enough for me to want to these jerks shut down in the most obnoxious way possible. And since as you mention in another post you "don't get it" then I'll cheerfully get out the Cluebat and explain it:
1. We bear a bandwidth cost even for mails tagged or rejected. 2. I expend significant effort keeping the s/n ratio high for my users. 3. The bulk of that traffic comes from botnetted machines. I eagerly await your explanation of what makes that ethical or legal. 4. Much of the spam attempts to make use of system, mail client, or browser vulnerabilities. The potential consequences range from minor breaches of privacy, compromised clients, to defrauded recipients.
5. Even the spams that don't carry some sort of technically malicious payload are out and out scams. They flog products that don't work, pirated software, and other such shenanigans.
So we don't have a mere annoyance here. Criminal means are used to flood mailservers with scams and even the (very) small residue that are actual businesses with actual products and the politicos are abusing the network resources of others.
That tank already gets A Big Honking Glider bolted to the side of it. Doubtless significant engineering is needed to adapt the tank from that application to something more akin to a conventional booster. Still, we're talking about buttressing and reconfiguring the load a structure is to carry. This is obviously less daunting than designing an entire system of boosters from scratch.
Jupiter just makes too much blatant sense and won't be adopted for that reason alone.
I've got a configless X.Org on my EEE701. There is still a very sparse xorg.conf that is heeded. So the X will do 95% of the work of setting itself up and if you still want some special tweaks then just chuck them into that minimal xorg.conf and they'll be picked up. I put a few things in there to un-braindamage the overfeatured trackpad.
Patents have been slapped on it that you have a license to if you use it under the CDDL. This means that it can't even be re-implemented on Linux. Sun is deliberately coy when asked about those patents. Sun doesn't want ZFS (natively) on Linux under any circumstances.
Rsync IS efficient with the bare transfer the data. I suspect his problem is with the time rsync can take to find all of the changed files in a large set of directories and files. I mitigate this somewhat by rsyncing sets of subdirectories.
Spammers also like to masquerade as legitimate advertising outfits. It used to be the one spamming was also flogging the bogus product. Now the spambot herds are a resource to rented and the spammers could care less whether any product moves or not. The only credit card they are interested in is the one that pays them for doing the spam runs.
Following the money will still work in this instance but you likely won't be punishing the spammer. Rather, you'll punish the one who hired the spammer either because they didn't understand the nature of the "marketing campaign" they contracted for or just didn't care. I'm not sorry for them in any case. It's called due diligence. Well, I'd go light on them IF a spambot herder gets his hide nailed to a wall.
I have yet to hear of any form of recourse whatsoever because a piece of MS software malfunctioned. Ever actually read that thing that most click "I Agree" on to make it go away?
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I've had to use it to force time syncs on bootup and to make applications that didn't automount shares behave. Bottom line: The GUI didn't have what I needed to fix an issue at hand but the scripting language did.
Um. Never had to use AppleScript to fix someone's problem now have you? It was tarted up and pass offed as a "language" but a one-liner is a one-liner is one-liner....
I have an iPod Nano which has never been linked to iTunes. Amarok saw that it was "uninitialized" then offered to do this for me. I've had zero trouble managing the contents of the player with Amarok. It even synced album art for me. Before saying things like "of course" you may want to spend a few minutes googling so you'll at least know what you're talking about. Incidentally, Amarok will do a thing iTunes won't: export music from the player.
I have no idea what it will be like on OS X but it is perfectly well integrated on KDE 3.5.x and not ugly at all.
Clark's Third Law states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If the psychotic alien is super advanced enough then he might as well be a god. But this all rides on context. The psycho alien may be nothing more than a disgruntled bookkeeper in his own existence.
I do propose one test for this that will work in many but not all circumstances. If it is possible for us to learn how the alien can do the things that he does then he becomes less godlike in our eyes. Many indigenous cultures who first encounter more technologically advanced cultures take them as godlike but this never lasts very long.
I've had it do ogg -> mp3 and didn't find the wait all that terrible. And this is only remotely a problem for people who are constantly changing the music on their players AND have slow computers. Any machine made in the last three years will transcode flac or vorbis to mp3 with a time penalty per track of 20 seconds or less. I have a 2.4 Ghz P-IV that transcodes a typical 4 minute track from flac to mp3 in less than 30. I do it twice a month tops so I'm going to cheerfully chuck any music I like into my collection and not worry about the format especially since I can do any number of other things while the player syncs.
The better class of music library software can automatically transcode files being transferred to a player. I believe Amarok will do this for iPods.
Windows gets a leg up in that the manufacturer does all that work for you and sees to it "those problems cannot exist". They are even taking generic drivers and form fitting them to the little customizations and buttons they added then delivering it to you as an integrated hw/sw combination. General Linux installers have to do the best they can in dealing with thousands of minor variations in hardware laptop manufacturers love to create. I've loaded up my share of Windows laptops from scratch then had to go hunt drivers and it is almost always trickier than a desktop.
If I really had the hots for a Linux laptop I'd buy it from a vendor that supplies them. There ARE a few and they too should do that work so you don't have to. Or at least, I'd do a lot of reading to be sure I'm not getting a difficult model if loading myself.
The nice thing about livecds is that you can least see how much will be supported without effort on your part and passing if enough things don't work off the bat.
I'm not sure why power management functions are so hard to get right.
They touch every subsytem and driver and have to preserve the running state of hardware, applications, and have to be able to deal with situations like the network being disconnected.
People skipped 2000 because of game and a small amount of consumer hardware compatibility. That and MS didn't really market it to consumers as it was intended as the "business os" to replace NT4. In many ways, 2000 was the finest OS MS ever put out. It could be cut down very small and it was fast and efficient and relatively simple to admin. In contexts where I deal with Windows, I still miss it.
Quite a few people held out on going to XP for awhile because it took more hardware to get the same speed 2000 could get although that differential was nowhere near as obscene as the difference between XP and Vista.
The much maligned Intel drivers support the necessary infrastructure properly and even the almost as maligned ATI drivers are better at it. I solved the problem for myself by just doing away with the eyecandy (I do this on Windows systems too). I never noticed that it made windows open, close, and minimize and so forth any better. It just looks really cool when it works and I just disable PulseAudio and use dmix. That little step isn't any worse than some of the things I've had to do get Windows boxes working.
As for FOSS being especially deserving of venom, I spend more of my time than I want to think about helping Windows and Mac users with their issues in my day job. Winmodems and some AC'97 chipsets are especially cute to deal with. They can even be cuter to deal with than video drivers in Linux. But then Windows is the epitome of polish now isn't it? And those driver vendors have no blame now do they?
Yeah there are things about some FOSS software that suck. You know what? Windows can and does suck at least as badly and nobody is making you use anything.
Just like people hurling venom at Vista should hurl it at NVidia/Creative/etc instead? Yup, I can definitely see people making that error being marked as troll/flamebait on /.
How is that an error? Vista's main problem these days is being a pig rather than being crashy. Sure it runs more or less acceptably if you have one of the spendier ATI or NVidia cards, a newer SATA drive, and 4GB of ram. The cute thing is that XP flies on a machine that chugs along with Vista.
As for Linux drivers, in-tree drivers mostly Just Work. I see little reason to withhold the necessary specs to create a driver even if the vendor doesn't want to open source the one they already have. Come to think of it, NVidia is problematical there too.
So I have to take an active role in finishing the operating system I am supposed to be productive on?
Well if it wouldn't bother you terribly. It's called "community". Now nobody expects patches from non-coders but I've submitted bugreports (now that is a "bugreport" not an expletive or insult ridden "flame". There is a difference.) to various projects and actually seen fixes not so long after.
I'm going to kick myself for responding to someone like you but the compositor problem is an Nvidia issue. NVidia has long had problems properly implementing the RENDER X extension. They claim to have fixed it in the latest version of their driver (heard that before) but it came out too late for Intrepid. If you're going to hurl venom then at least have enough clue to hurl it at the correct targets.
It does basically the same things Flash does but won't have the platform support of flash. The only remotely valid thing I've seen out of you is that you find it a tad easier to develop for (on Windows). The bottom line is this is meant to kick both non-Windows and Adobe in the nuts. Any other attributes it has are strictly secondary.
I don't think "Can't use most of the sites that employ Silverlight" is a "random criteria" in the least. It'll sorta work on non-MS and "work best" on MS. SSDD and we've all watched MS do this before.
Within the Linux world Ubuntu isn't niche:
apt-get install moonlight
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package moonlight
Even if that did work, I have severe doubts about Moonlight working with J. Random Silverlight site. Moonlight is likely to Silverlight what Gnash is to Flash: a 75% percent solution that isn't really practical but allows MS to tick off "Cross Platform" on the feature list and they damn well did it on purpose.
Have you ever actually tried to get a Windows installation to work without the benefit of the proprietary driver discs?
Slipstreaming DriverPacks into the install disc doesn't completely take that pain away but it helps considerably. I've had absolutely horrible times with new SATA controllers and DriverPacks REALLY helps with that one but even so I did have one machine that absolutely refused to load until I made the disc and dragged out the USB floppy drive that XP likes (and it only likes certain older ones). The other one that will absolutely kill you is the drivers for some WinModems. They may not work in Linux but even finding the correct driver for a lot of them is hell in Windows too. More than once, I've had the OEM modem installer fail to work and then have to hunt and hunt before I find an out of the way dusty generic version of the driver that does.
Well over 98% of our incoming mail traffic is spam. If I did nothing about this, email here wouldn't be useful at all. Trying to bury our legitimate business in a sea of penis enlargement ads is reason enough for me to want to these jerks shut down in the most obnoxious way possible. And since as you mention in another post you "don't get it" then I'll cheerfully get out the Cluebat and explain it:
1. We bear a bandwidth cost even for mails tagged or rejected.
2. I expend significant effort keeping the s/n ratio high for my users.
3. The bulk of that traffic comes from botnetted machines. I eagerly await your explanation of what makes that ethical or legal.
4. Much of the spam attempts to make use of system, mail client, or browser vulnerabilities. The potential consequences range from minor breaches of privacy, compromised clients, to defrauded recipients.
5. Even the spams that don't carry some sort of technically malicious payload are out and out scams. They flog products that don't work, pirated software, and other such shenanigans.
So we don't have a mere annoyance here. Criminal means are used to flood mailservers with scams and even the (very) small residue that are actual businesses with actual products and the politicos are abusing the network resources of others.
That tank already gets A Big Honking Glider bolted to the side of it. Doubtless significant engineering is needed to adapt the tank from that application to something more akin to a conventional booster. Still, we're talking about buttressing and reconfiguring the load a structure is to carry. This is obviously less daunting than designing an entire system of boosters from scratch.
Jupiter just makes too much blatant sense and won't be adopted for that reason alone.
NeoOffice is very actively developed and may not be so horrible now depending on when you tried it.
I've got a configless X.Org on my EEE701. There is still a very sparse xorg.conf that is heeded. So the X will do 95% of the work of setting itself up and if you still want some special tweaks then just chuck them into that minimal xorg.conf and they'll be picked up. I put a few things in there to un-braindamage the overfeatured trackpad.
Patents have been slapped on it that you have a license to if you use it under the CDDL. This means that it can't even be re-implemented on Linux. Sun is deliberately coy when asked about those patents. Sun doesn't want ZFS (natively) on Linux under any circumstances.
Rsync IS efficient with the bare transfer the data. I suspect his problem is with the time rsync can take to find all of the changed files in a large set of directories and files. I mitigate this somewhat by rsyncing sets of subdirectories.
Spammers also like to masquerade as legitimate advertising outfits. It used to be the one spamming was also flogging the bogus product. Now the spambot herds are a resource to rented and the spammers could care less whether any product moves or not. The only credit card they are interested in is the one that pays them for doing the spam runs.
Following the money will still work in this instance but you likely won't be punishing the spammer. Rather, you'll punish the one who hired the spammer either because they didn't understand the nature of the "marketing campaign" they contracted for or just didn't care. I'm not sorry for them in any case. It's called due diligence. Well, I'd go light on them IF a spambot herder gets his hide nailed to a wall.
I have yet to hear of any form of recourse whatsoever because a piece of MS software malfunctioned. Ever actually read that thing that most click "I Agree" on to make it go away?
It'd be nice to catalog all that and make it publically searchable. I'm sure there's lots of submarine patent torpedos in there.