That's an interesting article, and apparently the yeast wasn't his first old bug to bring back, he brought back a 25 million year old bacteria first.
That might qualify the initial yeast and bacteria as the longest lived organisms in history (being 45 and 25 million years old), but they would have died within hours or less of being re-awoken. It's simply a colony now, the old ones died a long time ago.
What makes it a botnet as opposed to the standard C&C setup is the fact that the bots acted together in a coordinated manner, controlled from a central location. Manually hacking a server and installing a C&C kit would make a bot, getting 100 of them to coordinate together to perform some task would make a botnet. The second is what happened.
What would be really troublesome is if the bots were established automatically, via a worm or some such. That would be a sizeable leap in malware technology.
Granted there have been some remote code execution exploits, but the number of those is miniscule compared to someone with a poorly configured box clicking something they shouldn't have clicked, and then saying "yes" when the thing they shouldn't have clicked wanted to install something they shouldn't have installed.
Organisms like Pando sure look like a single organism to me. The "trees" are simply energy collectors for the plant, if one is destroyed no big deal, it sends up another. Sorta like the hairs on my head, if I cut one, it simply grows back, and they produced inside my body and sent out.
Pando is actually a male aspen and can reproduce the normal plant way, but the result would produce a new root system from seedlings that are genetically different from Pando, and would be a different organism if they ever took hold. They don't though, the trees (also called stems) shoot up from the roots. The conditions are no longer right for Pando to reproduce. It just keeps growing instead.
Best guess puts Pando at 80,000 years, which really is little more than a guess, because the tree could easilly be 1 million years old - and some people think it might be.
The difficulty with these types of organisms is in the definition, and what you consider the organism. For example, some argue that colonial organisms like Pando cannot be considered individual organisms because the original root systems may have died off. However, by that definition animals could only be considered a few months to a few years old, after which point they are a new organism, because cells are constantly dieing and being replaced (via cloning, btw).
I say such organisms, so long as they are contiguous and have not been completely removed from the main organism are still an individual organism. They are just large on a scale that is hard to imagine, and tend to live primarily underground, making them seem like separate organisms.
Lol leave it to a Linux fanboy to re-define botnet from "a network of robots" to "anything else so long as it can't include Linux".
Ngix or whatever it's called is clearly a bot, any program that recieves input and performs a task fits that definition, and these servers are clearly networked together to operate a secondary botnet.
What exactly would you call it, besides a botnet? It's not a worm, those are self-propigating, often used to carry other forms of malware. It's not a virus, those are intended to cause harm to or steal data from the host. It's not a trojan, though it could be, trojans provide unfettered access to the host machine, but are not designed to link up with other compromised machine. It doesn't fit the semi-malicioius categories of spyware and adware, so what is it?
I'll tell you, it's a botnet.
Sorry, Linux fanboys are so smug about Linux security it's hard not to throw it back at them when they are wrong. Still, it's 1 Linux botnet vs thousands of Windows botnets, so it's not exactly something to get cocky about.
You know my favorite CLI though? Cisco IOS. ? makes everything magical, you can be 3/4 the way through a command and forget how to proceed, hit ? and it gives you all your options and a brief description.
Plus, the settings are the commands, so copy paste a config output from another router into the command line and it is made so. Change some names and IP addresses and you've successfully cloned the router. It's especially nice since you can do that before hand.
It's not exactly a general-purpose operating system though.
Desktop environments/window managers like GNOME and KDE are comparable to what you can find on Windows or Mac, unless you're talking about really old stuff like twm.
No, they aren't. Gnome especially looks like shit compared to Mac and Vista. You may have a point when talking about XP or the classic windows manager, though I still prefer XP to Gnome. I haven't used KDE 4, but KDE 3 isn't much better without some -heavy- customization. And I'm no UI designer so I usually end up just screwing it up.
Compiz is definitely cool, but it is ultimately useless and can be a serious resource hog. It's also very buggy, and the UI for managing it beyond "on", "light", or "off" is not very good.
Furthermore, Windows still doesn't have multiple virtual desktops like Linux has had for decades. I've come to rely on that feature for day-to-day use, and using Windows is downright painful for me these days.
Not natively, no, and neither does OSX. It's not really all that exciting of a feature unless you are used to breaking up your work like that, and if you are there are a number of free 3rd party apps that will do it for you. Millions of people get stuff done without it, and they aren't clamoring to have it either. I personally used it only a handful of times when I was using Linux. I would never be considered a Linux power user though.
I've used OS X quite a bit and I still don't see what everyone in in awe about. It does what its supposed to, but there isn't really anything that special or unique about its interface these days.
That's the whole point. The Linux desktops often do not do what they are supposed to, or they have "special" or "unique" features/quirks that tend to be more of an annoyance than a boon. Same with Windows, but it is getting better and is not nearly as bad as it used to be, or as Linux is now.
OSX is amazing because usually, if you break out of the way your OS of choice has trained you to operate and just think "what would make sense?" to do something, lo and behold that's the Mac way to do it. You don't want an app any more? Why navigate to Add/Remove Programs? Just throw it away! You want to install an app? Drop it into your Applications folder. Easy. They even do disk imaging straight from the install disk. For Linux you'd need to find some app that will do it for you, and with Windows Vista and later you'd have to know how to use the imagex tool, because that was NOT designed for the end user to use.
Stuff like that, once you stop thinking about the "Windows way" or looking for the terminal to do stuff the Unix way (which is still there in OSX if you want it, btw), most of the time it is very easy to use. The same cannot be said for Linux. Not by a long shot.
I honestly think the only things holding OSX back now are the expense of the hardware and the entrenched nature of Windows, and I don't think the second is as big a deal as it was even 5-10 years ago. Unfortunately, the hardware is a key part of their business model, and a key part of the stability of OSX, so I don't see it changing any time soon.
I don't even use a Mac (my roommate has one) and I'm saying this.
If you think they all suck, how is it FireFox's killer feature then?
I honestly don't like it that much, though I prefer Chrome's implimentation. It simply keeps a list of your last opened pages when you open the home page, and you can fire them up again if you want to. I hardly use it though.
Nice try, but we were talking about the GIMP alternative, which is Photoshop, not the full suite. Here is photoshop CS4, it can be had slightly cheaper elsewhere. For the full CS4 suite, which you referenced and includes Photoship, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat 9 Pro, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro, and Fireworks, $400 is about $1400 off retail. There is no decent FOSS product that is even close in functionality to most of thos programs, so until there is $400 is a damn good deal.
Photoshop CS3 is harder to find, but it can be had here for about $90, and this one is not a student version. CS3 has 95-99% of the features of CS4 and is more than enough for what almost all digital creators need.
The CS3 design premium suite is about $250. Again, kids buy snowboards and stuff that costs more than that, so if it's a serious hobby there is no reason young artists can't too. Save your pennies, seriously.
You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
That is the KEY difference between FOSS and proprietary software, and it explains all the issues people have with FOSS right there. FOSS programmers are usually writing the program for themselves, and don't think about what other people might want or need with their program. Proprietary software programmers are -always- thinking about what other people might want or need, because they are NOT coding it for themselves. Half the time they could care less and wouldn't use the product they are writing anyway, but they end up making the better programs.
FOSS is great for developing the underlying technologies behind programs, but when it comes to actually putting something out there for the masses to use, they suck. A proprietary UI with a FOSS core can do extremely well, just look at OSX.
FOSS projects have terrible UI's because good UI's are boring to program. It's a rare person who actually enjoys designing a good UI, and an even rarer person who enjoys writing the code behind it. The "fun stuff" is the creative stuff: coming up with the algorithms hum, comming up with the schema for accessing the data, doing something interesting that actually works as intended, etc. For these things, FOSS is great. For the boring stuff, it is terrible.
For proprietary software, enjoyment isn't a factor, people do those things because they are getting paid to do them, and the program manager told them to do it. With FOSS the incentive is enjoyment and providing a useful tool. "Useful" to a programmer is very, very different than what an end user thinks is useful, so generally the UI suffers and the FOSS project suffers.
Frankly, nobody likes designing the UI, and with FOSS, unlike with proprietary software, there is nobody who can make anybody else do it.
While manual updates are fine so long as you remember to hit the little shield and update in a timely manner (I think that's what you meant when you said you disabled auto-installs), I want to point out that disabling windows updates all together is a very very bad idea. Windows updates are there primarily to fix security issues, and while patching them can sometimes break things, it is generally better for you in the long run.
The most I'd recommend you to do is to set windows updates to critical updates only. Most programs should be unaffected by these, and any programs that are were probably doing things they shouldn't have in the first place.
For my own anecdotal experience with Ubuntu, waiting for major releases before updating broke more things than updating incrimentally and dealing with the minor issues at each update. One major update took me weeks to get everything working correctly. I was a little pissed about it.
In an app without bugs, it is very difficult for PEBKAC errors to occur. Most of the time, PEBKAC and ID10T errors are just excuses for developers not to fix a problem with their program.
Honestly, I have never seen Flash crash. I've seen it hang, or not start in some browsers, but I've never seen it crash. I've also never used FF3.5, so there you go.
If the Flash plugin uses a feature allowed by FF that causes FF to crash, it is a bug in FF. If FF allows flash to use too much memory and it crashes FF, it is a bug in FF. As you noted, Chrome properly handles this bug, but apparently Firefox does not.
Whenever any app crashes, it is that app writer's problem. It may not necessarily be their fault, but if they want their users to be happy they need to find a way to fix the problem.
But Firefox runs very fine here. So first FIX YOUR COMPUTER, before complaining about software stability.
That's like when someone calls tech support and says "my email doesn't work", and the tech support guy says "Well, mine is fine, so there is obviously no problem." It's an idiotic statement to make.
Here are the minimum requirements for FireFox 3.5.3 for windows straight from their website:
Minimum Hardware Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater) 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater) 52 MB hard drive space
If I have that setup and Firfox is the only app that crashes, there is a bug in Firefox. Recommending more RAM is useless, as Firefox is intended to work with as little as 64mb (though feature degradation at less than 128 is acceptable, since they recommend that much). If there are no OS issues, and FF crashes, it's FF's problem. Even if it's a plugin that causes it, it is still their problem and they need to fix it (not the plugin, just the crash).
One more time, just so we are perfectly clear, ANY time an app crashes and it is not related to a bug in the OS, it is a bug in the app. Period. App goes down, app has bug. End of story. A plugin may have a bug that causes the crash, but the fact that it crashes means there is a bug in the main app that allowed the crash to happen.
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
This, I can absolutely agree with, but as a developer of other software, and frequent user of Firefox, I wish people would be more precise in their bug reporting!
It's only worth it for Mozilla to fix the bugs if fixing the bugs will bring in more users/revenue than adding new features. As long as that is not the case, all the small but annoying bugs will be on the back-burner, and new features (which create more bugs) will be the primary goal.
The bug reporting should not be a problem with a proper bug collection system. Microsoft does this very well, with the pop up whenever an app crashes, they collect pertinant information so they know if it was their fault something crashed, and ask your permission to send it to MS home base. If enough people have the same issue, they can trace the problem and fix it.
Bug tracking via users entering information into a bug database is not very useful, and you will never get an accurate report of all the bugs that occur. You still won't with an automated system, but you will get a much higher percentage of bugs. The information should be collected at the moment of the crash so you get all the pertinant error information, with a little popup asking at most for a brief description of what you were doing. Check out joelonsoftware.com, he used to work for MS and now runs his own software company, and he was able to eliminate every single bug from one of his apps using a similar bug collection technique.
I work with a guy who has so many tabs open at any given time that he'll forget what he has open and re-open some website in a new tab, even though he has 4 other tabs open with the same website in it already.
I personally can't stand to have more than 5 or 6 tabs open at a time, I start closing them after that. It becomes more difficult to hunt for the tab than to just punch in the URL of whatever website, especially with the auto-complete features. Granted I love tabs more than separate windows - I have to use IE6 for work and that alone sucks, big time.
I also find plugins and extensions more annoying than anything, and this same guy has a dozen or so, and most people on/. love their FF extensions, so I suppose I'm the one who's odd.
Student versions of CS4 are about $200 or less, and student versions of CS3 can be had for a little over $100. If it is a serious hobby for you, $100 is not that expensive. Probably 90% of deviants on dA would qualify, and most of the rest could probably afford the full price if they really, really wanted it. Starving students spend more than that on snowboards, and if they went to college for graphics design, it was probably a required purchase.
Once you start using the advanced feature-set, both of those versions of Photoshop are miles ahead of GIMP. I think digital art done in Corel Painter better, though, and that is significantly cheaper in both retail and student versions.
"Lots of users" does not equal "a large percentage".
The number of people who use Windows but loath it could be twice the number of total number Linux users combined, and it would still be less than 5% of number of people who use Windows. There are not that many people who hate Windows, the vast majority of windows users love it, especially XP and even Vista now that they've got most of the bugs ironed out.
There will never be an open source replacement for Windows, if anything replaces it it will be a closed-source OS like OSX, because programming the bits that make Windows easy to use and acceptable to a large user base are the very bits that nobody likes to write. They are, in fact, a pain in the ass to write and there is no real sense of accomplishment. That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
With Windows, as well as with most proprietary software, some schmuck got paid to make sure all the bits that nobody likes to program work the way they are supposed to, and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it. This is one thing that open source developement is terrible at. Not bad, but terrible, and it is an area closed-source developement excels at. Usually the poor schmuck doing the GUI work is an intern or new guy making his way up the ranks, being told what to do by the high-paid GUI designer. Neither of those two exist in an open source project. If they do, it's very rare.
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare. In number they are greater, because you have almost 100 times as many users, but the majority of Windows/Mac users never have a problem with their system. Now, because of the number of Windows machines especially, there is more than enough work from the people who do have problems to create a healthy industry out of fixing them, whereas Linux users tend to fix the problems themselves.
So yeah, most things "just work" in Linux, but in my experience every Linux setup has one or more issues that need ironing out. If you're honest and you do anything more than web browsing, you'll agree. The very large community support base for Linux, especially the relative size compared to Windows (I'd say they are close to equal, even though the Windows user base is 90 times larger), is evidence of that. The difference is for Windows/Mac most users find that -everything- "just works", and the community support is for the relative few technically minded people who help those who have issues.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck.
That happened to me when I tried to use WINE. No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it, either. Scrubbing it from the computer didn't work, I was obviously missing a config setting somewhere that I couldn't find. Fortunately I managed to get a free copy of Crossover and that worked for my needs. I still ended up ditching Linux after about a year for issues along the same line (not resolution issues, but audio and other issues that were ridiculous in my mind).
I recently read a book that described the problem perfectly, and basically explained why Linux, no matter how great it becomes, will never supplant Windows or OSX on the desktop. Mind you I am not anti-Linux, I think it is fantastic and in many areas the technology behind it surpasses the big players like Windows and OSX. That does not mean it is any good on the desktop, however.
That's because with Windows/Mac, programmers write programs for the user. With Linux, programmers write programs for other programmers.
The difference, when you think about it, is huge. If you're a programmer writing programms for other programmers, you want all output and input to be in the form of ASCII or UTF-8 text, so that it is easilly manipulated by other programs, all of the applications features will be accessible from the command line, and the holy grail of a successful operation (that doesn't need to spit out a txt file for another program) is no output whatsoever. "Chatty" programs aren't as easy to integrate into other programs.
If you're writing programs for the user, you want to make sure the user knows everything worked as it should have, so you pop up a status message. You have progress bars and percentages and so on and so forth so they can see that all is working as it should, and you make it as easy as possible. Using the keyboard may be significantly faster than using the mouse, but there has been no invention for the computer that makes input easier than the mouse. So for user apps as much as possible must be point-and-click. A lot of these programmers know nobody is going to use the CLI, so they don't put in any more than basic command line operability.
With programs written for programmers, the GUI is usually tacked on after the fact just to help users use the program, the interfaces vary widely from app to app, and the general useability of the GUI ranges from mediocre to piss poor. Very rarely is it actually good.
Contrast that with programs written for users, and the GUI is often designed before the program is. If you write an app with Microsoft's Visual Studio (which is designed to help programmers write apps for users), the default options start you off with a form to build the GUI, for which you add the actual application code later. The GUI is ever on your mind, and it impacts the way you write a program.
Lastly, with programs written for users, consistancy is key. That means Microsoft and Apple both have strong incentives to provide a very consistant framework around which app developers write their programs.
There is no such thing in the Linux world, and Linux developers would be outraged if someone tried it.
For some reason programmers writing programs for users tend to be more humble than their counterparts, too. I suppose being part of a small minority can make some people feel superior, though it really has no bearing at all on their ability to program.
I think you missed his point, vendor lock-in is possible when the application is so difficult to develop and maintain that a fork would go nowhere.
Imagine a fork of Open Office, it isn't very likely even if there are a lot of things some people don't like about it. It's such a huge application that if it were developed on a volunteer basis, it would require a team of 100 coders to keep pace with its current developement, if not more. Organizing that many coders for a single project is difficult, and frankly it probably wouldn't take too long before the fork was terrible compaired to the main branch.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
Again, it is possible that someone could make a new office application, and people would certainly try (there are already alternatives out there, but by and large they suck), but as long as Open Office is the only serious free competition to MS Office, you're stuck with it if you want (or need) all the features.
Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
On the proprietary side, some enterprising fellow or company would note that NoScript's users were less than happy, and that there was a market for a new player. This fellow or company would write their own script/ad blocker and steal some of NoScript's userbase, forcing him to change NoScript to keep his users. Writing it from scratch (and with the SDKs and IDEs "scratch" means most of the work is still already done for you) they may even make it better, or add features, and you'd have a better product.
It's a little harder than a fork, but it's not like we're locked in to the whims of proprietary software developers.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, he said he worked there, not that he was doing the monitoring.
I work at an industrial facility, and there are a lot of people who support the people doing the monitoring. For example, I'm the network guy / one of the programmers. I don't know shit about monitoring the plant (ok, I know a tiny bit, just from working with the tools they work with, but it's a very tiny bit), procedures and all that good stuff. I maintain the (logical) network and one of the tools that automates opening their plant monitoring software.
I need to know "this program uses this syntax to open this file", not "this valve controls the flow into this pump, which feeds this reservoir, and when it goes into alarm all hell has broken loose". Other people know that stuff - though we've had a bunch of people retire, and the new guys don't know it as well as the old guys. That can be kinda scary sometimes.
The people giving the apology were not the people guilty of the crime. There is nothing to be absolved of. This is a government recognizing a man for his contributions to the country, and stating that what their predacessors did to him was wrong.
If you find fault with that, you are sick. That is the same mentality that allows senseless generational conflicts to continue for millenia on end. Just look to the Middle East, they are charged with racial tension for reasons nobody remembers. Most of the people leading the ideologies of hatred think exactly like you do.
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That's an interesting article, and apparently the yeast wasn't his first old bug to bring back, he brought back a 25 million year old bacteria first.
That might qualify the initial yeast and bacteria as the longest lived organisms in history (being 45 and 25 million years old), but they would have died within hours or less of being re-awoken. It's simply a colony now, the old ones died a long time ago.
Very cool though.
What makes it a botnet as opposed to the standard C&C setup is the fact that the bots acted together in a coordinated manner, controlled from a central location. Manually hacking a server and installing a C&C kit would make a bot, getting 100 of them to coordinate together to perform some task would make a botnet. The second is what happened.
What would be really troublesome is if the bots were established automatically, via a worm or some such. That would be a sizeable leap in malware technology.
It's been true since after 2000.
Granted there have been some remote code execution exploits, but the number of those is miniscule compared to someone with a poorly configured box clicking something they shouldn't have clicked, and then saying "yes" when the thing they shouldn't have clicked wanted to install something they shouldn't have installed.
Organisms like Pando sure look like a single organism to me. The "trees" are simply energy collectors for the plant, if one is destroyed no big deal, it sends up another. Sorta like the hairs on my head, if I cut one, it simply grows back, and they produced inside my body and sent out.
Pando is actually a male aspen and can reproduce the normal plant way, but the result would produce a new root system from seedlings that are genetically different from Pando, and would be a different organism if they ever took hold. They don't though, the trees (also called stems) shoot up from the roots. The conditions are no longer right for Pando to reproduce. It just keeps growing instead.
Best guess puts Pando at 80,000 years, which really is little more than a guess, because the tree could easilly be 1 million years old - and some people think it might be.
The difficulty with these types of organisms is in the definition, and what you consider the organism. For example, some argue that colonial organisms like Pando cannot be considered individual organisms because the original root systems may have died off. However, by that definition animals could only be considered a few months to a few years old, after which point they are a new organism, because cells are constantly dieing and being replaced (via cloning, btw).
I say such organisms, so long as they are contiguous and have not been completely removed from the main organism are still an individual organism. They are just large on a scale that is hard to imagine, and tend to live primarily underground, making them seem like separate organisms.
Lol leave it to a Linux fanboy to re-define botnet from "a network of robots" to "anything else so long as it can't include Linux".
Ngix or whatever it's called is clearly a bot, any program that recieves input and performs a task fits that definition, and these servers are clearly networked together to operate a secondary botnet.
What exactly would you call it, besides a botnet? It's not a worm, those are self-propigating, often used to carry other forms of malware. It's not a virus, those are intended to cause harm to or steal data from the host. It's not a trojan, though it could be, trojans provide unfettered access to the host machine, but are not designed to link up with other compromised machine. It doesn't fit the semi-malicioius categories of spyware and adware, so what is it?
I'll tell you, it's a botnet.
Sorry, Linux fanboys are so smug about Linux security it's hard not to throw it back at them when they are wrong. Still, it's 1 Linux botnet vs thousands of Windows botnets, so it's not exactly something to get cocky about.
Haha, too true.
You know my favorite CLI though? Cisco IOS. ? makes everything magical, you can be 3/4 the way through a command and forget how to proceed, hit ? and it gives you all your options and a brief description.
Plus, the settings are the commands, so copy paste a config output from another router into the command line and it is made so. Change some names and IP addresses and you've successfully cloned the router. It's especially nice since you can do that before hand.
It's not exactly a general-purpose operating system though.
Desktop environments/window managers like GNOME and KDE are comparable to what you can find on Windows or Mac, unless you're talking about really old stuff like twm.
No, they aren't. Gnome especially looks like shit compared to Mac and Vista. You may have a point when talking about XP or the classic windows manager, though I still prefer XP to Gnome. I haven't used KDE 4, but KDE 3 isn't much better without some -heavy- customization. And I'm no UI designer so I usually end up just screwing it up.
Compiz is definitely cool, but it is ultimately useless and can be a serious resource hog. It's also very buggy, and the UI for managing it beyond "on", "light", or "off" is not very good.
Furthermore, Windows still doesn't have multiple virtual desktops like Linux has had for decades. I've come to rely on that feature for day-to-day use, and using Windows is downright painful for me these days.
Not natively, no, and neither does OSX. It's not really all that exciting of a feature unless you are used to breaking up your work like that, and if you are there are a number of free 3rd party apps that will do it for you. Millions of people get stuff done without it, and they aren't clamoring to have it either. I personally used it only a handful of times when I was using Linux. I would never be considered a Linux power user though.
I've used OS X quite a bit and I still don't see what everyone in in awe about. It does what its supposed to, but there isn't really anything that special or unique about its interface these days.
That's the whole point. The Linux desktops often do not do what they are supposed to, or they have "special" or "unique" features/quirks that tend to be more of an annoyance than a boon. Same with Windows, but it is getting better and is not nearly as bad as it used to be, or as Linux is now.
OSX is amazing because usually, if you break out of the way your OS of choice has trained you to operate and just think "what would make sense?" to do something, lo and behold that's the Mac way to do it. You don't want an app any more? Why navigate to Add/Remove Programs? Just throw it away! You want to install an app? Drop it into your Applications folder. Easy. They even do disk imaging straight from the install disk. For Linux you'd need to find some app that will do it for you, and with Windows Vista and later you'd have to know how to use the imagex tool, because that was NOT designed for the end user to use.
Stuff like that, once you stop thinking about the "Windows way" or looking for the terminal to do stuff the Unix way (which is still there in OSX if you want it, btw), most of the time it is very easy to use. The same cannot be said for Linux. Not by a long shot.
I honestly think the only things holding OSX back now are the expense of the hardware and the entrenched nature of Windows, and I don't think the second is as big a deal as it was even 5-10 years ago. Unfortunately, the hardware is a key part of their business model, and a key part of the stability of OSX, so I don't see it changing any time soon.
I don't even use a Mac (my roommate has one) and I'm saying this.
If you think they all suck, how is it FireFox's killer feature then?
I honestly don't like it that much, though I prefer Chrome's implimentation. It simply keeps a list of your last opened pages when you open the home page, and you can fire them up again if you want to. I hardly use it though.
Nice try, but we were talking about the GIMP alternative, which is Photoshop, not the full suite. Here is photoshop CS4, it can be had slightly cheaper elsewhere. For the full CS4 suite, which you referenced and includes Photoship, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat 9 Pro, Dreamweaver, Flash Pro, and Fireworks, $400 is about $1400 off retail. There is no decent FOSS product that is even close in functionality to most of thos programs, so until there is $400 is a damn good deal.
Photoshop CS3 is harder to find, but it can be had here for about $90, and this one is not a student version. CS3 has 95-99% of the features of CS4 and is more than enough for what almost all digital creators need.
The CS3 design premium suite is about $250. Again, kids buy snowboards and stuff that costs more than that, so if it's a serious hobby there is no reason young artists can't too. Save your pennies, seriously.
You really only start caring about the UI when you code for others.
That is the KEY difference between FOSS and proprietary software, and it explains all the issues people have with FOSS right there. FOSS programmers are usually writing the program for themselves, and don't think about what other people might want or need with their program. Proprietary software programmers are -always- thinking about what other people might want or need, because they are NOT coding it for themselves. Half the time they could care less and wouldn't use the product they are writing anyway, but they end up making the better programs.
FOSS is great for developing the underlying technologies behind programs, but when it comes to actually putting something out there for the masses to use, they suck. A proprietary UI with a FOSS core can do extremely well, just look at OSX.
FOSS projects have terrible UI's because good UI's are boring to program. It's a rare person who actually enjoys designing a good UI, and an even rarer person who enjoys writing the code behind it. The "fun stuff" is the creative stuff: coming up with the algorithms hum, comming up with the schema for accessing the data, doing something interesting that actually works as intended, etc. For these things, FOSS is great. For the boring stuff, it is terrible.
For proprietary software, enjoyment isn't a factor, people do those things because they are getting paid to do them, and the program manager told them to do it. With FOSS the incentive is enjoyment and providing a useful tool. "Useful" to a programmer is very, very different than what an end user thinks is useful, so generally the UI suffers and the FOSS project suffers.
Frankly, nobody likes designing the UI, and with FOSS, unlike with proprietary software, there is nobody who can make anybody else do it.
While manual updates are fine so long as you remember to hit the little shield and update in a timely manner (I think that's what you meant when you said you disabled auto-installs), I want to point out that disabling windows updates all together is a very very bad idea. Windows updates are there primarily to fix security issues, and while patching them can sometimes break things, it is generally better for you in the long run.
The most I'd recommend you to do is to set windows updates to critical updates only. Most programs should be unaffected by these, and any programs that are were probably doing things they shouldn't have in the first place.
For my own anecdotal experience with Ubuntu, waiting for major releases before updating broke more things than updating incrimentally and dealing with the minor issues at each update. One major update took me weeks to get everything working correctly. I was a little pissed about it.
In an app without bugs, it is very difficult for PEBKAC errors to occur. Most of the time, PEBKAC and ID10T errors are just excuses for developers not to fix a problem with their program.
Honestly, I have never seen Flash crash. I've seen it hang, or not start in some browsers, but I've never seen it crash. I've also never used FF3.5, so there you go.
If the Flash plugin uses a feature allowed by FF that causes FF to crash, it is a bug in FF. If FF allows flash to use too much memory and it crashes FF, it is a bug in FF. As you noted, Chrome properly handles this bug, but apparently Firefox does not.
Whenever any app crashes, it is that app writer's problem. It may not necessarily be their fault, but if they want their users to be happy they need to find a way to fix the problem.
But Firefox runs very fine here. So first FIX YOUR COMPUTER, before complaining about software stability.
That's like when someone calls tech support and says "my email doesn't work", and the tech support guy says "Well, mine is fine, so there is obviously no problem." It's an idiotic statement to make.
Here are the minimum requirements for FireFox 3.5.3 for windows straight from their website:
Minimum Hardware
Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
52 MB hard drive space
If I have that setup and Firfox is the only app that crashes, there is a bug in Firefox. Recommending more RAM is useless, as Firefox is intended to work with as little as 64mb (though feature degradation at less than 128 is acceptable, since they recommend that much). If there are no OS issues, and FF crashes, it's FF's problem. Even if it's a plugin that causes it, it is still their problem and they need to fix it (not the plugin, just the crash).
One more time, just so we are perfectly clear, ANY time an app crashes and it is not related to a bug in the OS, it is a bug in the app. Period. App goes down, app has bug. End of story. A plugin may have a bug that causes the crash, but the fact that it crashes means there is a bug in the main app that allowed the crash to happen.
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
This, I can absolutely agree with, but as a developer of other software, and frequent user of Firefox, I wish people would be more precise in their bug reporting!
It's only worth it for Mozilla to fix the bugs if fixing the bugs will bring in more users/revenue than adding new features. As long as that is not the case, all the small but annoying bugs will be on the back-burner, and new features (which create more bugs) will be the primary goal.
The bug reporting should not be a problem with a proper bug collection system. Microsoft does this very well, with the pop up whenever an app crashes, they collect pertinant information so they know if it was their fault something crashed, and ask your permission to send it to MS home base. If enough people have the same issue, they can trace the problem and fix it.
Bug tracking via users entering information into a bug database is not very useful, and you will never get an accurate report of all the bugs that occur. You still won't with an automated system, but you will get a much higher percentage of bugs. The information should be collected at the moment of the crash so you get all the pertinant error information, with a little popup asking at most for a brief description of what you were doing. Check out joelonsoftware.com, he used to work for MS and now runs his own software company, and he was able to eliminate every single bug from one of his apps using a similar bug collection technique.
I work with a guy who has so many tabs open at any given time that he'll forget what he has open and re-open some website in a new tab, even though he has 4 other tabs open with the same website in it already.
I personally can't stand to have more than 5 or 6 tabs open at a time, I start closing them after that. It becomes more difficult to hunt for the tab than to just punch in the URL of whatever website, especially with the auto-complete features. Granted I love tabs more than separate windows - I have to use IE6 for work and that alone sucks, big time.
I also find plugins and extensions more annoying than anything, and this same guy has a dozen or so, and most people on /. love their FF extensions, so I suppose I'm the one who's odd.
Student versions of CS4 are about $200 or less, and student versions of CS3 can be had for a little over $100. If it is a serious hobby for you, $100 is not that expensive. Probably 90% of deviants on dA would qualify, and most of the rest could probably afford the full price if they really, really wanted it. Starving students spend more than that on snowboards, and if they went to college for graphics design, it was probably a required purchase.
Once you start using the advanced feature-set, both of those versions of Photoshop are miles ahead of GIMP. I think digital art done in Corel Painter better, though, and that is significantly cheaper in both retail and student versions.
So you're saying it's 100% the user's fault that they expect to be able to use all the functionality FireFox offers.
Nice.
"Lots of users" does not equal "a large percentage".
The number of people who use Windows but loath it could be twice the number of total number Linux users combined, and it would still be less than 5% of number of people who use Windows. There are not that many people who hate Windows, the vast majority of windows users love it, especially XP and even Vista now that they've got most of the bugs ironed out.
There will never be an open source replacement for Windows, if anything replaces it it will be a closed-source OS like OSX, because programming the bits that make Windows easy to use and acceptable to a large user base are the very bits that nobody likes to write. They are, in fact, a pain in the ass to write and there is no real sense of accomplishment. That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
With Windows, as well as with most proprietary software, some schmuck got paid to make sure all the bits that nobody likes to program work the way they are supposed to, and what you get is a GUI that is so easy to use nobody even thinks about it. This is one thing that open source developement is terrible at. Not bad, but terrible, and it is an area closed-source developement excels at. Usually the poor schmuck doing the GUI work is an intern or new guy making his way up the ranks, being told what to do by the high-paid GUI designer. Neither of those two exist in an open source project. If they do, it's very rare.
The difference is, with Linux the majority of users spend hours trying to get things to work, everybody has one or two things on their system that didn't quite work right and needed some config file edited or had to be initialized in such and such a way instead of the normal way, etc.
In Windows (and Mac), these problems are rare. In number they are greater, because you have almost 100 times as many users, but the majority of Windows/Mac users never have a problem with their system. Now, because of the number of Windows machines especially, there is more than enough work from the people who do have problems to create a healthy industry out of fixing them, whereas Linux users tend to fix the problems themselves.
So yeah, most things "just work" in Linux, but in my experience every Linux setup has one or more issues that need ironing out. If you're honest and you do anything more than web browsing, you'll agree. The very large community support base for Linux, especially the relative size compared to Windows (I'd say they are close to equal, even though the Windows user base is 90 times larger), is evidence of that. The difference is for Windows/Mac most users find that -everything- "just works", and the community support is for the relative few technically minded people who help those who have issues.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck.
That happened to me when I tried to use WINE. No matter what I did, I couldn't fix it, either. Scrubbing it from the computer didn't work, I was obviously missing a config setting somewhere that I couldn't find. Fortunately I managed to get a free copy of Crossover and that worked for my needs. I still ended up ditching Linux after about a year for issues along the same line (not resolution issues, but audio and other issues that were ridiculous in my mind).
I recently read a book that described the problem perfectly, and basically explained why Linux, no matter how great it becomes, will never supplant Windows or OSX on the desktop. Mind you I am not anti-Linux, I think it is fantastic and in many areas the technology behind it surpasses the big players like Windows and OSX. That does not mean it is any good on the desktop, however.
That's because with Windows/Mac, programmers write programs for the user. With Linux, programmers write programs for other programmers.
The difference, when you think about it, is huge. If you're a programmer writing programms for other programmers, you want all output and input to be in the form of ASCII or UTF-8 text, so that it is easilly manipulated by other programs, all of the applications features will be accessible from the command line, and the holy grail of a successful operation (that doesn't need to spit out a txt file for another program) is no output whatsoever. "Chatty" programs aren't as easy to integrate into other programs.
If you're writing programs for the user, you want to make sure the user knows everything worked as it should have, so you pop up a status message. You have progress bars and percentages and so on and so forth so they can see that all is working as it should, and you make it as easy as possible. Using the keyboard may be significantly faster than using the mouse, but there has been no invention for the computer that makes input easier than the mouse. So for user apps as much as possible must be point-and-click. A lot of these programmers know nobody is going to use the CLI, so they don't put in any more than basic command line operability.
With programs written for programmers, the GUI is usually tacked on after the fact just to help users use the program, the interfaces vary widely from app to app, and the general useability of the GUI ranges from mediocre to piss poor. Very rarely is it actually good.
Contrast that with programs written for users, and the GUI is often designed before the program is. If you write an app with Microsoft's Visual Studio (which is designed to help programmers write apps for users), the default options start you off with a form to build the GUI, for which you add the actual application code later. The GUI is ever on your mind, and it impacts the way you write a program.
Lastly, with programs written for users, consistancy is key. That means Microsoft and Apple both have strong incentives to provide a very consistant framework around which app developers write their programs.
There is no such thing in the Linux world, and Linux developers would be outraged if someone tried it.
For some reason programmers writing programs for users tend to be more humble than their counterparts, too. I suppose being part of a small minority can make some people feel superior, though it really has no bearing at all on their ability to program.
Fortunately, I have the SessionSaver extension (Firefox's killer feature) installed, so a browser crash is mostly an annoyance.
Newsflash, it's 2009, every modern browser (that I've used anyway) has this; it's not really a "killer feature" any more.
I think you missed his point, vendor lock-in is possible when the application is so difficult to develop and maintain that a fork would go nowhere.
Imagine a fork of Open Office, it isn't very likely even if there are a lot of things some people don't like about it. It's such a huge application that if it were developed on a volunteer basis, it would require a team of 100 coders to keep pace with its current developement, if not more. Organizing that many coders for a single project is difficult, and frankly it probably wouldn't take too long before the fork was terrible compaired to the main branch.
So if you want the most modern free office application, you are "locked-in" to Open Office.
Again, it is possible that someone could make a new office application, and people would certainly try (there are already alternatives out there, but by and large they suck), but as long as Open Office is the only serious free competition to MS Office, you're stuck with it if you want (or need) all the features.
Now imagine what would have happened if he didn't. Someone would have forked Noscript and started up his own addon without this feature. Some people would have switched over to this other addon and the Noscript author would see his ad revenue rapidly declining and would finally give in (or die). This is only possible because Noscript is free software.
On the proprietary side, some enterprising fellow or company would note that NoScript's users were less than happy, and that there was a market for a new player. This fellow or company would write their own script/ad blocker and steal some of NoScript's userbase, forcing him to change NoScript to keep his users. Writing it from scratch (and with the SDKs and IDEs "scratch" means most of the work is still already done for you) they may even make it better, or add features, and you'd have a better product.
It's a little harder than a fork, but it's not like we're locked in to the whims of proprietary software developers.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, he said he worked there, not that he was doing the monitoring.
I work at an industrial facility, and there are a lot of people who support the people doing the monitoring. For example, I'm the network guy / one of the programmers. I don't know shit about monitoring the plant (ok, I know a tiny bit, just from working with the tools they work with, but it's a very tiny bit), procedures and all that good stuff. I maintain the (logical) network and one of the tools that automates opening their plant monitoring software.
I need to know "this program uses this syntax to open this file", not "this valve controls the flow into this pump, which feeds this reservoir, and when it goes into alarm all hell has broken loose". Other people know that stuff - though we've had a bunch of people retire, and the new guys don't know it as well as the old guys. That can be kinda scary sometimes.
The people giving the apology were not the people guilty of the crime. There is nothing to be absolved of. This is a government recognizing a man for his contributions to the country, and stating that what their predacessors did to him was wrong.
If you find fault with that, you are sick. That is the same mentality that allows senseless generational conflicts to continue for millenia on end. Just look to the Middle East, they are charged with racial tension for reasons nobody remembers. Most of the people leading the ideologies of hatred think exactly like you do.