Agreed. But several prevalent religions (e.g. buddhism) do not believe in a supreme being in the sense of a god, and I'd wager than more than 5% of the world's population is Buddhist, given its large following out in Asia.
1 + 1 = 2 is, mathematically, an incredibly vague statement. As an algebraist, when you say 1, the first question that pops into my mind is to ask what ring or abelian group you're talking about. When I think of 1, I think of the multiplicative identity of a ring; hence, in the ring of nxn matrices, 1 would denote I, the identity matrix, and 2 has no meaning unless you're considering the nxn matrices as a Z-module. For example, in the finite field of order 2 or in any finite field of order 2^k for k > 0, 1 + 1 = 0, the additive identity.
Where do you get the figure 95%? I certainly doubt it's anywhere near that high, given the density of the population in Asia where Christianity still isn't widely accepted.
Perhaps you didn't notice this comment in my post:
Every so often, I'll feel compelled to throw a Linux distro on the P4 that I keep around for pretty much only KaZaa
So yes, I have installed Linux a couple times each year since I switched to Mac, and still found the experience to be largely dissatisfying. Given that it *still* has problems with my USB keyboard and mouse configuration (which works flawlessly for Windows, Mac OS X, and hell, even QNX), I don't hold much hope for it for the near future.
I *really* can't understand stories like this. I used Windows for years before first switching to Linux, and then to OS X, and I, nor anyone I know, had a fraction of the problems that you report having. I experienced at most one BSOD a month, and now, with Win XP chugging away on my P4, I've experienced no problems at all.
I especially shudder when I hear these stories coming from supposed "computer experts", which most of us are here on slashdot. I mean, really, what did you do to the OS to fux0r it up that badly? While Windows certainly wasn't (and still isn't) without strife, Linux hardly is either. Linux is certainly more stable, but I can't tell you how many times I've hosed a bunch of things by installing a seemingly innocuous RPM (once, from installing something like xmms-avi, I screwed up xmms so badly that even removing all associated RPMs and reinstalling xmms didn't fix the problem, and finally, I needed to completely reinstall Linux).
Granted there are a few bugs to squash in some of these apps, but to say Linux has a "loooong way" to go I have to disagree with. It is very very close. So close that I have started to use it exclusively as my desktop PC.
I would definitely disagree with this statement. I used to use Linux almost exclusively (making brief ventures into the world of Windows to play games and watch DVDs) up until the Mac OS X Public Beta came out, and I haven't really looked back since. Every so often, I'll feel compelled to throw a Linux distro on the P4 that I keep around for pretty much only KaZaa, and I have to say that while I see that a few apps have matured surprisingly nicely, there's still a huge number of deficiencies in the desktop.
Linux, to me, feels "cobbled together". I have the sense that it's a bunch of programs written by completely non-communicating different teams, built upon each other and then pieced together in a haphazard kind of way. I realize that this is likely the case with Windows, and definitely the case with OS X (using CUPS, Apache, etc...), but it's well hidden and cohesive so that you're not aware of it, and those cobbled-together apps are chosen in such a way that they work fairly reliably and in unison.
And, as I always claim, the utter, astounding complexity (and absurdity) of things like the KDE control panel and the GIMP submenu structure are far from being end-user-friendly. The fragmentation in Linux, while providing choice, also hinders support from third-parties. You simply can't guarantee that your application will work with Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSe, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, etc... I'm not even mentioning the fragmentation in terms of desktop environments / window managers and GUIs. It would also appear that some companies are abandoning their development of Linux as a desktop platform (e.g. Red Hat). I'm wondering if this is going to help (in the sense of reduced fragmentation) or hinder (in the sense that you need major Linux backers) the acceptance of Linux on the desktop. Only time will tell, I guess.
but life damage on the other hand is a whole other issue
*nods*... but this so-called "life damage" is caused by people who simply can't maintain a level of moderation in their lives. The blame falls largely on the individual rather than the drug.
I can't claim to know this for a fact or have read it from any reputable source, but I'd wager that a large number of people who feel compelled to use drugs in excess would probably find other ways to be self-destructive by indulging in excess if they didn't get hooked on drugs in the first place.
The fact that humans, for hundreds, if not thousands of years, have been consuming certain drugs like coca, opiates, marijuana, and psilocybin containing mushrooms (some in moderation, some to excess) without recorded disastrous long term effects? Even the hardcore opiates, like heroin and morphine, are extremely unlikely to cause brain damage, and while you do run the risk of overdose and addiction, the withdrawal is not dangerous in the majority of cases, and the drug itself is not directly harmful to the body.
Experience speaks for a lot, and many of these drugs have been used and abused throughout the history of humanity. Only a small handful of them have been shown to have really horrible long term side effects (e.g. alcohol, daturas, cocaine, amphetamines, and more recently, speculation unto the dissociative anaesthetics, but those, with the exception of nitrous oxide, are a relatively new class of drugs anyways so it's reasonable to assume that they're still poorly understood).
...is just about the most intelligence-insulting thing I've ever seen. I mean, really... the truth of the matter is that the majority of widely used drugs don't cause considerable brain damage, or at least brain damage on the level that is wreaked by say, alcohol abuse.
I think it should be banned for sheer stupidity rather than for any sort of inappropriateness.
Linux arguably has a larger installed base of desktop users than Apple
Highly doubtful. And even if this *was* the case, due to the fact that Mac OS X comes with iTunes, the majority of Mac users also use iTunes. If a Linux version were to be released, there's no reason for us to believe, apart from possibly facilitating uploading to an iPod, that even a fraction of Linux users would choose iTunes.
I hardly think it's the case that Apple "supports" Windows. I think it's more like Apple is trying to make its product (the iPod) available to as large an audience as possible in as convenient a fashion as they can manage, and seeing as the majority of computer users are Windows users, this seems like a sound marketing strategy to me.
I've come to the conclusion that due to the diversity of Linux (which is one of its so called strengths), in terms of things like GUIs, DEs, distros, etc..., the lack of standardization makes it virtually impossible for a company to provide a product, along with support, for Linux users. There's just too many inconsistencies from one distro and desktop to the next. And I think it's likely that even if Apple did release a version of iTunes that relied on, say, Qt, then you'd hear griping from the GTK+ community as to why Apple didn't support GTK+.
Personally, I'd highly recommend your next computer being a Mac running OS X. I'm typing this from my new PowerBook (which I've had for about a week now) and I'm loving it. I used to be a Linux advocate, but with the release of OS X, I'm not looking back (well, except for servers). My opinion is that Mac OS X is not without its faults, but it has far fewer faults than Linux or Windows... and it's just such a relief to play with applications that are usable and have been designed with the intention of being usable, unlike nightmares like the GIMP (powerful, but impossible for an amateur to accomplish the simplest tasks as I can attest to) or the KDE control panel (the most convoluted thing I've ever seen in my life).
The natural question that follows from your comment is why Linux isn't more widely selected as a desktop platform in an industry setting. Perhaps this has something to do with usability and standardization? I can't possibly know the answer to this question, but as it stands now, I see a vicious circle in place; industry doesn't choose Linux as there aren't enough applications or support, and industry doesn't write more applications / add more support to Linux due to the fact that they don't use Linux and due to the lack of standardization in Linux (i.e. how can a company possibly hope to offer industry level support over two or more desktop environments and 10 distros?).
I couldn't agree more. If developers were more usability-savvy, I think Linux could have some serious potential to make an impact in the desktop market. As things stand now, Linux is written by geeks from a geek perspective, and I don't think geeks know how to dumb it down enough for your average user, nor do they have the patience to sink down to that level and cater to the mentality of the computer unaware.
Wow... I don't think you gave us a single reason backing your thesis as to *why* Linux is better than Windows. You sort of state that Linux is almost as good as Windows on several levels, but you completely ignore some of the reasons that Windows is almost as good as / better than Linux (e.g. vendor support, standardized GUI, application selection). I fully acknowledge that both Windows and Linux have their strengths, but which one is a suitable choice is fully dependent on the audience. Personally, I used Linux for years, loved it for the most part, and yet I simply won't go back because I found that I had to engage in far too many sysadmin tasks in order to keep it working properly. My grandmother can hardly manage a mouse much less a command line prompt, and I don't think she'd ever be able to grok Linux. Both KDE and GNOME are indeed spiffy, but have some severe usability issues that need to be addressed before your average user's gonna feel comfortable working with Linux.
So yeah... I'd say Linux has some definite strengths over Windows, and Windows has some strengths, most notably usability and vendor support, over Linux. I think Windows usability does indeed suck, just not as badly as Linux usability.
The short answer is that the Linux desktop (Gnome/KDE) is just getting user-friendly enough that the average user feels comfortable with it.
People have been saying this since 1999 when I first left Windows for Linux, and I still don't see significant progress. For example: the KDE control panel, which used to be slightly complicated but was still fairly usable, is now an absolute mess of tabbed panels and check boxes. It's virtually impossible to perform any task in there unless you're quite familiar with the UI. I'm an experienced computer programmer who's used a large number of OSes, desktops, etc... and it took me 10 minutes to discover where was the proper location to turn off all sound effects for KDE.
Personally, I expected operating systems to get better, but while they've definitely become more feature packed, they've become inherently unstable in certain ways.
I mean, take Windows XP and my preferred OS, Mac OS X, for example. If my network should go down, both of my computers running these OSes take an eternity to boot up. Shouldn't whatever network activity that these OSes are trying to do be thread based instead of freezing up everything for a minute or more? It's things like this, coupled with the complete lack of usability in things such as Windows and KDE preferences, that make me glad I'm getting out of computer science and doing my PhD in algebra instead.
Between unexpected crashes, poorly behaved apps, badly written drivers, etc..., I find myself longing for the days of the Commodore 64. Sure, the OS / BASIC interpreter on that thing was pretty primitive compared to what you see today, but you didn't have to be a computer guru or shell out money for IDEs to learn basic programming skills, and the thing never crashed unless you started POKEing around in weird memory locations.
Isn't Galois Theory largely responsible for demonstrating that there is no general formula for the quintic? If the solvability of the quintic (and hence, all polynomials of higher degree) wasn't an important question that needed to be answered, I don't know what is.
No detailed studies, but it's fairly clear from reading slashdot posts since the inception of OS X. Previously, the Linux crowd seemed to laugh at Mac OS. Now, every time Macs are mentioned (which was virtually never before OS X), throngs of people post about how they've switched from PCs to Macs.
I'm one of those switchers myself, and I'll never look back. Linux has been supposedly becoming "the next big thing" since, what, 1996? It's seven years later, industry has lost interest in Linux as a desktop solution (they've recognized Linux's strengths as a server solution and embraced them, however), and it looks to me like Linux is going nowhere fast on the desktop.
Yes, because we all know that LaTeX is so intuitive to use and ready for Grandma, right? *rolls eyes*
I like LaTeX. As a masters student in math, I use LaTeX all the time, and I find it great. But if I was a home user who wanted to do something simple, there's absolutely no way that I'd be able to accomplish it with LaTeX short of reading 30 pages of material. It's totally ridiculous to even suggest such a thing as a viable alternative to the aforementioned programs.
And besides, since LaTeX, gcc, xfig, emacs, etc... are all available on OS X, I have no reason to use my Linux box anymore.
First off, let me say that I completely agree with you on the Print Centre in Mac OS X... It should be located in the System Preferences. I don't know why they didn't do this.
I do not expect a window to close when I click on a red water drop in the corner.
I don't think most computer newbies expect a window to close when they click a red X in the corner, either. It's a lesson you learn once, through experience, and after that, you don't forget it.
The GIMP may be powerful, but it suffers from the same problem that a number of Linux applications suffer from: there's no usability engineering done on it.
There have been many times, back when I was a diehard Linux zealot (before OS X), where there was something extremely simple I needed to do to a photo or picture. I'd load it up in GIMP, and after fifteen minutes of frustration and not being able to find out how to do it, I'd give up, boot into Windows, and do it in the default Windows photo editor in a matter of seconds. And when I got my Mac with OS X and Photoshop, my experiences with Photoshop were that the common tasks that novices would want to perform were immediately available and intuitively located. No sifting through submenus of a popup menu, no obtuse names, etc...
The fact of the matter is, is that you shouldn't have to be an expert with a particular OS or piece of software in order to accomplish certain tasks. With Linux, I don't think you could avoid this given the complexity of the OS itself and many of the pieces of software. I mean, seriously, while KDE is pretty damn cool, the control panel is a nightmare of panes with obscure options that 99% of users will never use (much less understand), and you have to dig through the complexity to accomplish the simple. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off the absolutely nightmarish sound scheme (I still have nightmares about it, I swear) that came turned on by default for KDE 3 with my installation of Mandrake Linux 9.
Indeed, the only way I see Linux passing MS on the desktop is if MS continues to make ridiculous blunders in the way they treat end users. Until then, I won't hold my breath. I got involved in Linux in '99, and back then, everyone was all a-buzz about how Linux was going to be the next best thing and take over the desktop. Four years later, I haven't seen any significant progress except with KDE and GNOME, and even both of them are lacking.
Seriously... I think Linux's biggest shortcoming is its fragmentation. Too many distros, too many desktop environments / window managers, too many GUIs, etc... You'll be hard pressed to get industries who are willing to commercially back Linux on a desktop setting if things continue as they are. Part of the reason I left Linux was because it was too frustrating to have 18 CD players installed by default, all at version 0.052, and all of them doing one or two things very well but not meeting the functionality of a CD player on Windows.
I still love Linux despite my frustrations, but I had days where it became easier for me to just save my home directory and reinstall than try to fix problems that arose from installing RPMs that killed other libs, etc... Linux is great, but I don't think it'll ever be suitable for anyone who's not a computer expert or doesn't have a helpful computer expert friend.
I don't think this really has anything to do with god, and indeed, I'm quite sure that McKenna didn't believe in god in the traditional Christian sense (so no, he didn't mean that this would be the "second coming" of Jesus or anything else like that).
As I understood it, we currently don't know how this end of things will come. Apparently, there's supposed to be a dramatic rise in creativity as the date draws near. For the actual event that will cause the end of humanity, no one knows, but it is speculated to be a number of things: death by a large asteroid, evolution to a new form of existence, etc...
*nods at other poster* 5-HTP is natural - it's usually marketed as capsules containing the crushed seed pod from the Griffonia simplicifolia plant.
As someone who suffers from extremely low serotonin but admanatly refuses to take SSRIs because of negative experiences, I found 5-HTP helped me tremendously. Sadly, it ended up causing me severe stomach pain (5-HTP also metabolizes into serotonin in the stomach, and your stomach has serotonin receptors, and you don't want to fuck with those).
I have to say that, from what I gathered, I found that the Matrix Reloaded fell into the same problem that I find with many major religions, and that is to attribute an extreme human-centric nature to the universe.
I mean, yeah, maybe this made sense when we thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe, but we (well, most of us;p) have come a long way since then and we now know that Earth is nothing more than an extremely small planet rotating around a sun in a very, and possibly infinitely large universe. To top matters off, how long have humans been around? I don't know the answer to this question, but if we take the ratio of human existence to universal existence, this is so incredibly small (and in the case of a universe that has been around infinitely, 0) that it boggles my mind that we can possibly believe that we are so ridiculously important in the context of things.
I really didn't like the whole "choice" aspect of the Matrix. Maybe I didn't understand thoroughly what they were trying to say, but after the tediousness of being subjected to Neo and Trinity's tenth make-out session (I practically yelled out at the screen: "Get a freaking room already!"), I really lost interest. Cause and effect, while repeatedly observed to be true, is not a basis for an entire philosophy, either.
Personally, I found the movie lacking. Entertaining, but certainly not deep by any stretch of the imagination (which is more-or-less how I found the original as well). And I still can't believe the ending. I won't say anything much here so as not to spoil, but I'll conclude with the following statement: Is Neo really such a pansy ass? My god.
This may be a feasible solution for some people, but obviously not for others. I must make myself contactable by strangers, be they students in classes I'm TAing, people who have questions about software I've written, or passerbys who stumble across my webpage and want to engage me in a chat.
Glad to hear that whitelisting works for you, but I think for the majority of people, we need a better solution.
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Agreed. But several prevalent religions (e.g. buddhism) do not believe in a supreme being in the sense of a god, and I'd wager than more than 5% of the world's population is Buddhist, given its large following out in Asia.
1 + 1 = 2 is, mathematically, an incredibly vague statement. As an algebraist, when you say 1, the first question that pops into my mind is to ask what ring or abelian group you're talking about. When I think of 1, I think of the multiplicative identity of a ring; hence, in the ring of nxn matrices, 1 would denote I, the identity matrix, and 2 has no meaning unless you're considering the nxn matrices as a Z-module. For example, in the finite field of order 2 or in any finite field of order 2^k for k > 0, 1 + 1 = 0, the additive identity.
Where do you get the figure 95%? I certainly doubt it's anywhere near that high, given the density of the population in Asia where Christianity still isn't widely accepted.
Perhaps you didn't notice this comment in my post:
Every so often, I'll feel compelled to throw a Linux distro on the P4 that I keep around for pretty much only KaZaa
So yes, I have installed Linux a couple times each year since I switched to Mac, and still found the experience to be largely dissatisfying. Given that it *still* has problems with my USB keyboard and mouse configuration (which works flawlessly for Windows, Mac OS X, and hell, even QNX), I don't hold much hope for it for the near future.
I *really* can't understand stories like this. I used Windows for years before first switching to Linux, and then to OS X, and I, nor anyone I know, had a fraction of the problems that you report having. I experienced at most one BSOD a month, and now, with Win XP chugging away on my P4, I've experienced no problems at all.
I especially shudder when I hear these stories coming from supposed "computer experts", which most of us are here on slashdot. I mean, really, what did you do to the OS to fux0r it up that badly? While Windows certainly wasn't (and still isn't) without strife, Linux hardly is either. Linux is certainly more stable, but I can't tell you how many times I've hosed a bunch of things by installing a seemingly innocuous RPM (once, from installing something like xmms-avi, I screwed up xmms so badly that even removing all associated RPMs and reinstalling xmms didn't fix the problem, and finally, I needed to completely reinstall Linux).
Granted there are a few bugs to squash in some of these apps, but to say Linux has a "loooong way" to go I have to disagree with. It is very very close. So close that I have started to use it exclusively as my desktop PC.
I would definitely disagree with this statement. I used to use Linux almost exclusively (making brief ventures into the world of Windows to play games and watch DVDs) up until the Mac OS X Public Beta came out, and I haven't really looked back since. Every so often, I'll feel compelled to throw a Linux distro on the P4 that I keep around for pretty much only KaZaa, and I have to say that while I see that a few apps have matured surprisingly nicely, there's still a huge number of deficiencies in the desktop.
Linux, to me, feels "cobbled together". I have the sense that it's a bunch of programs written by completely non-communicating different teams, built upon each other and then pieced together in a haphazard kind of way. I realize that this is likely the case with Windows, and definitely the case with OS X (using CUPS, Apache, etc...), but it's well hidden and cohesive so that you're not aware of it, and those cobbled-together apps are chosen in such a way that they work fairly reliably and in unison.
And, as I always claim, the utter, astounding complexity (and absurdity) of things like the KDE control panel and the GIMP submenu structure are far from being end-user-friendly. The fragmentation in Linux, while providing choice, also hinders support from third-parties. You simply can't guarantee that your application will work with Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSe, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, etc... I'm not even mentioning the fragmentation in terms of desktop environments / window managers and GUIs. It would also appear that some companies are abandoning their development of Linux as a desktop platform (e.g. Red Hat). I'm wondering if this is going to help (in the sense of reduced fragmentation) or hinder (in the sense that you need major Linux backers) the acceptance of Linux on the desktop. Only time will tell, I guess.
but life damage on the other hand is a whole other issue
*nods*... but this so-called "life damage" is caused by people who simply can't maintain a level of moderation in their lives. The blame falls largely on the individual rather than the drug.
I can't claim to know this for a fact or have read it from any reputable source, but I'd wager that a large number of people who feel compelled to use drugs in excess would probably find other ways to be self-destructive by indulging in excess if they didn't get hooked on drugs in the first place.
The fact that humans, for hundreds, if not thousands of years, have been consuming certain drugs like coca, opiates, marijuana, and psilocybin containing mushrooms (some in moderation, some to excess) without recorded disastrous long term effects? Even the hardcore opiates, like heroin and morphine, are extremely unlikely to cause brain damage, and while you do run the risk of overdose and addiction, the withdrawal is not dangerous in the majority of cases, and the drug itself is not directly harmful to the body.
Experience speaks for a lot, and many of these drugs have been used and abused throughout the history of humanity. Only a small handful of them have been shown to have really horrible long term side effects (e.g. alcohol, daturas, cocaine, amphetamines, and more recently, speculation unto the dissociative anaesthetics, but those, with the exception of nitrous oxide, are a relatively new class of drugs anyways so it's reasonable to assume that they're still poorly understood).
...is just about the most intelligence-insulting thing I've ever seen. I mean, really... the truth of the matter is that the majority of widely used drugs don't cause considerable brain damage, or at least brain damage on the level that is wreaked by say, alcohol abuse.
I think it should be banned for sheer stupidity rather than for any sort of inappropriateness.
Linux arguably has a larger installed base of desktop users than Apple
Highly doubtful. And even if this *was* the case, due to the fact that Mac OS X comes with iTunes, the majority of Mac users also use iTunes. If a Linux version were to be released, there's no reason for us to believe, apart from possibly facilitating uploading to an iPod, that even a fraction of Linux users would choose iTunes.
I hardly think it's the case that Apple "supports" Windows. I think it's more like Apple is trying to make its product (the iPod) available to as large an audience as possible in as convenient a fashion as they can manage, and seeing as the majority of computer users are Windows users, this seems like a sound marketing strategy to me.
I've come to the conclusion that due to the diversity of Linux (which is one of its so called strengths), in terms of things like GUIs, DEs, distros, etc..., the lack of standardization makes it virtually impossible for a company to provide a product, along with support, for Linux users. There's just too many inconsistencies from one distro and desktop to the next. And I think it's likely that even if Apple did release a version of iTunes that relied on, say, Qt, then you'd hear griping from the GTK+ community as to why Apple didn't support GTK+.
Personally, I'd highly recommend your next computer being a Mac running OS X. I'm typing this from my new PowerBook (which I've had for about a week now) and I'm loving it. I used to be a Linux advocate, but with the release of OS X, I'm not looking back (well, except for servers). My opinion is that Mac OS X is not without its faults, but it has far fewer faults than Linux or Windows... and it's just such a relief to play with applications that are usable and have been designed with the intention of being usable, unlike nightmares like the GIMP (powerful, but impossible for an amateur to accomplish the simplest tasks as I can attest to) or the KDE control panel (the most convoluted thing I've ever seen in my life).
The natural question that follows from your comment is why Linux isn't more widely selected as a desktop platform in an industry setting. Perhaps this has something to do with usability and standardization? I can't possibly know the answer to this question, but as it stands now, I see a vicious circle in place; industry doesn't choose Linux as there aren't enough applications or support, and industry doesn't write more applications / add more support to Linux due to the fact that they don't use Linux and due to the lack of standardization in Linux (i.e. how can a company possibly hope to offer industry level support over two or more desktop environments and 10 distros?).
I couldn't agree more. If developers were more usability-savvy, I think Linux could have some serious potential to make an impact in the desktop market. As things stand now, Linux is written by geeks from a geek perspective, and I don't think geeks know how to dumb it down enough for your average user, nor do they have the patience to sink down to that level and cater to the mentality of the computer unaware.
Wow... I don't think you gave us a single reason backing your thesis as to *why* Linux is better than Windows. You sort of state that Linux is almost as good as Windows on several levels, but you completely ignore some of the reasons that Windows is almost as good as / better than Linux (e.g. vendor support, standardized GUI, application selection). I fully acknowledge that both Windows and Linux have their strengths, but which one is a suitable choice is fully dependent on the audience. Personally, I used Linux for years, loved it for the most part, and yet I simply won't go back because I found that I had to engage in far too many sysadmin tasks in order to keep it working properly. My grandmother can hardly manage a mouse much less a command line prompt, and I don't think she'd ever be able to grok Linux. Both KDE and GNOME are indeed spiffy, but have some severe usability issues that need to be addressed before your average user's gonna feel comfortable working with Linux.
So yeah... I'd say Linux has some definite strengths over Windows, and Windows has some strengths, most notably usability and vendor support, over Linux. I think Windows usability does indeed suck, just not as badly as Linux usability.
The short answer is that the Linux desktop (Gnome/KDE) is just getting user-friendly enough that the average user feels comfortable with it.
People have been saying this since 1999 when I first left Windows for Linux, and I still don't see significant progress. For example: the KDE control panel, which used to be slightly complicated but was still fairly usable, is now an absolute mess of tabbed panels and check boxes. It's virtually impossible to perform any task in there unless you're quite familiar with the UI. I'm an experienced computer programmer who's used a large number of OSes, desktops, etc... and it took me 10 minutes to discover where was the proper location to turn off all sound effects for KDE.
Personally, I expected operating systems to get better, but while they've definitely become more feature packed, they've become inherently unstable in certain ways.
I mean, take Windows XP and my preferred OS, Mac OS X, for example. If my network should go down, both of my computers running these OSes take an eternity to boot up. Shouldn't whatever network activity that these OSes are trying to do be thread based instead of freezing up everything for a minute or more? It's things like this, coupled with the complete lack of usability in things such as Windows and KDE preferences, that make me glad I'm getting out of computer science and doing my PhD in algebra instead.
Between unexpected crashes, poorly behaved apps, badly written drivers, etc..., I find myself longing for the days of the Commodore 64. Sure, the OS / BASIC interpreter on that thing was pretty primitive compared to what you see today, but you didn't have to be a computer guru or shell out money for IDEs to learn basic programming skills, and the thing never crashed unless you started POKEing around in weird memory locations.
Isn't Galois Theory largely responsible for demonstrating that there is no general formula for the quintic? If the solvability of the quintic (and hence, all polynomials of higher degree) wasn't an important question that needed to be answered, I don't know what is.
No detailed studies, but it's fairly clear from reading slashdot posts since the inception of OS X. Previously, the Linux crowd seemed to laugh at Mac OS. Now, every time Macs are mentioned (which was virtually never before OS X), throngs of people post about how they've switched from PCs to Macs.
I'm one of those switchers myself, and I'll never look back. Linux has been supposedly becoming "the next big thing" since, what, 1996? It's seven years later, industry has lost interest in Linux as a desktop solution (they've recognized Linux's strengths as a server solution and embraced them, however), and it looks to me like Linux is going nowhere fast on the desktop.
Yes, because we all know that LaTeX is so intuitive to use and ready for Grandma, right? *rolls eyes*
I like LaTeX. As a masters student in math, I use LaTeX all the time, and I find it great. But if I was a home user who wanted to do something simple, there's absolutely no way that I'd be able to accomplish it with LaTeX short of reading 30 pages of material. It's totally ridiculous to even suggest such a thing as a viable alternative to the aforementioned programs.
And besides, since LaTeX, gcc, xfig, emacs, etc... are all available on OS X, I have no reason to use my Linux box anymore.
First off, let me say that I completely agree with you on the Print Centre in Mac OS X... It should be located in the System Preferences. I don't know why they didn't do this.
I do not expect a window to close when I click on a red water drop in the corner.
I don't think most computer newbies expect a window to close when they click a red X in the corner, either. It's a lesson you learn once, through experience, and after that, you don't forget it.
The GIMP may be powerful, but it suffers from the same problem that a number of Linux applications suffer from: there's no usability engineering done on it.
There have been many times, back when I was a diehard Linux zealot (before OS X), where there was something extremely simple I needed to do to a photo or picture. I'd load it up in GIMP, and after fifteen minutes of frustration and not being able to find out how to do it, I'd give up, boot into Windows, and do it in the default Windows photo editor in a matter of seconds. And when I got my Mac with OS X and Photoshop, my experiences with Photoshop were that the common tasks that novices would want to perform were immediately available and intuitively located. No sifting through submenus of a popup menu, no obtuse names, etc...
The fact of the matter is, is that you shouldn't have to be an expert with a particular OS or piece of software in order to accomplish certain tasks. With Linux, I don't think you could avoid this given the complexity of the OS itself and many of the pieces of software. I mean, seriously, while KDE is pretty damn cool, the control panel is a nightmare of panes with obscure options that 99% of users will never use (much less understand), and you have to dig through the complexity to accomplish the simple. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off the absolutely nightmarish sound scheme (I still have nightmares about it, I swear) that came turned on by default for KDE 3 with my installation of Mandrake Linux 9.
Indeed, the only way I see Linux passing MS on the desktop is if MS continues to make ridiculous blunders in the way they treat end users. Until then, I won't hold my breath. I got involved in Linux in '99, and back then, everyone was all a-buzz about how Linux was going to be the next best thing and take over the desktop. Four years later, I haven't seen any significant progress except with KDE and GNOME, and even both of them are lacking.
Seriously... I think Linux's biggest shortcoming is its fragmentation. Too many distros, too many desktop environments / window managers, too many GUIs, etc... You'll be hard pressed to get industries who are willing to commercially back Linux on a desktop setting if things continue as they are. Part of the reason I left Linux was because it was too frustrating to have 18 CD players installed by default, all at version 0.052, and all of them doing one or two things very well but not meeting the functionality of a CD player on Windows.
I still love Linux despite my frustrations, but I had days where it became easier for me to just save my home directory and reinstall than try to fix problems that arose from installing RPMs that killed other libs, etc... Linux is great, but I don't think it'll ever be suitable for anyone who's not a computer expert or doesn't have a helpful computer expert friend.
I don't think this really has anything to do with god, and indeed, I'm quite sure that McKenna didn't believe in god in the traditional Christian sense (so no, he didn't mean that this would be the "second coming" of Jesus or anything else like that).
As I understood it, we currently don't know how this end of things will come. Apparently, there's supposed to be a dramatic rise in creativity as the date draws near. For the actual event that will cause the end of humanity, no one knows, but it is speculated to be a number of things: death by a large asteroid, evolution to a new form of existence, etc...
*nods at other poster*
5-HTP is natural - it's usually marketed as capsules containing the crushed seed pod from the Griffonia simplicifolia plant.
As someone who suffers from extremely low serotonin but admanatly refuses to take SSRIs because of negative experiences, I found 5-HTP helped me tremendously. Sadly, it ended up causing me severe stomach pain (5-HTP also metabolizes into serotonin in the stomach, and your stomach has serotonin receptors, and you don't want to fuck with those).
I have to say that, from what I gathered, I found that the Matrix Reloaded fell into the same problem that I find with many major religions, and that is to attribute an extreme human-centric nature to the universe.
;p) have come a long way since then and we now know that Earth is nothing more than an extremely small planet rotating around a sun in a very, and possibly infinitely large universe. To top matters off, how long have humans been around? I don't know the answer to this question, but if we take the ratio of human existence to universal existence, this is so incredibly small (and in the case of a universe that has been around infinitely, 0) that it boggles my mind that we can possibly believe that we are so ridiculously important in the context of things.
I mean, yeah, maybe this made sense when we thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe, but we (well, most of us
I really didn't like the whole "choice" aspect of the Matrix. Maybe I didn't understand thoroughly what they were trying to say, but after the tediousness of being subjected to Neo and Trinity's tenth make-out session (I practically yelled out at the screen: "Get a freaking room already!"), I really lost interest. Cause and effect, while repeatedly observed to be true, is not a basis for an entire philosophy, either.
Personally, I found the movie lacking. Entertaining, but certainly not deep by any stretch of the imagination (which is more-or-less how I found the original as well). And I still can't believe the ending. I won't say anything much here so as not to spoil, but I'll conclude with the following statement: Is Neo really such a pansy ass? My god.
This may be a feasible solution for some people, but obviously not for others. I must make myself contactable by strangers, be they students in classes I'm TAing, people who have questions about software I've written, or passerbys who stumble across my webpage and want to engage me in a chat.
Glad to hear that whitelisting works for you, but I think for the majority of people, we need a better solution.
Since IBM apparently unleashed a torrent of UNIX code into Linux, doesn't that make Linux an official UNIX? :-)