You can't get replacement under the product's warranty if it is proven to you (for example thanks to a flooding sensor (back to the topic so to speak) that you exceeded the stated functionality parameters, whcih is the norm rather than the exception in warm/humid regions.
The "free market", by the way,has proven multiple time that it doesn't automatically promote the better products (in terms of quality, not quantity)
Basically what happens is that stuff breaks very fast here, and people buy them again and again. Average lifespan of a notebook : 1 year. After that everything inside is rusty, the DVD drive doesn't work at all anymore, the keyboard is broken and the notebook overheats WAY faster than it used to (generally due to failure of the fans). Mobile phones have a similar lifespan.
Same for desktops of course, but at least you can change parts and clean up
"It's a free market", "Move somewhere else" and "Start a Business making them" ? Sure... As soon as I collected my Lottery winnings. The point is : Stuff is made to break, so that new stuff (and I use the word "stuff" in the broadest sense) can be sold. It's not like making electronic devices like mobile phone more resilient to standard natural conditions is particularly expensive or difficult, it's just that companies profit from their vulnerability.
I live in the Caribbeans.. I guess I should stop using ANY product right now, considering the ambient temperature and humidity are ALWAYS close to the limits if not over them, unless you stay locked in a room with an AC. Similarly, people living in areas like Louisiana or Florida might want to stop too, et least during the summer.
Another thing you might not like, is that some slashdot users are NOT native English speakers and might therefore make simple spelling errors, especially when the English word is the same as the one in their native language, save for a single letter -> "prominent".
My last six or so OS installs didn't have any billboards. I tend to use an OS which "just works", is "ready for prime-time and the desktop", and fulfills a few other marketing buzz-sentences. It is, incidentally, free, and can do without a half-rotten-fruity-logo, but needs to be installed manually by the users while avoiding FUD from commercial competitors, which probably explains (though doesn't really excuses) the fact that it DOESN'T offer the user a choice of browser during install (even though it definitely could, but then some people would complain that clicking the mouse one more time during install makes it unuseable for normal users)
Indeed. But as I understand it, if you buy a pre-installed system with windows7, you'll be greeted by the browser selection screen too.
The pre-installed trial versions of Office and especially Norton can be very nasty by the way. A friend bought an HP notebook, and asked me to install everything she needed and set it up correctly, so I was the one who did the initial boot (vista btw). The installation script actually popped up a window asking whether I wanted Norton pre-installed. I was pleasantly surprised, clicked "NO", and 5 sec. later the Norton icon appeared in the tray bar:/
Thankfully for me, Windows is just my game ~console~, and Linux is my day-2-day OS. So I don't have to really bother about all those things:)
Although I agree that most people will install IE, some might actually call people they think are knowledgeable (the famous Neighbourhood Geek) or even choose something different on their own. Those who install IE by default will have at least HEARD about the alternatives, which makes it easier to make them switch later on.
You might not like it, but having seen/heard about alternatives on such a proeminent place does make a difference
You assume most people actually KNOW there are free browsers (or even that they know what an "internet browser" is). That's sadly as far removed from reality as it can be.
Most people don't even know what Internet Explorer *IS*, for them, the IE icon means that they load up the internet (no... they don't connect. why would they connect? it's in.. aeh.. the thing under the table... the harddrive!). If you tell them "you should use chrome, it's faster" or "you should use Firefox, it can do more stuff" or even "you should use anything but IE, as IE is a PoS" they'll look at you with big glassy eye and answer "but.. but... I need Ze Internet!".
That's why having the ballot screen is a good thing : it tells the unknowing masses that there are alternatives. Now... if we could have something similar for the bundled 30-days trials of MS Office and Norton... (my wish would actually be that those wouldn't be bundled at all... but that's probably completely unrealistic.)
hmm.. let's take Carlin's speech point by point, by slightly paraphrasing what he says:
"politicians are puppets controlled by corporations and rich lobbies" . I'd say that is true for the most part, even if it doesn't happen in a direct way. Corporations can threaten to cut jobs, close down factories or offices, relocate in another state or country or even just disproportionally increase the price of their product if the CEOs think that new legislations might decrease the profit for their shareholders. That would result in, at least, jobs being lost in the area and might (and probably would) prove a big enough incentive to stop certain laws or regulations to be passed. Everybody is just doing their job : politicians have to evaluate whether the law or regulation is worth the corporation's reaction, and corporation's need to maximise the profit for the shareholders. (I'll pass the cases where hands have to be greased or forced, or when a politician only thinks of his career)"
"Corporations, etc... don't want the common folks to be capable of critical thinking", Although it would make sense (read "1984"), there is no direct evidence of it... only circumstantial : the rise of Fox Network for example, or the way newspapers will rather tell you that Lindsay Lohan broke her toe nail, or that the giants won the superball rather than that, again, X american soldiers were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan one day earlier. Incidentally repeatedly pounding on how great your nation is and making kids repeat that over and over is a great way to hammer obedience in the mind of the people you want to govern
"Society has a class system, and most people are not in the ruling/rich class". well... that there is a widening gap between rich and poor (yes, I know... 2 years old. But I don't believe this has changed much. Prove me wrong). So... nothing to see. He is right. And before you reply "The poor deserved it. Everybody can be rich", check this very nice and interesting TED talk about (along other things) Meritocracies
"Politicians don't care about the people who elect them". I'm not completely as nihilistic as Carlin. I honestly think many politicians start their career because they actually genuinely care. Sadly, as should be obvious to anybody who switched from his productive job to Management and was full of hope to be able to make a change, the higher you are the thinner the air is and the more you just struggle to survive. Even if some politicians do still care about the people after they've been elected to a position of power, helping people is probably more of an afterthought while juggling with more important issues (what those can be is probably not even something the politicians can decide themselves)
so... 'the paranoid ramblings of a deluded old man shouting at hippies' ? perhaps, but at least he actually knows what he is talking about.
The standard user doesn't want to install his own program (or if he does, it's some weird windows95 accounting program he found in the sales bin at his local store, and which runs probably better in wine than it would on XP, let alone Vista). Generally, people don't even KNOW they can install anything. They are rather happy with what is on their computer by default (until MS-Office and Norton start complaining that the 30 days trial is over and that they should pay)
As to "needing something to work", it's irrelevant in this case. Some people who need something special which can not be found (and for which there exists no equivalent) are:
people *NEEDING* photoshop. Not as in "I need photoshop because it's l33t" but as in "I need Photoshop because it has some unique function I absolutely need for work, and my employer is too stingy to allow me to use the office computers. For most people, even GIMP is a complete overkill, and for most people who need an advanced graphic editor but don't need some of the more esoteric tools from photoshop, it's more than powerful enough (not going in a debate about whether Gimp's UI sucks or not. It's really just a matter of being used to it, exactly like Photoshop's which isn't particularly noob friendly neither)
People needing to create FLASH stuff. I wouldn't call them exactly "standard users", and yes, then they are out of luck (although Flash runs well in WINE as far as I know)
Other professionals with VERY specific needs (not "I need a tool to edit my videos" but "I need AVID XPress Pro".) Those aren't the majority of users. They have very specific needs, which most users just don't have
Remember that I'm not talking about the slashdot crowd here. I'm talking about the girl behind the counter at your local grocery store who manically checks facebook and tweeter and has 10 IM windows open, or the retired car salesman who wants to keep in touch with his old colleagues and to send angry comments to NYT editors about their latest article. Those people don't care (and seldom knows) whether they are using windows XP, Vista or some brand of Linux (they generally know when they are running MacOSX, although I'm wild-guessing they couldn't tell you which version). All they want is something which works... and Linux does that (nowadays)
Would "I bought a linux netbook, and the first thing I did was install a *SANE* linux distribution (Ubuntu 8.10) on it instead of the PoS that is Linpus" count as a false positive too?
Let's face it, people who don't know the first thing about linux MUST be turned down by the weird distros found on linux netbooks these days
I had the opportunity to buy an height year old Toshiba laptop very cheap from the company I used to work for. My mom's computer had died a while ago, so I told her I'd give her this one, but it would be "slightly different". I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it (gnome). After explaining to her that Word and Excel were now called "Open Office" I left her alone with it. I never had any complaints, but what's more, I never got any "my computer is slow" calls anymore neither. This was even so clear to her, that a few weeks ago her best friend called me to ask me if I could install "the windows your mom has" on her computer, after she had had another one of those "YOUR VIRUS IS INFECTED" popups appear
The thing is : for a standard (Internet browser / Email / IM / Fotos / Movies / Music / Wordprocessor / Spreadsheet) user, Linux is not only ready for the desktop, it should be mandatory
I'm all with GP. I speak and understand French, German and English and every localization (save for two notable exceptions : "Little Big Adventure" and it's sequel) I've heard/seen so far has been awful. Additionally patches often also need to be localized (and so is generally late for non-English speaker), which creates a delay for those owning the localized versions before (sometimes game-breaking) bugs are fixed.
And then you have games like Oblivion or Fallout3, which live from the user created mods. Those are obviously not localized (although a few non-English modders translate their mods in English). Nothing like having everybody in the game talking in French and have suddenly subtitles or voices in English.
If at least buying (or switching in the games options to) the English version was an option, everybody would be happy, but most of the time the only one you can get in France or Germany is the localized one. An easy and cheap solution would be to only localize the subtitles, optimally have the original subtitles included on the disc too, but let the audio part be in whatever language the original was. The publisher saves money and the player understands what is going on even if he doesn't understands the original language but has the additional benefit of good voice acting and of patch-compatibility.
Anonyme Lache, If you create an account on youtube, you can set it to English permanently.
nahhh.. in my analogy, the GC is your mom. the programmer is the one with the smelly condoms and the used sneakers.
This is/. after all, so I guess I should have used a car analogy:
Interpreted Script languages (Python, etc) are like an original VW beetle. It won't be fast, it doesn't have anything shiny or particularly exciting in it, the motor is at the wrong end, but it will get you where you want to go... in its own time
C/C++ is like a sports car with a manual clutch and not many gadgets assisting your driving. It's fast, deadly, but if you learned driving on the afore mentioned beetle, you'll be able to drive where you want to and have lot of fun making it do exactly what you want. You most definitely don't want to learn driving in THAT, but once you're used to the beetle, you'll want something fast, better.. more sexy. The fact that the beetle and the really fast car are so different in look and feel will ensure that you won't just rush in, and so will be more careful about the idiosyncracies of your new vehicle.
Java is more like a sporty limousine. Lots of flashing lights, automatic gear, ABS, EBD, and other stuff with weird acronymes. In Theory, it can drive up to 200mph, but every time you try to get that fast, the motor automagically loses power. If you try to make it slide around a corner, all the nifty lamps light up, things start to blink and kick in, and the car just drives as if on rails. If you learn to drive in THAT, you'll have a hell of a time with the fast but deadly car, and will probably crash it more often than not, because you're used to fast cars but expect them to do everything for you.
okay.. the analogy is probably a massive fail and I'm burning Karma as if there was no tomorow here, still.. I stand to my point : start with something really easy, and when you want to play with the big kids, use a language which keeps the hand-holding to a minimum.
personally, I'd say newbies starting programming should start with an interpreted language which gives them some instant gratification (my personal favourite being python).
Java is just too complex for a newbie in my opinion. Complexity-wise it's just short of C/C++. So instead of Java, just use C/C++ and get at least some better understanding on how things work.
I would say that learning manual memory management first is more beneficial than learning to be lazy ant let the GC do all the work, and, the day you need to use a language which doesn't clean up in your path, write memory leaking piece of feces. Of course, it means that when you need to write in java, you'll be sorely missing the freedom to decide WHEN the garbage is collected.
It's a bit like the difference between living in your mom's basement and having her come and clean up you room randomly when you're not at home (or when she thinks you are not, but are in fact, having a good time with your girlfri... I mean, inflatable doll) and living alone, having to do the cleaning up yourself, but at least knowing exactly where everything is and deciding yourself that you can live for a day more with your dirty laundry in a corner of the room
It's funny how you probably wouldn't move your small finger at work without getting paid, but apparently expect other people to do the work for free and if possible to LOSE money while they help you.
In your examples you conveniently forget that 1) the techie has got to be onsite to some of the operations so has to spend some non-fixed time and fuel before and after fixing your ~problem~. In most cases this is handled by using a fix cost. 2) even when he can do it in his lab (installing an OS, Datatransfer), it still costs time, especially if you don't happen to have all the drivers needed (assuming windows here of course.)
If you just count in the actual work needed, then yes, it's expensive. If you count in all the factors it's maybe slightly overpriced in your examples, but understandable.
It doesn't make a difference, does it? I mean : your standard steel or concrete house will burn as well as a wooden one, unless it's completely empty of any inflammable materials (and even then, I'm not sure it would be structurally okay once the flames are out).
I'm living in a wooden house (although it's only 2 stories high), and we had an approximately 1minute long 7.4 earthquake slightly over a year ago (just two months after being visited by a hurricane actually). From what my sister in law who was in it at the time tells me, the house shook like hell. After the quake, it was structurally intact. All the concrete houses I saw afterward on the island, on the other hand, had extra aeration where the walls had split, most had internal water leakage (that's what you get for having the water conduits in the walls) and at least 2 had to be destroyed and rebuilt completely.
To be fair, I should note that our wooden house fared way worse than the concrete ones during the hurricane (mostly the roof that was swept away, as it was designed to)
Yep. As far as I understand it, Kon-Boot will only allow you to gain root to any computer to which you have *physical* access. So no domain controllers
Slashdot Mirror
You can't get replacement under the product's warranty if it is proven to you (for example thanks to a flooding sensor (back to the topic so to speak) that you exceeded the stated functionality parameters, whcih is the norm rather than the exception in warm/humid regions.
The "free market", by the way,has proven multiple time that it doesn't automatically promote the better products (in terms of quality, not quantity)
Basically what happens is that stuff breaks very fast here, and people buy them again and again. Average lifespan of a notebook : 1 year. After that everything inside is rusty, the DVD drive doesn't work at all anymore, the keyboard is broken and the notebook overheats WAY faster than it used to (generally due to failure of the fans). Mobile phones have a similar lifespan.
Same for desktops of course, but at least you can change parts and clean up
"It's a free market", "Move somewhere else" and "Start a Business making them" ? Sure ... As soon as I collected my Lottery winnings. The point is : Stuff is made to break, so that new stuff (and I use the word "stuff" in the broadest sense) can be sold. It's not like making electronic devices like mobile phone more resilient to standard natural conditions is particularly expensive or difficult, it's just that companies profit from their vulnerability.
I live in the Caribbeans .. I guess I should stop using ANY product right now, considering the ambient temperature and humidity are ALWAYS close to the limits if not over them, unless you stay locked in a room with an AC. Similarly, people living in areas like Louisiana or Florida might want to stop too, et least during the summer.
Another thing you might not like, is that some slashdot users are NOT native English speakers and might therefore make simple spelling errors, especially when the English word is the same as the one in their native language, save for a single letter -> "prominent".
My last six or so OS installs didn't have any billboards. I tend to use an OS which "just works", is "ready for prime-time and the desktop", and fulfills a few other marketing buzz-sentences. It is, incidentally, free, and can do without a half-rotten-fruity-logo, but needs to be installed manually by the users while avoiding FUD from commercial competitors, which probably explains (though doesn't really excuses) the fact that it DOESN'T offer the user a choice of browser during install (even though it definitely could, but then some people would complain that clicking the mouse one more time during install makes it unuseable for normal users)
Indeed. But as I understand it, if you buy a pre-installed system with windows7, you'll be greeted by the browser selection screen too.
The pre-installed trial versions of Office and especially Norton can be very nasty by the way. A friend bought an HP notebook, and asked me to install everything she needed and set it up correctly, so I was the one who did the initial boot (vista btw). The installation script actually popped up a window asking whether I wanted Norton pre-installed. I was pleasantly surprised, clicked "NO", and 5 sec. later the Norton icon appeared in the tray bar :/
Thankfully for me, Windows is just my game ~console~, and Linux is my day-2-day OS. So I don't have to really bother about all those things :)
Although I agree that most people will install IE, some might actually call people they think are knowledgeable (the famous Neighbourhood Geek) or even choose something different on their own. Those who install IE by default will have at least HEARD about the alternatives, which makes it easier to make them switch later on.
You might not like it, but having seen/heard about alternatives on such a proeminent place does make a difference
... says AC. Now THAT is a credible source of information!
You assume most people actually KNOW there are free browsers (or even that they know what an "internet browser" is). That's sadly as far removed from reality as it can be.
Most people don't even know what Internet Explorer *IS*, for them, the IE icon means that they load up the internet (no... they don't connect. why would they connect? it's in .. aeh .. the thing under the table ... the harddrive!). If you tell them "you should use chrome, it's faster" or "you should use Firefox, it can do more stuff" or even "you should use anything but IE, as IE is a PoS" they'll look at you with big glassy eye and answer "but .. but ... I need Ze Internet!".
That's why having the ballot screen is a good thing : it tells the unknowing masses that there are alternatives. Now ... if we could have something similar for the bundled 30-days trials of MS Office and Norton ... (my wish would actually be that those wouldn't be bundled at all ... but that's probably completely unrealistic.)
hmm .. let's take Carlin's speech point by point, by slightly paraphrasing what he says :
so ... 'the paranoid ramblings of a deluded old man shouting at hippies' ? perhaps, but at least he actually knows what he is talking about.
mod me and my wife funny!
depends on whether you're talking about primary additive colours or primary substractive colours.
As the idea here is to send light in your eyes, and not buckets of paint, I guess additive is what you're looking for
The standard user doesn't want to install his own program (or if he does, it's some weird windows95 accounting program he found in the sales bin at his local store, and which runs probably better in wine than it would on XP, let alone Vista). Generally, people don't even KNOW they can install anything. They are rather happy with what is on their computer by default (until MS-Office and Norton start complaining that the 30 days trial is over and that they should pay)
As to "needing something to work", it's irrelevant in this case. Some people who need something special which can not be found (and for which there exists no equivalent) are :
Remember that I'm not talking about the slashdot crowd here. I'm talking about the girl behind the counter at your local grocery store who manically checks facebook and tweeter and has 10 IM windows open, or the retired car salesman who wants to keep in touch with his old colleagues and to send angry comments to NYT editors about their latest article. ... and Linux does that (nowadays)
Those people don't care (and seldom knows) whether they are using windows XP, Vista or some brand of Linux (they generally know when they are running MacOSX, although I'm wild-guessing they couldn't tell you which version). All they want is something which works
Would "I bought a linux netbook, and the first thing I did was install a *SANE* linux distribution (Ubuntu 8.10) on it instead of the PoS that is Linpus" count as a false positive too?
Let's face it, people who don't know the first thing about linux MUST be turned down by the weird distros found on linux netbooks these days
Similar story here.
I had the opportunity to buy an height year old Toshiba laptop very cheap from the company I used to work for. My mom's computer had died a while ago, so I told her I'd give her this one, but it would be "slightly different". I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it (gnome). After explaining to her that Word and Excel were now called "Open Office" I left her alone with it. I never had any complaints, but what's more, I never got any "my computer is slow" calls anymore neither. This was even so clear to her, that a few weeks ago her best friend called me to ask me if I could install "the windows your mom has" on her computer, after she had had another one of those "YOUR VIRUS IS INFECTED" popups appear
The thing is : for a standard (Internet browser / Email / IM / Fotos / Movies / Music / Wordprocessor / Spreadsheet) user, Linux is not only ready for the desktop, it should be mandatory
I'm all with GP. I speak and understand French, German and English and every localization (save for two notable exceptions : "Little Big Adventure" and it's sequel) I've heard/seen so far has been awful. Additionally patches often also need to be localized (and so is generally late for non-English speaker), which creates a delay for those owning the localized versions before (sometimes game-breaking) bugs are fixed.
And then you have games like Oblivion or Fallout3, which live from the user created mods. Those are obviously not localized (although a few non-English modders translate their mods in English). Nothing like having everybody in the game talking in French and have suddenly subtitles or voices in English.
If at least buying (or switching in the games options to) the English version was an option, everybody would be happy, but most of the time the only one you can get in France or Germany is the localized one. An easy and cheap solution would be to only localize the subtitles, optimally have the original subtitles included on the disc too, but let the audio part be in whatever language the original was. The publisher saves money and the player understands what is going on even if he doesn't understands the original language but has the additional benefit of good voice acting and of patch-compatibility.
Anonyme Lache, If you create an account on youtube, you can set it to English permanently.
nahhh .. in my analogy, the GC is your mom. the programmer is the one with the smelly condoms and the used sneakers.
This is /. after all, so I guess I should have used a car analogy :
You most definitely don't want to learn driving in THAT, but once you're used to the beetle, you'll want something fast, better
okay .. the analogy is probably a massive fail and I'm burning Karma as if there was no tomorow here, still .. I stand to my point : start with something really easy, and when you want to play with the big kids, use a language which keeps the hand-holding to a minimum.
personally, I'd say newbies starting programming should start with an interpreted language which gives them some instant gratification (my personal favourite being python).
Java is just too complex for a newbie in my opinion. Complexity-wise it's just short of C/C++. So instead of Java, just use C/C++ and get at least some better understanding on how things work.
I would say that learning manual memory management first is more beneficial than learning to be lazy ant let the GC do all the work, and, the day you need to use a language which doesn't clean up in your path, write memory leaking piece of feces. Of course, it means that when you need to write in java, you'll be sorely missing the freedom to decide WHEN the garbage is collected.
It's a bit like the difference between living in your mom's basement and having her come and clean up you room randomly when you're not at home (or when she thinks you are not, but are in fact, having a good time with your girlfri... I mean, inflatable doll) and living alone, having to do the cleaning up yourself, but at least knowing exactly where everything is and deciding yourself that you can live for a day more with your dirty laundry in a corner of the room
It's funny how you probably wouldn't move your small finger at work without getting paid, but apparently expect other people to do the work for free and if possible to LOSE money while they help you.
In your examples you conveniently forget that 1) the techie has got to be onsite to some of the operations so has to spend some non-fixed time and fuel before and after fixing your ~problem~. In most cases this is handled by using a fix cost. 2) even when he can do it in his lab (installing an OS, Datatransfer), it still costs time, especially if you don't happen to have all the drivers needed (assuming windows here of course.)
If you just count in the actual work needed, then yes, it's expensive. If you count in all the factors it's maybe slightly overpriced in your examples, but understandable.
maybe "he" is not a native english speaker and just used the french word, which incidentally exists in english too?
yes. sorry. that's what I meant :)
It doesn't make a difference, does it? I mean : your standard steel or concrete house will burn as well as a wooden one, unless it's completely empty of any inflammable materials (and even then, I'm not sure it would be structurally okay once the flames are out).
I'm living in a wooden house (although it's only 2 stories high), and we had an approximately 1minute long 7.4 earthquake slightly over a year ago (just two months after being visited by a hurricane actually). From what my sister in law who was in it at the time tells me, the house shook like hell. After the quake, it was structurally intact. All the concrete houses I saw afterward on the island, on the other hand, had extra aeration where the walls had split, most had internal water leakage (that's what you get for having the water conduits in the walls) and at least 2 had to be destroyed and rebuilt completely.
To be fair, I should note that our wooden house fared way worse than the concrete ones during the hurricane (mostly the roof that was swept away, as it was designed to)
Yep. As far as I understand it, Kon-Boot will only allow you to gain root to any computer to which you have *physical* access. So no domain controllers
No problem. At least it's not a white font on a black screen :P
Not that I have anything to do with Kon-Boot anyway.
If you need a password to access an account in windows (or linux for that matter), just use Kon-boot instead of messing around with rainbow tables.