Then the US I am sure will be fine in no time because by the same logic Congressmen + deeper pockets filled by lobbyists must equal better government for every American and citizen of the world. Thanks for clarifying that issue for me. I had always been told that corruption and bribes harm society, but so it would seem it really contributes to the GREATER good. Guess I just wasn't seeing how much GREATER that really was. Thanks.
Now that I understand, think I am going to call up my bank and thank them for raising my interest rate.
OS X and Linux are STILL just playing catchup to where Windows was 5 years ago
Ok, now that I am done laughing, I am still a bit puzzled. Catch up to what? Compatibility in running Microsoft software? Cleverly tricking [consumer] people into giving them money? Yeah, you get back to me on that.
Just not the same thing. Apple convinced insecure and wannabe nerds (and some real nerds too) that a big shiny new gadget will make them look cool. The Linux Community is trying to convince people that enjoy finger painting and story-time that reading and writing are valuable skills that that can benefit you throughout your entire life.
I am sure this sounds like typical fanboyism, but have you ever listened to someones excuses for not wanting to learn to read, write, or learn basic algebra? It is the same excuses: It won't be relevant to the career I want, I get along just fine speaking, that's just for smart people. Well, how is it that Linux can be both demonized for being inferior AND only for the really smart computer genius type. Might it be worth a moment to try and see what they see? Honestly, that is what convinced me that despite the fact that it was HARD, and there were things I had to LEARN or even REMEMBER, it was about communicating, building, developing, and working together in a radically different way. I think it took me about a year to get comfortable with Linux, several more before I really began to see why it is used in all the places that it is, and why people feel so passionately about it.
Some people see a computer as a fancy typewriter for papers, a canvas for painting a picture, and an easier way to send letters and pictures than via snail mail. digital music is just another way to listen to music. For all those old things done in new ways, there is something uniquely special that can be expressed through a computer that isn't just a digital form of the same old thing in a different way. There is something uniquely powerful that enables people to fundamentally work different, and only Linux is where people can share instantly and unlimitedly the tools to express yourself and communicate with the world DIFFERENTLY.
Sure, Microsoft and Apple let you push the button, but just like reading and writing, no matter how good the story is told, don't think that is any kind of substitute. You just aren't talking about the same thing. It isn't digital literacy.
But don't worry, sure I am making a big deal out of nothing. You can already read and write, and computers are really just like books where it is easier to fix mistakes without wasting paper. There are nerds out there that take care of this stuff so that normal people can use them like books. Doubt learning how they work would ever be something worth anything to the 'normal' user.
I stopped paying attention when it went from "The year of Linux" to "The year of the Linux Desktop". Didn't anyone notice what happened in between? Further, The Year of the Linux Desktop was 2004 with the release of openSuse. The Year of Linux was 1997 with the Internet. If you care about being literate in a digital age, you know about Linux.
Wish I had made the effort to learn earlier, but guess just happy to be there. Having been there, there is just no way to explain to an adult illiterate person the value of learning how to read and write. I know it sounds elitist, but it really just struck me today how similar the arguments are. Think about it.
Didn't they do that with trial versions of Office 2008? Part of the installation process was to convert all office documents to the 2008 version. Either buy office, or pay someone to convert all your documents back. What is the cheaper and easier solution for most people? I think they got a few complaints about that one.
Being in a bind and needing to setup a machine with Ubuntu at one point, all I had with me was an Xubuntu 6.06 alternate CD. Installed and updated to 9.04 alpha 5 quickly and fairly easily. There was one small issue that required me to use dpkg to force the installation of a package apt-get would not let me upgrade (mutual dependency conflict) and with almost no prior knowledge was resolved in If someone was trying to install XP, but didn't have a disk and asked "Well, I got a Windows 95 CD, shouldn't I be able to use that and just update?", they would probably get a lot of weird looks... but the appropriate response would be "No, it isn't like Linux".
Hell, I once had a broken Gentoo machine I could not fix, I gave up and with no external media or even downloading an iso just switched it over to Ubuntu in a couple of hours... though in all honesty, I hope never to do that again.
I've read complaints that reviews of new Linux distros often focus too much on the installation process
The complaints are generic that, imho, revolve around "Why are you focusing in <thing I can do easily> instead of <my strange special case scenario feature>?"
Sadly, while I can not hardly fathom difficulties in installing Ubuntu Linux, or many other distros, The incentive and ease for a non-techie person to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to install their own operating system MUST be very high. This means FLAWLESS in every respect with EVERYTHING. The fact that OEM's often must tweak Windows to get it to work in ways that are very difficult to repeat by regular users is not an issue for those with Windows preinstalled, or a special disk for their computer. I see OEM disks all the time that say "Only use with your machine". This is because it is customized to work. In my personal experience, I have never encountered a computer where retail windows just worked with everything; there are always several third party drivers that must be installed.
In this way, while it may not seem fair, until there are many time more machines in stores coming with preinstalled Linux, the expectation of the ease of use for the installer will be far beyond anything that has ever been expected of Windows.
And the same goes for updates / upgrades. Windows Update only updates core system components but can be setup to update Microsoft products, and works reasonably well in most situations. Apt-get, to simply say that it supports third party software, is grossly understating what it manages.
Blessing and curse for Microsoft is that Windows users will tolerate pretty much anything. No QA == no progress.
Yeah, seems really strange that an article about the doom of CAPTCHAs wouldn't propose some kind of alternative solution to the problem. Really seems like so many of these articles would people complaining than helping in any kind of way. Someone should really come up with a solution to that.
Maybe idealistic, but with transparency and feedback, this seems like a good way to go. It would also be nice to see if they have been more or less effected by the "financial crisis" than others. I'll look into it:)
Which I would completely agree with as a matter of policy. I can find no compelling reason to support capital punishment as a matter of policy because incarceration alone completely takes care (as an immediate reactionary resolution) of the narrow social problem of an individuals behavior.
More realistically, as a minimalist, any crime is a violation of the 'social contract'. In any contract violation a violation by one party does not give completely free reign to do whatever they want arguing that the contract was broken. God policy should make prudent effort to adhere to the spirit of the contract in so far as it can relevantly apply. I would argue that in this case murder, the most extreme violation of the social contract, prison is a reasonable and effective solution to protecting society and maintains some, whatever minimal, respect for the sovereignty of the criminal... no matter how much we hate them. But to be clear, it isn't necessarily or so much the liberty of the 'criminal' that concerns me so much as giving over-reaching and disproportionate entitlements to the state. I do not need to financially support the exclusive right to control executions any more than I should have to pay a governing body to hold meetings carefully regulating and rationing who I must pay to mow my lawn. I don't think that is too far off an example.
But more back to point, the most justifiable reason for capital punishment is that the rest of us should should not be too greatly burdened by the cost of the incarceration, yet we do want to financially support a fair and just legal system for many reasons. Not only is the level of efficiency presently poor in getting the right person, but also in cost. If it would take more money to catch the right person, not execute the wrong person, and the cost of execution is already, then there is no justification as a matter of policy to justify capital punishment. As for the deterrent factor and its role in policy, it has been shown that life imprisonment is as effective as capital punishment.
Several months ago on the radio on the anniversary of the event, a 'survivor' that lost her all but her maternal grandmother of her entire blood related family including her two young sons told her story. She had fought very hard politically from the beginning opposing the church for more than a decade before the massacre. I am really not one to cry... ever, but on my hour+ drive home listening to this women, I seriously wept the entire way.
For the sake of breaking through taboos, it was a last ditch effort to interpretation. If it is a JonesTown reference, why Kool-Aide and not just say fruit punch? I thought it might like be like someone saying "Someones been snacking on on the fried chicken and watermelon again". Like if someone comes into work and they look really terrible and you ask them "what's up?" and they tell you they got into some bad celery. Just to over explain, it means they were drinking Bloody Marys (or were drinking in general) and are actually hung over. Sometimes people say bad lime or some other thing that can be served with drinks. In one way it is just a clever joke, but I think in part it plays to the sometimes perceived lack of personal responsibility or rationalism made by alcoholics. I have heard people say they "got into some bad punch" as to imply they didn't know it was spiked, going along the same lines. So that is just where my my logic led me not having anyone explain it to me before.
So in this case, it wasn't bad Kool-Aide, it was just too much (was the phrase). Personally, as far as those kinds of jokes go, to imply a correlation between Kool-Aide and ignorance is pretty clever and possibly funny in the right group. I say 'racial stereotype', and that is me playing the race card when he was actually trying to make a joke about the mass slaughter of women and children? Sorry, i'll try to me more PC cause thinking about it now, I guess a more appropriate term would have been "educational and developmental impact on children of socioeconomically disenfranchised bargain hunting parents"... hmm... sounds like another card. But if I had said "Does Kool-Aide really make you stupid?", I would probably have been modded troll.
IBM owns more patents than any other company in the world. So I have been lead to believe, Sun holds some of the most valuable patents in the world. IBM was the MS of the 60's 70's and 80's. I am sure there are some old farts at IBM griping about dirty deals MS made to defeat Lotus out of the marketplace, not to mention the legal taunting of Linux users to intimidate small businesses out of adoption. Overall, I'll admit I am scratching my head on this one, but I bet there are several Microsoft people with some ideas on how it may effect them.:)
Well, considering they INTENTIONAL tried to follow the design of MS Office, they did a really great job. It isn't turd polishing from scratch, this is like genetically engineered feces grown from stem cells; give them some credit.
If you can be bothered for 3 seconds to bother reading a manual, learn Lyx / LaTeX / TeX. If you are going to do something at all, why not bother doing it write. LYX is to OO.o or word what Inkscape is to MS Paint.
If you are happy with OO.o, cool. I loved it for a long time too, but if you feel like it is just like word in the worst ways, and too often find yourself saying "Why the hell did it think I would want it to look like that?" or "crap, why don't these things line up the way I want?" or the ever popular "gee, yeah, templates great, but why the hell do they have to be so freakin' useless?". Not that everybody or even most people say that, but some + perfectionists and professional publishers likely would, with an exception, professional publishers have known and used TeX and derivatives for longer than MS has been significant.
Want to evolve to better precision, control, and auditing? Learn LaTeX. Lyx makes it easy to learn and use:)
Since this entire thread is completely off topic of the article, your choice of signature reminded me of an idea I had, and was curious what you might think.
I have weighed all the difference evidence and such out there regarding the death penalty and such as I found it difficult to decide what to support and its relationship to my own philosophy. In the end, I think it is unjustifiably expensive, and horribly immoral, but not immoral for what I might call "the typical reasons". I think it is immoral that a person that was not a victim is the executioner, and the sterile atmosphere trying to make it appear so "humane" is just disgusting. The state has a compelling interest in justice because we pay them through taxes to be the benevolent and fair moderator, and if a person has possibly committed a crime that morally justifies death, the state should get to make the final decision, but them actually doing the killing is wrong.
I like what (I have been lead to believe is true) goes on in Japan. Honor killings. If you have been dishonored or wronged in such a way that means the criminal deserves death, they can issue you a permit, more or less, to hunt that person down and kill them. THAT is honorable. THAT is humane. THAT is moral. It isn't a "bad dog" that needs to be put down, this is a living human being that deserves to DIE! Let a man (or woman) in such a position face their death with some dignity, and the face of the person they wronged be it with a rope around their neck, or a knife swiftly jabbing into them. Let that face be the last thing they see before meeting their maker up close and personal. Not behind some sterile glass where the "victim" sits right along site the criminals lawyer. What a sick and pathetic situation for both parties.
Making the family responsible for the execution of an individual not only puts responsibility where it should lie and make them accountable for their accusations, but could also brig a type of closure better then some damn shrink is going to give them helping them "talk about their problem".
If you are morally object to killing the person yourself, or none of the members of the family will kill them, or possible closest friend (maybe put that in a will? In the event of my murder, I entrust the undersigned to avenge my death. Hmm...) then the person should get life imprisonment. Further, if the victim is against honor killing / death penalty or the such, then no revenge death can be granted.
Why is is that justifiable homicide can be a defense, but only after the fact? Premeditated justifiable homicide can only be committed by the state? That just doesn't seem right.
Anyway, I think you get the point. Have you thought about this? I know personal responsibility really isn't a virtue in the United states much anymore, but as a matter of principle more than policy, what do you think?
Insightful and interesting, and I totally agree. One thing though that I would add is that the only OSS value in MacOSX is for those that appreciate OSS for what it is at face value today but either don't give a shit, or don't have the capacity to understand or willingness to educate themselves on how those 'products' GOT to where they are today, as if past and present are only some kind of vague coincidence.
While I could make some more gruesomely satisfying comment, I will refrain and simply say that anyone that can say they were driven to OSX because of their love for OSS really makes me painfully wonder what in the world they could possibly mean.
What I think the parent had meant to say was that Apple like most American companies are only forward thing as the next financial quarter because that is all American investors want to see is what is going to give their portfolio the quickest buck. There are other business philosophies out there, ones that are more customer oriented such that customers are retained long term, where you make a quality product and let the product sell itself. These businesses last much longer and tend to be more financially stable. Their prices will often be a little higher, but not always. In the end, it is still only about the money because that is the way we measure everything. The difference in philosophy is that long term stability maximizes returns over the lifetime of the company. Each have their challenges, and so in the end, every company needs to keep some kind of balance (or a good lobbyist... but that is another topic)
Apple has done some really cool things, and some things that really make you wonder how Steve Jobs can sleep at night. Microsoft, Sony, AT&T have all made major contributions in many ways that have improved the quality of life for many people around the world, if not at very least with jobs... but there are other things they have done that mean I can not trust to do business with them because I don't feel I can trust what I am going to get from them.
Companies just want your money, cause shareholders only want to see that maximum return, and I am sure if your boss came to you and said "Well, we really don't have any more money to pay you, but you are welcome to keep working as long as you like". What are the chances you are sticking around? Hmm.. MAYBE if it is some kind of AIDS cure, you already have tons of money to support yourself... and you have no family or someone in your family has AIDS. Wow, you must be so selfish!
The kool-aide I want to drink (ok, honestly, I don't really get what the hell that even means, unless it a racial stereotype / ignorance joke) is that money is only a tool. What we want to do is enable ourselves with the power to make choices for our own life. In a philosophy of liberty is is prudent in the pursuit of such power to enable others with such power such that you may work together to make better accomplishments. It would seem that it is so typical to measure such power in dollars and cents, given its status as legal tender, but in the end it really is the useful labor that is encouraged and a smoother flow of goods and services through the economy that causes us to use money at all. It also doesn't mean that for every dollar moved an equal amount of useful work was done. In this way the value of the dollar is highly volatile.
So while it may be complicated, different philosophies even conflict, and while everyone is only out there for the money, what others do with money one chooses to give away will play an influence, in some way, on who they will end up giving that money too.
Simple common sense that I think has been touted for years? use the CLI. GUI is more often an excuse to not learn anything than to really actually simplify any task. The IDEA behind a gui is data organization; complex things can be expressed in images that can be difficult to express textually, for example, GIMP is much more practical than sed for image editing. I could do a lot of what I use GIMP for using sed with a reasonable understanding of the image format specification, and sometimes that can be fun... but honestly, I'll take the circle tool over an XOR of (cos(Î-r)-sinÎ)(r^4-2r^2cos(2Î+2.4)+0.9)+(0.62r)^1000<0 as some kind of regular expression. And if precision is an issue, I'll just do it as an svg and again, I'll be using Inkscape, not vi.
I love Blender, Lyx, compiz-settings-manager, and I play WoW not MUDS... but I also use Gnome. Gnome is simple and tries to stick to 'make a gui where a gui makes sense, or don't make one'. In my opinion, for lack of a better example, gnome is for the people that want to learn how to write beautiful, powerful, and useful expressions; kde would like to give you a carefully organized list of beautiful, powerful and useful expressions with easy to follow instructions and buttons to click that will explain and perform whatever the expressions were meant to do.
A friend once told me that he used kde for a long time, until one day he imagined developing an "intuitive" regular expression generator gui for grep, sed, awk, etc in order to bring the power of the command line to the typical user. It was an epiphany "Ooh, now I get it!" he exclaimed, and switched to Gnome.
When instead of just trying to make things "better" you put upper and lower limits on design policy, imo, you end up with something much more simple, much more clean, and honestly more productive. Intuition is for experts (anyone read The Pragmatic Programmer?), not novices. Good interfaces should be designed with the idea that the user is going to be able to get smarter and more productive as they learn the system. The things that may be tedious for those people are the kinds of things that should be simplified. In your case, things were designed for those that think a man page means constitutes difficult work, and could only end up one way: BLOATED with the feature of the day, and yesterday, and the day before.:)
It is a strange world, I'll admit. One thing that I tell people looking at adoption is "get ready to relearn everything you thought you knew about your computer". I find your signature particularly ironic because I think Linux philosophy has many close parallels to the philosophy of conservatism and virtually immune to the damning effects of democracy.
One of the things that I feel has hurt Windows over the years is that Microsoft has lost touch with what works. Development is strongly driven by criticism, and what people want is what they will get. This is most apparent in Vista where their top down development model was strongly influenced by user feedback. It SEEMS like a great idea, and honestly it is almost difficult to understand why it failed so miserably.
This is where Linux takes almost the opposite approach, but 'approach' seems to imply a type of central control that does not exist, but looking past that; Linux is COMPLETELY decentralized. Not only is development bottom-up, but so is influence, criticism, standards, motivation, and anything that might be interpreted as 'marketing'. With the money being removed from the structure of Linux development, it is really one of the purest / idealistic forms of liberty to have ever existed. While today I don't think many fundamentally understand the difference between Liberty and Anarchy, I think many are dumbfounded that a pure merit based system that completely relies on personally responsibility could have accomplished anything. I consider myself a pretty hard core libertarian compared to some (but that may have something to do with living in California), but as I get more involved in Ubuntu development, I often don't understand why anything developed this way doesn't just cause all my hardware to burst into flames.
On the flip side, you can only get so far making people do things they don't want to do. In Linux, If I want something that doesn't exist, it is my personal responsibility to develop it or get it developed. Yelling at the computer and flaming message boards only gets you so far, and it should be of little surprise that no one is intimidated let alone motivated to rush out on their free time fix that issue for you. At the end of the day, someone must actually write the code, and do all the things that are involved in getting that code to you, and in by far MOST cases, writing a code patch and emailing it to you won't be good enough. You don't want me to code it; if you use Ubuntu, you want me to write a blue print, register the appropriate branch, put together a team, write the code, debug it, test it, share it, get it reviewed, revise it, propose for merge, voted on and approved, merge, package, and integrate into repository; and as if that wasn't good enough, you want it for your platform, back-ported, automatically updated on your system, and then maintained indefinitely. Sorry, but the only way I am doing that in my free time, for free, is that I really want it myself, and even then, if we disagree, if I am stuck doing all the work, I am going to implement and design parts however I feel like.
So while it may seem really rude or a brush off when people say "do it yourself", it isn't that they are heartless or lazy, I think they are really trying to save you some effort. If you consider the greatly consolidated steps mentioned above as 'X', and 'Y' as the amount of effort it may take to convince someone else to do the work, does it really need to be explained that 'X
If you don't want to develop, and you don't manage a team and pay for development, and you kinda just want it to work, people will be happy to let you know that a that level of influence, and that level of personal responsibility, that level of merit earns you "whatever exists". No one dictates these rules, it is just nature. Imagine being stranded on an island, whose responsibility is it that you survive? If ALL your faith is in the coast guard to come bail you out, you could put all your effort into waiting patiently, screaming at the sky, or
Least popular is relative. I see it this way: Crack OpenBSD, and you are a God amongst men because so few can do it. Crack Windows and you are an asshole because anyone can do it. Few people use OpenBSD because virtually no one needs that much security.
Consider the context. The kind of people cracking Windows and their ability to apply their knowledge I highly doubt correlates to Microsoft's representation of market share data. So you are saying the amount of money people that use BSD is almost nothing? Gee, big surprise.
I find it hard to believe that the reason the military uses BSD (among others not Windows) to secure their systems is because they figure if anyone tried to hack it, it is unlikely the attacker would be familiar enough with the system to gain access.
You say that however it seems the less popular a product is the better it is.
Look at Ruby, it's got to be one of the least popular programming languages of today, however it's proclaimed as one of the best.
Ruby was at the bottom of the list of languages picked for new FOSS projects for 2008. What does that mean? It means Ruby was at the bottom of the list of languages picked for new FOSS projects for 2008. For all its claims of improvements over python, why wasn't it more greatly adopted? Who knows! I am sure there are reasons, but that doesn't mean the first thing we can guess must be right just because the explanation is simple.
I take exception to the idea that only scholarly journals may be sources of information.
There, fixed it for you. I'd even agree in proportion to the triviality of such information. As far as "Only scholarly journals are primary sources", the only other type of primary source is direct observation and personal opinion, but they needed to be stated as such and kept in context. The easiest thing to do here is when it isn't a scholarly journal, cite in text the context of your supporting argument, like "Joe the Plummer, some idiot tax cheat with no license that calls himself a plummer that happened to be standing around near Barack Obama one day while the camera was on him says we need XYZ to fix the economy" is reasonable, but saying "some people believe we need XYZ to fix the economy", and your source is Joe the Plummer and you cite it hurts your integrity. There is a really important difference.
Though honestly, my BS alarm always goes off when I hear the phrase "scientists say" or "doctors agree" us often followed by a line of bullshit. Truth or not, it is the epitome of lazy "journalism". Just take a short line to explain who is saying it, and a rough idea of their credentials. Then, not only can the information be put in context, but when it is proven wrong it doesn't send creationists in a frenzy writing their local school board.
This way when people share interesting stuff they read, they can say "Hey, some doctor guy is looking into investigating a possible link between mercury and autism." rather than "Hey, did you know the reason your kid has autism is because of those vaccinations you gave him?" Not that people are going to stop being idiots and grossly exaggerate things out of context, but at least when someones BS alarm goes off, they can more easily hunt down the source and confirm some kind of validity.
I would hope that despite publications [that suck], we can have slightly higher expectations for something we are going to call an encyclopedia.
Great article! This exposes some major issues with how Microsoft has implemented Windows Update, what of software that ISN'T a part of Windows Update. I am sure you could use this same method just crawling websites looking for patches for anything. Sure, some programs have updaters, but there is typically a different one for every publisher. Bleh!
I want software from people whose motivation is better software, that way we get things like Synaptic Package Manager and Update Manager at least in the case of Ubuntu. Synaptic works because it is people trying to work together for better software. Nothing like synaptic could ever work on Windows because there would be endless bickering over... is there any limit? Anything I can think of just has a super-set of problems that would stop that problem from even existing. Coordination costs? Microsoft going to just give out their patches for free? But wait, there is hardly an organized way to check if a piece of software is installed; each program can be different. And whatever way it goes, I couldn't even begin to imagine what Microsoft would put together and call 'intuitive' for the addition of 'third-party repositories', even if they would allow for such a thing. Eek!
I think it is as simple as this: Windows Update is designed for Microsoft, not the user. Any other parts of the system give that impression?
Personally, if Microsoft says that if anyone looking at the code would expose the software to an unlimited number of critical vulnerabilities compromising your network and all your data, that doesn't make me concerned about Gnu/Linux, that makes me concerned about Windows.
Like seriously, the code is that bad?
I'd tell customers with that concern that Gnu/Linux have been openly audited by the nerdiest geeks for roughly 25 years and worked together to develop the best security ever. Linux community says that open source is more secure; if Microsoft is saying that being able to see the source code exposes you to limitless vulnerabilities, maybe there should be some concern that the code to Windows has been leaked to the Internet for quite some time? Not to mention, didn't they recently change to some "shared-source" BS where you can look at the code, but it doesn't actually mean shit like with OpenOffice?
Anyone else having as much difficulty following Microsoft's supposed argument here, and how if true, just makes everything look worse for Microsoft?
Ha ha ha!!! Make the government accountable to the people for what they do? I am sure they would have tried it by now if it could have worked. Right?
Considering anything the US government wants to do it just charges to their giant no-limit credit card, how would this make an impact? Taxes only go to paying the interest on their spending, and the principle is paid down by... uh... well I forget, but I am sure they do it somehow.
I think the current list is something like this:
Its April 15! What do you want to do today?
[] Give half my income to bankers for
whom we are so grateful for printing
our money.
[] Go to jail.
But we progressed to "withholdings" to make the whole system go a lot more smoothly. Hurray for progress where I no longer have to worry whether or not I checked the right box.
Slashdot Mirror
Then the US I am sure will be fine in no time because by the same logic Congressmen + deeper pockets filled by lobbyists must equal better government for every American and citizen of the world. Thanks for clarifying that issue for me. I had always been told that corruption and bribes harm society, but so it would seem it really contributes to the GREATER good. Guess I just wasn't seeing how much GREATER that really was. Thanks.
Now that I understand, think I am going to call up my bank and thank them for raising my interest rate.
OS X and Linux are STILL just playing catchup to where Windows was 5 years ago
Ok, now that I am done laughing, I am still a bit puzzled. Catch up to what? Compatibility in running Microsoft software? Cleverly tricking [consumer] people into giving them money? Yeah, you get back to me on that.
Just not the same thing. Apple convinced insecure and wannabe nerds (and some real nerds too) that a big shiny new gadget will make them look cool. The Linux Community is trying to convince people that enjoy finger painting and story-time that reading and writing are valuable skills that that can benefit you throughout your entire life.
I am sure this sounds like typical fanboyism, but have you ever listened to someones excuses for not wanting to learn to read, write, or learn basic algebra? It is the same excuses: It won't be relevant to the career I want, I get along just fine speaking, that's just for smart people. Well, how is it that Linux can be both demonized for being inferior AND only for the really smart computer genius type. Might it be worth a moment to try and see what they see? Honestly, that is what convinced me that despite the fact that it was HARD, and there were things I had to LEARN or even REMEMBER, it was about communicating, building, developing, and working together in a radically different way. I think it took me about a year to get comfortable with Linux, several more before I really began to see why it is used in all the places that it is, and why people feel so passionately about it.
Some people see a computer as a fancy typewriter for papers, a canvas for painting a picture, and an easier way to send letters and pictures than via snail mail. digital music is just another way to listen to music. For all those old things done in new ways, there is something uniquely special that can be expressed through a computer that isn't just a digital form of the same old thing in a different way. There is something uniquely powerful that enables people to fundamentally work different, and only Linux is where people can share instantly and unlimitedly the tools to express yourself and communicate with the world DIFFERENTLY.
Sure, Microsoft and Apple let you push the button, but just like reading and writing, no matter how good the story is told, don't think that is any kind of substitute. You just aren't talking about the same thing. It isn't digital literacy.
But don't worry, sure I am making a big deal out of nothing. You can already read and write, and computers are really just like books where it is easier to fix mistakes without wasting paper. There are nerds out there that take care of this stuff so that normal people can use them like books. Doubt learning how they work would ever be something worth anything to the 'normal' user.
I stopped paying attention when it went from "The year of Linux" to "The year of the Linux Desktop". Didn't anyone notice what happened in between? Further, The Year of the Linux Desktop was 2004 with the release of openSuse. The Year of Linux was 1997 with the Internet. If you care about being literate in a digital age, you know about Linux.
Wish I had made the effort to learn earlier, but guess just happy to be there. Having been there, there is just no way to explain to an adult illiterate person the value of learning how to read and write. I know it sounds elitist, but it really just struck me today how similar the arguments are. Think about it.
Alright, now flame away.
Didn't they do that with trial versions of Office 2008? Part of the installation process was to convert all office documents to the 2008 version. Either buy office, or pay someone to convert all your documents back. What is the cheaper and easier solution for most people? I think they got a few complaints about that one.
Being in a bind and needing to setup a machine with Ubuntu at one point, all I had with me was an Xubuntu 6.06 alternate CD. Installed and updated to 9.04 alpha 5 quickly and fairly easily. There was one small issue that required me to use dpkg to force the installation of a package apt-get would not let me upgrade (mutual dependency conflict) and with almost no prior knowledge was resolved in
If someone was trying to install XP, but didn't have a disk and asked "Well, I got a Windows 95 CD, shouldn't I be able to use that and just update?", they would probably get a lot of weird looks... but the appropriate response would be "No, it isn't like Linux".
Hell, I once had a broken Gentoo machine I could not fix, I gave up and with no external media or even downloading an iso just switched it over to Ubuntu in a couple of hours... though in all honesty, I hope never to do that again.
I've read complaints that reviews of new Linux distros often focus too much on the installation process
The complaints are generic that, imho, revolve around "Why are you focusing in <thing I can do easily> instead of <my strange special case scenario feature>?"
Sadly, while I can not hardly fathom difficulties in installing Ubuntu Linux, or many other distros, The incentive and ease for a non-techie person to TAKE THE INITIATIVE to install their own operating system MUST be very high. This means FLAWLESS in every respect with EVERYTHING. The fact that OEM's often must tweak Windows to get it to work in ways that are very difficult to repeat by regular users is not an issue for those with Windows preinstalled, or a special disk for their computer. I see OEM disks all the time that say "Only use with your machine". This is because it is customized to work. In my personal experience, I have never encountered a computer where retail windows just worked with everything; there are always several third party drivers that must be installed.
In this way, while it may not seem fair, until there are many time more machines in stores coming with preinstalled Linux, the expectation of the ease of use for the installer will be far beyond anything that has ever been expected of Windows.
And the same goes for updates / upgrades. Windows Update only updates core system components but can be setup to update Microsoft products, and works reasonably well in most situations. Apt-get, to simply say that it supports third party software, is grossly understating what it manages.
Blessing and curse for Microsoft is that Windows users will tolerate pretty much anything. No QA == no progress.
Yeah, seems really strange that an article about the doom of CAPTCHAs wouldn't propose some kind of alternative solution to the problem. Really seems like so many of these articles would people complaining than helping in any kind of way. Someone should really come up with a solution to that.
Maybe idealistic, but with transparency and feedback, this seems like a good way to go. It would also be nice to see if they have been more or less effected by the "financial crisis" than others. I'll look into it :)
Which I would completely agree with as a matter of policy. I can find no compelling reason to support capital punishment as a matter of policy because incarceration alone completely takes care (as an immediate reactionary resolution) of the narrow social problem of an individuals behavior.
More realistically, as a minimalist, any crime is a violation of the 'social contract'. In any contract violation a violation by one party does not give completely free reign to do whatever they want arguing that the contract was broken. God policy should make prudent effort to adhere to the spirit of the contract in so far as it can relevantly apply. I would argue that in this case murder, the most extreme violation of the social contract, prison is a reasonable and effective solution to protecting society and maintains some, whatever minimal, respect for the sovereignty of the criminal... no matter how much we hate them. But to be clear, it isn't necessarily or so much the liberty of the 'criminal' that concerns me so much as giving over-reaching and disproportionate entitlements to the state. I do not need to financially support the exclusive right to control executions any more than I should have to pay a governing body to hold meetings carefully regulating and rationing who I must pay to mow my lawn. I don't think that is too far off an example.
But more back to point, the most justifiable reason for capital punishment is that the rest of us should should not be too greatly burdened by the cost of the incarceration, yet we do want to financially support a fair and just legal system for many reasons. Not only is the level of efficiency presently poor in getting the right person, but also in cost. If it would take more money to catch the right person, not execute the wrong person, and the cost of execution is already, then there is no justification as a matter of policy to justify capital punishment. As for the deterrent factor and its role in policy, it has been shown that life imprisonment is as effective as capital punishment.
Several months ago on the radio on the anniversary of the event, a 'survivor' that lost her all but her maternal grandmother of her entire blood related family including her two young sons told her story. She had fought very hard politically from the beginning opposing the church for more than a decade before the massacre. I am really not one to cry... ever, but on my hour+ drive home listening to this women, I seriously wept the entire way.
That makes me feel a little better about the world, and I would like to think that is exactly an example of the real point I was trying to make.
For the sake of breaking through taboos, it was a last ditch effort to interpretation. If it is a JonesTown reference, why Kool-Aide and not just say fruit punch? I thought it might like be like someone saying "Someones been snacking on on the fried chicken and watermelon again". Like if someone comes into work and they look really terrible and you ask them "what's up?" and they tell you they got into some bad celery. Just to over explain, it means they were drinking Bloody Marys (or were drinking in general) and are actually hung over. Sometimes people say bad lime or some other thing that can be served with drinks. In one way it is just a clever joke, but I think in part it plays to the sometimes perceived lack of personal responsibility or rationalism made by alcoholics. I have heard people say they "got into some bad punch" as to imply they didn't know it was spiked, going along the same lines. So that is just where my my logic led me not having anyone explain it to me before.
So in this case, it wasn't bad Kool-Aide, it was just too much (was the phrase). Personally, as far as those kinds of jokes go, to imply a correlation between Kool-Aide and ignorance is pretty clever and possibly funny in the right group. I say 'racial stereotype', and that is me playing the race card when he was actually trying to make a joke about the mass slaughter of women and children? Sorry, i'll try to me more PC cause thinking about it now, I guess a more appropriate term would have been "educational and developmental impact on children of socioeconomically disenfranchised bargain hunting parents"... hmm... sounds like another card. But if I had said "Does Kool-Aide really make you stupid?", I would probably have been modded troll.
See? Can't win.
Joking aside, thanks for the info.
IBM owns more patents than any other company in the world. So I have been lead to believe, Sun holds some of the most valuable patents in the world. IBM was the MS of the 60's 70's and 80's. I am sure there are some old farts at IBM griping about dirty deals MS made to defeat Lotus out of the marketplace, not to mention the legal taunting of Linux users to intimidate small businesses out of adoption. Overall, I'll admit I am scratching my head on this one, but I bet there are several Microsoft people with some ideas on how it may effect them. :)
Well, considering they INTENTIONAL tried to follow the design of MS Office, they did a really great job. It isn't turd polishing from scratch, this is like genetically engineered feces grown from stem cells; give them some credit.
:)
If you can be bothered for 3 seconds to bother reading a manual, learn Lyx / LaTeX / TeX. If you are going to do something at all, why not bother doing it write. LYX is to OO.o or word what Inkscape is to MS Paint.
If you are happy with OO.o, cool. I loved it for a long time too, but if you feel like it is just like word in the worst ways, and too often find yourself saying "Why the hell did it think I would want it to look like that?" or "crap, why don't these things line up the way I want?" or the ever popular "gee, yeah, templates great, but why the hell do they have to be so freakin' useless?". Not that everybody or even most people say that, but some + perfectionists and professional publishers likely would, with an exception, professional publishers have known and used TeX and derivatives for longer than MS has been significant.
Want to evolve to better precision, control, and auditing? Learn LaTeX. Lyx makes it easy to learn and use
Since this entire thread is completely off topic of the article, your choice of signature reminded me of an idea I had, and was curious what you might think.
I have weighed all the difference evidence and such out there regarding the death penalty and such as I found it difficult to decide what to support and its relationship to my own philosophy. In the end, I think it is unjustifiably expensive, and horribly immoral, but not immoral for what I might call "the typical reasons". I think it is immoral that a person that was not a victim is the executioner, and the sterile atmosphere trying to make it appear so "humane" is just disgusting. The state has a compelling interest in justice because we pay them through taxes to be the benevolent and fair moderator, and if a person has possibly committed a crime that morally justifies death, the state should get to make the final decision, but them actually doing the killing is wrong.
I like what (I have been lead to believe is true) goes on in Japan. Honor killings. If you have been dishonored or wronged in such a way that means the criminal deserves death, they can issue you a permit, more or less, to hunt that person down and kill them. THAT is honorable. THAT is humane. THAT is moral. It isn't a "bad dog" that needs to be put down, this is a living human being that deserves to DIE! Let a man (or woman) in such a position face their death with some dignity, and the face of the person they wronged be it with a rope around their neck, or a knife swiftly jabbing into them. Let that face be the last thing they see before meeting their maker up close and personal. Not behind some sterile glass where the "victim" sits right along site the criminals lawyer. What a sick and pathetic situation for both parties.
Making the family responsible for the execution of an individual not only puts responsibility where it should lie and make them accountable for their accusations, but could also brig a type of closure better then some damn shrink is going to give them helping them "talk about their problem".
If you are morally object to killing the person yourself, or none of the members of the family will kill them, or possible closest friend (maybe put that in a will? In the event of my murder, I entrust the undersigned to avenge my death. Hmm...) then the person should get life imprisonment. Further, if the victim is against honor killing / death penalty or the such, then no revenge death can be granted.
Why is is that justifiable homicide can be a defense, but only after the fact? Premeditated justifiable homicide can only be committed by the state? That just doesn't seem right.
Anyway, I think you get the point. Have you thought about this? I know personal responsibility really isn't a virtue in the United states much anymore, but as a matter of principle more than policy, what do you think?
Insightful and interesting, and I totally agree. One thing though that I would add is that the only OSS value in MacOSX is for those that appreciate OSS for what it is at face value today but either don't give a shit, or don't have the capacity to understand or willingness to educate themselves on how those 'products' GOT to where they are today, as if past and present are only some kind of vague coincidence.
While I could make some more gruesomely satisfying comment, I will refrain and simply say that anyone that can say they were driven to OSX because of their love for OSS really makes me painfully wonder what in the world they could possibly mean.
What I think the parent had meant to say was that Apple like most American companies are only forward thing as the next financial quarter because that is all American investors want to see is what is going to give their portfolio the quickest buck. There are other business philosophies out there, ones that are more customer oriented such that customers are retained long term, where you make a quality product and let the product sell itself. These businesses last much longer and tend to be more financially stable. Their prices will often be a little higher, but not always. In the end, it is still only about the money because that is the way we measure everything. The difference in philosophy is that long term stability maximizes returns over the lifetime of the company. Each have their challenges, and so in the end, every company needs to keep some kind of balance (or a good lobbyist... but that is another topic)
Apple has done some really cool things, and some things that really make you wonder how Steve Jobs can sleep at night. Microsoft, Sony, AT&T have all made major contributions in many ways that have improved the quality of life for many people around the world, if not at very least with jobs... but there are other things they have done that mean I can not trust to do business with them because I don't feel I can trust what I am going to get from them.
Companies just want your money, cause shareholders only want to see that maximum return, and I am sure if your boss came to you and said "Well, we really don't have any more money to pay you, but you are welcome to keep working as long as you like". What are the chances you are sticking around? Hmm.. MAYBE if it is some kind of AIDS cure, you already have tons of money to support yourself... and you have no family or someone in your family has AIDS. Wow, you must be so selfish!
The kool-aide I want to drink (ok, honestly, I don't really get what the hell that even means, unless it a racial stereotype / ignorance joke) is that money is only a tool. What we want to do is enable ourselves with the power to make choices for our own life. In a philosophy of liberty is is prudent in the pursuit of such power to enable others with such power such that you may work together to make better accomplishments. It would seem that it is so typical to measure such power in dollars and cents, given its status as legal tender, but in the end it really is the useful labor that is encouraged and a smoother flow of goods and services through the economy that causes us to use money at all. It also doesn't mean that for every dollar moved an equal amount of useful work was done. In this way the value of the dollar is highly volatile.
So while it may be complicated, different philosophies even conflict, and while everyone is only out there for the money, what others do with money one chooses to give away will play an influence, in some way, on who they will end up giving that money too.
Simple common sense that I think has been touted for years? use the CLI. GUI is more often an excuse to not learn anything than to really actually simplify any task. The IDEA behind a gui is data organization; complex things can be expressed in images that can be difficult to express textually, for example, GIMP is much more practical than sed for image editing. I could do a lot of what I use GIMP for using sed with a reasonable understanding of the image format specification, and sometimes that can be fun... but honestly, I'll take the circle tool over an XOR of (cos(Î-r)-sinÎ)(r^4-2r^2cos(2Î+2.4)+0.9)+(0.62r)^1000<0 as some kind of regular expression. And if precision is an issue, I'll just do it as an svg and again, I'll be using Inkscape, not vi.
:)
I love Blender, Lyx, compiz-settings-manager, and I play WoW not MUDS... but I also use Gnome. Gnome is simple and tries to stick to 'make a gui where a gui makes sense, or don't make one'. In my opinion, for lack of a better example, gnome is for the people that want to learn how to write beautiful, powerful, and useful expressions; kde would like to give you a carefully organized list of beautiful, powerful and useful expressions with easy to follow instructions and buttons to click that will explain and perform whatever the expressions were meant to do.
A friend once told me that he used kde for a long time, until one day he imagined developing an "intuitive" regular expression generator gui for grep, sed, awk, etc in order to bring the power of the command line to the typical user. It was an epiphany "Ooh, now I get it!" he exclaimed, and switched to Gnome.
When instead of just trying to make things "better" you put upper and lower limits on design policy, imo, you end up with something much more simple, much more clean, and honestly more productive. Intuition is for experts (anyone read The Pragmatic Programmer?), not novices. Good interfaces should be designed with the idea that the user is going to be able to get smarter and more productive as they learn the system. The things that may be tedious for those people are the kinds of things that should be simplified. In your case, things were designed for those that think a man page means constitutes difficult work, and could only end up one way: BLOATED with the feature of the day, and yesterday, and the day before.
It is a strange world, I'll admit. One thing that I tell people looking at adoption is "get ready to relearn everything you thought you knew about your computer". I find your signature particularly ironic because I think Linux philosophy has many close parallels to the philosophy of conservatism and virtually immune to the damning effects of democracy.
One of the things that I feel has hurt Windows over the years is that Microsoft has lost touch with what works. Development is strongly driven by criticism, and what people want is what they will get. This is most apparent in Vista where their top down development model was strongly influenced by user feedback. It SEEMS like a great idea, and honestly it is almost difficult to understand why it failed so miserably.
This is where Linux takes almost the opposite approach, but 'approach' seems to imply a type of central control that does not exist, but looking past that; Linux is COMPLETELY decentralized. Not only is development bottom-up, but so is influence, criticism, standards, motivation, and anything that might be interpreted as 'marketing'. With the money being removed from the structure of Linux development, it is really one of the purest / idealistic forms of liberty to have ever existed. While today I don't think many fundamentally understand the difference between Liberty and Anarchy, I think many are dumbfounded that a pure merit based system that completely relies on personally responsibility could have accomplished anything. I consider myself a pretty hard core libertarian compared to some (but that may have something to do with living in California), but as I get more involved in Ubuntu development, I often don't understand why anything developed this way doesn't just cause all my hardware to burst into flames.
On the flip side, you can only get so far making people do things they don't want to do. In Linux, If I want something that doesn't exist, it is my personal responsibility to develop it or get it developed. Yelling at the computer and flaming message boards only gets you so far, and it should be of little surprise that no one is intimidated let alone motivated to rush out on their free time fix that issue for you. At the end of the day, someone must actually write the code, and do all the things that are involved in getting that code to you, and in by far MOST cases, writing a code patch and emailing it to you won't be good enough. You don't want me to code it; if you use Ubuntu, you want me to write a blue print, register the appropriate branch, put together a team, write the code, debug it, test it, share it, get it reviewed, revise it, propose for merge, voted on and approved, merge, package, and integrate into repository; and as if that wasn't good enough, you want it for your platform, back-ported, automatically updated on your system, and then maintained indefinitely. Sorry, but the only way I am doing that in my free time, for free, is that I really want it myself, and even then, if we disagree, if I am stuck doing all the work, I am going to implement and design parts however I feel like.
So while it may seem really rude or a brush off when people say "do it yourself", it isn't that they are heartless or lazy, I think they are really trying to save you some effort. If you consider the greatly consolidated steps mentioned above as 'X', and 'Y' as the amount of effort it may take to convince someone else to do the work, does it really need to be explained that 'X
If you don't want to develop, and you don't manage a team and pay for development, and you kinda just want it to work, people will be happy to let you know that a that level of influence, and that level of personal responsibility, that level of merit earns you "whatever exists". No one dictates these rules, it is just nature. Imagine being stranded on an island, whose responsibility is it that you survive? If ALL your faith is in the coast guard to come bail you out, you could put all your effort into waiting patiently, screaming at the sky, or
Good to know. If I happen to be talking to a Windows user that brings up the issue, I'll mention it to them :)
Consider the context. The kind of people cracking Windows and their ability to apply their knowledge I highly doubt correlates to Microsoft's representation of market share data. So you are saying the amount of money people that use BSD is almost nothing? Gee, big surprise.
I find it hard to believe that the reason the military uses BSD (among others not Windows) to secure their systems is because they figure if anyone tried to hack it, it is unlikely the attacker would be familiar enough with the system to gain access.
You say that however it seems the less popular a product is the better it is. Look at Ruby, it's got to be one of the least popular programming languages of today, however it's proclaimed as one of the best.
Ruby was at the bottom of the list of languages picked for new FOSS projects for 2008. What does that mean? It means Ruby was at the bottom of the list of languages picked for new FOSS projects for 2008. For all its claims of improvements over python, why wasn't it more greatly adopted? Who knows! I am sure there are reasons, but that doesn't mean the first thing we can guess must be right just because the explanation is simple.
I take exception to the idea that only scholarly journals may be sources of information.
There, fixed it for you. I'd even agree in proportion to the triviality of such information. As far as "Only scholarly journals are primary sources", the only other type of primary source is direct observation and personal opinion, but they needed to be stated as such and kept in context. The easiest thing to do here is when it isn't a scholarly journal, cite in text the context of your supporting argument, like "Joe the Plummer, some idiot tax cheat with no license that calls himself a plummer that happened to be standing around near Barack Obama one day while the camera was on him says we need XYZ to fix the economy" is reasonable, but saying "some people believe we need XYZ to fix the economy", and your source is Joe the Plummer and you cite it hurts your integrity. There is a really important difference.
Though honestly, my BS alarm always goes off when I hear the phrase "scientists say" or "doctors agree" us often followed by a line of bullshit. Truth or not, it is the epitome of lazy "journalism". Just take a short line to explain who is saying it, and a rough idea of their credentials. Then, not only can the information be put in context, but when it is proven wrong it doesn't send creationists in a frenzy writing their local school board.
This way when people share interesting stuff they read, they can say "Hey, some doctor guy is looking into investigating a possible link between mercury and autism." rather than "Hey, did you know the reason your kid has autism is because of those vaccinations you gave him?" Not that people are going to stop being idiots and grossly exaggerate things out of context, but at least when someones BS alarm goes off, they can more easily hunt down the source and confirm some kind of validity.
I would hope that despite publications [that suck], we can have slightly higher expectations for something we are going to call an encyclopedia.
Great article! This exposes some major issues with how Microsoft has implemented Windows Update, what of software that ISN'T a part of Windows Update. I am sure you could use this same method just crawling websites looking for patches for anything. Sure, some programs have updaters, but there is typically a different one for every publisher. Bleh!
... is there any limit? Anything I can think of just has a super-set of problems that would stop that problem from even existing. Coordination costs? Microsoft going to just give out their patches for free? But wait, there is hardly an organized way to check if a piece of software is installed; each program can be different. And whatever way it goes, I couldn't even begin to imagine what Microsoft would put together and call 'intuitive' for the addition of 'third-party repositories', even if they would allow for such a thing. Eek!
I want software from people whose motivation is better software, that way we get things like Synaptic Package Manager and Update Manager at least in the case of Ubuntu. Synaptic works because it is people trying to work together for better software. Nothing like synaptic could ever work on Windows because there would be endless bickering over
I think it is as simple as this: Windows Update is designed for Microsoft, not the user. Any other parts of the system give that impression?
Personally, if Microsoft says that if anyone looking at the code would expose the software to an unlimited number of critical vulnerabilities compromising your network and all your data, that doesn't make me concerned about Gnu/Linux, that makes me concerned about Windows.
Like seriously, the code is that bad?
I'd tell customers with that concern that Gnu/Linux have been openly audited by the nerdiest geeks for roughly 25 years and worked together to develop the best security ever. Linux community says that open source is more secure; if Microsoft is saying that being able to see the source code exposes you to limitless vulnerabilities, maybe there should be some concern that the code to Windows has been leaked to the Internet for quite some time? Not to mention, didn't they recently change to some "shared-source" BS where you can look at the code, but it doesn't actually mean shit like with OpenOffice?
Anyone else having as much difficulty following Microsoft's supposed argument here, and how if true, just makes everything look worse for Microsoft?
Ha ha ha!!! Make the government accountable to the people for what they do? I am sure they would have tried it by now if it could have worked. Right?
Considering anything the US government wants to do it just charges to their giant no-limit credit card, how would this make an impact? Taxes only go to paying the interest on their spending, and the principle is paid down by... uh... well I forget, but I am sure they do it somehow.
I think the current list is something like this:
Its April 15! What do you want to do today?
[] Give half my income to bankers for
whom we are so grateful for printing
our money.
[] Go to jail.
But we progressed to "withholdings" to make the whole system go a lot more smoothly. Hurray for progress where I no longer have to worry whether or not I checked the right box.