Of course, you can actually use Ubuntu during the upgrade (although some programs, such as Firefox, malfunction to some extent in that time, so it helps to have less complex alternatives), so it's not as bad. (My last Ubuntu upgrade took about 2 hours, by the way.)
I have done so, with one of my own programs; it simply looked on the floppy drive (this was back in the Windows 95/98 days) for a file called something like install.exe or setup.exe, then ran it. I wonder if this was in case people bought a program that came with floppy disks but no install instructions, and Microsoft imagined that the first reaction of the customer was "I know, I'll use add/remove programs"? (I also vaguely wonder if that trick still works nowadays, with XP/Vista/7? Presumably it would look on CDs as well; maybe it did then.)
At least apt/.deb (used by Debian and Ubuntu) has two sorts of uninstall options; a normal uninstall leaves things like customised configuration files behind (so you can reinstall the program again and it goes back to the same state), and a 'purge' removes everything related to the program's package itself, which is the sort of uninstall you to bring the HD back to its original state. (If you want to go all the way back, you'd also delete dependencies of the program which weren't in use by anything else, which the package managers can do automatically for you as part of or just after your uninstall, if you like; and if you're really insane about getting everything exactly the same, you'd remove the log entries relating to the install, and use touch to put the last-modified timestamps of the relevant directories back to their old value, but that's just overkill.)
I'm not sure about other package managers, but they quite possibly have something similar.
Agreed; look out of the window in a moderate-length flight over Europe (and probably the US too, although I don't know this from personal experience), when above the cloud layer, and you'll see in the distance a long chain of planes following each other along almost exactly the same route. With nothing in the sky above the cloud layer but other planes, the existence of lanes tends to be relatively obvious.
Doesn't most spyware also have an EULA that says you agree to everything it does? Is it equally legitimate? (I suspect the proportion of people who read spyware EULAs is similar to the proportion of people who read Microsoft's.)
Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c.
There's actually more logic there than you've already mentioned; the ones starting C-c are the mode-specific ones, whereas the C-x shortcuts are constant no matter what you're doing.
I hardly think the existing user base of distros like Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, is going to make a rampant switch to Google's nix OS.
I don't think that's the issue; it's more that Chrome OS makes it a lot less likely that 'mainstream' Linux distros will ever re-become a standard install on netbooks, thus denying them one rather good opportunity to get market share and thus public awareness.
Actually, there's a complex algorithm which looks at people's random comments, and then attaches them to posts where they apparently make sense. It's amazing what modern AI can do to construct what looks like a coherent discussion out of ramblings made at 4am. (It's also responsible for appending [NO CARRIER] and submitting when the connection inexplicably breaks down in the middle of a post.)
The issue's really the amount of knee-jerk anti-European (or occasionally pro-European) responses here in the UK. Many people seem to assume that anything to do with Europe is bad (including the human rights legislation), or occasionally good; the number of people who seem to think both good and bad things come out of the European parliament is worryingly low. (/me mentally accuses certain newspapers...)
Microsoft do want us to be happy, though, it distracts attention from the rest of what they're doing. (I suspect Microsoft Research is a large division churning out useful things that help people in general, with nothing evil about it at all, used as a distraction to make the company look good as a whole.)
In D&D at least, and quite possibly in real life, Wisdom implies being a good judge of character and good at noticing things, whereas Intelligence is more about memory and working things out.
I've made Firehose comments before now pointing out deficiencies in the summaries; however, they seem to have been ignored when the story was actually posted...
You forgot M-y, which isn't any of cut/copy/paste, but instead, the incredibly useful "paste less recent copy/cut", and the big reason Emacs' cut/copy/paste is superior to the traditional one.
I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know".
No, we get $9.99 keyboards because they're better than the expensive ones. The expensive ones tend to have all sorts of weird buttons which aren't all that useful and seem designed for people who have no idea what a computer is. (Have you ever seen an "F lock" key, for instance? Wow I hate that concept.)
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
Why? The way a typewriter works, instead of using backspace, you can compose characters by holding down space while typing them. (Might not be a bad feature to add to modern computers, either; holding down space to insert lots of spaces is not the right way to use most sensible programs.)
Screen readers often use capslock as an extra control key to control the screen reader, so you can use the regular control/shift/alt/{super|win} to control your programs.
On the two laptops I most commonly use, one has Fn on the left of Ctrl, the other has Fn on the right of Ctrl, which is really confusing. Which way round do you think they ought to be?
This strikes me as desperation, in a way. You get a discount if you install something before everyone's got a chance to find out it's no good? The discount worries me; I'd expect early installs to cost more if there was nothing to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Reddit got this story first. You'll notice that the links in the summary go to Reddit...
Of course, you can actually use Ubuntu during the upgrade (although some programs, such as Firefox, malfunction to some extent in that time, so it helps to have less complex alternatives), so it's not as bad. (My last Ubuntu upgrade took about 2 hours, by the way.)
I have done so, with one of my own programs; it simply looked on the floppy drive (this was back in the Windows 95/98 days) for a file called something like install.exe or setup.exe, then ran it. I wonder if this was in case people bought a program that came with floppy disks but no install instructions, and Microsoft imagined that the first reaction of the customer was "I know, I'll use add/remove programs"? (I also vaguely wonder if that trick still works nowadays, with XP/Vista/7? Presumably it would look on CDs as well; maybe it did then.)
At least apt/.deb (used by Debian and Ubuntu) has two sorts of uninstall options; a normal uninstall leaves things like customised configuration files behind (so you can reinstall the program again and it goes back to the same state), and a 'purge' removes everything related to the program's package itself, which is the sort of uninstall you to bring the HD back to its original state. (If you want to go all the way back, you'd also delete dependencies of the program which weren't in use by anything else, which the package managers can do automatically for you as part of or just after your uninstall, if you like; and if you're really insane about getting everything exactly the same, you'd remove the log entries relating to the install, and use touch to put the last-modified timestamps of the relevant directories back to their old value, but that's just overkill.)
I'm not sure about other package managers, but they quite possibly have something similar.
Agreed; look out of the window in a moderate-length flight over Europe (and probably the US too, although I don't know this from personal experience), when above the cloud layer, and you'll see in the distance a long chain of planes following each other along almost exactly the same route. With nothing in the sky above the cloud layer but other planes, the existence of lanes tends to be relatively obvious.
Doesn't most spyware also have an EULA that says you agree to everything it does? Is it equally legitimate? (I suspect the proportion of people who read spyware EULAs is similar to the proportion of people who read Microsoft's.)
Most short-cuts comes from the first characters of their respective commands, the more commonly used commands are used with just Control while the less commonly used ones are prefixed with C-x or C-c.
There's actually more logic there than you've already mentioned; the ones starting C-c are the mode-specific ones, whereas the C-x shortcuts are constant no matter what you're doing.
Word wrap view already existed, but visual-line-mode (which makes loads of wordwrap-related changes at once) is new.
Assuming ASCII, 'u' is actually 0111 0101; not even palindromic. I agree, 'U' seems more likely.
You also seem to grossly underestimate the number of non-geeks who have routers at home.
You seem to overestimate the number of non-geeks who try to configure their routers themselves.
I hardly think the existing user base of distros like Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, is going to make a rampant switch to Google's nix OS.
I don't think that's the issue; it's more that Chrome OS makes it a lot less likely that 'mainstream' Linux distros will ever re-become a standard install on netbooks, thus denying them one rather good opportunity to get market share and thus public awareness.
Actually, there's a complex algorithm which looks at people's random comments, and then attaches them to posts where they apparently make sense. It's amazing what modern AI can do to construct what looks like a coherent discussion out of ramblings made at 4am. (It's also responsible for appending [NO CARRIER] and submitting when the connection inexplicably breaks down in the middle of a post.)
The issue's really the amount of knee-jerk anti-European (or occasionally pro-European) responses here in the UK. Many people seem to assume that anything to do with Europe is bad (including the human rights legislation), or occasionally good; the number of people who seem to think both good and bad things come out of the European parliament is worryingly low. (/me mentally accuses certain newspapers...)
Microsoft do want us to be happy, though, it distracts attention from the rest of what they're doing. (I suspect Microsoft Research is a large division churning out useful things that help people in general, with nothing evil about it at all, used as a distraction to make the company look good as a whole.)
As I said elsethread, you forgot about SCO. (It fits the definition of a zombie company pretty well at the moment, I think.)
In D&D at least, and quite possibly in real life, Wisdom implies being a good judge of character and good at noticing things, whereas Intelligence is more about memory and working things out.
You've obviously never heard of SCO.
I've made Firehose comments before now pointing out deficiencies in the summaries; however, they seem to have been ignored when the story was actually posted...
You forgot M-y, which isn't any of cut/copy/paste, but instead, the incredibly useful "paste less recent copy/cut", and the big reason Emacs' cut/copy/paste is superior to the traditional one.
I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know".
No, we get $9.99 keyboards because they're better than the expensive ones. The expensive ones tend to have all sorts of weird buttons which aren't all that useful and seem designed for people who have no idea what a computer is. (Have you ever seen an "F lock" key, for instance? Wow I hate that concept.)
In which case they may as well be using cat.
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
Why? The way a typewriter works, instead of using backspace, you can compose characters by holding down space while typing them. (Might not be a bad feature to add to modern computers, either; holding down space to insert lots of spaces is not the right way to use most sensible programs.)
Screen readers often use capslock as an extra control key to control the screen reader, so you can use the regular control/shift/alt/{super|win} to control your programs.
On the two laptops I most commonly use, one has Fn on the left of Ctrl, the other has Fn on the right of Ctrl, which is really confusing. Which way round do you think they ought to be?
This strikes me as desperation, in a way. You get a discount if you install something before everyone's got a chance to find out it's no good? The discount worries me; I'd expect early installs to cost more if there was nothing to hide.