In a 2001 rant against RMS (on which I take no stand here) he wrote this:
Despite what Stallman believes, maintaining a GNU project is NOT a privilege. It's a burden, and the bigger the project the bigger the burden. I have no interest to allow somebody else to tell me what to do and not to do if this is part of my free time. There are plenty of others interesting things to do and I'll immediately walk away from glibc if I see a situation like this coming up again. I will always be able to fix my own system (and if the company I work for wants it, their systems).
Graphic Novels work rather differently than comic books here in the US. Most bookstores will carry those. Some of them carry a whole wall of them, both US comics and translated Japanese manga, like my local Barnes & Noble.
As I understand it, comics were popular, but not routinely bought. Kids would park themselves near the rack and read them, but little actually got purchased. Parents would buy them for their kids (thanks Mom!) but, increasingly in the late 80s, fewer and fewer would be sold. So stores did what stores do with something that takes up space, but doesn't produce adequate profit: they got rid of them.
I still like comics, but at $3.00 a shot and the monthly grind that I am no longer interested in dealing with (hello early 1990s!) I just wait for the trade to come out.
But the book would have sucked and have bombed. Then you'd be in here complaining that you should have spent all that time playing some non-existent game where you could zap ghosts with a want of polymorph or drop merchant caravans into lava out of curiosity.
Building a well has proven to be problematic, though educational. I learned that there are different kinds of rivers. If you do it wrong you will flood your fortress and drown your dwarves. It made me sad.
And psycho axe wielding dwarf maniacs were not something I was expecting either.
The problem is that the Supreme Court upheld the "hate speech" stuff. The court has accepted that what you say or believe can, in fact, lead to criminal penalties.
With your Windows example, you demonstrated that it is easy, if you already know how to do it. There isn't anything particularly intuitive about it. Grandma wouldn't be able to do this.
I'm not trying to flame; it is just that the out of the box intuitiveness of Windows is tremendously overstated.
Apple has spent gobs of cash to get the bump up in market share and still they can't get to even 10%. The ubiquity of laptops has changed the market to a significant extent and Apple does far better there than on the desktop.
Seeing as Linux has pretty much only word of mouth for promotion for desktop usage, its not doing too shabbily.
One thing that has routinely annoyed me is when some of the Gnome devs do stuff and their reasoning consists of nothing more than "that is what Windows does". COM, the awfulness of gconf (*actually* modeled on the Windows registry), and so on.
Big problem is that if your aim is to catch up, then, by definition, you can never lead.
Anywhere I have a choice, I don't use Windows because I do not like it. I never used Photoshop or Visio or Office (I don't like word processors either). I did play a lot of games, but my dislike of Windows was great enough that I just forked over cash for a game console and I don't touch PC games anymore. So, for me, there were no insurmountable boundaries for dumping it; I recognize that there are apps which other people find essential and for which there are no acceptable alternatives in FOSS. Sucks, but again, unless something SUPERIOR appears, we'll always be in catch up mode, because somebody else is the defining example.
So it can't just be "just as easy" or even "a good bit easier". It pretty much needs to be a game changer.
Primary problem, in my opinion, is that Wine is attempting too much. For example, there are known instances of games which worked okay with older versions of Wine which do not work with later versions.
I would think a practical approach would let several versions of the Wine dlls exist and keep working with apps which depend on them. That plus some sort of database which Wine (instead of the user) can check for "what works best with this program".
One of the primary problems of estimating the number of users who use Linux or the BSDs is that, if they use them there, they likely use Windows at work. So at work they tally in the Windows column, even though it is only because they have to.
I think in order to get a better picture, they need to estimate the number of Windows users who are using it at work and then cut them out. The comparison of what is left would give a better idea, I would think, about what people use when they have a choice in the matter.
The average user has so many problems on Windows that there are an entire industries dedicated to fixing their problems.
The Windows UI is crap. The everything and the kitchen sink program listing is awful. Most of the admin utilities are hideous and about as unintuitive as they come.
If Windows was even marginally as "easy to use" as is claimed, then my name would not be in the mental rolodex of everyone I know where I am listed under "can fix my computer".
How is driving to a store easier than using Synaptic? How is having to find crap like the VB runtime (manual dependency checking) so simple?
Last time I bothered with trying to dual boot (for games, 2 1/2 years ago), practically nothing was supported. Had to find all the drivers by manually looking for them on the internet (in Ubuntu, since the network card didn't work in Windows) and the wireless never worked at all. The experience was such shit, I wiped the partition and now only use Windows at work, where due to the shoddiness of the OS, the anti-virus makes it unusable for an hour a day.
I've got a UltraSparc IIe laptop and the only OSes that will run on it are Solaris and OpenBSD. Newer versions of Solaris give an awful user experience no matter what you do; the machine does only have a 650Mhz processor. It had gotten so bad it was looking like I might actually have to buy a new laptop, instead of waiting like I want to for relatively inexpensive mobile quad core.
The OpenBSD guys, for whatever reason, decided that supporting this oddball laptop was something they wanted to do. No idea what prompted this, but it has been a godsend for me. I did have to do some hand X configuration stuff, but it was easy enough. Initially, I ran XFCE, but now use awesome (because it is awesome, obviously) and I really like the set up.
Aside from a web browser, a PDF reader (epdfview), freecell and ummm, nothing else I guess; I don't really use that many GUI apps on my laptop. While I'd prefer to use Midori (the laptop is slow), firefox performance is still in the acceptable range.
I'm using the shell a lot more, obviously, than I do on my Ubuntu desktop and I'm liking it well enough.
The OpenBSD team decided to actively support my Tadpole Sparcle 650SX and they have my gratitude for this.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe that I'm never gonna come get some again...
In a 2001 rant against RMS (on which I take no stand here) he wrote this:
Despite what Stallman believes, maintaining a GNU project is NOT a privilege. It's a burden, and the bigger the project the bigger the burden. I have no interest to allow somebody else to tell me what to do and not to do if this is part of my free time. There are plenty of others interesting things to do and I'll immediately walk away from glibc if I see a situation like this coming up again. I will always be able to fix my own system (and if the company I work for wants it, their systems).
I got what you meant and I agreed :) In the context of what you were talking about (a fully functioning system), that stuff is pretty low level.
Graphic Novels work rather differently than comic books here in the US. Most bookstores will carry those. Some of them carry a whole wall of them, both US comics and translated Japanese manga, like my local Barnes & Noble.
As I understand it, comics were popular, but not routinely bought. Kids would park themselves near the rack and read them, but little actually got purchased. Parents would buy them for their kids (thanks Mom!) but, increasingly in the late 80s, fewer and fewer would be sold. So stores did what stores do with something that takes up space, but doesn't produce adequate profit: they got rid of them.
I still like comics, but at $3.00 a shot and the monthly grind that I am no longer interested in dealing with (hello early 1990s!) I just wait for the trade to come out.
But the book would have sucked and have bombed. Then you'd be in here complaining that you should have spent all that time playing some non-existent game where you could zap ghosts with a want of polymorph or drop merchant caravans into lava out of curiosity.
Building a well has proven to be problematic, though educational. I learned that there are different kinds of rivers. If you do it wrong you will flood your fortress and drown your dwarves. It made me sad.
And psycho axe wielding dwarf maniacs were not something I was expecting either.
It is a change of who you are allowed to hate, I guess.
And don't forget the "if you don't vote for this, you are a racist!" nonsense.
The problem is that the Supreme Court upheld the "hate speech" stuff. The court has accepted that what you say or believe can, in fact, lead to criminal penalties.
With your Windows example, you demonstrated that it is easy, if you already know how to do it. There isn't anything particularly intuitive about it. Grandma wouldn't be able to do this.
I'm not trying to flame; it is just that the out of the box intuitiveness of Windows is tremendously overstated.
My bad. I meant to write gconf-editor.
Can't forget the marketing campaigns.
Apple has spent gobs of cash to get the bump up in market share and still they can't get to even 10%. The ubiquity of laptops has changed the market to a significant extent and Apple does far better there than on the desktop.
Seeing as Linux has pretty much only word of mouth for promotion for desktop usage, its not doing too shabbily.
One thing that has routinely annoyed me is when some of the Gnome devs do stuff and their reasoning consists of nothing more than "that is what Windows does". COM, the awfulness of gconf (*actually* modeled on the Windows registry), and so on.
Big problem is that if your aim is to catch up, then, by definition, you can never lead.
Anywhere I have a choice, I don't use Windows because I do not like it. I never used Photoshop or Visio or Office (I don't like word processors either). I did play a lot of games, but my dislike of Windows was great enough that I just forked over cash for a game console and I don't touch PC games anymore. So, for me, there were no insurmountable boundaries for dumping it; I recognize that there are apps which other people find essential and for which there are no acceptable alternatives in FOSS. Sucks, but again, unless something SUPERIOR appears, we'll always be in catch up mode, because somebody else is the defining example.
So it can't just be "just as easy" or even "a good bit easier". It pretty much needs to be a game changer.
Primary problem, in my opinion, is that Wine is attempting too much. For example, there are known instances of games which worked okay with older versions of Wine which do not work with later versions.
I would think a practical approach would let several versions of the Wine dlls exist and keep working with apps which depend on them. That plus some sort of database which Wine (instead of the user) can check for "what works best with this program".
"Even reasonably non-technical dumbasses could do such a thing in windows."
No they can't.
But this does not solve your problem. How have you tried to do it? Perhaps we can help.
One of the primary problems of estimating the number of users who use Linux or the BSDs is that, if they use them there, they likely use Windows at work. So at work they tally in the Windows column, even though it is only because they have to.
I think in order to get a better picture, they need to estimate the number of Windows users who are using it at work and then cut them out. The comparison of what is left would give a better idea, I would think, about what people use when they have a choice in the matter.
The average user has so many problems on Windows that there are an entire industries dedicated to fixing their problems.
The Windows UI is crap. The everything and the kitchen sink program listing is awful. Most of the admin utilities are hideous and about as unintuitive as they come.
If Windows was even marginally as "easy to use" as is claimed, then my name would not be in the mental rolodex of everyone I know where I am listed under "can fix my computer".
How is driving to a store easier than using Synaptic? How is having to find crap like the VB runtime (manual dependency checking) so simple?
Last time I bothered with trying to dual boot (for games, 2 1/2 years ago), practically nothing was supported. Had to find all the drivers by manually looking for them on the internet (in Ubuntu, since the network card didn't work in Windows) and the wireless never worked at all. The experience was such shit, I wiped the partition and now only use Windows at work, where due to the shoddiness of the OS, the anti-virus makes it unusable for an hour a day.
Is that the one where psot, having killed post, is hunted down by what turns out to be a previously unknown triplet, tops?
I read slashdot on Windows at work, Linux at home and OpenBSD at the coffee shop. I am, statistically, 3 people :)
So Linux could have a negative users? I mean, I can be disgruntled...
I've got a UltraSparc IIe laptop and the only OSes that will run on it are Solaris and OpenBSD. Newer versions of Solaris give an awful user experience no matter what you do; the machine does only have a 650Mhz processor. It had gotten so bad it was looking like I might actually have to buy a new laptop, instead of waiting like I want to for relatively inexpensive mobile quad core.
The OpenBSD guys, for whatever reason, decided that supporting this oddball laptop was something they wanted to do. No idea what prompted this, but it has been a godsend for me. I did have to do some hand X configuration stuff, but it was easy enough. Initially, I ran XFCE, but now use awesome (because it is awesome, obviously) and I really like the set up.
Aside from a web browser, a PDF reader (epdfview), freecell and ummm, nothing else I guess; I don't really use that many GUI apps on my laptop. While I'd prefer to use Midori (the laptop is slow), firefox performance is still in the acceptable range.
I'm using the shell a lot more, obviously, than I do on my Ubuntu desktop and I'm liking it well enough.
The OpenBSD team decided to actively support my Tadpole Sparcle 650SX and they have my gratitude for this.
It was a rare thing, really. An entire planetful of people crying out, "This sucks!" and, lo!, they were right.
Everybody claimed that Spiderman 3 sucked.