Let me clarify and this goes for the post by slim as well - I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to change the environment, but there should be a standard one out of the box. I think it's kind of wierd that the X architecture doesn't come with its own widgets, and that linux doesn't have a standard GUI. If you want to be productive in a work environment like my own, you need to be able to sit down at any machine and know how to use it, not have to learn the linux l33t wm of the week.
GUI customizations/wm replacements in linux are, for the most part, frivolous and unnecessary. I'm talking geared mostly towards the workplace here, since that seems to be what linux is targetting these days. And frankly, I can see the IT staff of a large company requiring that there be a standard interface across desktop machines - otherwise, support could be a horrible headache. The option should be there, but there should be a standard default.
As far as the widget sets go, I don't care WHO does it. Point is, right now, X looks hella ugly, with every app using a different set. If someone wants to come up with a different widget set, more power to them. Balkanization is, like it or not, inherent in OSS. Here's an idea - maybe someone needs to make an architecture to use different widgets instead of including them with an app - ie, centralized control over widgets. That would be WAY preferable.
A crucial element of having a GUI is that there is a common look and feel among the applications. In Linux, there's 4+ widget sets, a couple desktop environments, and countless window managers - and each distro comes set up differently. At the very least, a widget set should be made standard, and a default windowmanager/desktop environment should be chosen.
This lack of consistent interface is one of the major things that the X environment ugly as hell, along with things like having no anti-aliasing, that should be replaced in the next release.
All politics aside, I'd be happy to use Office for Linux. Simply put, it's better than anything else currently available on the platform. And of course, for those of us that have to interact with the real world occasionally, having support for MS formats is fairly critical, whether we like it or not. If MS wants to release it and loosen the Windows monopoly, more power to them.
Well, I suppose I'm just vain. Or insecure, however you want to put it. And I have no idea how paunch is sexy. I've never found it attractive on a guy. Thing I've seen is that most women don't care one way or the other how you look at all - I suppose women just aren't as into physical attraction as men are, so I suppose it's difficult for me to understand. But if they don't care either way, I may as well go for the way that looks best to me.
"I like female voices, and the female characters in games generally make all kinds of cute little grunts and moans and groans. I don't mean that in any kind of erotic manner either, it's just that they sound nice."
I got a chuckle out of that one. Must just be some of those non-erotic but just aesthetically pleasing moans, groans, and grunts. Ok, so did none of the respondents admit that the female pain sounds turn them on? Sure, it's disturbing, but hey, pain moans sound a lot like sex moans. Deal with it. No one wants to admit the models/skins turn them on? I mean, there are other reasons to play female characters (artists DO put way more time in to them), but I think basic issues of libido were WAY minimized.
Seems like a lot of guys that sent in comments were quick to say that although they enjoyed the aesthetics of female models, the sounds, movements, etc - none of it is (*gasp*) erotic, mind you. Well, hey - I can just speak for myself, but I think they are. The reason I like the female form is because of beauty and eroticism, not some sterile, art-gallery appreciation. Possibly guys don't want to say this because they're afraid as coming of as being sexist or freakish? Or maybe I'm the only guy who feels this way and will say so.
Okay, do you want to offer anything to back up your statements, or would you prefer to talk out of your ass? You remind me of a billboard running in the town where I live now:
"Strip Bars are hurtful to women and children", with a child hiding in the corner with a teddy bear.
No explanation as to what children have to do with strip bars, nor how women are harmed. I'm sure "porn addiction" can occur, much like chocolate "addiction", internet "addiction", and any other bullshit addictions that people use to place blame for their actions on something other than themselves.
Also, show me one instance of the "obsessive viewing of porn in public".
mmmkay, you've obviously not watched european television. The level of actual nudity is WAY higher than what you'll see in the US. The idea there is that there's way more sex, and a lot less violence. And that's the way it should be.
I'm sure this guy objects to being called horrifying. I myself was 5'11 and 120-125 lbs all through high school, and there was nothing wrong with me. I ate reasonably well. I mean, yes, my hipbones and ribs stuck out a little bit, but I had no physical problems as a result of it, and probably looked better, IMO than I do now(I'm now 6' and 145-150). I've been weight training, which probably has something to do with the gain.
BTW, what are other exercises to do for your abs other than situps and leglifts? I just feel the pull in my upper abs, what can I do for the lower? (read: I wanna sixpack.:)
There is a post above addressing this, but just as a counterexample: I know several vegans who have never broken a bone.
This is about the most ridiculous argument you make here. The point that was trying to be made was that vegans tend to break bones more easily, and take longer to heal, not that all vegan people break bones. Should we counter your arguments with "Well, I know several meat-eaters that have never had a heart attack."?
Apparently a lot of people experience this at first when switching to any unfamiliar diet. It takes time for your body to adjust. Three months is not very long.
Three months is quite a long time. Most nutritional books I have read indicate that changes in diet will have noticable effect in the time of one month. I think it would be a correct conclusion to draw if one was vegan for 3 months and felt weaker, that being vegan is not for that person.
This is a common claim of whey protein purveyors.
And that is a common claim of vegans. Who's telling the truth?
This article really doesn't say a whole lot - it doesn't even give any numbers except for downtime. Can anyone find the actual statistics of the study? They didn't provide a link to them, and I can't find it on Bloor's website. It's going to take a little more than the information in this report to convince me, and most anyone else except for current Linux users, to use Linux in a corporate setting.
The one good point in the article, though, was that neither Linux nor NT are suitable for enterprise environments.
I don't know much about landfill technology - were these things compacted before dumping? Guess there's no chance of being able to excavate them by now, without some pretty sophisticated sonar.
There are 2 problems I have with this kind of strategy - it uses software patents, and it reinforces problems that a lot of the non-linux OS community have been having. There are too many programs e.g. OSS(don't get me started), that say "here, the Linux version is free, but you have to pay for any other version". Giving things away for free is all fine and good, but doing it selectively is very frustrating for those of use that use any OSes like xBSd.
Either make it open, or make it closed, don't be half-assed about it.
You're not helping either, making the rest of us atheists look like jackasses. Don't you think it's a little hypocritical to complain about xians handing out bibles, and then proselytizing from your point of view?
Oh grow up. Do you really think that everyone who says something critical of Linux is somehow spreading FUD, or is paid off by MS? Can we say that you're just spreading lies from the RedHat marketing dept? IMO, I thought that was a very good post - there are very few high-quality applications that end-users care about available for Linux. None of the office suites are as good as MS Office, none of the web browsers are as functional and stable as IE.
The vast majority of those "thousands of applications" are things that end-users wouldn't care much about - windowmaker dock apps, command line utilities, obscure network tools, etc. Obviously, there is plenty of decent software, but as far as real high-quality applications for the end user, there's just not much there.
And it's real simple to tell which users prefer. Give them a Linux box, give them a windows box, and see which one they go for. Everywhere I've worked, most users preferred Windows over Unix.
As far as "demonstrating" anything,
a) How are you supposed to do that in a/. forum?
b) By any standard guidelines of debate procedure, the burden of proof is upon you to prove that Linux IS up to the challenge of any desktop user, not for us to prove otherwise.
The prices of site licenses vary, but when you get into the range of >$10,000 you can usually get a much better deal by getting one, and it makes keeping track of licenses soooo much easier - like, you don't have to:).
What's really a shame is that CS classes are being overrun with MS development tools. I mean, obviously that's very useful in the real world, but unix programming should at least be an option - but in the CS dept. where I'm at, everything has gone to NT. Teaching intro classes with Visual J++.
I'm not sure about the universities paying all that much money, I'd have to investigate further and talk to the people in the computing center here.
You may be paying $200 per disc where you are, but the value of the software is determined by how many people buy it. If only one person bought the disc, it would be worth thousands. If a lot of people buy it, the price per disc goes down. That said, I'm not even certain that our Universities have the same deal.
I understand this deal. But when I go and buy a copy of Win98, WinNT, Visual Everything, and MS Office all for $20, I've saved a hell of a lot more than my "technology fee". And at my university, they sell around 50-100 cds a day. I don't see how that indicates that the administration is corrupt - they shelled out some money to provide a useful service for their students, and MS gave them software for cheap.
1) After you graduate, your license will run up and you will be forced to purchase a new version of Visual Studio (with a REAL license this time) for $2000
No problem. $2000 is cheap, and most companies will gladly give me that.
2) You will convince your pointy-haired boss that you NEED Visual Studio for productive work, so he will be forced to shell out $2000x100 for all of his employees.
No, if you need that many copies, then what you would buy is a site license, as my workplace has for MS Office.
3) A client your company has is using a *nix variant and you don't know how to do it... You convince them to switch to Microsoft and they pay the same thing your pointy haired boss did.
I do know how to use Unix. There's no reason why using, learning, and being effective with different operating systems can't happen at the same time. It's good for one to learn Unix, but it's absolutely critical to have knowledge of MS products. The reason for that is partially that they have a hold on the OS market, and partially because they make some good products.
Does any corporation do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? Are we supposed to think that RedHat isn't a business, but a collection of philanthropes? I very much realize why Microsoft is giving the product away, but that doesn't keep me from liking it any less.
-lx
Figures the first time I get a score of 4 I accidentally post as an AC...
Erm, can linux stream video and sound while playing an mp3 and browsing the web? -->I don't think so
Nowhere did I say Linux definitely COULDN'T do these things, just that I have not observed it. My Linux box cannot reliably play a video and an mp3 without chopping up while I do other things. My BeOS box can. BeOS is generally optimized for media applications, whereas Linux is server-oriented. Linux is not a swiss army OS that can just be applied to anything.
I very much doubt that OS had much to do with this, and maybe that the DoS even took down any BSD boxes. According to what I've read from Yahoo, the problem was with the volume of traffic hitting their routers. It may not have taken anything down, but was simply "offline" because nothing could squeeze around the traffic from the DoS. I doubt there are many sites in the world that can handle 1GB/s of traffic gracefully.
In my experience with FreeBSD, you can bang on the thing so hard that it takes 15 minutes for a mouse cursor refresh(of course no one runs X on their servers), and it still stays up. Of course, FreeBSD can be taken down, but it's a mite bit harder than other OSes.
Oops, I'm sorry, I guess I missed when Linux came out with multinode audio, and an integrated, stable sound system. However, it is good to see that Linux is finally getting support for journalling file systems after all these years.
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Let me clarify and this goes for the post by slim as well - I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to change the environment, but there should be a standard one out of the box. I think it's kind of wierd that the X architecture doesn't come with its own widgets, and that linux doesn't have a standard GUI. If you want to be productive in a work environment like my own, you need to be able to sit down at any machine and know how to use it, not have to learn the linux l33t wm of the week.
GUI customizations/wm replacements in linux are, for the most part, frivolous and unnecessary. I'm talking geared mostly towards the workplace here, since that seems to be what linux is targetting these days. And frankly, I can see the IT staff of a large company requiring that there be a standard interface across desktop machines - otherwise, support could be a horrible headache. The option should be there, but there should be a standard default.
As far as the widget sets go, I don't care WHO does it. Point is, right now, X looks hella ugly, with every app using a different set. If someone wants to come up with a different widget set, more power to them. Balkanization is, like it or not, inherent in OSS. Here's an idea - maybe someone needs to make an architecture to use different widgets instead of including them with an app - ie, centralized control over widgets. That would be WAY preferable.
-lx
A crucial element of having a GUI is that there is a common look and feel among the applications. In Linux, there's 4+ widget sets, a couple desktop environments, and countless window managers - and each distro comes set up differently. At the very least, a widget set should be made standard, and a default windowmanager/desktop environment should be chosen.
This lack of consistent interface is one of the major things that the X environment ugly as hell, along with things like having no anti-aliasing, that should be replaced in the next release.
-lx
All politics aside, I'd be happy to use Office for Linux. Simply put, it's better than anything else currently available on the platform. And of course, for those of us that have to interact with the real world occasionally, having support for MS formats is fairly critical, whether we like it or not. If MS wants to release it and loosen the Windows monopoly, more power to them.
-lx
Well, I suppose I'm just vain. Or insecure, however you want to put it. And I have no idea how paunch is sexy. I've never found it attractive on a guy. Thing I've seen is that most women don't care one way or the other how you look at all - I suppose women just aren't as into physical attraction as men are, so I suppose it's difficult for me to understand. But if they don't care either way, I may as well go for the way that looks best to me.
-lx
"I like female voices, and the female characters
in games generally make all kinds of cute little grunts and moans and groans. I don't mean that in any kind of erotic manner either, it's just that they sound nice."
I got a chuckle out of that one. Must just be some of those non-erotic but just aesthetically pleasing moans, groans, and grunts. Ok, so did none of the respondents admit that the female pain sounds turn them on? Sure, it's disturbing, but hey, pain moans sound a lot like sex moans. Deal with it. No one wants to admit the models/skins turn them on? I mean, there are other reasons to play female characters (artists DO put way more time in to them), but I think basic issues of libido were WAY minimized.
Seems like a lot of guys that sent in comments were quick to say that although they enjoyed the aesthetics of female models, the sounds, movements, etc - none of it is (*gasp*) erotic, mind you. Well, hey - I can just speak for myself, but I think they are. The reason I like the female form is because of beauty and eroticism, not some sterile, art-gallery appreciation. Possibly guys don't want to say this because they're afraid as coming of as being sexist or freakish? Or maybe I'm the only guy who feels this way and will say so.
(shrug)
-lx
Okay, do you want to offer anything to back up your statements, or would you prefer to talk out of your ass? You remind me of a billboard running in the town where I live now:
"Strip Bars are hurtful to women and children", with a child hiding in the corner with a teddy bear.
No explanation as to what children have to do with strip bars, nor how women are harmed. I'm sure "porn addiction" can occur, much like chocolate "addiction", internet "addiction", and any other bullshit addictions that people use to place blame for their actions on something other than themselves.
Also, show me one instance of the "obsessive viewing of porn in public".
-lx
mmmkay, you've obviously not watched european television. The level of actual nudity is WAY higher than what you'll see in the US. The idea there is that there's way more sex, and a lot less violence. And that's the way it should be.
-lx
I'm sure this guy objects to being called horrifying. I myself was 5'11 and 120-125 lbs all through high school, and there was nothing wrong with me. I ate reasonably well. I mean, yes, my hipbones and ribs stuck out a little bit, but I had no physical problems as a result of it, and probably looked better, IMO than I do now(I'm now 6' and 145-150). I've been weight training, which probably has something to do with the gain.
:)
BTW, what are other exercises to do for your abs other than situps and leglifts? I just feel the pull in my upper abs, what can I do for the lower? (read: I wanna sixpack.
-lx
There is a post above addressing this, but just as a counterexample: I know several vegans who have never broken a bone.
This is about the most ridiculous argument you make here. The point that was trying to be made was that vegans tend to break bones more easily, and take longer to heal, not that all vegan people break bones. Should we counter your arguments with "Well, I know several meat-eaters that have never had a heart attack."?
Apparently a lot of people experience this at first when switching to any unfamiliar diet. It takes time for your body to adjust. Three months is not very long.
Three months is quite a long time. Most nutritional books I have read indicate that changes in diet will have noticable effect in the time of one month. I think it would be a correct conclusion to draw if one was vegan for 3 months and felt weaker, that being vegan is not for that person.
This is a common claim of whey protein purveyors.
And that is a common claim of vegans. Who's telling the truth?
-lx
This article really doesn't say a whole lot - it doesn't even give any numbers except for downtime. Can anyone find the actual statistics of the study? They didn't provide a link to them, and I can't find it on Bloor's website. It's going to take a little more than the information in this report to convince me, and most anyone else except for current Linux users, to use Linux in a corporate setting.
The one good point in the article, though, was that neither Linux nor NT are suitable for enterprise environments.
-lx
RMS did some great things, but keep them in perspective - he also gave us EMACS and bash.
-lx
I don't know much about landfill technology - were these things compacted before dumping? Guess there's no chance of being able to excavate them by now, without some pretty sophisticated sonar.
-lx
There are 2 problems I have with this kind of strategy - it uses software patents, and it reinforces problems that a lot of the non-linux OS community have been having. There are too many programs e.g. OSS(don't get me started), that say "here, the Linux version is free, but you have to pay for any other version". Giving things away for free is all fine and good, but doing it selectively is very frustrating for those of use that use any OSes like xBSd.
Either make it open, or make it closed, don't be half-assed about it.
-lx
That's "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'".
-lx
You're not helping either, making the rest of us atheists look like jackasses. Don't you think it's a little hypocritical to complain about xians handing out bibles, and then proselytizing from your point of view?
-lx
Oh grow up. Do you really think that everyone who says something critical of Linux is somehow spreading FUD, or is paid off by MS? Can we say that you're just spreading lies from the RedHat marketing dept? IMO, I thought that was a very good post - there are very few high-quality applications that end-users care about available for Linux. None of the office suites are as good as MS Office, none of the web browsers are as functional and stable as IE.
/. forum?
The vast majority of those "thousands of applications" are things that end-users wouldn't care much about - windowmaker dock apps, command line utilities, obscure network tools, etc. Obviously, there is plenty of decent software, but as far as real high-quality applications for the end user, there's just not much there.
And it's real simple to tell which users prefer. Give them a Linux box, give them a windows box, and see which one they go for. Everywhere I've worked, most users preferred Windows over Unix.
As far as "demonstrating" anything,
a) How are you supposed to do that in a
b) By any standard guidelines of debate procedure, the burden of proof is upon you to prove that Linux IS up to the challenge of any desktop user, not for us to prove otherwise.
-lx
The prices of site licenses vary, but when you get into the range of >$10,000 you can usually get a much better deal by getting one, and it makes keeping track of licenses soooo much easier - like, you don't have to :).
What's really a shame is that CS classes are being overrun with MS development tools. I mean, obviously that's very useful in the real world, but unix programming should at least be an option - but in the CS dept. where I'm at, everything has gone to NT. Teaching intro classes with Visual J++.
I'm not sure about the universities paying all that much money, I'd have to investigate further and talk to the people in the computing center here.
-lx
You may be paying $200 per disc where you are, but the value of the software is determined by how many people buy it. If only one person bought the disc, it would be worth thousands. If a lot of people buy it, the price per disc goes down. That said, I'm not even certain that our Universities have the same deal.
-lx
I understand this deal. But when I go and buy a copy of Win98, WinNT, Visual Everything, and MS Office all for $20, I've saved a hell of a lot more than my "technology fee". And at my university, they sell around 50-100 cds a day. I don't see how that indicates that the administration is corrupt - they shelled out some money to provide a useful service for their students, and MS gave them software for cheap.
-lx
1) After you graduate, your license will run up and you will be forced to purchase a new version of Visual Studio (with a REAL license this time) for $2000
No problem. $2000 is cheap, and most companies will gladly give me that.
2) You will convince your pointy-haired boss that you NEED Visual Studio for productive work, so he will be forced to shell out $2000x100 for all of his employees.
No, if you need that many copies, then what you would buy is a site license, as my workplace has for MS Office.
3) A client your company has is using a *nix variant and you don't know how to do it... You convince them to switch to Microsoft and they pay the same thing your pointy haired boss did.
I do know how to use Unix. There's no reason why using, learning, and being effective with different operating systems can't happen at the same time. It's good for one to learn Unix, but it's absolutely critical to have knowledge of MS products. The reason for that is partially that they have a hold on the OS market, and partially because they make some good products.
-lx
Does any corporation do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? Are we supposed to think that RedHat isn't a business, but a collection of philanthropes? I very much realize why Microsoft is giving the product away, but that doesn't keep me from liking it any less.
-lx
Figures the first time I get a score of 4 I accidentally post as an AC...
Erm, can linux stream video and sound while playing an mp3 and browsing the web? -->I don't think so
Nowhere did I say Linux definitely COULDN'T do these things, just that I have not observed it. My Linux box cannot reliably play a video and an mp3 without chopping up while I do other things. My BeOS box can. BeOS is generally optimized for media applications, whereas Linux is server-oriented. Linux is not a swiss army OS that can just be applied to anything.
-lx
I very much doubt that OS had much to do with this, and maybe that the DoS even took down any BSD boxes. According to what I've read from Yahoo, the problem was with the volume of traffic hitting their routers. It may not have taken anything down, but was simply "offline" because nothing could squeeze around the traffic from the DoS. I doubt there are many sites in the world that can handle 1GB/s of traffic gracefully.
In my experience with FreeBSD, you can bang on the thing so hard that it takes 15 minutes for a mouse cursor refresh(of course no one runs X on their servers), and it still stays up. Of course, FreeBSD can be taken down, but it's a mite bit harder than other OSes.
Oops, I'm sorry, I guess I missed when Linux came out with multinode audio, and an integrated, stable sound system. However, it is good to see that Linux is finally getting support for journalling file systems after all these years.
Point out to me one lie in my previous post.
-lx
Of course there's a linguistic contradiction, but it's a perfectly reasonable comment to make. I don't understand what you're getting at.
-lx