You'll have to pay $1 after 50 years, and $1 every 5 years after that (55, 60, 65, etc.) in order to keep your copyright for whatever maximum length of time Disney has forced Congress to set by then.
50 years! Do you really think your software will be useful for that long? Think of how much technology will change by then (provided we haven't all killed each other).
If you abuse this system, then you will be giving ammunition to the telemarketing companies, possibly resulting in the list going away. I, for one, will be more than happy to simply add my own number to this list and be done with it. Let everyone see that it works exactly as intended.
I don't care if they can make enough of a profit off of calling other people to continue calling me. Honestly, I don't spend my money in the same way as most other people, so I don't see how the profitability of the company and their ability to invade my day with advertising are related.
Just because I think that the clothes, food, music, etc. that other people buy every day in this country are terrible does not mean that the majority will stop buying them. Therefore, companies whose products do not interest me can continue to be profitable, and I can do nothing about it. But you are suggesting that nothing should stop them from advertising to me.
This is why companies are required to maintain their own "no call" list in the U.S., and required to put you on it for 10 years when you ask. All that is new here is making it more convenient for me to tell everyone "NO" all at once. I don't want my guitar playing interrupted by someone trying to sell me the New York Times. If I want to buy something, I take the time to look for options on my own, and usually get things on the recommendations of friends.
Commercial breaks on TV are time for situps, or switching to Cartoon Network for a few minutes. Spam is filtered. Those who knock on my door never succeed. Really, I would be doing these companies a favor by telling them not to bother with me, and increasing their profits rather than decreasing them.
Working at a college radio station, we get a few dozen CDs every week. About half of these are bland like what is on commercial radio, but at least a few every week are really, really good. Also, if a CD only has two or three good tracks on it, that's the exception, not the rule.
Of course, it may be harder for you to find this type of stuff, since you don't have labels and distributors sending it to you every week. But it's not that hard. Check out your local college station. If you don't have one, or they don't play the type of music you like, check out ours! [Note: currently automated broadcast from our catalog because this is finals time, but that will give you some idea of the music.] Most towns have music venues and CD stores that focus on independant/local artists; check those out too. In Baltimore, it's SoundGarden (not related to the band). Visit www.cmj.com for "what's new" this week in college radio (but note that every station will have its own version, leaving out some of those bands and inserting others. We don't make our DJs follow playlists.)
Commercial radio is going to be bland because the people behind it are interested in making money rather than art. But you don't have to be limited by their ambitions.
OK, so the frog boiling thing is an urban legend. But according to my brother, who sells dozens of different types of reptiles and knows a great deal about them, there is a frog that is SO LAZY that they will not move even though they are being gradually eaten by smaller insects.
This frog is known as the Pac-Man Frog (I Am Not Making This Up). I saw some two days ago at a reptile show, and they deserve the name; they're basically a big blob with a mouth. Their daily routine consists of sitting still and eating whatever comes too close (including mice, or your hand; they do have fangs and a quite painful bite).
Why do you think there's no variety in music radio? Consolidation! Hello!? Could it be that the same company owns most of the radio stations? Could this be why all the music sounds the same? Try listening to a college radio station sometime, and not a make-believe college station that isn't run by the students (we have a few of these in Maryland, and it's really annoying; that is NOT "college radio").
Newspapers are still more comfortable to read than Web sites, and the iLoo notwithstanding, there are many situations where they still just work better. The Retriever at UMBC, a medium-sized research university (mostly commuters, mostly disinterested in anything but academics, many CS majors) has a circulation of 15,000, and NO subscribers. That's just from people picking up the paper. It's all online too, at trw.umbc.edu, but we sure don't get 15,000 hits a week.
To be 100% honest, I'm half-convinced you're a troll. But if not, please consider my statements.
It's not a good idea to hit someone in the face (with a fist), as that's an easy way to break one or more of your fingers. Make sure to either use an open-handed strike (hit them with the heel of your palm), or something even better, like a chair.
This article is not about plugging your $100 printer into your $500 PC. It's about businesses, and it would be silly for them to use such equipment. Even with small businesses, it makes far more sense to have at least a network printer (like HP's 4000N or whatever newer model has replaced it), and probably a print/file server as well. There is more than enough hardware compatibility for such things.
Samsung Contact, formerly an HP product under a different name, is an Exchange replacement for at least Linux (and possibly other *nix platforms). I hear it's quite good. I haven't used it personally, but I can say that they're very good about keeping their freshmeat record up to date, and leaving tons of comments to let users know what's happening.:)
You probably took a psychology course or two in college; do you remember Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? It basically puts the needs of people into 5 groups in a pyramid shape, and states that you can't begin to work on a certain type of need until you've satisfied the one below it.
So obviously, if you're worrying about getting food, you're not thinking so much about living in a dangerous area. Living in a dangerous area? It's hard to concentrate on raising a good family (but it can be done; there are exceptions to every rule, including the rule that there are exceptions to every rule:).
We do list Cygwin; it's one of our very special exceptions to the rule, along with a project that allows you to run KDE on Windows.
As for the projects you named which have Windows equivalents, we do list this information, though it is up to the contributor to classify it as such. A project can be added to one of several Windows categories if it supports that platform, and if you browse by category, you can see all of the software we list that runs on Windows (provided it's categorized correctly, which is a big "provided", but not something we can control).
I bought "It Isn't The Fall" by The Lesser Birds of Paradise (Loose Thread Recordings) for my mother, and "High Society" by Enon (Touch and Go) for my brother.
I know I sound like a broken record (ha ha ha), but these smaller labels actually want people to listen to their music. They have enough trouble promoting the stuff; they're certainly not going to put up any obstacles, or do things that would tick off the few customers/loyal radio stations they have.
"But I don't know how to find that stuff / indie music sucks!"
No, it doesn't suck. "High Society" certainly beats the hell out of Queens of the Stone Age. The new Apples In Stereo is great too.
As for finding the music, the College Music Journal (cmj.com) is a great starting point. I'd point you to WMBC's own music database, which is (barely) searchable, but it's still a little shaky; I'm hoping to straighten out the code this winter and release it publically (it also does the tracking the RIAA requires for Internet broadcasting).
[On a nice note, I also got "Big Swing Face" by Bruce Hornsby (RCA) for my father, and it wasn't crippled either.]
Curses; I was about to yell that you still hadn't read the FAQ link I posted, but now I find that gnusoftware.com appears to have vanished. opensource.org has links to some sites, but I'm not sure how good they are. There's also www.ossblacksheep.com, and I believe sourceforge lists any open source project (though they're hardly the same as freshmeat, you can still search for things)
Davecentral is probably more like what you wanted. Unfortunately, it's gone now, and for similar reasons; OSDN didn't have the resources to continue with it [I think that's what the site said a month ago, so it's not like I'm giving out secret information here]. If freshmeat could have handled absorbing it as we did themes.org, maybe we would have.
We still do get oodles of Windows-only submissions, both open and closed source. The problem with only accepting open source Windows apps is that we'd _still_ have a double standard, because we accept closed-source *nix apps.
Finally, I think that part of the reason this new section came into being is because Catie and Patrick use and like OS X. None of us use Windows; Jeff hardly even uses X. I'm not sure we'd be qualified to run a directory of Windows software, and I don't think we're hiring:)
However, freshmeat isn't hostile to Windows users. We have Trove categories for Windows operating systems, and will happily list software which runs under Windows as long as it also runs under one of our supported operating systems. Browsing by category, you can find lots of software "for Windows", and you can restrict searches too. Keep in mind that we don't directly link to Windows downloadables, and we don't take any action if they disappear from project homepages.
Compare our Unix software section and the Palm section. The Palm section is microscopic in comparison; it's dwarfed by the Themes section, which is in turn dwarfed by the Software section.
But imagine what would happen if we allowed Windows software. A flood of applications, to say the least. Sometimes it gets a bit hectic keeping up with all the Unix software and themes, and I think we'd be totally swamped if we added Windows software, thus reducing the usefulness of the site.
Finally, as the FAQ says, there are plenty of software download sites for Windows. We don't need to reinvent that wheel. This is different than PalmOS, because our selection of Palm apps is generally a different sort than the ones at other sites (When we launched the section, Jeff noted that other sites had mainly apps for business users, whereas ours could be more for geeks).
[Why Palm? Unless I'm mistaken, that's still the PDA of choice for *nix folks, since they can actually sync with it]
I am not officially representing OSDN, blah, blah...
True. So make it an option. Popup blocking will return a real handle but not actually draw the window. You can decide whether or not you want it to actually download the content (via an option which is off by default). This might not even have to be in the GUI (the dev team already complains about how complex it's become), but just in prefs.js.
Maybe there could also be an option for popups to open in a tab in the background; I seem to remember someone mentioning this, but I haven't been able to find it.
I think you probably meant to say, "I hate to admit it, but when it comes to usability (GUI, ease of software installation, system navigation) MS is what I believe to be the easiest system that I have used."
Are you really going to try and back up the claim that Windows XP is easier to use than MacOS X? For everyone? Apple did lots of usability testing, and created an operating system that new users can just pick up and run with. Software is also distributed as one file, and the GUI looks much nicer than that of Microsoft.
Of course, these are just the opinions of many happy MacOS users (except for the usability testing and the software distribution; those are facts). Personally, I can't stand to use Windows. I find Enlightenment _far_ easier to use for my daily tasks. I find the software to be much better for my needs. I even like it better than MacOS X.
If set up properly, Linux can be easier for end users to casually use (Web browsing, word processing, email) than Microsoft operating systems. I know; I've helped to do it at the Agape House and I've done it at The Retriever Weekly . It can be customized down to the point of being as simple as possible, without the complexity of a Start Menu and other things which are unnecessary to the user of a few applications.
I find that using Linux as my own desktop is like using vi as my editor. Yes, it took longer to learn than Notepad. However, I can do so much more with it now, and work so much more efficiently. Windows (on other people's machines; I don't dual boot) feels clunky in comparison.
For new users, I think I'd recommend MacOS X. For serious computer people, I'd recommend taking the time to learn a free *nix type system (such as Linux or FreeBSD). I would really only recommend Microsoft Windows to people who are used to it and who don't have the time to learn their way around anything else, or the money to buy a Mac. Sorry, but not everyone feels the same way you do.
My uncle is a science teacher at the McGehee school in North Carolina. He and his students calculated that the mass of the air inside of a refrigerator is about that of a grapefruit.
It's the same reason the temperature is different near the coast, or the ocean is still cold when the days are hot; air doesn't hold on to heat very well, at least not as well as ocean water...or grapes. Your refrigerator is much more efficient when it is full than when it is empty, because the food holds its temperature better than the air. Leaving the door open for several seconds isn't so terrible (however, you shouldn't keep very perishible items, such as eggs, on the door shelves, because they get waved around in the air away from all of the cold food).
An oven works the same way; when you open it, much of the hot air escapes. But if you've let it preheat long enough, the walls of the oven will have been heated through, and the air inside will be able to heat up much faster after you close the door again.
Or, when your one user that insists on running rtin on the server quits, and rtin spirals upward to 99% CPU usage, the machine is still usable by everyone else because rtin is only pegging one CPU. Replace rtin with any other program that does that (though the kernel is getting good at murdering rogue processes).
Why would you do such a silly thing? You could just SSH into the machine and do it yourself. Remember, Linux is designed to be administered remotely.
Additionally, I'd say you're a bit of a strange case, using Windows as an artist. Most artists I know use Macs. My brother is the one exception; he doesn't like Macs at all, though he didn't really like Windows either. He's currently happy using Debian, and likes using the GIMP better than he liked Photoshop.
I use Debian too, but it's not as if I'm doing any serious music work with it (I prefer paper). Though since we finally got that Hammerfall card at the recording studio, that may change soon.
Many people (in the U.S., anyway) don't even know the first thing about taking care of their cars. They may have this vague idea about changing the oil in their cars, but probably only becase Jiffy Lube said so, and that doesn't mean they'll actually do it. They certainly don't know why it's important.
This is a perfect analogy to computers; people don't know about Windows Update, auto-launching email viruses, how to clean up their start menu so that it's not a horrible mass of garbage, not having 80,000 programs running in the systray.
There are plenty of third party Quicktime players, but like most people who think "sushi" means "raw fish", that's probably not what you meant. You probably meant something that plays Quicktime using the Sorenson codec. Quicktime is merely a container; you can shove all sorts of compression schemes in there, and there have been Quicktime players for Linux for years. The specification is open (yes, just like PDF).
(and now there's finally a third party player which supports the Sorenson codecs. The interface looks less like a beat up Pinto than it does, say, ychat:)
Re:Grocery store business is dying, except for WMT
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Oh, poor you, no grocery store alchohol after midnight. In Maryland, they can't sell it at all. Want to cook with some wine (no, not the salt solution passed off as "cooking wine", the real stuff)? That'd be a separate stop at the liquor store, then.
On the upside, Metro is open 24-7, Giant is open almost-24-7 (they close for a bit Sunday morning), and Mars and Han Ah Reum (which are the best for produce) are at least open until 10pm.
I used to do my shopping at 1am, but I've found that as long as you don't do something crazy like visit an Asian supermarket on a Sunday afternoon, and generally avoid rush hour shopping, it's not bad at all.
I'd also much rather shop at a locally owned and run business like Mars than a massive soul-eating entity such as Wal-Mart. I save money by buying fresh food and cooking it myself. It takes more time than getting TV dinners, Stouffer's, or whatever, but I get enjoyment out of cooking, and it tastes better.
This is actually what concerns me the most about online shopping: produce quality. There are always a few rejects in the bin, and I wonder whether they'll use them or not. If I go to the store and the broccoli is just OK, I'll revise my dinner plans for that night. If I click on "order" beneath a picture of perfect broccoli and it shows up wilted, I'm stuck.
In my experience, onboard sound is generally not that hot anyway, especially under Linux (some onboard chipsets can apparently only do 48khz, requiring you to use something like XMMS, which can cope with this. While this is not a big problem, some people prefer command line clients for scripting/reliability [moosic, a program by my former roommate Daniel Pearson, comes to mind]).
Maybe I'm biased, since I have spent several years studying music, including recording, but I've always stayed away from onboard sound. If all you're looking for is audio output, you should be able to easily get a good PCI sound card for under $20 (I'm actually using such a card to stream the live signal for the radio station listed in my sig...and no, it's not down because of the cheap card; we just don't have people on the weekend:).
If it were between a $20 sound card and maintaining a whole other machine, I'd do the sound card for the heat and noise savings alone. You said that your other machine would be running anyway, but hey, it wouldn't have to run Windows.
(I know the pain of keeping a separate Windows machine just for ONE THING, as I used to have to do so in order to sync my PDA [vtech Helio]).
What, exactly, does your Windows machine do with media files that Mplayer can't?
I'm not trolling (I don't troll); I'm really trying to help you with your problem (since you despise Microsoft, I'm assuming you'd like to get rid of that extra Windows machine).
The _only_ thing that currently bothers me about using Debian as a desktop OS is not being able to play all Sorenson files. And, hey, they just fixed it, and I didn't really care all _that_ much about it in the first place. I mean...gee, I can't watch movie trailers. Oh, no! All the fansubs I want to watch are released in some other format anyway. RealOne w/ browser plugin works great with Mozilla (for those foodtv.com videos). No audio formats are unplayable. abcde is amazing at ripping CDs, and xcdroast is trivial to use for burning them.
All I ever had to do with Mplayer was the regular ol'./configure, make, make install.
No need to change your taste in music. If you name some popular bands that you like, I'm sure I can supply a nice list of smaller acts to get you started (if the popular acts are very recent, I might need to do some listening, as my "regular" radio has been broken for about four years).
I'm a music director at a small radio station. Suggesting music that people would like is one of the things that I do:)
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You'll have to pay $1 after 50 years, and $1 every 5 years after that (55, 60, 65, etc.) in order to keep your copyright for whatever maximum length of time Disney has forced Congress to set by then.
50 years! Do you really think your software will be useful for that long? Think of how much technology will change by then (provided we haven't all killed each other).
If you abuse this system, then you will be giving ammunition to the telemarketing companies, possibly resulting in the list going away. I, for one, will be more than happy to simply add my own number to this list and be done with it. Let everyone see that it works exactly as intended.
I don't care if they can make enough of a profit off of calling other people to continue calling me. Honestly, I don't spend my money in the same way as most other people, so I don't see how the profitability of the company and their ability to invade my day with advertising are related.
Just because I think that the clothes, food, music, etc. that other people buy every day in this country are terrible does not mean that the majority will stop buying them. Therefore, companies whose products do not interest me can continue to be profitable, and I can do nothing about it. But you are suggesting that nothing should stop them from advertising to me.
This is why companies are required to maintain their own "no call" list in the U.S., and required to put you on it for 10 years when you ask. All that is new here is making it more convenient for me to tell everyone "NO" all at once. I don't want my guitar playing interrupted by someone trying to sell me the New York Times. If I want to buy something, I take the time to look for options on my own, and usually get things on the recommendations of friends.
Commercial breaks on TV are time for situps, or switching to Cartoon Network for a few minutes. Spam is filtered. Those who knock on my door never succeed. Really, I would be doing these companies a favor by telling them not to bother with me, and increasing their profits rather than decreasing them.
Working at a college radio station, we get a few dozen CDs every week. About half of these are bland like what is on commercial radio, but at least a few every week are really, really good. Also, if a CD only has two or three good tracks on it, that's the exception, not the rule.
Of course, it may be harder for you to find this type of stuff, since you don't have labels and distributors sending it to you every week. But it's not that hard. Check out your local college station. If you don't have one, or they don't play the type of music you like, check out ours! [Note: currently automated broadcast from our catalog because this is finals time, but that will give you some idea of the music.] Most towns have music venues and CD stores that focus on independant/local artists; check those out too. In Baltimore, it's SoundGarden (not related to the band). Visit www.cmj.com for "what's new" this week in college radio (but note that every station will have its own version, leaving out some of those bands and inserting others. We don't make our DJs follow playlists.)
Commercial radio is going to be bland because the people behind it are interested in making money rather than art. But you don't have to be limited by their ambitions.
OK, so the frog boiling thing is an urban legend. But according to my brother, who sells dozens of different types of reptiles and knows a great deal about them, there is a frog that is SO LAZY that they will not move even though they are being gradually eaten by smaller insects.
t tp://www.pacmanfrog.com/
This frog is known as the Pac-Man Frog (I Am Not Making This Up). I saw some two days ago at a reptile show, and they deserve the name; they're basically a big blob with a mouth. Their daily routine consists of sitting still and eating whatever comes too close (including mice, or your hand; they do have fangs and a quite painful bite).
http://www.geocities.com/Petsburgh/Zoo/6379/
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Why do you think there's no variety in music radio? Consolidation! Hello!? Could it be that the same company owns most of the radio stations? Could this be why all the music sounds the same? Try listening to a college radio station sometime, and not a make-believe college station that isn't run by the students (we have a few of these in Maryland, and it's really annoying; that is NOT "college radio").
Newspapers are still more comfortable to read than Web sites, and the iLoo notwithstanding, there are many situations where they still just work better. The Retriever at UMBC, a medium-sized research university (mostly commuters, mostly disinterested in anything but academics, many CS majors) has a circulation of 15,000, and NO subscribers. That's just from people picking up the paper. It's all online too, at trw.umbc.edu, but we sure don't get 15,000 hits a week.
To be 100% honest, I'm half-convinced you're a troll. But if not, please consider my statements.
It's not a good idea to hit someone in the face (with a fist), as that's an easy way to break one or more of your fingers. Make sure to either use an open-handed strike (hit them with the heel of your palm), or something even better, like a chair.
This article is not about plugging your $100 printer into your $500 PC. It's about businesses, and it would be silly for them to use such equipment. Even with small businesses, it makes far more sense to have at least a network printer (like HP's 4000N or whatever newer model has replaced it), and probably a print/file server as well. There is more than enough hardware compatibility for such things.
Samsung Contact, formerly an HP product under a different name, is an Exchange replacement for at least Linux (and possibly other *nix platforms). I hear it's quite good. I haven't used it personally, but I can say that they're very good about keeping their freshmeat record up to date, and leaving tons of comments to let users know what's happening. :)
You probably took a psychology course or two in college; do you remember Maslow's hierarchy of human needs? It basically puts the needs of people into 5 groups in a pyramid shape, and states that you can't begin to work on a certain type of need until you've satisfied the one below it.
:).
Self-actualization
Recognition - (for achievements)
Belongingness - family, coworkers
Security - safety, job security
Physical - food, clothing, shelter
So obviously, if you're worrying about getting food, you're not thinking so much about living in a dangerous area. Living in a dangerous area? It's hard to concentrate on raising a good family (but it can be done; there are exceptions to every rule, including the rule that there are exceptions to every rule
We do list Cygwin; it's one of our very special exceptions to the rule, along with a project that allows you to run KDE on Windows.
As for the projects you named which have Windows equivalents, we do list this information, though it is up to the contributor to classify it as such. A project can be added to one of several Windows categories if it supports that platform, and if you browse by category, you can see all of the software we list that runs on Windows (provided it's categorized correctly, which is a big "provided", but not something we can control).
I bought "It Isn't The Fall" by The Lesser Birds of Paradise (Loose Thread Recordings) for my mother, and "High Society" by Enon (Touch and Go) for my brother.
I know I sound like a broken record (ha ha ha), but these smaller labels actually want people to listen to their music. They have enough trouble promoting the stuff; they're certainly not going to put up any obstacles, or do things that would tick off the few customers/loyal radio stations they have.
"But I don't know how to find that stuff / indie music sucks!"
No, it doesn't suck. "High Society" certainly beats the hell out of Queens of the Stone Age. The new Apples In Stereo is great too.
As for finding the music, the College Music Journal (cmj.com) is a great starting point. I'd point you to WMBC's own music database, which is (barely) searchable, but it's still a little shaky; I'm hoping to straighten out the code this winter and release it publically (it also does the tracking the RIAA requires for Internet broadcasting).
[On a nice note, I also got "Big Swing Face" by Bruce Hornsby (RCA) for my father, and it wasn't crippled either.]
Curses; I was about to yell that you still hadn't read the FAQ link I posted, but now I find that gnusoftware.com appears to have vanished. opensource.org has links to some sites, but I'm not sure how good they are. There's also www.ossblacksheep.com, and I believe sourceforge lists any open source project (though they're hardly the same as freshmeat, you can still search for things)
Davecentral is probably more like what you wanted. Unfortunately, it's gone now, and for similar reasons; OSDN didn't have the resources to continue with it [I think that's what the site said a month ago, so it's not like I'm giving out secret information here]. If freshmeat could have handled absorbing it as we did themes.org, maybe we would have.
We still do get oodles of Windows-only submissions, both open and closed source. The problem with only accepting open source Windows apps is that we'd _still_ have a double standard, because we accept closed-source *nix apps.
Finally, I think that part of the reason this new section came into being is because Catie and Patrick use and like OS X. None of us use Windows; Jeff hardly even uses X. I'm not sure we'd be qualified to run a directory of Windows software, and I don't think we're hiring
However, freshmeat isn't hostile to Windows users. We have Trove categories for Windows operating systems, and will happily list software which runs under Windows as long as it also runs under one of our supported operating systems. Browsing by category, you can find lots of software "for Windows", and you can restrict searches too. Keep in mind that we don't directly link to Windows downloadables, and we don't take any action if they disappear from project homepages.
Thanks for reading our FAQ :)
http://freshmeat.net/faq/view/34/
Compare our Unix software section and the Palm section. The Palm section is microscopic in comparison; it's dwarfed by the Themes section, which is in turn dwarfed by the Software section.
But imagine what would happen if we allowed Windows software. A flood of applications, to say the least. Sometimes it gets a bit hectic keeping up with all the Unix software and themes, and I think we'd be totally swamped if we added Windows software, thus reducing the usefulness of the site.
Finally, as the FAQ says, there are plenty of software download sites for Windows. We don't need to reinvent that wheel. This is different than PalmOS, because our selection of Palm apps is generally a different sort than the ones at other sites (When we launched the section, Jeff noted that other sites had mainly apps for business users, whereas ours could be more for geeks).
[Why Palm? Unless I'm mistaken, that's still the PDA of choice for *nix folks, since they can actually sync with it]
I am not officially representing OSDN, blah, blah...
True. So make it an option. Popup blocking will return a real handle but not actually draw the window. You can decide whether or not you want it to actually download the content (via an option which is off by default). This might not even have to be in the GUI (the dev team already complains about how complex it's become), but just in prefs.js.
Maybe there could also be an option for popups to open in a tab in the background; I seem to remember someone mentioning this, but I haven't been able to find it.
I think you probably meant to say, "I hate to admit it, but when it comes to usability (GUI, ease of software installation, system navigation) MS is what I believe to be the easiest system that I have used."
Are you really going to try and back up the claim that Windows XP is easier to use than MacOS X? For everyone? Apple did lots of usability testing, and created an operating system that new users can just pick up and run with. Software is also distributed as one file, and the GUI looks much nicer than that of Microsoft.
Of course, these are just the opinions of many happy MacOS users (except for the usability testing and the software distribution; those are facts). Personally, I can't stand to use Windows. I find Enlightenment _far_ easier to use for my daily tasks. I find the software to be much better for my needs. I even like it better than MacOS X.
If set up properly, Linux can be easier for end users to casually use (Web browsing, word processing, email) than Microsoft operating systems. I know; I've helped to do it at the Agape House and I've done it at The Retriever Weekly . It can be customized down to the point of being as simple as possible, without the complexity of a Start Menu and other things which are unnecessary to the user of a few applications.
I find that using Linux as my own desktop is like using vi as my editor. Yes, it took longer to learn than Notepad. However, I can do so much more with it now, and work so much more efficiently. Windows (on other people's machines; I don't dual boot) feels clunky in comparison.
For new users, I think I'd recommend MacOS X. For serious computer people, I'd recommend taking the time to learn a free *nix type system (such as Linux or FreeBSD). I would really only recommend Microsoft Windows to people who are used to it and who don't have the time to learn their way around anything else, or the money to buy a Mac. Sorry, but not everyone feels the same way you do.
My uncle is a science teacher at the McGehee school in North Carolina. He and his students calculated that the mass of the air inside of a refrigerator is about that of a grapefruit.
It's the same reason the temperature is different near the coast, or the ocean is still cold when the days are hot; air doesn't hold on to heat very well, at least not as well as ocean water...or grapes. Your refrigerator is much more efficient when it is full than when it is empty, because the food holds its temperature better than the air. Leaving the door open for several seconds isn't so terrible (however, you shouldn't keep very perishible items, such as eggs, on the door shelves, because they get waved around in the air away from all of the cold food).
An oven works the same way; when you open it, much of the hot air escapes. But if you've let it preheat long enough, the walls of the oven will have been heated through, and the air inside will be able to heat up much faster after you close the door again.
Or, when your one user that insists on running rtin on the server quits, and rtin spirals upward to 99% CPU usage, the machine is still usable by everyone else because rtin is only pegging one CPU. Replace rtin with any other program that does that (though the kernel is getting good at murdering rogue processes).
Why would you do such a silly thing? You could just SSH into the machine and do it yourself. Remember, Linux is designed to be administered remotely.
Additionally, I'd say you're a bit of a strange case, using Windows as an artist. Most artists I know use Macs. My brother is the one exception; he doesn't like Macs at all, though he didn't really like Windows either. He's currently happy using Debian, and likes using the GIMP better than he liked Photoshop.
I use Debian too, but it's not as if I'm doing any serious music work with it (I prefer paper). Though since we finally got that Hammerfall card at the recording studio, that may change soon.
Many people (in the U.S., anyway) don't even know the first thing about taking care of their cars. They may have this vague idea about changing the oil in their cars, but probably only becase Jiffy Lube said so, and that doesn't mean they'll actually do it. They certainly don't know why it's important.
This is a perfect analogy to computers; people don't know about Windows Update, auto-launching email viruses, how to clean up their start menu so that it's not a horrible mass of garbage, not having 80,000 programs running in the systray.
Argh!
There are plenty of third party Quicktime players, but like most people who think "sushi" means "raw fish", that's probably not what you meant. You probably meant something that plays Quicktime using the Sorenson codec. Quicktime is merely a container; you can shove all sorts of compression schemes in there, and there have been Quicktime players for Linux for years. The specification is open (yes, just like PDF).
(and now there's finally a third party player which supports the Sorenson codecs. The interface looks less like a beat up Pinto than it does, say, ychat
Oh, poor you, no grocery store alchohol after midnight. In Maryland, they can't sell it at all. Want to cook with some wine (no, not the salt solution passed off as "cooking wine", the real stuff)? That'd be a separate stop at the liquor store, then.
On the upside, Metro is open 24-7, Giant is open almost-24-7 (they close for a bit Sunday morning), and Mars and Han Ah Reum (which are the best for produce) are at least open until 10pm.
I used to do my shopping at 1am, but I've found that as long as you don't do something crazy like visit an Asian supermarket on a Sunday afternoon, and generally avoid rush hour shopping, it's not bad at all.
I'd also much rather shop at a locally owned and run business like Mars than a massive soul-eating entity such as Wal-Mart. I save money by buying fresh food and cooking it myself. It takes more time than getting TV dinners, Stouffer's, or whatever, but I get enjoyment out of cooking, and it tastes better.
This is actually what concerns me the most about online shopping: produce quality. There are always a few rejects in the bin, and I wonder whether they'll use them or not. If I go to the store and the broccoli is just OK, I'll revise my dinner plans for that night. If I click on "order" beneath a picture of perfect broccoli and it shows up wilted, I'm stuck.
In my experience, onboard sound is generally not that hot anyway, especially under Linux (some onboard chipsets can apparently only do 48khz, requiring you to use something like XMMS, which can cope with this. While this is not a big problem, some people prefer command line clients for scripting/reliability [moosic, a program by my former roommate Daniel Pearson, comes to mind]).
Maybe I'm biased, since I have spent several years studying music, including recording, but I've always stayed away from onboard sound. If all you're looking for is audio output, you should be able to easily get a good PCI sound card for under $20 (I'm actually using such a card to stream the live signal for the radio station listed in my sig...and no, it's not down because of the cheap card; we just don't have people on the weekend
If it were between a $20 sound card and maintaining a whole other machine, I'd do the sound card for the heat and noise savings alone. You said that your other machine would be running anyway, but hey, it wouldn't have to run Windows.
(I know the pain of keeping a separate Windows machine just for ONE THING, as I used to have to do so in order to sync my PDA [vtech Helio]).
What, exactly, does your Windows machine do with media files that Mplayer can't?
I'm not trolling (I don't troll); I'm really trying to help you with your problem (since you despise Microsoft, I'm assuming you'd like to get rid of that extra Windows machine).
The _only_ thing that currently bothers me about using Debian as a desktop OS is not being able to play all Sorenson files. And, hey, they just fixed it, and I didn't really care all _that_ much about it in the first place. I mean...gee, I can't watch movie trailers. Oh, no! All the fansubs I want to watch are released in some other format anyway. RealOne w/ browser plugin works great with Mozilla (for those foodtv.com videos). No audio formats are unplayable. abcde is amazing at ripping CDs, and xcdroast is trivial to use for burning them.
All I ever had to do with Mplayer was the regular ol'
No need to change your taste in music. If you name some popular bands that you like, I'm sure I can supply a nice list of smaller acts to get you started (if the popular acts are very recent, I might need to do some listening, as my "regular" radio has been broken for about four years).
I'm a music director at a small radio station. Suggesting music that people would like is one of the things that I do