It's filmed in Vancouver, aired in several different markets, and is arguably a "space show" without most of the episodes actually being set in space. In fact, the few that are set in space seem kind of odd.
They've got their trademark special effects (the stargate of course, and the Goa'uld equipment/voices/glowy eyes), and for many episodes that's all they need. This is thanks to the plot device of most stargate-accessible worlds being populated by humans who were originally taken from Earth.
It works though (for me at least), probably because of a cool premise and actors who can run with it. Though I must say that Urgo (the episode with Dom DeLuise as a guest) was pretty damn annoying.
Or at least Baltimore did, as that was what I used in the last few elections. Connect the arrows (which Florida fans will note are directly across from each other) with the special pen. Put it in the machine and go home. Before that, we used the manual machines with levers, but that was years and years ago.
(The Diebold commercial for their electronic machines in Maryland featured a guy trying to figure out whether a chad was hanging or not, and being chastised by a Diebold rep. They said "Maryland" in the commercial, but they didn't think about it.)
Why we absolutely needed to "upgrade" to these machines when Maryland is facing a serious budget crisis (state institutions are under hiring freezes, doing layoffs and furloughs, raising tuition by leaps and bounds, etc.) is beyond me.
I think that I heard this on the Daily Show (which actually does report real facts, it just makes fun of them) that it costs less than the face value of (at least certain units of) currency to make the currency. When they introduce new coins, they have to introduce more than they want in circulation because people like to collect new coins (especially tourists). So this actually counts as a slight profit.
I'm glad such "free replacement for x" software exists right now. Coming up with entirely new ideas and ways of doing something is HARD, and coming up with ones that work and that people want to use is even harder. I mean, I haven't thought of anything, and I did recording for years (although I admit I take a "record a good band correctly the first time and you won't _need_ a pile of effects" approach). Is there something you want?
If your goal is "do studio work using Linux", then it's good to have some tools to do it in familiar ways. I'll take "possible" when "innovative" is going to be much longer in coming. I think that many of these projects will start to come up with their own features that make them unique once they feel they have enough "standard" functionality to work for most users.
I think that when you said "Completely different than the real world", you meant "Completely different than the world of commercial software." Apache, Linux, PostgreSQL, Mozilla, etc. are all part of "the real world." People use them for important things every day.
Maybe working on an open source project won't be as impressive as the same number of years in a commercial development environment...if you're looking to get a job as a commercial developer. But if you're looking to get a job as, say, an IT person in a company which doesn't sell software as its main focus (or at all), they'll know they have a person that's familiar with software that tends to be free; someone who knows how to work on it and with the community. Such a person will probably save them money in operational expenses.
Most software development isn't going towards a product to sell to other companies. COTS software is a small part of software in general. Even with expensive stuff like Peoplesoft, implementation is a huge part of the cost.
You can download music from a service like eMusic in VBR MP3 format. However, the first half of your point 2 negates point 1. Record labels who own "popular" music will not, in the near future, offer music on the terms that you want. You have to stick with labels who still value music more than money.
As for point 3, your "or better" stipulation is silly, as most music from the past 30 years was not mastered in anything higher than CD quality.
1. The most expensive option (per track) is $10 for 40 songs per month. They show you the album cover, but that seems to be all you get.
2. The file format is lossy, but it's also VBR MP3, which can't be distinguished from CD quality audio by many people.
3. DRM is a bitch. That's why they don't use it. Also, much of their music is available to those outside of the U.S., which is something almost no one else offers.
So what's stopping you? I know that a lot of your "favorite artists" may not be on there, but wouldn't you like to support artists/labels that are willing to give you music on your terms? You can preview any track, and download your first 50 tracks for free.
(As an example, if you like synth pop, go to freezepop.net. Download the free MP3s. If you like them, you can get all 4 of their CDs for $32 [or buy them individually, of course.] Lyrics are on their site. This is the kind of band that gets my money.)
Don't like synth-pop? I can recommend something else. There are plenty of bands out there making great music who actually want you to hear it.
2.2.0 had a bug where the system would instantly reboot when any user ran "ldd". I wouldn't call that "ready for prime time":)
(I remember this because we were waiting for 2.2.x to come out, having just gotten a dual P-II 350 server [2.0.x didn't have SMP support]. Fortunately, we managed to hold off for the first few revisions.)
It's not as if this problem is unique to the Linux kernel. "Never use a Red Hat.0 release" is pretty sage advice, and of course we know Microsoft's track record. You're not going to be able to catch all of the bugs before something gets truly widespread testing, no matter what you call it or how long you work on it.
Photon isn't exactly a video game. For those who aren't familiar with it, you wear a battery pack, helmet, and chestplate, and run around a dark room with a cool structure (ramps, sniper points, etc.) shooting at each other. Sometimes you play as 2 teams, sometimes it's a free-for-all. It's sort of "real life Quake", although you all have the same weapon. If you get shot, you can't fire for a few seconds. Scores are updated in real time for your non-playing friends to watch, and you see them at the end when you leave. Sometimes there was fog.
I went there for my birthday for several years, and would have gone more often if I could have. It's just something that's really difficult to do at home. I guess you can get paintball guns and run around in a park, but that's not quite the same thing.
The social interaction is definitely there too, and on top of that, you're getting a bit of exercise running around with that heavy (to a kid) battery pack.
I've always thought it would be cool to have a fighting game which actually tracked your movements. Of course, it would be limited, and doing any grappling beyond quick throws would be difficult. You'd have to have some "gesture" moves for doing cool stuff like throwing fireballs, but it would certainly be better (IMHO) than having a joystick and 18 buttons and STILL not getting a great degree of control.
Not here; a standard right-click offers the option.
I meant to note before that this is not quite as useful as "su", since it's a bit limited. I don't think you can open up "special" things with "run as", such as control panel items (and unlike some Linux distributions and OS X, it will simply slap you down if you have insufficient priveleges, rather than prompting for the Administrator password). But it's helpful for installing things like Flash plugins without logging out.
Remember Pivx Labs, the folks that used to host the "21 unpatched vulnerabilities in IE" page and has since switched to being a slight MS apologist? They've got a nice product which is (currently) free. What they basically did was to tighten down Windows via things from standard settings to registry tweaks to a degree which most users won't notice. Several of the recently discovered IE vulnerabilities wouldn't have worked, and Blaster wouldn't have worked either under these settings.
After trying it on my workstation for a couple of weeks, I've started deploying it to others. It seems to interfere with Norton Antivirus, though not McAffee (which is what UMBC machines should be using anyway).
I also send out the desktops with Mozilla, Media Player Classic, RealAlternative, etc. If people want IM, I try to recommend GAIM. Open source apps tend to have been "written in a more paranoid age" as another poster put it, and also can't as easily get away with doing dumb crap. I also remove the IE and Outlook shortcuts from the desktop (but leave the IE shortcut in the start menu, because the eternally pending PeopleSoft requires it).
Windows 2000 and up have "run as" functionality, which allow you to run binaries as another user (normally Administrator). Just right-click on it.
I have everyone running as "Power Users" on Win2k desktops, and I'm considering trying to get that down to the lower setting where nothing can be installed.
If you start on the process of implementing project management software, whether you're doing building construction or coding, it can help improve the project process. The main thing is that any reasonably complex piece of software will require people to start keeping track of things. It starts making it easy to see who did what and when, what things made you fall behind schedule, what makes projects go over-budget, etc. You know the saying that a camera does not just capture things because its presence changes what happens?
More than likely, the administrators have all actually gotten raises, while others were furloughed and/or laid off, AND tuition was raised a significant amount. Then everyone gets a mass email from the president about "the cost of education." Not that I know anything about that.
You can use Python and the Pygame libraries, and that will probably work for all but the most intensive 3d fast action stuff.
The big problem with "all platforms" is that once you start including different architectures (x86 and PowerPC, for example) then emulation gets more complicated, as you have to emulate all of the underlying hardware.
Of course, we have near-perfect emulators for video game consoles which run on PCs, but the platform doing the emulating is going to have to be a whole lot beefier than the original.
WINE is not just for "basic apps."
on
WineConf 2004 Wrapup
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sometimes you have this old, closed-source 16-bit program (possibly for an old, out-of-date piece of external hardware) that you really can't replace because all of this other stuff is built up around it. The company isn't around anymore, but the version of the application won't run on modern, supported versions of Windows for some reason. This is where WINE can really help you out.
It can help in other ways, too. My Playstation 2 was having a problem reading discs. In searching for a local repair place on the Web, I found out that several people sell cheap "self-repair" guides, but these are in some wacky Windows hypertext browser format (probably to prevent copying). Worked fine in WINE, and I had repaired my own PS2 for $10 in less than an hour.
I've taken one of those surveys after every class in both colleges I've attended. In fact, we had two for each class; one with free-form answers, and one "scan-tron" with fill-in bubbles.
The parent to my post was arguing that numbers were all that needed to be published. I said that this was insufficient. That does not imply that I don't know about end of course surveys.
Your post is confusing. You say "This is what should be published." What is? The page long piece on anything I want? Well, we can't use a median average scoring method for that, so I guess not. In that case, it doesn't support your argument, so we're still dealing with numbers.
I would greatly prefer to read whatever a student has to say. I can use the student's writing style to determine how seriously I can take his review. Obviously, if I see something saying "hE is t3h crazy!!!11!!", I'm not going to pay too much attention to it.
On the other hand, I happened to think that many of the people in my classes were...under-abled. So I wouldn't necessarily want the fringe results to be discarded. I'm part of the fringe, so I want to hear what they have to say. I don't want their vote to be mathematically struck down.
Very funny. Tropical fish can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars each. Cheap ones are maybe $15, and $30-45 is pretty standard. "Live rock" sells for WAY more than it sounds like it should cost, and it's absolutely necessary to have a lot of it for a saltwater tank.
Also, please read over my comments again; we were making a few dollars per hard drive, not 20% (in fact, we made 20% on few items).
I would have to disagree. Sometimes, students will rate a professor lower because they felt the professor made the course too challenging (or not challenging enough). Certain people would find one of those an advantage rather than a downside. However, there are some teachers who are vague, wrong, incompetant, teach using very ineffective methods, are impossible to understand, rude, refuse to meet with you, grade seemingly randomly, etc. It can take much longer than necessary to get rid of a problem professor, and until then, it's helpful for students to see why they got a low rating.
If a teacher is rated highly by students for handing out A's without teaching much, and I actually want to learn the subject, I don't want that teacher. The numbers aren't always enough.
I'm sorry, I assumed that when the parent poster said "Cinderella", that is what he meant, not "Cinelerra". See, there's actually a freshmeat project called Cinderella, though on closer examination it's interactive geometry software. I should have looked more carefully before assuming that someone else could spell.
You didn't mention anything about Apple, so I guess my point about the ability to be "100% Microsoft free" still stands?
Sure, FreeBSD may be a great example of a community united. So is the Debian project. However, the 3 BSDs are at least as fragmented and war-torn as the Linux distributions. Actually, I don't see any "I hate you so I'm forking the Linux distribution" examples on the Linux side. But the BSDs and Linux distributions help each other out, too.
I don't have to worry about all of those package formats. If it's not in the Debian APT repository, and no one has provided an APT source or.deb (uncommon to see without an APT source these days), I build it from source. I have had to do this only a few times in several years.
You don't have to worry about all of those package formats. If it's not in the ports tree, you build it from source. I'm not seeing the difference.
As for commercial support, it seems to me that a company is most likely to support something on Red Hat Linux. Not the other distributions, but not FreeBSD either. So you either figure out a way to get it to work, or you play their game and set up one Red Hat server. Part of the cost of using the commercial software; hey, you wanted it. If the commercial app you need to do your job only runs on Windows, you use Windows or you find a workaround (emulation, replacement program, etc.)
zapp's comment below is good, but I feel the need to add some things.
There are still PLENTY of Windows applications that don't use Add/Remove programs. You have to find their uninstaller, if they have one. This is the same as downloading a tar.gz with the source and hoping it has a "make uninstall" target. However, free software is available to track packages you compile and the files they install. Software is probably available to help uninstall stuff under Windows too.
With Debian, I can find out all of the files a package has installed. I can re-run the initial configuration. When I uninstall the application, it won't remove the config files in case I re-install later (unless I tell it to "purge"). I can query the package database and find out what the package is actually supposed to do, which is often a problem for me on Windows systems which are not my own ("What is this?" "I don't know!")
Additionally, a good package management front-end like APT, coupled with well-organized packages, makes maintenance a breeze. I can update every application with two commands*. Libraries are only installed if I need them, and it's safe to share libraries because programs won't be trying to install incompatible versions of them (if they did, the package manager would notice and tell me).
So yes, installation programs like MSI files are simpler, but I wouldn't say they were easier.
* Except for the source-installed apps, of course, but those are a) not packages, and b) few and far between on a Debian system.
Slashdot Mirror
It's filmed in Vancouver, aired in several different markets, and is arguably a "space show" without most of the episodes actually being set in space. In fact, the few that are set in space seem kind of odd.
They've got their trademark special effects (the stargate of course, and the Goa'uld equipment/voices/glowy eyes), and for many episodes that's all they need. This is thanks to the plot device of most stargate-accessible worlds being populated by humans who were originally taken from Earth.
It works though (for me at least), probably because of a cool premise and actors who can run with it. Though I must say that Urgo (the episode with Dom DeLuise as a guest) was pretty damn annoying.
Both Stargate SG-1 and South Park are preparing to go into season 8, and the former is also generating a spin-off (Stargate: Atlantis).
(On the other hand, I hope that Scare Tactics dies as quickly as possible so that I can stop hearing about it EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK.)
Or at least Baltimore did, as that was what I used in the last few elections. Connect the arrows (which Florida fans will note are directly across from each other) with the special pen. Put it in the machine and go home. Before that, we used the manual machines with levers, but that was years and years ago.
(The Diebold commercial for their electronic machines in Maryland featured a guy trying to figure out whether a chad was hanging or not, and being chastised by a Diebold rep. They said "Maryland" in the commercial, but they didn't think about it.)
Why we absolutely needed to "upgrade" to these machines when Maryland is facing a serious budget crisis (state institutions are under hiring freezes, doing layoffs and furloughs, raising tuition by leaps and bounds, etc.) is beyond me.
I think that I heard this on the Daily Show (which actually does report real facts, it just makes fun of them) that it costs less than the face value of (at least certain units of) currency to make the currency. When they introduce new coins, they have to introduce more than they want in circulation because people like to collect new coins (especially tourists). So this actually counts as a slight profit.
No, we require all freshmeat announcements to have good spelling and grammar by the time they hit our front page :)
I'm glad such "free replacement for x" software exists right now. Coming up with entirely new ideas and ways of doing something is HARD, and coming up with ones that work and that people want to use is even harder. I mean, I haven't thought of anything, and I did recording for years (although I admit I take a "record a good band correctly the first time and you won't _need_ a pile of effects" approach). Is there something you want?
If your goal is "do studio work using Linux", then it's good to have some tools to do it in familiar ways. I'll take "possible" when "innovative" is going to be much longer in coming. I think that many of these projects will start to come up with their own features that make them unique once they feel they have enough "standard" functionality to work for most users.
I think that when you said "Completely different than the real world", you meant "Completely different than the world of commercial software." Apache, Linux, PostgreSQL, Mozilla, etc. are all part of "the real world." People use them for important things every day.
Maybe working on an open source project won't be as impressive as the same number of years in a commercial development environment...if you're looking to get a job as a commercial developer. But if you're looking to get a job as, say, an IT person in a company which doesn't sell software as its main focus (or at all), they'll know they have a person that's familiar with software that tends to be free; someone who knows how to work on it and with the community. Such a person will probably save them money in operational expenses.
Most software development isn't going towards a product to sell to other companies. COTS software is a small part of software in general. Even with expensive stuff like Peoplesoft, implementation is a huge part of the cost.
You can download music from a service like eMusic in VBR MP3 format. However, the first half of your point 2 negates point 1. Record labels who own "popular" music will not, in the near future, offer music on the terms that you want. You have to stick with labels who still value music more than money.
As for point 3, your "or better" stipulation is silly, as most music from the past 30 years was not mastered in anything higher than CD quality.
1. The most expensive option (per track) is $10 for 40 songs per month. They show you the album cover, but that seems to be all you get.
2. The file format is lossy, but it's also VBR MP3, which can't be distinguished from CD quality audio by many people.
3. DRM is a bitch. That's why they don't use it. Also, much of their music is available to those outside of the U.S., which is something almost no one else offers.
So what's stopping you? I know that a lot of your "favorite artists" may not be on there, but wouldn't you like to support artists/labels that are willing to give you music on your terms? You can preview any track, and download your first 50 tracks for free.
(As an example, if you like synth pop, go to freezepop.net. Download the free MP3s. If you like them, you can get all 4 of their CDs for $32 [or buy them individually, of course.] Lyrics are on their site. This is the kind of band that gets my money.)
Don't like synth-pop? I can recommend something else. There are plenty of bands out there making great music who actually want you to hear it.
2.2.0 had a bug where the system would instantly reboot when any user ran "ldd". I wouldn't call that "ready for prime time" :)
.0 release" is pretty sage advice, and of course we know Microsoft's track record. You're not going to be able to catch all of the bugs before something gets truly widespread testing, no matter what you call it or how long you work on it.
(I remember this because we were waiting for 2.2.x to come out, having just gotten a dual P-II 350 server [2.0.x didn't have SMP support]. Fortunately, we managed to hold off for the first few revisions.)
It's not as if this problem is unique to the Linux kernel. "Never use a Red Hat
Photon isn't exactly a video game. For those who aren't familiar with it, you wear a battery pack, helmet, and chestplate, and run around a dark room with a cool structure (ramps, sniper points, etc.) shooting at each other. Sometimes you play as 2 teams, sometimes it's a free-for-all. It's sort of "real life Quake", although you all have the same weapon. If you get shot, you can't fire for a few seconds. Scores are updated in real time for your non-playing friends to watch, and you see them at the end when you leave. Sometimes there was fog.
I went there for my birthday for several years, and would have gone more often if I could have. It's just something that's really difficult to do at home. I guess you can get paintball guns and run around in a park, but that's not quite the same thing.
The social interaction is definitely there too, and on top of that, you're getting a bit of exercise running around with that heavy (to a kid) battery pack.
I've always thought it would be cool to have a fighting game which actually tracked your movements. Of course, it would be limited, and doing any grappling beyond quick throws would be difficult. You'd have to have some "gesture" moves for doing cool stuff like throwing fireballs, but it would certainly be better (IMHO) than having a joystick and 18 buttons and STILL not getting a great degree of control.
(a platform game like this would rock too)
Not here; a standard right-click offers the option.
I meant to note before that this is not quite as useful as "su", since it's a bit limited. I don't think you can open up "special" things with "run as", such as control panel items (and unlike some Linux distributions and OS X, it will simply slap you down if you have insufficient priveleges, rather than prompting for the Administrator password). But it's helpful for installing things like Flash plugins without logging out.
Remember Pivx Labs, the folks that used to host the "21 unpatched vulnerabilities in IE" page and has since switched to being a slight MS apologist? They've got a nice product which is (currently) free. What they basically did was to tighten down Windows via things from standard settings to registry tweaks to a degree which most users won't notice. Several of the recently discovered IE vulnerabilities wouldn't have worked, and Blaster wouldn't have worked either under these settings.
After trying it on my workstation for a couple of weeks, I've started deploying it to others. It seems to interfere with Norton Antivirus, though not McAffee (which is what UMBC machines should be using anyway).
I also send out the desktops with Mozilla, Media Player Classic, RealAlternative, etc. If people want IM, I try to recommend GAIM. Open source apps tend to have been "written in a more paranoid age" as another poster put it, and also can't as easily get away with doing dumb crap. I also remove the IE and Outlook shortcuts from the desktop (but leave the IE shortcut in the start menu, because the eternally pending PeopleSoft requires it).
Windows 2000 and up have "run as" functionality, which allow you to run binaries as another user (normally Administrator). Just right-click on it.
I have everyone running as "Power Users" on Win2k desktops, and I'm considering trying to get that down to the lower setting where nothing can be installed.
If you start on the process of implementing project management software, whether you're doing building construction or coding, it can help improve the project process. The main thing is that any reasonably complex piece of software will require people to start keeping track of things. It starts making it easy to see who did what and when, what things made you fall behind schedule, what makes projects go over-budget, etc. You know the saying that a camera does not just capture things because its presence changes what happens?
It wouldn't be on freshmeat, as we don't list Windows-only projects :)
More than likely, the administrators have all actually gotten raises, while others were furloughed and/or laid off, AND tuition was raised a significant amount. Then everyone gets a mass email from the president about "the cost of education." Not that I know anything about that.
You can use Python and the Pygame libraries, and that will probably work for all but the most intensive 3d fast action stuff.
The big problem with "all platforms" is that once you start including different architectures (x86 and PowerPC, for example) then emulation gets more complicated, as you have to emulate all of the underlying hardware.
Of course, we have near-perfect emulators for video game consoles which run on PCs, but the platform doing the emulating is going to have to be a whole lot beefier than the original.
Sometimes you have this old, closed-source 16-bit program (possibly for an old, out-of-date piece of external hardware) that you really can't replace because all of this other stuff is built up around it. The company isn't around anymore, but the version of the application won't run on modern, supported versions of Windows for some reason. This is where WINE can really help you out.
It can help in other ways, too. My Playstation 2 was having a problem reading discs. In searching for a local repair place on the Web, I found out that several people sell cheap "self-repair" guides, but these are in some wacky Windows hypertext browser format (probably to prevent copying). Worked fine in WINE, and I had repaired my own PS2 for $10 in less than an hour.
I've taken one of those surveys after every class in both colleges I've attended. In fact, we had two for each class; one with free-form answers, and one "scan-tron" with fill-in bubbles.
The parent to my post was arguing that numbers were all that needed to be published. I said that this was insufficient. That does not imply that I don't know about end of course surveys.
Your post is confusing. You say "This is what should be published." What is? The page long piece on anything I want? Well, we can't use a median average scoring method for that, so I guess not. In that case, it doesn't support your argument, so we're still dealing with numbers.
I would greatly prefer to read whatever a student has to say. I can use the student's writing style to determine how seriously I can take his review. Obviously, if I see something saying "hE is t3h crazy!!!11!!", I'm not going to pay too much attention to it.
On the other hand, I happened to think that many of the people in my classes were...under-abled. So I wouldn't necessarily want the fringe results to be discarded. I'm part of the fringe, so I want to hear what they have to say. I don't want their vote to be mathematically struck down.
Very funny. Tropical fish can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars each. Cheap ones are maybe $15, and $30-45 is pretty standard. "Live rock" sells for WAY more than it sounds like it should cost, and it's absolutely necessary to have a lot of it for a saltwater tank.
Also, please read over my comments again; we were making a few dollars per hard drive, not 20% (in fact, we made 20% on few items).
I would have to disagree. Sometimes, students will rate a professor lower because they felt the professor made the course too challenging (or not challenging enough). Certain people would find one of those an advantage rather than a downside. However, there are some teachers who are vague, wrong, incompetant, teach using very ineffective methods, are impossible to understand, rude, refuse to meet with you, grade seemingly randomly, etc. It can take much longer than necessary to get rid of a problem professor, and until then, it's helpful for students to see why they got a low rating.
If a teacher is rated highly by students for handing out A's without teaching much, and I actually want to learn the subject, I don't want that teacher. The numbers aren't always enough.
I'm sorry, I assumed that when the parent poster said "Cinderella", that is what he meant, not "Cinelerra". See, there's actually a freshmeat project called Cinderella, though on closer examination it's interactive geometry software. I should have looked more carefully before assuming that someone else could spell.
You didn't mention anything about Apple, so I guess my point about the ability to be "100% Microsoft free" still stands?
Sure, FreeBSD may be a great example of a community united. So is the Debian project. However, the 3 BSDs are at least as fragmented and war-torn as the Linux distributions. Actually, I don't see any "I hate you so I'm forking the Linux distribution" examples on the Linux side. But the BSDs and Linux distributions help each other out, too.
.deb (uncommon to see without an APT source these days), I build it from source. I have had to do this only a few times in several years.
I don't have to worry about all of those package formats. If it's not in the Debian APT repository, and no one has provided an APT source or
You don't have to worry about all of those package formats. If it's not in the ports tree, you build it from source. I'm not seeing the difference.
As for commercial support, it seems to me that a company is most likely to support something on Red Hat Linux. Not the other distributions, but not FreeBSD either. So you either figure out a way to get it to work, or you play their game and set up one Red Hat server. Part of the cost of using the commercial software; hey, you wanted it. If the commercial app you need to do your job only runs on Windows, you use Windows or you find a workaround (emulation, replacement program, etc.)
zapp's comment below is good, but I feel the need to add some things.
There are still PLENTY of Windows applications that don't use Add/Remove programs. You have to find their uninstaller, if they have one. This is the same as downloading a tar.gz with the source and hoping it has a "make uninstall" target. However, free software is available to track packages you compile and the files they install. Software is probably available to help uninstall stuff under Windows too.
With Debian, I can find out all of the files a package has installed. I can re-run the initial configuration. When I uninstall the application, it won't remove the config files in case I re-install later (unless I tell it to "purge"). I can query the package database and find out what the package is actually supposed to do, which is often a problem for me on Windows systems which are not my own ("What is this?" "I don't know!")
Additionally, a good package management front-end like APT, coupled with well-organized packages, makes maintenance a breeze. I can update every application with two commands*. Libraries are only installed if I need them, and it's safe to share libraries because programs won't be trying to install incompatible versions of them (if they did, the package manager would notice and tell me).
So yes, installation programs like MSI files are simpler, but I wouldn't say they were easier.
* Except for the source-installed apps, of course, but those are a) not packages, and b) few and far between on a Debian system.