Read "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielson. Great book, and not very expensive. It has plenty of examples for all of the points covered.
The problem here is that the interface forces the user to make arbitrary connections between parts of a picture and functions/parts of the site. Without the descriptive text (which happens all too often), the user would have the additional burden of remembering which part does what. This one is a bit better than most: it clearly indicates which parts can be clicked, and uses hover to indicate what you're about to do. But it's still a completely pointless use of a large graphic. Show me a picture, sure, but give me standard, simple navigation.
The site in my.sig was designed by me. It's certainly not perfect, but I'd hold it up against navigation like this any day.
No, Expose would have the same value to someone with 20 terminal windows open as it would to someone with 10 applications having 2 windows each open.
As an Enlightenment user, I've always wondered how Mac and Windows people managed to have more than 3 applications open at the same time and not go insane. I'm glad that Apple has come up with a really nice solution for you. I still think that an environment without multiple desktops and focus-follows-mouse will result in wasted time and screen real estate, but you probably work differently than I do.
I should also mention that in E (and Windowmaker, IIRC) the desktop doesn't do anything except provide a blank spot to allow you to launch menus. So a "show the desktop" function wouldn't make much sense.
Microsoft apparently decided that people didn't want "minimize all windows" anymore (I can't find the equivalent on this XP machine), and now look what happens. I wouldn't think there was much difference between a windowlist with selectable windows and Expose, except that some users might prefer Expose's more graphical approach. Some people also have a small enough email volume (or large enough patience) to use GUI email clients, I guess. It's all about needs and preferences.
Personally, I tend to either tile my windows or, in the case of Mozilla, have stacks of windowshaded windows (which have multiple tabs, but I keep everything grouped by window so it's easy to keep track). Now, thanks to focus-follows-mouse, "tiled" doesn't necessarily mean that you can see all of every window. If I'm only going to use the left-hand side of this Eterm, why not have GNUcash overlap it?
For me, Expose wouldn't compare to multiple desktops because I use them not just to sort windows, but for _mindsets_. I don't even want to think about what's on those other desktops when I'm in my "development" desktop. IRC and email shouldn't even exist, but can just do their own thing until I get back to them. And I have a desktop set aside for whatever new thing I'm starting on at the moment, so I can work on it when I'm in the mood and forget about it otherwise.
Now your desktop can look like whatever you want, including (since you say you weren't talking about XP) OS X. I really hope you weren't talking about CDE, but just in case (bleeeargh), you can make it look like that too.
Personally, I use the default E theme (BrushedMetal-TigerT). I don't really care how it looks; my background is always obscured by dozens of Windows, and I don't stare at the window decorations. Things like GAIM, xChat, and Pan certainly look a lot nicer to me than the official AIM client, mIRC, and Agent. And Mozilla/IE isn't even close.
(no, I'm not a "typical programmer with no sense of aesthetics"; I'm an artist who happens to be good at IT, and so has to starve a bit less.)
I don't see how you can trick someone into clicking on a URL that sends POST values using their Web browser. You could send it using something like netcat, sure. Just because something doesn't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it does nothing at all.
Also, you can't just rely on replacing HTML brackets, especially if you're using any sort of SQL database (or any database, really). Even if you're not, your scripts could be tricked into revealing the contents of files.
To nitpick, the article really should have said, "If you want to use one of the online major-label-music services other than iTunes...". emusic.com sells you music as regular VBA MP3s, so I don't see why you couldn't put those on your iPod.
Personally, I bought my cheap Phillips MP3 CD player before the iPod even came out, and I won't replace it until it breaks. When I do replace it, it will be with something that supports Ogg (and has the ability to be updated to support other formats, hopefully).
"That which is not explicitly permitted is denied." That is, whitelists rather than blacklists.
Of course, you should also familiarize yourself with the mechanisms your language of choice has to help defend against such attacks. In PHP, this means register_globals = off, and there are also freely available input validation functions designed with XSS in mind.
I like to maks sure that as many of my forms use POST as possible, and include code at the top to halt processing if anyone attempts to pass a PHP page more GET arguments than it is supposed to have (ideally zero, but sometimes GET is useful.)
Recently, the Charles Theatre in Baltimore began a Kurosawa marathon. They'll be showing a different one of his movies each week, once on Saturday night and once on Thursday night.
I had actually never seen the Seven Samurai before, so I figured this was the time. My martial arts teacher gave me permission to skip class for something so important ("I would not be completely unhappy if you skipped class to see the Seven Samurai.")
For those who don't know, it's over 3 hours; it started at 9:30 with no ads or trailers, and we got out of the theatre at about 12:40. When that intermission (5 minutes, IIRC) hit in the middle, I was pretty glad, and it looked like at least half of the theatre was too. I had even made sure not to drink vast amounts of anything (I usually drink a lot of water), but of course, Murphy's Law WILL bring the magical feeling upon you right in the middle of a great movie.
The government should do as little as possible about obesity and motorcycles, because that falls under the category of "protecting us from ourselves".
Now, I do agree with thing like mandatory seatbelt laws. This ensures that all cars will have seatbelts so that they are available to those who need them, and encourages parents to be responsible with the lives of themselves and their children (the children might not be able to decide for themselves yet, and the parents should be around to raise them).
Mandatory helmet laws for motorcycles? Maybe. That falls into the category of "really, really good idea", something like seatbelt laws but not quite as strong. I support mandatory bike helmet laws for minors.
But obesity? Nutritional information is already available for food sources from the government (check out "Nut" on freshmeat), and pre-packaged food must be accurately labeled. There is a ton of information out there. No one needs to be fat if their desire to lose weight is strong enough to overcome their desire for the things that make them fat. Different diets work for different people. If there are fake diets that work for no one, they will go out of business or get busted for fraud/false advertising.
What do you suggest? Fat quotas? Social security number checks when you eat fast food to make sure that you're not eating it too often? I know, I'm being silly, but I don't see how the government should reasonably be expected to do more than it already has. Obesity is a very personal issue, and people are perfectly able to fix it themselves. There are reams of information available for free, and good food is cheaper than bad food.
Just having the APT command set ported is not enough. You could port the command set to Windows, but it wouldn't mean anything. The reason APT works so well with Debian is the _huge_ hierarchy of _well-organized_ packages that are (under stable) _all_ guaranteed to play well with each other.
If your distribution supports APT, but it's not the official method of installing packages, that's not as good as Debian. If your distribution's APT repositories have far fewer packages, that's not as good as Debian.
Mixing stable packages with unstable will not necessarily "break the system". It's just not 100% guaranteed to work with no problems. I keep mixed systems, because I want everything to be from Stable except for Mozilla and GAIM. Mozilla comes from testing, and GAIM is installed by using `apt-get -b source gaim`. On my home desktop, I've run unstable for years without problems.
You can't go back to stable if you completely upgrade to unstable, but how is that different from any other distribution? So this is not a point against Debian. You can, however, upgrade to the next "stable" while the system is running, and vast amounts of effort are made to ensure a smooth transition with as little reconfiguration as possible. We have woody servers that started out running slink (as did my sid desktop).
As for the Social Contract, that's what will keep your company out of legal hot water, and ensure that your Linux distributor stays out of hot water too (you do want someone to be around to provide security fixes, right?). You can clearly see when things are coming from non-free, and evaluate each case to make certain that the license will work for your situation. I'd much rather have this than, say, Red Hat violating the PINE license for years by distributing modified binaries.
The MPlayer folks themselves didn't want packages being made of their software until it was all under the GPL. Now that that issue has been resolved (aside from the plugins), packages can be freely made.
Yes, Debian runs on tons of architectures. In fact, Debian's XFree86 packages run on more architectures than the vanilla distribution of XFree86, which is why it sometimes takes them a bit longer to make it into unstable. The maintainer refuses to treat non-x86 archs like "second-class citizens", and I feel that this is absolutely the right attititude.
I've always gone by the saying "locks are there to keep honest people honest."
I do agree with SysKoll's reply, but I think we need to look beyond even Microsoft. It's pretty much impossible to write software which will defend against a DDoS attack; even those that do simply prevent the system from crashing. The service is still unavailable for normal use while under attack, and other parts of the Internet will likely be affected as well.
I don't care about the expanded address set of IPv6 nearly as much as the security features it offers, but it seems like we're going to implement it about the same time as we (the U.S.) convert to the metric system.
Granted, Microsoft is not doing as much as it could, but there are also problems that need to be addressed at lower levels.
I have a Samsung 19" CRT, and the text is perfectly readable to me at 1600 x 1200. Granted, I don't need vision correction, but if I did, that would hardly be the monitor's fault. Lower resolutions don't "look like crap" either.
If you're talking about an LCD rather than a CRT, I can see where lower resolutions might look worse, but I don't understand how that could be with a CRT. But if you're talking about an LCD that does 1600 x 1200 at 19", I'd sure like to hear about it, because I haven't been able to find any under 20".
That said, the upcoming Longhorn feature sounds nice, though I'm guessing the XFree86 folks might be able to come up with something comparable in the 2 years that they have. It will be good to stop having to explain to people why a higher resolution means that things get smaller; after all, printers don't work that way.
If Windows does "what many people want", then why do so many people complain about "computers"? Oh, computers are always crashing, you can't trust them, blah blah blah and a yakkity schmakkity. Talk to users and you'll find that they've come up with bizarre rituals, bending themselves around the flaws in the system. I think you may find that instead of being what people want, it's really what people are used to using.
I'm sure there must be someone out there for whom Windows mostly does just what they'd like it to do, but it's way too complicated for the needs of most people. They only want to run a few apps -- no, scratch that. They only want to _do_a_few_things_, which is different. They shouldn't have to think about start menus and video card drivers.
When I worked in a small "screwdriver shop", I saw plenty of people bring their (Windows) computers in to have scanners installed. There were tons of people who bought add-on cards, thought they could install them under Windows, and couldn't. It's no holy grail.
I think that the companies moving towards "Internet terminals" and similar devices are thinking in the right direction. The more complicated computers with general-purpose operating systems become, the less viable (and reliable) they will be for the general population.
I agree on the "bad dubbing to make wonderfully bad movies wonderfully worse" bit. Try renting the dub of the Fist of the North Star movie (anime) sometime. It's sooo bad, and the dub just piles on the badness. Generally found in the sort of video store that stocks about 10 anime titles on VHS.
A lot of games that came out for the Dreamcast were probably cool because they didn't have the budget to "Americanize" them, and so all the wacky Japanisms (I've seen their non-anime TV, and it's insane) were left to shine. Much better than listening to Tidus whine endlessly.
"Jap" is considered a racial slur by many Japanese, and very offensive. It's probably best to avoid using it.
And yes, they did use a (fairly wheezy) male voice actor in the Japanese version, which was odd since the character made more sense (to me, anyway) as female. I agree that the dub in general was quite good (as far as those things go), and that Billy Bob Thornton was just OK. I definitely prefer subtitles to dubs, but I think a lot of Americans refuse to deal with subtitles. At least, I like to pretend that's the reason why Delicatessen hasn't come out on DVD, and not that people have no taste for cool, dark humor.
The scary part is that I think people like Coulter, Savage, etc. really are serious. Actually, I guess the REALLY scary part is that large numbers of people seem to just say "yuh-huh, that's right" to whatever they're spewing this week.
Personally, I get most of my news from The Daily Show. Yes, I am serious. I know they lampoon the news, but they still report on real events, and I can actually stand watching them, and it's easy to tell what bits are satire.
Wednesday night on The Daily Show, Norm Macdonald and John Stewart were talking about how the scrolling tickers were originally used to convey important information about "the war on terror", but now that there wasn't so much news, they were being filled with fluff. John Stewart came up with the zaniest example: during a newscast about how Saddam's sons had just been killed, a ticker scrolling across the bottom stated that Bianca had declared that she didn't like the word "bootylicious".
First of all, is the release schedule of Debian really that vexing to your business requirements? I can see you having issues if a new major software revision comes out that supports a feature which would make things much easier for you, but does that really happen so often? I prefer the peace of mind that things will continue to function correctly.
There are also options available. I have one machine that acts as a server for streaming MP3 and Webcam images, so it runs stable. However, it also acts as a playlist entry machine for the DJs, and Mozilla 1.0 has annoying bugs. I simply told APT that I wanted the Mozilla package from testing, and kept the rest of the system stable. A few other libraries also had to be upgraded, but if an important security problem came out for one of the "testing" packages, I could make a decision on what to do (install the new one from unstable, apt-get -b source my own package, etc.). I could have also used "apt-get -b source" in the first place to avoid upgrading libraries, which is what I do with GAIM.
I can't say I rely on the non-free archives so much. The only thing I use from non-free is daemontools, but I compile this myself, and of course it has never had any security problems:) I have also recently discovered a clone, runit, which is under a Free license and very tiny. I will be looking into this soon.
The point is not about body count, granted, though it does help to put the number of deaths into perspective to stop extremists from foaming at the mouth (not you).
As for security, I challenge the notion that we are truly significantly more secure today than we were before 9/11. HOW DO YOU KNOW? You can't really quantify something like national security. Why did we do nothing of this sort after the Oklahoma city bombing? Was that less tragic because less people were killed? But it's not about body count. Terrorist attacks by American-born citizens seem like MORE of a danger to me.
Has the rate of terrorist attacks gone down as a result of the Patriot Act? Maybe the terrorists are focusing on our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, really, there weren't a whole heck of a lot of terrorist attacks on US soil before 9/11, so it's not exactly shocking that there isn't a flood of them now.
Yes, that seems to be the solution for most people, but it's not the only way to go.
Roblimo once said (on our LUG mailing list) that he knows 2 basic types of people. One set likes a more "usual" lifestyle with a regular job, family car, house (probably in the suburbs or city), etc. The other sort has the "beach bum" mentality: contract work when you need money, mess around with all sorts of stuff the rest of the time. I agree with him that there's nothing wrong with choosing either path, but you should always remember that both exist.
Right now, I have a "regular" job (7:30-4), plus 10 hours a week for freshmeat. Do I see this lasting forever? No; the other side of things sounds fun too, and honestly, I quite like tinkering.
But the point is that Linux can be used in a business setting quite easily, as everything will be pre-configured and you won't want users installing/configuring things themselves.
As for a home setting, Linux might not be ready to use for the novice who would want to install a driver or UT2003. But it can certainly be sold pre-packaged as a "Web/email/other Internet services/word processing" machine for those who will only use their computer casually ("Buy the kids a PS2 and keep their damn games off the computer").
The only problem I see right now is that someone might want to install something like a new digital camera, but according to Mac "switcher" commercials, Windows users need to call in the nerds too, right?:) I guess this reinforces the notion that Linux is fine for advanced users and very casual users, but it's the middle of the road that will still have some trouble. The goal, as I see it, is to keep pressing in from both sides towards that middle.
Slashdot Mirror
Read "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielson. Great book, and not very expensive. It has plenty of examples for all of the points covered.
.sig was designed by me. It's certainly not perfect, but I'd hold it up against navigation like this any day.
The problem here is that the interface forces the user to make arbitrary connections between parts of a picture and functions/parts of the site. Without the descriptive text (which happens all too often), the user would have the additional burden of remembering which part does what. This one is a bit better than most: it clearly indicates which parts can be clicked, and uses hover to indicate what you're about to do. But it's still a completely pointless use of a large graphic. Show me a picture, sure, but give me standard, simple navigation.
The site in my
No, Expose would have the same value to someone with 20 terminal windows open as it would to someone with 10 applications having 2 windows each open.
As an Enlightenment user, I've always wondered how Mac and Windows people managed to have more than 3 applications open at the same time and not go insane. I'm glad that Apple has come up with a really nice solution for you. I still think that an environment without multiple desktops and focus-follows-mouse will result in wasted time and screen real estate, but you probably work differently than I do.
I should also mention that in E (and Windowmaker, IIRC) the desktop doesn't do anything except provide a blank spot to allow you to launch menus. So a "show the desktop" function wouldn't make much sense.
Microsoft apparently decided that people didn't want "minimize all windows" anymore (I can't find the equivalent on this XP machine), and now look what happens. I wouldn't think there was much difference between a windowlist with selectable windows and Expose, except that some users might prefer Expose's more graphical approach. Some people also have a small enough email volume (or large enough patience) to use GUI email clients, I guess. It's all about needs and preferences.
Personally, I tend to either tile my windows or, in the case of Mozilla, have stacks of windowshaded windows (which have multiple tabs, but I keep everything grouped by window so it's easy to keep track). Now, thanks to focus-follows-mouse, "tiled" doesn't necessarily mean that you can see all of every window. If I'm only going to use the left-hand side of this Eterm, why not have GNUcash overlap it?
For me, Expose wouldn't compare to multiple desktops because I use them not just to sort windows, but for _mindsets_. I don't even want to think about what's on those other desktops when I'm in my "development" desktop. IRC and email shouldn't even exist, but can just do their own thing until I get back to them. And I have a desktop set aside for whatever new thing I'm starting on at the moment, so I can work on it when I'm in the mood and forget about it otherwise.
themes.freshmeat.net
Now your desktop can look like whatever you want, including (since you say you weren't talking about XP) OS X. I really hope you weren't talking about CDE, but just in case (bleeeargh), you can make it look like that too.
Personally, I use the default E theme (BrushedMetal-TigerT). I don't really care how it looks; my background is always obscured by dozens of Windows, and I don't stare at the window decorations. Things like GAIM, xChat, and Pan certainly look a lot nicer to me than the official AIM client, mIRC, and Agent. And Mozilla/IE isn't even close.
(no, I'm not a "typical programmer with no sense of aesthetics"; I'm an artist who happens to be good at IT, and so has to starve a bit less.)
I don't see how you can trick someone into clicking on a URL that sends POST values using their Web browser. You could send it using something like netcat, sure. Just because something doesn't completely eliminate the problem doesn't mean it does nothing at all.
Also, you can't just rely on replacing HTML brackets, especially if you're using any sort of SQL database (or any database, really). Even if you're not, your scripts could be tricked into revealing the contents of files.
To nitpick, the article really should have said, "If you want to use one of the online major-label-music services other than iTunes...". emusic.com sells you music as regular VBA MP3s, so I don't see why you couldn't put those on your iPod.
Personally, I bought my cheap Phillips MP3 CD player before the iPod even came out, and I won't replace it until it breaks. When I do replace it, it will be with something that supports Ogg (and has the ability to be updated to support other formats, hopefully).
"That which is not explicitly permitted is denied." That is, whitelists rather than blacklists.
Of course, you should also familiarize yourself with the mechanisms your language of choice has to help defend against such attacks. In PHP, this means register_globals = off, and there are also freely available input validation functions designed with XSS in mind.
I like to maks sure that as many of my forms use POST as possible, and include code at the top to halt processing if anyone attempts to pass a PHP page more GET arguments than it is supposed to have (ideally zero, but sometimes GET is useful.)
Recently, the Charles Theatre in Baltimore began a Kurosawa marathon. They'll be showing a different one of his movies each week, once on Saturday night and once on Thursday night.
I had actually never seen the Seven Samurai before, so I figured this was the time. My martial arts teacher gave me permission to skip class for something so important ("I would not be completely unhappy if you skipped class to see the Seven Samurai.")
For those who don't know, it's over 3 hours; it started at 9:30 with no ads or trailers, and we got out of the theatre at about 12:40. When that intermission (5 minutes, IIRC) hit in the middle, I was pretty glad, and it looked like at least half of the theatre was too. I had even made sure not to drink vast amounts of anything (I usually drink a lot of water), but of course, Murphy's Law WILL bring the magical feeling upon you right in the middle of a great movie.
The government should do as little as possible about obesity and motorcycles, because that falls under the category of "protecting us from ourselves".
Now, I do agree with thing like mandatory seatbelt laws. This ensures that all cars will have seatbelts so that they are available to those who need them, and encourages parents to be responsible with the lives of themselves and their children (the children might not be able to decide for themselves yet, and the parents should be around to raise them).
Mandatory helmet laws for motorcycles? Maybe. That falls into the category of "really, really good idea", something like seatbelt laws but not quite as strong. I support mandatory bike helmet laws for minors.
But obesity? Nutritional information is already available for food sources from the government (check out "Nut" on freshmeat), and pre-packaged food must be accurately labeled. There is a ton of information out there. No one needs to be fat if their desire to lose weight is strong enough to overcome their desire for the things that make them fat. Different diets work for different people. If there are fake diets that work for no one, they will go out of business or get busted for fraud/false advertising.
What do you suggest? Fat quotas? Social security number checks when you eat fast food to make sure that you're not eating it too often? I know, I'm being silly, but I don't see how the government should reasonably be expected to do more than it already has. Obesity is a very personal issue, and people are perfectly able to fix it themselves. There are reams of information available for free, and good food is cheaper than bad food.
When will people stop repeating this foolishness?
Just having the APT command set ported is not enough. You could port the command set to Windows, but it wouldn't mean anything. The reason APT works so well with Debian is the _huge_ hierarchy of _well-organized_ packages that are (under stable) _all_ guaranteed to play well with each other.
If your distribution supports APT, but it's not the official method of installing packages, that's not as good as Debian. If your distribution's APT repositories have far fewer packages, that's not as good as Debian.
Mixing stable packages with unstable will not necessarily "break the system". It's just not 100% guaranteed to work with no problems. I keep mixed systems, because I want everything to be from Stable except for Mozilla and GAIM. Mozilla comes from testing, and GAIM is installed by using `apt-get -b source gaim`. On my home desktop, I've run unstable for years without problems.
You can't go back to stable if you completely upgrade to unstable, but how is that different from any other distribution? So this is not a point against Debian. You can, however, upgrade to the next "stable" while the system is running, and vast amounts of effort are made to ensure a smooth transition with as little reconfiguration as possible. We have woody servers that started out running slink (as did my sid desktop).
As for the Social Contract, that's what will keep your company out of legal hot water, and ensure that your Linux distributor stays out of hot water too (you do want someone to be around to provide security fixes, right?). You can clearly see when things are coming from non-free, and evaluate each case to make certain that the license will work for your situation. I'd much rather have this than, say, Red Hat violating the PINE license for years by distributing modified binaries.
The MPlayer folks themselves didn't want packages being made of their software until it was all under the GPL. Now that that issue has been resolved (aside from the plugins), packages can be freely made.
Yes, Debian runs on tons of architectures. In fact, Debian's XFree86 packages run on more architectures than the vanilla distribution of XFree86, which is why it sometimes takes them a bit longer to make it into unstable. The maintainer refuses to treat non-x86 archs like "second-class citizens", and I feel that this is absolutely the right attititude.
I've always gone by the saying "locks are there to keep honest people honest."
I do agree with SysKoll's reply, but I think we need to look beyond even Microsoft. It's pretty much impossible to write software which will defend against a DDoS attack; even those that do simply prevent the system from crashing. The service is still unavailable for normal use while under attack, and other parts of the Internet will likely be affected as well.
I don't care about the expanded address set of IPv6 nearly as much as the security features it offers, but it seems like we're going to implement it about the same time as we (the U.S.) convert to the metric system.
Granted, Microsoft is not doing as much as it could, but there are also problems that need to be addressed at lower levels.
Coming from someone whose username is "DNS-and-BIND".
Granted, they may have finally gotten it mostly right this last time, but there's certainly DNS software that was written correctly the first time.
I have a Samsung 19" CRT, and the text is perfectly readable to me at 1600 x 1200. Granted, I don't need vision correction, but if I did, that would hardly be the monitor's fault. Lower resolutions don't "look like crap" either.
If you're talking about an LCD rather than a CRT, I can see where lower resolutions might look worse, but I don't understand how that could be with a CRT. But if you're talking about an LCD that does 1600 x 1200 at 19", I'd sure like to hear about it, because I haven't been able to find any under 20".
That said, the upcoming Longhorn feature sounds nice, though I'm guessing the XFree86 folks might be able to come up with something comparable in the 2 years that they have. It will be good to stop having to explain to people why a higher resolution means that things get smaller; after all, printers don't work that way.
If Windows does "what many people want", then why do so many people complain about "computers"? Oh, computers are always crashing, you can't trust them, blah blah blah and a yakkity schmakkity. Talk to users and you'll find that they've come up with bizarre rituals, bending themselves around the flaws in the system. I think you may find that instead of being what people want, it's really what people are used to using.
I'm sure there must be someone out there for whom Windows mostly does just what they'd like it to do, but it's way too complicated for the needs of most people. They only want to run a few apps -- no, scratch that. They only want to _do_a_few_things_, which is different. They shouldn't have to think about start menus and video card drivers.
When I worked in a small "screwdriver shop", I saw plenty of people bring their (Windows) computers in to have scanners installed. There were tons of people who bought add-on cards, thought they could install them under Windows, and couldn't. It's no holy grail.
I think that the companies moving towards "Internet terminals" and similar devices are thinking in the right direction. The more complicated computers with general-purpose operating systems become, the less viable (and reliable) they will be for the general population.
I agree on the "bad dubbing to make wonderfully bad movies wonderfully worse" bit. Try renting the dub of the Fist of the North Star movie (anime) sometime. It's sooo bad, and the dub just piles on the badness. Generally found in the sort of video store that stocks about 10 anime titles on VHS.
A lot of games that came out for the Dreamcast were probably cool because they didn't have the budget to "Americanize" them, and so all the wacky Japanisms (I've seen their non-anime TV, and it's insane) were left to shine. Much better than listening to Tidus whine endlessly.
"Jap" is considered a racial slur by many Japanese, and very offensive. It's probably best to avoid using it.
And yes, they did use a (fairly wheezy) male voice actor in the Japanese version, which was odd since the character made more sense (to me, anyway) as female. I agree that the dub in general was quite good (as far as those things go), and that Billy Bob Thornton was just OK. I definitely prefer subtitles to dubs, but I think a lot of Americans refuse to deal with subtitles. At least, I like to pretend that's the reason why Delicatessen hasn't come out on DVD, and not that people have no taste for cool, dark humor.
You want Bill Gates to get into a flamewar with Steve Ballmer, then split off from Microsoft and create his own, similar operating system?
> One question though is Anne Coulter serious?
The scary part is that I think people like Coulter, Savage, etc. really are serious. Actually, I guess the REALLY scary part is that large numbers of people seem to just say "yuh-huh, that's right" to whatever they're spewing this week.
Personally, I get most of my news from The Daily Show. Yes, I am serious. I know they lampoon the news, but they still report on real events, and I can actually stand watching them, and it's easy to tell what bits are satire.
Wednesday night on The Daily Show, Norm Macdonald and John Stewart were talking about how the scrolling tickers were originally used to convey important information about "the war on terror", but now that there wasn't so much news, they were being filled with fluff. John Stewart came up with the zaniest example: during a newscast about how Saddam's sons had just been killed, a ticker scrolling across the bottom stated that Bianca had declared that she didn't like the word "bootylicious".
First of all, is the release schedule of Debian really that vexing to your business requirements? I can see you having issues if a new major software revision comes out that supports a feature which would make things much easier for you, but does that really happen so often? I prefer the peace of mind that things will continue to function correctly.
:) I have also recently discovered a clone, runit, which is under a Free license and very tiny. I will be looking into this soon.
There are also options available. I have one machine that acts as a server for streaming MP3 and Webcam images, so it runs stable. However, it also acts as a playlist entry machine for the DJs, and Mozilla 1.0 has annoying bugs. I simply told APT that I wanted the Mozilla package from testing, and kept the rest of the system stable. A few other libraries also had to be upgraded, but if an important security problem came out for one of the "testing" packages, I could make a decision on what to do (install the new one from unstable, apt-get -b source my own package, etc.). I could have also used "apt-get -b source" in the first place to avoid upgrading libraries, which is what I do with GAIM.
I can't say I rely on the non-free archives so much. The only thing I use from non-free is daemontools, but I compile this myself, and of course it has never had any security problems
The point is not about body count, granted, though it does help to put the number of deaths into perspective to stop extremists from foaming at the mouth (not you).
As for security, I challenge the notion that we are truly significantly more secure today than we were before 9/11. HOW DO YOU KNOW? You can't really quantify something like national security. Why did we do nothing of this sort after the Oklahoma city bombing? Was that less tragic because less people were killed? But it's not about body count. Terrorist attacks by American-born citizens seem like MORE of a danger to me.
Has the rate of terrorist attacks gone down as a result of the Patriot Act? Maybe the terrorists are focusing on our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or, really, there weren't a whole heck of a lot of terrorist attacks on US soil before 9/11, so it's not exactly shocking that there isn't a flood of them now.
Another solution is to not have a 9-to-5 job :)
Yes, that seems to be the solution for most people, but it's not the only way to go.
Roblimo once said (on our LUG mailing list) that he knows 2 basic types of people. One set likes a more "usual" lifestyle with a regular job, family car, house (probably in the suburbs or city), etc. The other sort has the "beach bum" mentality: contract work when you need money, mess around with all sorts of stuff the rest of the time. I agree with him that there's nothing wrong with choosing either path, but you should always remember that both exist.
Right now, I have a "regular" job (7:30-4), plus 10 hours a week for freshmeat. Do I see this lasting forever? No; the other side of things sounds fun too, and honestly, I quite like tinkering.
But the point is that Linux can be used in a business setting quite easily, as everything will be pre-configured and you won't want users installing/configuring things themselves.
:) I guess this reinforces the notion that Linux is fine for advanced users and very casual users, but it's the middle of the road that will still have some trouble. The goal, as I see it, is to keep pressing in from both sides towards that middle.
As for a home setting, Linux might not be ready to use for the novice who would want to install a driver or UT2003. But it can certainly be sold pre-packaged as a "Web/email/other Internet services/word processing" machine for those who will only use their computer casually ("Buy the kids a PS2 and keep their damn games off the computer").
The only problem I see right now is that someone might want to install something like a new digital camera, but according to Mac "switcher" commercials, Windows users need to call in the nerds too, right?
Just because a counting system doesn't consist solely of the characters 0-9 doesn't mean that the expressions aren't still numeric.
(after all, I, II, III, etc. are referred to as "Roman numerals".)