From my experience being a system polyglot, the phenomenon you speak of is specific to Windows, IMO. Because of the opacity of the underlying system, I notice people on these sites trying to troubleshoot odd problems tend to quickly hit a brick wall whereas this is less likely to happen to people on OSX and Linux-based systems. Although in OSX's case it has more to do with being tightly integrated to the hardware and each model of Mac having a greater critical mass than their many Windows-based counterparts.
People look at those new phones and tablets, see the Windows logo and think about the antivirus running on their PC at home and at work. Some of them even remember editing the register. They feel a shiver down their spine and move to the next shelf. That's the number 1 problem, IMHO.
Number 2, the UI issue the article is about.
I think for much the same reasons, the world probably isn't willing anymore to do full Microsoft product upgrade cycles every 3 years.
From my experience being a system polyglot, the phenomenon you speak of is specific to Windows, IMO. Because of the opacity of the underlying system, I notice people on these sites trying to troubleshoot odd problems tend to quickly hit a brick wall whereas this is less likely to happen to people on OSX and Linux-based systems. Although in OSX's case it has more to do with being tightly integrated to the hardware and each model of Mac having a greater critical mass than their many Windows-based counterparts.
I think you misread the parent. Android's UI belongs to the Android OS, not Linux per se.
The main underlying problem we are wringing hands about in this thread is that Linux enthusiasts are trying to use 'OS' in the strict academic sense of the term, which doesn't fly on the desktop. Personal computers follow a defacto set of standards set by Apple and Microsoft: One of them is that the user interface must be readily recognizable to laypeople across any number of up-to-date computers (e.g. if I switch from a Mac at my old employer to a Mac at my new job, the new one should be familiar).
Another standard expectation on personal computers is that the user/owner can get software products written and distributed by independent third parties and easily install them. This is enabled by having a rich set of APIs that are *always* included with each copy of the OS, which is itself largely defined by these high-level APIs.
So-called "Linux" does not rate as a personal computer OS by such standards. When it comes down to it, Linux really is just a kernel and geeks need to stop using it to grab the attention of average consumers... you are just confusing them and, in the end, making yourself appear irritatingly inane.
The software malady that occurs when you create yet another Linux distro with the expectation that plenty of people will want to use an amorphous pile of different user interfaces with no effort whatsoever to tightly adapt the OS to any particular line of hardware. So the user has to learn about different UIs and also about chipsets and peripheral chips and how they are wired differently in various computer models. They also have to learn about repositories, and how they are structured to reject the software you actually want to download and install yourself.
Extra Distro-itis points if you're an app developer and got so sick of configuring and packaging for umpteen different distros that you went and created your own new Linux distro specially configured to run certain applications (hardware problems notwithstanding).
I've been complaining about this stuff for years pointing out that "Ubuntu Linux" is far less helpful and appealing than just "Ubuntu".
The Linux distro milieu creates low expectations for certain important features of personal computer operating systems (OS as defined by the defacto standards set by Mac and Windows systems, not the anemic definition from academia that Linux proponents like to hide behind). One of those features is rich GUI & multimedia functionality set behind a searingly sharp demarcation line that defines "services that are always offered, even on different computers", and optional stuff on the other side. That creates an environment where third-party apps can be distributed for the platform independently, wherever and however the authors and users like, while being confident the apps will actually run.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
Karma, baby.
Someone couldn't muster an intelligent reply, but in my experience pro-nukes don't have any good rebuttals to the above arguments.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
Ecology trumps economics on proper accounting for all relevant factors-- every time.
Economics is loaded with a ton of chauvinistic value judgments that all boil down to, "if *I* don't do this polluting or oppressive exploit to increase my real buying power and decrease everyone else's, then someone else will so it might as well be me!"... "And if regulation is threatened, then I'll inanely scream about the tragedy of the commons and demand privatization of the resources."
The attitudes are fairly evident in the practices of biotech firms like Monsanto. There is this great pretense of *science* along with their research staff trained in science... but they stonewall against analysis and critique from the field of ecology. In this (yet another) crucial sense, the machinations of unrestrained capital are advancing the grip of pseudoscience. It represents another runaway use of technology to externalize the risks and damages that come from "making money".
It the difference between huge anti-war protests being blacked-out of news coverage (at least until after the war has started), while handfuls of individuals called Tea Party immediately become media darlings when they surround town hall meetings with guns.
There are just certain topics and demographics that prompt discomfort or hostility in the corporate media.
Speaking of discomfort... Someone didn't realize I have karma to burn.:)
It the difference between huge anti-war protests being blacked-out of news coverage (at least until after the war has started), while handfuls of individuals called Tea Party immediately become media darlings when they surround town hall meetings with guns.
There are just certain topics and demographics that prompt discomfort or hostility in the corporate media.
Germany was fighting an election where the government stated unequivocally that they would not go to war. The opposition refused to commit themselves. The government surprised everyone by just shading the election, probably on this issue. Germany did not go to war. The then foreign minister even told Powell at the UN: "with all due respect, I think you are wrong on this".
Several months before the war started, European media outlets had already reported that the satellite photos, yellow cake documents, and suspicions about aluminum tubes and bioweapons stockades were indeed fabricated (not to mention Blair's plagerizing of an old, inaccurate document).
The American news media ignored each and every report. Their colleagues around the globe were treated like non-entities (and, closer to the action during the war, like hostiles).
Our post-90s megacorporate media are in the business of taking the great mass of mundane news about murders, fires, weather, etc. and using it as credibility so they can mix in misinformation on the big issues. Today's network news reporters are first and foremost attuned to their stock options and the interests of Wall St. finance.
Yes, nothing is 100% efficient or safe. I don't mind throwing a couple extra GB at the problem of security, however, especially if it gets me robust hardware-backed isolation.
IOMMU hardware in recent CPUs translates the device into the VMs address space. Then the kernel running inside the VM can use its normal drivers to operate the device at essentially full speed.
The kernel that runs the hypervisor only runs a limited set of drivers by default.
The browser is a rather complex beast and there is probably no way that the application itself can ensure system integrity... at least with any consistency.
Some of us are migrating our online activities to Qubes OS which is a desktop distro (I know...) that allows you to create App VM domains for things like "personal", "work", "unsafe", etc. and also a "disposable" one that gets reset on exit. Each domain of apps is displayed in window borders that have an associated color.
Taking it further, some of the commonly-attacked system components like the network stack are virtualized as well.
Qubes employs VT-x and VT-d/IOMMU hardware to allow you to operate different types of peripherals (like bluetooth) without incurring all of the risk they normally carry. Even device drivers are paravirtualized! So the attack surface that can be used against the core system (or any other domains in the system) is kept to a bare minimum.
An added benefit of this approach is that user activities are tracked somewhat less than normal (especially if you use disposable VMs).
The thing that really gets me is how the hippies explicitly turned their backs on consumerism, and then corporations reformulate their propaganda efforts in the 70s and win them over.
The other Adam Curtis documentaries are also quite eye-opening...
In The Mayfair Set he shows how in the 80s vulture capitalists transformed pension funds into ravenous dissolvers of the western industrial base that created them.
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience being a system polyglot, the phenomenon you speak of is specific to Windows, IMO. Because of the opacity of the underlying system, I notice people on these sites trying to troubleshoot odd problems tend to quickly hit a brick wall whereas this is less likely to happen to people on OSX and Linux-based systems. Although in OSX's case it has more to do with being tightly integrated to the hardware and each model of Mac having a greater critical mass than their many Windows-based counterparts.
People look at those new phones and tablets, see the Windows logo and think about the antivirus running on their PC at home and at work. Some of them even remember editing the register. They feel a shiver down their spine and move to the next shelf. That's the number 1 problem, IMHO.
Number 2, the UI issue the article is about.
I think for much the same reasons, the world probably isn't willing anymore to do full Microsoft product upgrade cycles every 3 years.
Techies are one thing. But if the distro wars never end in the consumer space, Linux will never truly live.
From my experience being a system polyglot, the phenomenon you speak of is specific to Windows, IMO. Because of the opacity of the underlying system, I notice people on these sites trying to troubleshoot odd problems tend to quickly hit a brick wall whereas this is less likely to happen to people on OSX and Linux-based systems. Although in OSX's case it has more to do with being tightly integrated to the hardware and each model of Mac having a greater critical mass than their many Windows-based counterparts.
http://qubes-os.org/
It gives you hardware-enforced security for your desktop.
...aren't also targets for reprogramming and surveillance.
I think you misread the parent. Android's UI belongs to the Android OS, not Linux per se.
The main underlying problem we are wringing hands about in this thread is that Linux enthusiasts are trying to use 'OS' in the strict academic sense of the term, which doesn't fly on the desktop. Personal computers follow a defacto set of standards set by Apple and Microsoft: One of them is that the user interface must be readily recognizable to laypeople across any number of up-to-date computers (e.g. if I switch from a Mac at my old employer to a Mac at my new job, the new one should be familiar).
Another standard expectation on personal computers is that the user/owner can get software products written and distributed by independent third parties and easily install them. This is enabled by having a rich set of APIs that are *always* included with each copy of the OS, which is itself largely defined by these high-level APIs.
So-called "Linux" does not rate as a personal computer OS by such standards. When it comes down to it, Linux really is just a kernel and geeks need to stop using it to grab the attention of average consumers... you are just confusing them and, in the end, making yourself appear irritatingly inane.
The software malady that occurs when you create yet another Linux distro with the expectation that plenty of people will want to use an amorphous pile of different user interfaces with no effort whatsoever to tightly adapt the OS to any particular line of hardware. So the user has to learn about different UIs and also about chipsets and peripheral chips and how they are wired differently in various computer models. They also have to learn about repositories, and how they are structured to reject the software you actually want to download and install yourself.
Extra Distro-itis points if you're an app developer and got so sick of configuring and packaging for umpteen different distros that you went and created your own new Linux distro specially configured to run certain applications (hardware problems notwithstanding).
I've been complaining about this stuff for years pointing out that "Ubuntu Linux" is far less helpful and appealing than just "Ubuntu".
The Linux distro milieu creates low expectations for certain important features of personal computer operating systems (OS as defined by the defacto standards set by Mac and Windows systems, not the anemic definition from academia that Linux proponents like to hide behind). One of those features is rich GUI & multimedia functionality set behind a searingly sharp demarcation line that defines "services that are always offered, even on different computers", and optional stuff on the other side. That creates an environment where third-party apps can be distributed for the platform independently, wherever and however the authors and users like, while being confident the apps will actually run.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
Karma, baby.
Someone couldn't muster an intelligent reply, but in my experience pro-nukes don't have any good rebuttals to the above arguments.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
Hector Avalos comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP5LdELd_0o
"How archaeology killed the Bible" from a former child evangelist.
Or James Randi, for that matter... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxEJHO8KIXY
While all three are distinctly different ideologues with little real overlap.[SIC]
LOL!
GP is spot-on though. Upgrading to Windows Ultimate to get full-disk encryption is an expensive proposition. One might as well buy a Mac...
>And of course, there are the billions in green crony subsidies.
Your tax dollars at work...
LOL! As opposed to the respectible kind of cronyism that a conservative would be comfortable with.
They are heading below $2/watt before credits as we speak. I can even find a 5kw system for below that.
Ecology trumps economics on proper accounting for all relevant factors-- every time.
Economics is loaded with a ton of chauvinistic value judgments that all boil down to, "if *I* don't do this polluting or oppressive exploit to increase my real buying power and decrease everyone else's, then someone else will so it might as well be me!" ... "And if regulation is threatened, then I'll inanely scream about the tragedy of the commons and demand privatization of the resources."
The attitudes are fairly evident in the practices of biotech firms like Monsanto. There is this great pretense of *science* along with their research staff trained in science... but they stonewall against analysis and critique from the field of ecology. In this (yet another) crucial sense, the machinations of unrestrained capital are advancing the grip of pseudoscience. It represents another runaway use of technology to externalize the risks and damages that come from "making money".
....a set of mainframe services. Re-brand it as 'cloud' all you want-- Over the long term, its not the best fit.
Its better to have locally-running apps that give you a choice of data storage points (especially local and private VPN).
It the difference between huge anti-war protests being blacked-out of news coverage (at least until after the war has started), while handfuls of individuals called Tea Party immediately become media darlings when they surround town hall meetings with guns.
There are just certain topics and demographics that prompt discomfort or hostility in the corporate media.
Speaking of discomfort... Someone didn't realize I have karma to burn. :)
It the difference between huge anti-war protests being blacked-out of news coverage (at least until after the war has started), while handfuls of individuals called Tea Party immediately become media darlings when they surround town hall meetings with guns.
There are just certain topics and demographics that prompt discomfort or hostility in the corporate media.
Germany was fighting an election where the government stated unequivocally that they would not go to war. The opposition refused to commit themselves. The government surprised everyone by just shading the election, probably on this issue. Germany did not go to war. The then foreign minister even told Powell at the UN: "with all due respect, I think you are wrong on this".
Several months before the war started, European media outlets had already reported that the satellite photos, yellow cake documents, and suspicions about aluminum tubes and bioweapons stockades were indeed fabricated (not to mention Blair's plagerizing of an old, inaccurate document).
The American news media ignored each and every report. Their colleagues around the globe were treated like non-entities (and, closer to the action during the war, like hostiles).
Our post-90s megacorporate media are in the business of taking the great mass of mundane news about murders, fires, weather, etc. and using it as credibility so they can mix in misinformation on the big issues. Today's network news reporters are first and foremost attuned to their stock options and the interests of Wall St. finance.
Yes, nothing is 100% efficient or safe. I don't mind throwing a couple extra GB at the problem of security, however, especially if it gets me robust hardware-backed isolation.
OK, thanks for correcting my terminology there!
IOMMU hardware in recent CPUs translates the device into the VMs address space. Then the kernel running inside the VM can use its normal drivers to operate the device at essentially full speed.
The kernel that runs the hypervisor only runs a limited set of drivers by default.
The browser is a rather complex beast and there is probably no way that the application itself can ensure system integrity... at least with any consistency.
Some of us are migrating our online activities to Qubes OS which is a desktop distro (I know...) that allows you to create App VM domains for things like "personal", "work", "unsafe", etc. and also a "disposable" one that gets reset on exit. Each domain of apps is displayed in window borders that have an associated color.
Taking it further, some of the commonly-attacked system components like the network stack are virtualized as well.
Qubes employs VT-x and VT-d/IOMMU hardware to allow you to operate different types of peripherals (like bluetooth) without incurring all of the risk they normally carry. Even device drivers are paravirtualized! So the attack surface that can be used against the core system (or any other domains in the system) is kept to a bare minimum.
An added benefit of this approach is that user activities are tracked somewhat less than normal (especially if you use disposable VMs).
The thing that really gets me is how the hippies explicitly turned their backs on consumerism, and then corporations reformulate their propaganda efforts in the 70s and win them over.
The other Adam Curtis documentaries are also quite eye-opening...
In The Mayfair Set he shows how in the 80s vulture capitalists transformed pension funds into ravenous dissolvers of the western industrial base that created them.