its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security -- which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas!
Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.
A lofty goal, but it's not realistic. Patents are abused, but they're also so ingrained into our society that it's unthinkable to not have any patents whatsoever. Everyone's made the joke that if they invent something that could make them a lot of money, they'll patent it.
Perhaps the idea should be to take patents back to the original purpose of them - to protect the inventor from other people stealing their ideas, and NOT to be used as a legal weapon against other companies.
I guess it's better than the current option we have for running QuakeLive for Linux (i.e. nothing). Yes I know they're working on it, but it'd be nice if Linux wasn't treated second-class to Windows all the time.
I have no understanding of how Symantec remains in business. There's something deeply wrong with that.
That's easy - software bundle contracts with all major computer vendors, branding and market exposure, plus they seem to always be available for interviews with '60 minutes' every time there's a trojan/virus outbreak like Conficker. This all culminates into ordinary people looking at anti-virus boxes on retail store shelves, seeing 'Symantic' and triggering that name from wherever they heard or saw it before.
It's simple marketing, and the fact they're still in business means they're damn good at it. Just like Microsoft.
Why is John Carmack the only developer of commercial game engines who actually releases the source code after they have become technically obsolete? I mean it's very nice, since it's given us games like Urban Terror and OpenAreana which can be released completely free as standalone games, but companies very rarely do things out of the goodness of their hearts.
The only reason I can see him doing this is because he believes in the open-source cause, but will his new owner allow him to continue this trend?
No offense, but if we keep chalking up video games to being the realm of "pre-pubescent boys" we're going to keep seeing our rights eroded away in the name of "protecting the children."
To be fair, log onto any popular game or platform which has some kind of text/voice chat service (eg. Xbox live, Counter-Strike, etc), and the stereotype will hold true. Sure it's not the case everywhere, but damnit, it's not a lie.
I didn't write the failure blog. Unless your criticism was directly towards the actual writer, in which case so be it. But if you were having a go at me for initially siding with his blog, then fuck you. It's a differing opinion, get used to it.
I think it's a bit of a cop-out to just wrap the delay under "Government job", but it does make sense, particularly your time-line. A fair point you make.:)
Typical Slashdot moderators. Unable to face the fact that not everything is perfect in their own little world.
I provided two useful blogs that gave facts and opinions from both sides of the migration, plus my own opinion... and I get modded "Flamebait". If this isn't a perfect example of how your opinion WILL be punished if it's not totally for the FOSS line of thought, then I don't know what is.
I love open-source when it's applicable, but I'm not going change my opinion if I think it's fallen short. Got to laugh at those who can't stand dissent. But thank you to anyone who can post with some maturity.
From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side. It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money? It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?
Maybe now he'll understand why it's so important to be able to install third-party parts and he'll decide to loosen-up the licensing a little bit.
Hey, at least he didn't get his liver sourced from Microsoft. He'd have 30 days to activate it before his liver shuts down, and if he needs another transplant in the future, his body configuration might change enough that he has to call up Microsoft again to reactivate his internal organs.
To be honest, my solution was to accept that the geek lifestyle (i.e. an obsession with computers and technology) was professionally satisfying but a total disaster for anything else. I found it to be a very vapid and hollow existence, so I gravitated away from geekness being a virtue to being a handicap. Funnily enough - it worked. I'm now much happier than I was, I have a wonderful girlfriend, enjoying life a lot more, but still have just enough of a connection to the geek world that I can still work as an engineer without becoming obsessed over it, to the determent of others.
So, what I would suggest is that you broaden your lifestyle. TRY NEW THINGS, things that you would never have cared about. Hang out with friends who have interests different to yours. You never know what might happen. But above all - reduce your care-factor for hardware. It's not going to be your life's sole source of happiness. People are much more fulfilling to be with.
I disagree. Users generally don't want applications which follow the UNIX-style ideology (do one thing, and do it well) - users want applications to performs lots of things.
eg. iTunes can play music, collate music into a library, edit metadata, rip audio from CDs, allow the user to purchase music from iTunes, allow the user to sync their music with their iPod, allow a user to purchase apps for their iPhone, etc.
Imagine having to use seperate programs to organise music, play music, edit metadata, rip discs, purchase music and apps, etc. Well... we don't have to imagine, such seperate programs exist on all platforms. But iTunes integrates these feactures because that's what people want. There's a reason Amarok, Banshee and Rhythmbox exist in Linux - to copy iTunes and its method of doing things.
Whether you like it or not, people generally prefer the collapsing of various functions into a single package, resulting in a desire for having fewer programs that can do more than individual programs. The same goes for phones - phones aren't used for just making phone calls these days, given how packed most of them are with features.
It took me slightly longer than normal to implement all these changes because I was distracted trying to decide a fitting way to end the e-mail authors life but, in the end I implemented all their "suggestions". I'm ashamed to say that they were right. The product was far more polished after I did all those seemingly pointless things.
Don't feel ashamed.
It's been said time and time again, but it bears repeating - developers don't understand how important a GUI is to the end user. All those little things you mentioned were an annoyance to implement, and yet had a cumulative effect that even you could appreciate. The problem is that you had someone to kick your ass and tell you what was necessary to implement for the GUI, and since it was your job and you were being paid to do this, you obviously had to implement the additions. Developers for OSS unfortunately do not have such motivation and do not have an external force to push them into improving the GUI in such subtle ways, and this is why OSS tends to (but not always) have a far less slick interface than their closed-source counterparts.
The iPhone has a slick interface. This is noted by virtually anyone who uses it, but this interface wasn't an accident of design.
Funny - I've usually seen it's the geeks who take the trouble to turn on the 'classic' look and feel in Windows and get rid of all the cloying eye-candy. Meanwhile non-technical users just stick with the default.
I consider myself a geek but I like Compiz and Aero because not only are they more modern looking than the boring old grey themes of past desktop GUIs, but they also have the benefit of offloading the rendering of the GUI from the CPU and onto the GPU, which in most cases improves responsiveness.
I still like the bling though, but I'm most certainly not a non-technical user. I just don't believe a geek has to insist on a bland desktop. So where can I be pigeon-holed?
I gotta say, per-application volume control -- in whatever OS -- always seemed like a fairly useless feature to me. Virtually all applications that generate sound already have an internal volume control independent from the system master. I've had PulseAudio for over a year now, and I haven't used this feature once.
I have. In Vista (and Windows 7) I can mute the audio from Firefox so that I can play Free Tetris online and listen to my music without hearing any annoying sound effects. The game doesn't have a way to mute the audio, so I can do it though the audio subsystem of the OS.
It's nice to have the capability, so please don't dismiss something just because you don't use it.
Schools are a tricky environment, I give you that. You can basically forget about usage policies, you can't really sensibly enforce them. Why is locking down USB ports not an option?
I guess it's mainly because USB drives are seen as the modern equivalent of floppy disks. People might want to work on documents at home, or take data from home to use on school computers. In these cases it might be preferable to just throw the USB drive in and copy things across, rather than resort with emailing yourself the files. Schools like to keep things simple remember, and USB drives are a simple, ubiquitous method for file transport.
The first is the user and sensible usage policies. When people can download and execute arbitrary software and plug in USB sticks at random, you have bigger problems than the choice of your AV.
So what would you recommend?
I don't disagree with you; smart and sensible policies are the best defense. But then again, I service schools, and schools have kids and parents (and teachers) who aren't going to follow the rules, so AV is still necessary. I can't lock down the USB ports (physically or otherwise); I'd have a rebellion on my hands.
BTW - I'm an engineer by trade, just acting as an IT jockey in the meantime, so I don't know all the best tricks of the trade yet. But it'd be helpful to know.:)
Before anyone asks why someone bothered to do this, I'll answer it - because they can. Simple as that.
It has no practical use, that's for sure, but not everyone needs to be done to have a practical use. Some stuff is just cool. That's why we have these things called hobbies. I certainly wouldn't have invested my time into getting something like this to work, but I can't disparage anyone who does. It's a hobby. I would even argue that it does not reflect one way or another on a person's ability to get laid.:)
What about portability... open standards... interoperability.
No-one cares about such things in the real world. Everyone uses Windows, remember?/sarcasm... or is it?
Doesn't seem to matter much. Slashdotters want such things, business don't care, because such benefits aren't seen when the vast majority of people are using Windows. I see it time and time again - we are losing the battle for open standards. If Silverlight and other proprietary technologies are GAINING prominence, how can we win?
I can't believe that some people still don't get the basic facts of this case.
If my readings on Neowin are anything, I think it's a bit simpler than that:
* People either don't KNOW about Microsoft's history with the law, or * People don't care, or don't see it as being particularly important
The first is simple ignorance. Keep in mind a lot of younger folk won't remember or will have heard about past issues with MS. Furthermore, Slashdot seems to be the only site that has a fixation about Microsoft's anti-trust issues, and since we keep going on about it in comments, people from the outside see us as IRRATIONAL Microsoft haters instead of wondering WHY.
The second is simple - unless it affects them, people don't care about what Microsoft does. The EU are seen as money-grabbing corrupt bastards, and everyone's trying to get a piece of the Microsoft pie. Poor Microsoft.
You have to options: slap some reality into your users and put them in their place, or burn out. Your choice.
Given your post title is "Fuck em", are you're suggesting I have sex with my users and include some spanking with it, in order to put them in their place as it were?
I'm not sure our corporate policy covers this particular situation.
Indeed. The more it becomes obvious the publishers care less about the quality of the product and more about the ways in which they can take money from customers, the less likely people will be to deal with them. The publisher-customer relationship isn't set in stone, and being greedy bastards simply means someone can move to another publisher who won't be so unfair.
Assuming the customer is savvy of course, but we aren't all brain-dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.
A lofty goal, but it's not realistic. Patents are abused, but they're also so ingrained into our society that it's unthinkable to not have any patents whatsoever. Everyone's made the joke that if they invent something that could make them a lot of money, they'll patent it.
Perhaps the idea should be to take patents back to the original purpose of them - to protect the inventor from other people stealing their ideas, and NOT to be used as a legal weapon against other companies.
I guess it's better than the current option we have for running QuakeLive for Linux (i.e. nothing). Yes I know they're working on it, but it'd be nice if Linux wasn't treated second-class to Windows all the time.
That's easy - software bundle contracts with all major computer vendors, branding and market exposure, plus they seem to always be available for interviews with '60 minutes' every time there's a trojan/virus outbreak like Conficker. This all culminates into ordinary people looking at anti-virus boxes on retail store shelves, seeing 'Symantic' and triggering that name from wherever they heard or saw it before.
It's simple marketing, and the fact they're still in business means they're damn good at it. Just like Microsoft.
Why is John Carmack the only developer of commercial game engines who actually releases the source code after they have become technically obsolete? I mean it's very nice, since it's given us games like Urban Terror and OpenAreana which can be released completely free as standalone games, but companies very rarely do things out of the goodness of their hearts.
The only reason I can see him doing this is because he believes in the open-source cause, but will his new owner allow him to continue this trend?
To be fair, log onto any popular game or platform which has some kind of text/voice chat service (eg. Xbox live, Counter-Strike, etc), and the stereotype will hold true. Sure it's not the case everywhere, but damnit, it's not a lie.
I didn't write the failure blog. Unless your criticism was directly towards the actual writer, in which case so be it. But if you were having a go at me for initially siding with his blog, then fuck you. It's a differing opinion, get used to it.
I think it's a bit of a cop-out to just wrap the delay under "Government job", but it does make sense, particularly your time-line. A fair point you make. :)
Typical Slashdot moderators. Unable to face the fact that not everything is perfect in their own little world.
I provided two useful blogs that gave facts and opinions from both sides of the migration, plus my own opinion... and I get modded "Flamebait". If this isn't a perfect example of how your opinion WILL be punished if it's not totally for the FOSS line of thought, then I don't know what is.
I love open-source when it's applicable, but I'm not going change my opinion if I think it's fallen short. Got to laugh at those who can't stand dissent. But thank you to anyone who can post with some maturity.
Here's the blog from Floria Schiessl, project leader of the LiMux distro and the Munich migration: http://www.floschi.info/
Here's a blog from someone who believes the Munich migration was a failure: http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/
From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side. It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money? It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?
Hey, at least he didn't get his liver sourced from Microsoft. He'd have 30 days to activate it before his liver shuts down, and if he needs another transplant in the future, his body configuration might change enough that he has to call up Microsoft again to reactivate his internal organs.
A chemist friend of mine keeps an extremely corrosive acid (I forget what type) in a bottle marked "rm -rf"
Very apt name for whoever gets their hands covered in it...
Man WTF is "juice"?
Pour on some Apple drink!
To be honest, my solution was to accept that the geek lifestyle (i.e. an obsession with computers and technology) was professionally satisfying but a total disaster for anything else. I found it to be a very vapid and hollow existence, so I gravitated away from geekness being a virtue to being a handicap. Funnily enough - it worked. I'm now much happier than I was, I have a wonderful girlfriend, enjoying life a lot more, but still have just enough of a connection to the geek world that I can still work as an engineer without becoming obsessed over it, to the determent of others.
So, what I would suggest is that you broaden your lifestyle. TRY NEW THINGS, things that you would never have cared about. Hang out with friends who have interests different to yours. You never know what might happen. But above all - reduce your care-factor for hardware. It's not going to be your life's sole source of happiness. People are much more fulfilling to be with.
I disagree. Users generally don't want applications which follow the UNIX-style ideology (do one thing, and do it well) - users want applications to performs lots of things.
eg. iTunes can play music, collate music into a library, edit metadata, rip audio from CDs, allow the user to purchase music from iTunes, allow the user to sync their music with their iPod, allow a user to purchase apps for their iPhone, etc.
Imagine having to use seperate programs to organise music, play music, edit metadata, rip discs, purchase music and apps, etc. Well... we don't have to imagine, such seperate programs exist on all platforms. But iTunes integrates these feactures because that's what people want. There's a reason Amarok, Banshee and Rhythmbox exist in Linux - to copy iTunes and its method of doing things.
Whether you like it or not, people generally prefer the collapsing of various functions into a single package, resulting in a desire for having fewer programs that can do more than individual programs. The same goes for phones - phones aren't used for just making phone calls these days, given how packed most of them are with features.
Don't feel ashamed.
It's been said time and time again, but it bears repeating - developers don't understand how important a GUI is to the end user. All those little things you mentioned were an annoyance to implement, and yet had a cumulative effect that even you could appreciate. The problem is that you had someone to kick your ass and tell you what was necessary to implement for the GUI, and since it was your job and you were being paid to do this, you obviously had to implement the additions. Developers for OSS unfortunately do not have such motivation and do not have an external force to push them into improving the GUI in such subtle ways, and this is why OSS tends to (but not always) have a far less slick interface than their closed-source counterparts.
The iPhone has a slick interface. This is noted by virtually anyone who uses it, but this interface wasn't an accident of design.
I consider myself a geek but I like Compiz and Aero because not only are they more modern looking than the boring old grey themes of past desktop GUIs, but they also have the benefit of offloading the rendering of the GUI from the CPU and onto the GPU, which in most cases improves responsiveness.
I still like the bling though, but I'm most certainly not a non-technical user. I just don't believe a geek has to insist on a bland desktop. So where can I be pigeon-holed?
I have. In Vista (and Windows 7) I can mute the audio from Firefox so that I can play Free Tetris online and listen to my music without hearing any annoying sound effects. The game doesn't have a way to mute the audio, so I can do it though the audio subsystem of the OS. It's nice to have the capability, so please don't dismiss something just because you don't use it.
I guess it's mainly because USB drives are seen as the modern equivalent of floppy disks. People might want to work on documents at home, or take data from home to use on school computers. In these cases it might be preferable to just throw the USB drive in and copy things across, rather than resort with emailing yourself the files. Schools like to keep things simple remember, and USB drives are a simple, ubiquitous method for file transport.
So what would you recommend?
I don't disagree with you; smart and sensible policies are the best defense. But then again, I service schools, and schools have kids and parents (and teachers) who aren't going to follow the rules, so AV is still necessary. I can't lock down the USB ports (physically or otherwise); I'd have a rebellion on my hands.
BTW - I'm an engineer by trade, just acting as an IT jockey in the meantime, so I don't know all the best tricks of the trade yet. But it'd be helpful to know. :)
Before anyone asks why someone bothered to do this, I'll answer it - because they can. Simple as that.
It has no practical use, that's for sure, but not everyone needs to be done to have a practical use. Some stuff is just cool. That's why we have these things called hobbies. I certainly wouldn't have invested my time into getting something like this to work, but I can't disparage anyone who does. It's a hobby. I would even argue that it does not reflect one way or another on a person's ability to get laid. :)
No-one cares about such things in the real world. Everyone uses Windows, remember? /sarcasm... or is it?
Doesn't seem to matter much. Slashdotters want such things, business don't care, because such benefits aren't seen when the vast majority of people are using Windows. I see it time and time again - we are losing the battle for open standards. If Silverlight and other proprietary technologies are GAINING prominence, how can we win?
If my readings on Neowin are anything, I think it's a bit simpler than that:
* People either don't KNOW about Microsoft's history with the law, or
* People don't care, or don't see it as being particularly important
The first is simple ignorance. Keep in mind a lot of younger folk won't remember or will have heard about past issues with MS. Furthermore, Slashdot seems to be the only site that has a fixation about Microsoft's anti-trust issues, and since we keep going on about it in comments, people from the outside see us as IRRATIONAL Microsoft haters instead of wondering WHY.
The second is simple - unless it affects them, people don't care about what Microsoft does. The EU are seen as money-grabbing corrupt bastards, and everyone's trying to get a piece of the Microsoft pie. Poor Microsoft.
So don't act surprised.
Given your post title is "Fuck em", are you're suggesting I have sex with my users and include some spanking with it, in order to put them in their place as it were?
I'm not sure our corporate policy covers this particular situation.
Indeed. The more it becomes obvious the publishers care less about the quality of the product and more about the ways in which they can take money from customers, the less likely people will be to deal with them. The publisher-customer relationship isn't set in stone, and being greedy bastards simply means someone can move to another publisher who won't be so unfair.
Assuming the customer is savvy of course, but we aren't all brain-dead.