> Windows already comes with their PCs and does pretty much what they want to.
Someone mod up the AC. He beat me to it.
It has been proven in survey after survey that most people stick with what came with their PC when they bought it. For the vast majority, that's Windows. Likewise, most phones now run iOS or Android, and that's what it'll run. They've never heard of version numbers or "Ice Cream Sandwich" or anything else like that.
OK, and now I'm probably off topic, but I'm an older guy and as we get older, we like to reminisce. (Between bellowed exhortations to remove ones feet from the lawn, of course.)
I remember a million years ago, when I was developing VxDs for Windows 95. I rigged up the debugger to go active early in the boot... and had to disable it.
Windows 95 generated SO MANY faults during the boot, it took forever otherwise. I mean, it constantly klonged. Bang, bang, bang, one exception after another. They (mostly) went away when Windows 95 OSR2 appeared.:)
Ah, memories... Blue Screens of Death.... random disk corruption... it was a beautiful thing.
> Windows has never had anything as serious as a file system corruption bug.
I'm going to assume that either you are joking, or you have only been using Windows for about 5 minutes.
On the off chance that you are actually serious, Geoff Chappell documented a case some years ago in which Windows would occasionally toggle a byte (might have been a word; can't remember now) on the hard drive. Just one byte in a random sector somewhere on the drive. Happy flower sunshine.
You should also Google "Windows disk corruption" and look at all the complaints and cries for help.
One reason why I tried Linux, then switched to it and have stuck with it, was because I was sick and tired of having to run scandisk and/or chkdsk at least once a week on my Windows systems just to keep them running. At the time, I was a contract programmer doing a ton of development, and believe me, if you were constantly working the hard drive (as I was), you WOULD have corruption issues. At random, no explanation. You learned to do constant backups and to be prepared for anything.
The only thing I've experienced even close to that under Linux is that the installer typically does a quick format instead of a full format. As a result, if you have a drive that's iffy and with bad sectors, the install will appear to complete successfully, but it won't work. The answer to that one is, "buy a new hard drive.":)
(I had to learn that one the hard way. If you get ANY errors on a hard drive, just replace the blasted thing. Don't wait, either. Do it now.)
Windows 7 seems to be fairly stable, but XP (just to name one) is notorious for just blowing things up at random. It might be a registry entry; it might be a corrupted executable image on disk. Who knows? But the standard cure is just to back up and reinstall.
Wait until the investigation determines what actually happened. Even "billions of dollars" of electronics can fail, or glitch, or human error can misread or miscalculate (Mars Climate Orbiter, anyone?).
But I'll add this: the Montpelier is a Los Angeles-class attack sub. Their captains aren't exactly chosen for their shy, retiring natures. (I once worked with a guy who served on such a sub. He couldn't talk about what he did, but it was obvious that he'd been in some hair-raising places, doing some hair-raising things.)
My first full-time job as a broadcast engineer was with a 100,000 watt FM in Southeastern NC. After I moved on, they built a new tower near the NC/SC border. Air Force guys would hot dog all around that tower -- they apparently took dares to fly under and between the guy wires. Sure enough, one of these guys finally misjudged a bit, nicked a guy wire, pulled the tower down and crashed the jet. (He ejected and survived.)
Don't get me wrong: political correctness and shy, retiring natures don't really belong in the military, not if it's going to be effective. But hey; sometimes, they DO hot dog and show off.:)
... with a bad economy, with money tight, most businesses are looking for a way to trim a buck. Just because your particular firm isn't willing to spend the (minimal, in most cases) effort on a migration that will literally save your company tons of money, don't think that all of us think that way. We certainly don't.
Look: that argument was compelling up until just a few years ago. I'll grant you that, especially back in the old StarOffice days (gack, gag), then on to OpenOffice.org. But speaking for myself -- freely admitting that your mileage will vary -- I haven't had trouble opening anything in LibreOffice for a couple of years now. Including some fairly sweet PPT presentations.
Besides, Microsoft has tried to introduce the "subscription" model before. They'll probably back off of it after they get deluged with complaints. Again.
(Or -- this is my real fear -- they'll go after things like Libre and KOffice with the patent hammer.)
> Those of us who don't live in your California suburb and who have multiple devices...
Yep. Or those of us who really, REALLY need our phones. I travel all over Alabama looking after 5 radio stations, some of which have towers in the middle of nowhere. I pay a premium for Verizon because to date, they've been best where I need to go. (Although I'll say this, coverage hasn't been same here -- with any carrier -- since the tornadoes came through on April 27th, 2011. Lot of damage from those things.)
I don't need fancy apps, but I do need text, email and a Web browser. I get that with the LG Ally that Verizon basically threw in when I signed up for another 2 years of indentured service-itude.:)
To be fair, I don't know how typical we are. Maybe most folks can get by with a barebones plan and spotty coverage. But to stay on topic, even in that case, I just don't see the appeal of this Mozilla OS, not now. Maybe 5 years ago, but not now.
> The intent here is to replace so much of the specialized cabling
Yup. I'm glad I work in radio, where we've been ferrying oversampled, high-quality audio over IP for some years now.
The digital switching and input assignments are a dream as well. Not that many years ago, if someone came into Engineering and said, "sorry, forgot! We have a paid ballgame going on at 4PM!"... my assistants and I would literally grab a punch tool and some Belden wire and start frantically running cables. Many was the time we'd put something on air by literally throwing a pair across the floor with gaffer's tape. "Watch Yer Step!":)
Nowadays, any source in our facility can be assigned to any input on any mixer in any control room. Run once, use many times. Ah, it's a beautiful thing. I can move an entire radio station from one control to another literally in a matter of minutes. It takes longer for the staff to physically grab their coffee cups and lucky charms than it does for my staff to move the signals.
My poor brethren in TV just have entirely too much data. If we'd all go back to RADIO drama, see, this wouldn't be a problem, now woodit?:D
I called you a "scoundrel" because you made me hungry. I had also forgotten what those tomatoes were called. You reminded me.:)
Haven't had much luck growing tomatoes in this terrible soil in Alabama. It's too alkaline. I got decent results once with a bucket filled with potting soil and some plant food, but it also gets very hot here and they need a LOT of water. The soil in my yard is very hard rocky clay.
Now, back home in NC (where I'm originally from), tomatoes are easy to grow. There was a local grocer who grew his own tomatoes every summer and they were excellent as well.
I couldn't bear to look at those pictures of the Cherokee Purples for more than a few moments.:)
You scoundrel! The wife and I are headed to the mountains of TN/NC in the next couple of weeks, and I plan to fetch a few if I can. I found some a couple of a years ago at the farmer's market up in Asheville and they were so good they made me cry!
You are absolutely right. If someone is looking for a great tomato, look for "heirloom." I'd rather have a Cherokee Purple or a Big Ugly grown with chemical fertilizer than a typical mass-market hybrid grown with pure, organic compost. Any day of the week.
For the record: for US Presidential elections, it's Congress and the state legislatures. That's clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and modified by the 12th Amendment. This came into play in the election of 1824, where no candidate received a clear majority of electoral votes. (One interesting quirk that most people are unaware of: in this event, the votes are BY STATE -- in other words, each state gets one vote for the President, regardless of size and how many electors in has!!!)
I'm not saying that the electoral college system couldn't be improved (or even eliminated), but the assertion that there is no "tie-breaker" is one that has been deliberately raised by both parties to allow them to slug it out in court, instead of handing it to the legislature, as is provided by the Constitution. In fact, the somewhat-complicated electoral system here in the US has "tie-breaking" built in, if it's followed correctly.
I was screaming back in 2000 that the whole quagmire in Florida could have been avoided if the Constitution had simply been followed. In that case, the state legislature should have gotten involved. The fact that it had a Republican majority at the time meant that Bush would have won anyway, but I'm completely fair when I say that: if Florida had had a Democratic majority in 2000, it would've been Gore, and I would have accepted that just as readily. ANYTHING rather than throw it into endless court fights that left half of America bitter to this day.
And I disagree with anyone who thinks that the Canadian model would work any better with our much larger population. The US is as divided as I've ever seen it, and there will continue to be close elections. I don't know what the final answer will be, but I don't think the Canadian approach would work here.
Yep. Bingo. Another article -- I believe I saw it here, might have been elsewhere -- showed that you were just as likely to get food-borne illness from organic meats and eggs.
I think there are certain cases, such as using growth hormones in meat, where the organic has an advantage. But yeah, look at tomatoes: nothing beats a big, juicy, ripe beefsteak grown in your own backyard, whether you fertilize it with chemicals or compost. The tomatoes at the grocery stores -- again, organic or otherwise -- are special cultivars that have been selected for ruggedness and shelf life. Nutritional content (and taste) is secondary to the vendor.
(I grew up in farming country, folks, and trust me: a solid-red tomato should NOT be crunchy and green on the inside. If it is, it was gassed.)
When it comes to poultry, again, whether organic or not, the issue is the "plumping" -- how much broth they inject into it, and what went into it. When you say, "I prefer Swift to Hormel turkeys," what you're actually saying is, "I like Swift's injected 'basting' solution better. I don't like the taste of chicken skin, and at present, I've stopped eating Tyson's chicken because they apparently grind up and use the skin in their "plumping" solution. (YMMV, of course.)
I'm not at all surprised by this study, and I expect that others will bear this out as well.
Yes, and the "Demoncrats" are all socialists who want to compromise American sovereignty and reduce us to a third world nation. Right?
Dood, BOTH parties are bought and paid for. Each may be owned by a different set of crooks, but at the end of the day, they're P0wned.
Look at each candidate. Forget the party. The best time to do this is during the primaries, but it's too late for that now. You'll just have to hold your nose and vote for the least-offensive candidate. But if you're a believer that EITHER party has your best interests at heart across the board, you're deluding yourself.
If the American people would stop following party lines, and (most importantly) stop treating each election like a popularity contest, there might be some real change.
When I see Karl Rove or Mitch McConnell, I change the channel or click to a different Web page. They both turn my stomach. But so do Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi is especially endearing because she is obviously as thick as two short planks. (Not that she's alone in that distinction by any means.) I have a salt shaker in my kitchen with a higher IQ.
Not much of a choice, in my book. There may be some sharp philosophical differences between the two, but the fact is that both parties are bought and paid for. And have been for some time.
That said, this is at least an acknowledgment of the issue. Whether it has any useful effect remains to be seen.
Indeed they do. Whether this particular story is accurate, speaking as someone who has run a small business, it's a constant and real problem.
In fact, here's a life lesson, something to keep in mind no matter where you shop: if you go into my store and are waited on by a not-especially-quick employee, you might wonder why I hired him or her. It's simple: because they're HONEST. I'm not looking for Betty Blaze or Stormin' Norman. Just give me someone who'll keep their hands off inventory and their fingers out of the till. I'll put up with some slowness and other irritations.
> So why wouldn't they be snarky at someone who cannot read?
jbolden and ACS Solver beat me to it.
Even the KDE devs have now admitted that they handled that one very badly.
If they had just taken the time to ensure that, at the very least, the 3.x branch would continue to be maintained WHILE the 4.x series was being introduced, they wouldn't have gotten nearly as many complaints. Instead, they basically just dismissed 3.x, said "we ain't doing it no more," and the distros HAD NO CHOICE but to upgrade to the less-than-beta-quality 4.x releases.
I stayed with CentOS 5 for quite some time just so I could stay with KDE3 on some of my machines.
> One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
Another thing I have suggested for ANYONE writing software -- whether FOSS or proprietary -- is to hand your software package to an end user. Then go sit in another room and watch them through a window. You can't help them or give them tips. Watch whether they struggle with it.
I've done this myself and 15 minutes watching a real, live, end user is more profitable than anything I can think of. Speaking from experience, the first thing you'll likely discover is that there are libraries on your development machine that aren't on the end user's, and you forgot to include them in the package (even if only as listed dependencies for the package manager). But once you get it installed, you sit back and watch. Look at their frustration as they try to figure out which menu items to click to do what they want.
More often than not (I've seen this, too, unfortunately) is they'll just give up and go back to what they're used to. If they can't easily navigate around your Brand New Thing(tm), they're going to blow it off.
I think that if everyone who developed software would do this simple bit of research, it would be a much happier world.:)
> Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well.
Speaking as someone who made that transition back when I was using DOS/Windows, it wasn't that bad. Can't speak for NT, but Windows 95 came with an intro that showed you where all your old stuff was. If you had a 3.1x Program Manager set up with all your windows and icons grouped just the way you liked, you could even switch to that. (I ran with PM that way for some months just out of sheer curmudgeon-ity.)
I don't use Windows anymore. I'm strictly Linux with KDE on my laptop and desktop PCs. But I have to give Microsoft credit: back in the 95 era, they made it VERY easy to migrate your settings. Even under XP, you could install an older Windows program and it would know how to translate the old Program Manager settings into the Start menu for you. Easy as pie.
Compare to what I experienced when KDE switched from 3 to 4 and... well, there IS no comparison. A number of features that I had come to depend on were missing. Just gone. When I asked about them, a KDE developer actually scolded me in one of the online fora. I switched to Gnome for a while, and finally went back to KDE when it became somewhat usable, around 4.6 or 4.7 (I'm running the latter now).
But they STILL haven't worked out a way to transfer my settings when I upgrade. Maybe that's a distro problem (I use OpenSUSE), but it's a problem nonetheless.
This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."
This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.
I much prefer open source to proprietary software, but there's a price for the "free" stuff. I guess this is just part of it. A commercial software product that treated its "customers" the way that some FOSS projects do would be out of business in a matter of weeks.
Just my opinion and worth exactly what you paid for it.:)
> Which distributions are you using which let you install from the repositories without being root
I wouldn't have a distro that didn't require installation as root.:)
Any decent distro will not only install Postgres from repository for you, it will set up the Postgres(ql) user and group. Yes, it will be installed and available to all users on the system, but, while the original poster might personally have a concern about this, for 99% of us, it's a non-issue.
If the GP is concerned about people being able to download and "tinker," that's not a mainstream concern. Besides, the way I do something like that is virtualization: set up your test environment, have fun and blow it up, then delete it when done.
> Yes and every once in a while a revolution comes along that burns the old ways and chops heads or worse.
And within a generation or two (if that long), the revolutionaries are just as corrupt as the original regime.
Also, it's a rare revolutionary who just wants things to be FAIR. Most of them want to get EVEN. (A very fine distinction.) History is also filled with examples of revolutionaries who, once having taken power, simply use that power to oppress those who originally oppressed them.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.
Slashdot Mirror
> Windows already comes with their PCs and does pretty much what they want to.
Someone mod up the AC. He beat me to it.
It has been proven in survey after survey that most people stick with what came with their PC when they bought it. For the vast majority, that's Windows. Likewise, most phones now run iOS or Android, and that's what it'll run. They've never heard of version numbers or "Ice Cream Sandwich" or anything else like that.
OK, and now I'm probably off topic, but I'm an older guy and as we get older, we like to reminisce. (Between bellowed exhortations to remove ones feet from the lawn, of course.)
I remember a million years ago, when I was developing VxDs for Windows 95. I rigged up the debugger to go active early in the boot ... and had to disable it.
Windows 95 generated SO MANY faults during the boot, it took forever otherwise. I mean, it constantly klonged. Bang, bang, bang, one exception after another. They (mostly) went away when Windows 95 OSR2 appeared. :)
Ah, memories ... Blue Screens of Death .. .. random disk corruption ... it was a beautiful thing.
> Windows has never had anything as serious as a file system corruption bug.
I'm going to assume that either you are joking, or you have only been using Windows for about 5 minutes.
On the off chance that you are actually serious, Geoff Chappell documented a case some years ago in which Windows would occasionally toggle a byte (might have been a word; can't remember now) on the hard drive. Just one byte in a random sector somewhere on the drive. Happy flower sunshine.
You should also Google "Windows disk corruption" and look at all the complaints and cries for help.
One reason why I tried Linux, then switched to it and have stuck with it, was because I was sick and tired of having to run scandisk and/or chkdsk at least once a week on my Windows systems just to keep them running. At the time, I was a contract programmer doing a ton of development, and believe me, if you were constantly working the hard drive (as I was), you WOULD have corruption issues. At random, no explanation. You learned to do constant backups and to be prepared for anything.
The only thing I've experienced even close to that under Linux is that the installer typically does a quick format instead of a full format. As a result, if you have a drive that's iffy and with bad sectors, the install will appear to complete successfully, but it won't work. The answer to that one is, "buy a new hard drive." :)
(I had to learn that one the hard way. If you get ANY errors on a hard drive, just replace the blasted thing. Don't wait, either. Do it now.)
Windows 7 seems to be fairly stable, but XP (just to name one) is notorious for just blowing things up at random. It might be a registry entry; it might be a corrupted executable image on disk. Who knows? But the standard cure is just to back up and reinstall.
It's just a shame that Weekly World News went under before the Internet became a viable business method.
I miss Bat Boy. :(
Wait until the investigation determines what actually happened. Even "billions of dollars" of electronics can fail, or glitch, or human error can misread or miscalculate (Mars Climate Orbiter, anyone?).
But I'll add this: the Montpelier is a Los Angeles-class attack sub. Their captains aren't exactly chosen for their shy, retiring natures. (I once worked with a guy who served on such a sub. He couldn't talk about what he did, but it was obvious that he'd been in some hair-raising places, doing some hair-raising things.)
My first full-time job as a broadcast engineer was with a 100,000 watt FM in Southeastern NC. After I moved on, they built a new tower near the NC/SC border. Air Force guys would hot dog all around that tower -- they apparently took dares to fly under and between the guy wires. Sure enough, one of these guys finally misjudged a bit, nicked a guy wire, pulled the tower down and crashed the jet. (He ejected and survived.)
Don't get me wrong: political correctness and shy, retiring natures don't really belong in the military, not if it's going to be effective. But hey; sometimes, they DO hot dog and show off. :)
> In the real world
Look: that argument was compelling up until just a few years ago. I'll grant you that, especially back in the old StarOffice days (gack, gag), then on to OpenOffice.org. But speaking for myself -- freely admitting that your mileage will vary -- I haven't had trouble opening anything in LibreOffice for a couple of years now. Including some fairly sweet PPT presentations.
Besides, Microsoft has tried to introduce the "subscription" model before. They'll probably back off of it after they get deluged with complaints. Again.
(Or -- this is my real fear -- they'll go after things like Libre and KOffice with the patent hammer.)
> Those of us who don't live in your California suburb and who have multiple devices ...
Yep. Or those of us who really, REALLY need our phones. I travel all over Alabama looking after 5 radio stations, some of which have towers in the middle of nowhere. I pay a premium for Verizon because to date, they've been best where I need to go. (Although I'll say this, coverage hasn't been same here -- with any carrier -- since the tornadoes came through on April 27th, 2011. Lot of damage from those things.)
I don't need fancy apps, but I do need text, email and a Web browser. I get that with the LG Ally that Verizon basically threw in when I signed up for another 2 years of indentured service-itude. :)
To be fair, I don't know how typical we are. Maybe most folks can get by with a barebones plan and spotty coverage. But to stay on topic, even in that case, I just don't see the appeal of this Mozilla OS, not now. Maybe 5 years ago, but not now.
But hey, I've been wrong before.
> The intent here is to replace so much of the specialized cabling
Yup. I'm glad I work in radio, where we've been ferrying oversampled, high-quality audio over IP for some years now.
The digital switching and input assignments are a dream as well. Not that many years ago, if someone came into Engineering and said, "sorry, forgot! We have a paid ballgame going on at 4PM!" ... my assistants and I would literally grab a punch tool and some Belden wire and start frantically running cables. Many was the time we'd put something on air by literally throwing a pair across the floor with gaffer's tape. "Watch Yer Step!" :)
Nowadays, any source in our facility can be assigned to any input on any mixer in any control room. Run once, use many times. Ah, it's a beautiful thing. I can move an entire radio station from one control to another literally in a matter of minutes. It takes longer for the staff to physically grab their coffee cups and lucky charms than it does for my staff to move the signals.
My poor brethren in TV just have entirely too much data. If we'd all go back to RADIO drama, see, this wouldn't be a problem, now woodit? :D
> if you get just one frame that doesn't compress nicely ... your network has to be able to handle that bandwidth
Or, your system has to *insert* latency in the form of elastic buffers to give the stream time to "catch up." Either way, your point is valid. :)
I called you a "scoundrel" because you made me hungry. I had also forgotten what those tomatoes were called. You reminded me. :)
Haven't had much luck growing tomatoes in this terrible soil in Alabama. It's too alkaline. I got decent results once with a bucket filled with potting soil and some plant food, but it also gets very hot here and they need a LOT of water. The soil in my yard is very hard rocky clay.
Now, back home in NC (where I'm originally from), tomatoes are easy to grow. There was a local grocer who grew his own tomatoes every summer and they were excellent as well.
I couldn't bear to look at those pictures of the Cherokee Purples for more than a few moments. :)
> Cherokee Purple
You scoundrel! The wife and I are headed to the mountains of TN/NC in the next couple of weeks, and I plan to fetch a few if I can. I found some a couple of a years ago at the farmer's market up in Asheville and they were so good they made me cry!
You are absolutely right. If someone is looking for a great tomato, look for "heirloom." I'd rather have a Cherokee Purple or a Big Ugly grown with chemical fertilizer than a typical mass-market hybrid grown with pure, organic compost. Any day of the week.
> some sort of tie breaker
For the record: for US Presidential elections, it's Congress and the state legislatures. That's clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and modified by the 12th Amendment. This came into play in the election of 1824, where no candidate received a clear majority of electoral votes. (One interesting quirk that most people are unaware of: in this event, the votes are BY STATE -- in other words, each state gets one vote for the President, regardless of size and how many electors in has!!!)
I'm not saying that the electoral college system couldn't be improved (or even eliminated), but the assertion that there is no "tie-breaker" is one that has been deliberately raised by both parties to allow them to slug it out in court, instead of handing it to the legislature, as is provided by the Constitution. In fact, the somewhat-complicated electoral system here in the US has "tie-breaking" built in, if it's followed correctly.
I was screaming back in 2000 that the whole quagmire in Florida could have been avoided if the Constitution had simply been followed. In that case, the state legislature should have gotten involved. The fact that it had a Republican majority at the time meant that Bush would have won anyway, but I'm completely fair when I say that: if Florida had had a Democratic majority in 2000, it would've been Gore, and I would have accepted that just as readily. ANYTHING rather than throw it into endless court fights that left half of America bitter to this day.
And I disagree with anyone who thinks that the Canadian model would work any better with our much larger population. The US is as divided as I've ever seen it, and there will continue to be close elections. I don't know what the final answer will be, but I don't think the Canadian approach would work here.
> organic growers tend to choose cultivars ...
Yep. Bingo. Another article -- I believe I saw it here, might have been elsewhere -- showed that you were just as likely to get food-borne illness from organic meats and eggs.
I think there are certain cases, such as using growth hormones in meat, where the organic has an advantage. But yeah, look at tomatoes: nothing beats a big, juicy, ripe beefsteak grown in your own backyard, whether you fertilize it with chemicals or compost. The tomatoes at the grocery stores -- again, organic or otherwise -- are special cultivars that have been selected for ruggedness and shelf life. Nutritional content (and taste) is secondary to the vendor.
(I grew up in farming country, folks, and trust me: a solid-red tomato should NOT be crunchy and green on the inside. If it is, it was gassed.)
When it comes to poultry, again, whether organic or not, the issue is the "plumping" -- how much broth they inject into it, and what went into it. When you say, "I prefer Swift to Hormel turkeys," what you're actually saying is, "I like Swift's injected 'basting' solution better. I don't like the taste of chicken skin, and at present, I've stopped eating Tyson's chicken because they apparently grind up and use the skin in their "plumping" solution. (YMMV, of course.)
I'm not at all surprised by this study, and I expect that others will bear this out as well.
> In 2004 there was a program to refit a ... [NO CARRIER]
See? SEE?!? You start revealing Their Secrets(tm) and you get cut ... [NO CARRIER]
> Republicantards
Yes, and the "Demoncrats" are all socialists who want to compromise American sovereignty and reduce us to a third world nation. Right?
Dood, BOTH parties are bought and paid for. Each may be owned by a different set of crooks, but at the end of the day, they're P0wned.
Look at each candidate. Forget the party. The best time to do this is during the primaries, but it's too late for that now. You'll just have to hold your nose and vote for the least-offensive candidate. But if you're a believer that EITHER party has your best interests at heart across the board, you're deluding yourself.
If the American people would stop following party lines, and (most importantly) stop treating each election like a popularity contest, there might be some real change.
When I see Karl Rove or Mitch McConnell, I change the channel or click to a different Web page. They both turn my stomach. But so do Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi is especially endearing because she is obviously as thick as two short planks. (Not that she's alone in that distinction by any means.) I have a salt shaker in my kitchen with a higher IQ.
> choice between Democrats and Republicans
Not much of a choice, in my book. There may be some sharp philosophical differences between the two, but the fact is that both parties are bought and paid for. And have been for some time.
That said, this is at least an acknowledgment of the issue. Whether it has any useful effect remains to be seen.
> People steal from work!
Indeed they do. Whether this particular story is accurate, speaking as someone who has run a small business, it's a constant and real problem.
In fact, here's a life lesson, something to keep in mind no matter where you shop: if you go into my store and are waited on by a not-especially-quick employee, you might wonder why I hired him or her. It's simple: because they're HONEST. I'm not looking for Betty Blaze or Stormin' Norman. Just give me someone who'll keep their hands off inventory and their fingers out of the till. I'll put up with some slowness and other irritations.
> Is a big button on the panel that says "Make it Work Like Gnome 2" Or FVWM, I'm not picky.
THIS. THIS IN SPADES.
Got it in one.
> So why wouldn't they be snarky at someone who cannot read?
jbolden and ACS Solver beat me to it.
Even the KDE devs have now admitted that they handled that one very badly.
If they had just taken the time to ensure that, at the very least, the 3.x branch would continue to be maintained WHILE the 4.x series was being introduced, they wouldn't have gotten nearly as many complaints. Instead, they basically just dismissed 3.x, said "we ain't doing it no more," and the distros HAD NO CHOICE but to upgrade to the less-than-beta-quality 4.x releases.
I stayed with CentOS 5 for quite some time just so I could stay with KDE3 on some of my machines.
> One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
Another thing I have suggested for ANYONE writing software -- whether FOSS or proprietary -- is to hand your software package to an end user. Then go sit in another room and watch them through a window. You can't help them or give them tips. Watch whether they struggle with it.
I've done this myself and 15 minutes watching a real, live, end user is more profitable than anything I can think of. Speaking from experience, the first thing you'll likely discover is that there are libraries on your development machine that aren't on the end user's, and you forgot to include them in the package (even if only as listed dependencies for the package manager). But once you get it installed, you sit back and watch. Look at their frustration as they try to figure out which menu items to click to do what they want.
More often than not (I've seen this, too, unfortunately) is they'll just give up and go back to what they're used to. If they can't easily navigate around your Brand New Thing(tm), they're going to blow it off.
I think that if everyone who developed software would do this simple bit of research, it would be a much happier world. :)
> Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well.
Speaking as someone who made that transition back when I was using DOS/Windows, it wasn't that bad. Can't speak for NT, but Windows 95 came with an intro that showed you where all your old stuff was. If you had a 3.1x Program Manager set up with all your windows and icons grouped just the way you liked, you could even switch to that. (I ran with PM that way for some months just out of sheer curmudgeon-ity.)
I don't use Windows anymore. I'm strictly Linux with KDE on my laptop and desktop PCs. But I have to give Microsoft credit: back in the 95 era, they made it VERY easy to migrate your settings. Even under XP, you could install an older Windows program and it would know how to translate the old Program Manager settings into the Start menu for you. Easy as pie.
Compare to what I experienced when KDE switched from 3 to 4 and ... well, there IS no comparison. A number of features that I had come to depend on were missing. Just gone. When I asked about them, a KDE developer actually scolded me in one of the online fora. I switched to Gnome for a while, and finally went back to KDE when it became somewhat usable, around 4.6 or 4.7 (I'm running the latter now).
But they STILL haven't worked out a way to transfer my settings when I upgrade. Maybe that's a distro problem (I use OpenSUSE), but it's a problem nonetheless.
> Almost all software has that problem.
This. Especially among open source projects. I deeply appreciate their efforts, but when you go into their forums with a suggestion, or to ask why they are doing something a certain way (or more often nowadays, why they stopped doing something that everyone liked), you get scolded. Or talked down to. "Trust us, little man, we're the experts and we know what we're doing."
This article is about Gnome, but I'm still sore from the way the KDE developers handled their transition to version 4. Even the politest request was greeted with outright hostility. Gnome is by no means the only offender, nor is the offense limited to desktop environments. But it's a real problem.
I much prefer open source to proprietary software, but there's a price for the "free" stuff. I guess this is just part of it. A commercial software product that treated its "customers" the way that some FOSS projects do would be out of business in a matter of weeks.
Just my opinion and worth exactly what you paid for it. :)
> Which distributions are you using which let you install from the repositories without being root
I wouldn't have a distro that didn't require installation as root. :)
Any decent distro will not only install Postgres from repository for you, it will set up the Postgres(ql) user and group. Yes, it will be installed and available to all users on the system, but, while the original poster might personally have a concern about this, for 99% of us, it's a non-issue.
If the GP is concerned about people being able to download and "tinker," that's not a mainstream concern. Besides, the way I do something like that is virtualization: set up your test environment, have fun and blow it up, then delete it when done.
> Yes and every once in a while a revolution comes along that burns the old ways and chops heads or worse.
And within a generation or two (if that long), the revolutionaries are just as corrupt as the original regime.
Also, it's a rare revolutionary who just wants things to be FAIR. Most of them want to get EVEN. (A very fine distinction.) History is also filled with examples of revolutionaries who, once having taken power, simply use that power to oppress those who originally oppressed them.
"The Innocent Man" by John Grisham. It details a case in which a man was wrongfully sentenced to death on bad evidence.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative when it comes to things like this, but fair is fair. If someone is wrongfully convicted, it needs to be reviewed. In particular, the use of hair samples and other forensic evidence decades ago, before the advent of DNA testing, resulted in quite a few such wrongful convictions.