Heh. Yeah, that's pretty much what I started doing too. Though I didn't throw out the TV 'cause I still like watching movies on a larger-than-my-computer-monitor screen. Invader Zim's coming out on DVD too, so I guess I'll have to succumb to the whole DVD thing and buy them up rabidly.:)
I want to take it one step further. I stopped watching TV a few years ago, but there's still the occasional show (Invader Zim comes to mind) that I'd love to see, and just went over to friends' houses to watch. What I want to have is a service that lets me go to a webpage or something, select which *show* I want, and then for that half-hour or so I can watch just that show. There's no way in hell I'm paying a full monthly rate for all of Nickelodeon when the only thing worth watching on it is half an hour on Friday nights, or whenever the hell IZ was on.
On the contrary. At home, I've been running only Linux for the past five years (though I admit I use winex to play the occasional Windoze game). I haven't had a Windows installation in ages. The last job that required me to keep a Windoze partition around I left a couple of years ago. I completely agree that graphics cards are very often autodetected quite well. The newer XFrees don't even require you to put in Hsync and Vsync into XF86Config, it's very nice. But when problems develop, and they do develop, and when hardware changes and needs change, just about everywhere I've ever seen users try to get support from says "go change this in the config files."
As for the quality of Windoze autodetection, perhaps I am a bit out of touch for that. I've used a few win2k boxes back at the old job I mentioned, and they always did a fantastic job, but perhaps XP is different.
And why would that same end user care what windowing system he uses on Linux?
Well, the end user probably wouldn't. But the end user would certainly care which distro to use, and the distro determines windowing system, etc, etc...
That's just nonsense. You develop for GTK or QT.
Have you ever taken it upon yourself to write a graphical app for Linux?
Choice does not equal incompatibilities!
Of course it does. Different software will behave differently.
Also, having a choice doesn't mean that you must chooce!
Of course it does. Even if you just say "I'll accept whatever Fedora's defaults are," you're making the choice to use those options.
Yes with Windows you only have one choice. What if that one and only choice sucks and there's something wrong with it? Uh oh... you're out of luck.
Yeah, I dig it. I never said I liked windoze better, or even that in the end windoze makes for a better desktop environment. I've been using nothing but Linux as a desktop for a long time now and I can't imagine going back. I find Windoze completely loathsome, impossible to debug, and generally frustrating. All I'm saying is that I've seen what people want out of a computing system when they're not geeks. In my experience, some end user sits down at a system, they want The One System. The want to learn this One System and be able to go to another computer on the other end of the building and use it the same way. I've seen people try to get into Linux and run away from it because what they learn on one distro, on one window manager, on one desktop environment, may not let them get by at all on someone else's computer.
Now, I've just completely veered away from the XFree/XOrg thing, but I'm just saying that that's *one more thing* that's helping fragment the System As A Whole, and I still believe that's going to harm acceptance of Linux as a desktop system.
Riiight. Windows XP introduced a whole bunch of incompatibilities, especially for older games. Lots and lots of people are staying with Win98 exactly because of that.
Windows is not as perfect as you claim.
I was more referring to the mindset of Joe User who's walking in off the street saying, "Hey, I'd like to get a computer. What version of windows should I get?" To which the Guy At The Store will say "the latest, XP." There's no decision to be made, there's no thought that has to happen, and until Linux can become as simple, it won't "conquer the desktop."
Anwyay, I should probably stop before I repeat myself any more than I already am.:P
There are a number of extensions which are widely accepted as de-facto standard extensions.
How about new extensions? How about when XFree and XOrg each implement new extensions providing similar but slightly different functionality? How about when one extension doesn't work quite the same way in both, for whatever reason?
All of them.
For now, yes. Want to guarantee that forever?
Do you really think distros won't take care of automatic hardware detection and automatic X configuration before they release the thing to the public?
Ha! Linux autoconfiguration has a looong way to go before it'll be comparable to Windoze in that respect. Please. I've seen very few solutions to X problems on IRC or forums or mailing lists that don't involve editing config files. Yes, in theory it'd be great, but that's just not the reality yet.
Windows is no different, but I don't hear anyone complain that there are so many versions of Windows out there.
Sure it is. The different windows versions are the result of upgrades. You don't hear me complaining when there's a new release of X which happens to be different, or if there's a new release of any other kind of software. The difference is that, in a Windows world, nobody has to ask the question, "what kind of windowing software should I use?" Or, IMO, much worse yet, "what kind of windowing system should I develop my application for?" Again, this is both a huge strength and a huge weakness for Linux. Choice is good for us geeks, but in terms of mainstream, desktop acceptance, it's a turnoff for most people. There's the perpetual question in the back, "Did I make the right choice here? Am I just going to have to install some completely different version in a few months? If I have problems and want to get help from IRC, are the people there going to be able to help me out or will I be laughed at for my choice of windowing software?" With Windoze, even though you're admittedly forced into a perpetual upgrade cycle, there's never any question about that. To the end user, you simply install the latest version of Windoze, problem solved. What do you do when there's more than one "latest version?"
Most of the problems you mentioned only occur if distros are lazy and don't make a good migration path.
Within a distro, no, it's not going to be as much of a problem, but unless one distro is the clear "winner" of the "Linux Desktop Initiative" or whatever, distro interoperability is a lot more important IMO. *Linux* will never take over the desktop while Fedora uses X, Mandrake uses Y, and Suse uses Z. And again, this isn't necessarily a *bad* thing; personally I dig all the choice, and I think it's great. But it's a huge impediment for taking over "The Desktop." And obviously that involves more than just XFree/XOrg, but now that's a part of the situation too.
All your apps will still work, no matter what X server you run! X is a *standard*.
Yes, obviously, but what extensions will the new one end up supporting? Which drivers will end up working well? How will it end up being configured? Which little quirk exists in one but not the other? Where does your average end-user go for support? "I'm having a problem with X?" "What sort of X?" It just complicates the desktop experience. I'll stand by my comment that this will do no immediate good for acceptance of Linux into the desktop market, which was all I was talking about. In the long run, in a number of years, it could yield some benefits if the "losers" die out and we're left with one real standard, but I don't think that's entirely likely.
When Linux "fragmentates" everybody screams "fragmentation! linux sucks! bla bla bla"
Again, I didn't say it was necessarily bad. I'm sure that the quality of software is going to increase. And it'll certainly do well for *me* because I don't mind playing around with the various versions. But I'll still say that this kind of fragmentation is going to hurt any attempt made to "bring Linux to the desktop," as it were. Granted, I feel that the KDE/Gnome split is far worse for desktop acceptance than this will be, but it's still problematic.
I didn't say that we won't get better-quality software out there, I just implied that Linux will never come close to conquering the desktop market while there's contention about the basic building blocks of the desktop experience. And I'll stand by that. The software will undoubtedly get better, but that kind of basic, low-level choice is both a stength and, in the case of the desktop market, a large weakness.
I'm probably redundant with this by now, but I grew up playing early video games, and I loved them. Then I became relatively disenchanted with most of what I played, and GTA3 was actually the first game to hold my interest for more than a day or so. Yet I still like the early video games.
Just because you feel guilty about causing some 1s and 0s to look like they're running over a prostitute doesn't mean that someone else can't enjoy it without realizing that the only thing happening is a bunch of 1s and 0s flipping on and off. (And remember, nothing in the game requires you to do so; your decision to do that was entirely your own, you don't even get bonus points for it, and there are far easier ways to make money in the game.) I'm all for depravity, and I'm all for the non-depravity too. I don't care. Just make it fun, and I'll play it. I don't have problems discerning the difference between what's on the CRT in front of me and the real world just a few feet away in every direction.
You bet Sevn's fat that his comment was mean-spirited? Did Sevn give you permission to bet his fat? And what does Sevn get if he wins the bet? Just to keep his own fat? Seems like a pretty lousy deal. Then again, if he *wins* then you get his fat and he loses some weight, which is probably a good thing for him and kind of disgusting for you. Unless he's the sort of computer guy who's all wiry, and skinny, in which case he needs all the fat he can get, most likely.
I don't believe that the Gimp folks ever said anything about it being a "proper Mac application." Let's look at the quote one more time, shall we?
The highly anticipated version 2.0 of the GIMP, due out next month, will run under Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
Where in there do they state that Gimp is suddenly going to use the native OSX gui? Nowhere. They said it'll run on OSX, that's all. And it will.
Mac programs are held to certain standard, and running on X doesn't cut it.
For a program to be an "official Mac-OS-X-Runs-Using-Native-GUI-Using-Apple's-Guide lines-Etc" program, of course. The Gimp isn't, and probably will never be (unless someone more familiar with OSX coding decides to do a port), one of those programs. Nor does it claim to be.
Er, okay. Me, whenever I start up one of my trusty ol' X applications inside my GF's OSX box, I'm willing to accept that the software "runs in Mac OS X."
By your logic, practically nothing runs on Linux. Want xchat? Well gosh, you've gotta install GTK, X Windows, perhaps some other GNU libs... What's wrong with requiring dependencies? This has nothing to do with "GNU radicals" and everything to do with the fact that, well, you can run Gimp in OSX.
but music and other forms of artistic expression are essential to many people's mental well-being
So the only way to sustain your mental well-being is to buy CDs that you feel, after the fact, are priced too high? Bull. I highly doubt that someone's mental well-being hinged on the ability to buy the newest RIAA-label CD, and if so, that person's got a hell of a lot more problems than just what price someone's charging for a CD.
An industry which has near-total control over access to a form of art is hurting a lot of people, and hurting The People as well
Yeah, I know I've certainly been hurt by the price of CDs. All my friends too. Yep, emotionally scarred, lifeless husks of humanity, that's us. If you feel like you've been hurt somehow just because you were willing to pay $16 for a CD, then I maintain that's your problem. Your life isn't going to end if you don't pick up that latest album.
I hate hearing about that damned settlement. CDs are luxury items, and as such they're worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Obviously however much you've been paying for CDs is all right for you, otherwise you wouldn't be buying the CDs. That's why I haven't bought as much music since prices have been going up; they're generally not worth it to me. If you feel like you've been taken advantage of, then think about who was willing to pay the damned price. You were. The RIAA does a lot of despicable things, but charging what consumers are willing to pay for entertainment certainly isn't one of them. I'd be ashamed to get one of those rebate checks.
... what do you want to bet that the existing independant SoC programs are gonna get Cease+Desisted once it's been released? That'll suck. I know that Klaus was very unhappy about the existance of s3d, but with the legal and financial power of Microsoft to back him up, he could probably be much more successful in closing these things down.
I mean, in all fairness, he *does* own the copyrights for this stuff, but it sucks for those of us who have been buying Mayfair's stuff forever now and like playing online too.
Uhhh... did I miss something? My DSL line peaks at 1.5Mb on a good day. Where can I get a ten-megabit cable modem? And "average home-computer users" have them? I thought average home-computer users were still using 56K modems.
Yeah, no doubt, I was wondering that myself. My cable line used to get about 3mbit, which was nice, but that's not not the speeds they were talking about.
Excellent. I'm hoping it'll be easy to get a list of the people involved in the class action. Those are those jerks who have been encouraging spammers by replying to junk email. Get 'em!
Well, there is something to be said for manually typing things in. What's to stop someone from sending you something with a domain which looks very much like one you actually have an account on? Especially with recent expansions to be able to use a wider charset for domain names, it should be fairly trivial to spoof a domain name. Or even just use a.org when the site is supposed to be a.com... There's ways of making domains "look" real without resorting to the tricks you have to in IE.
This is how it should happen. I'd much rather have identity requests come as a court order rather than via some organization like the RIAA. The DMCA has some very worrying clauses about your duty as an ISP to take care of problems once they've been brought up by the RIAA et al, but damned if I'd just hand out user information. If it's coming in as an actual court order in response to an actual, pending case, that's something different. That's working inside the system, and the RIAA doesn't have any special privileges. That's what's always pissed me off about the DMCA, is that it seems to give the media organizations these godlike policing powers, where a notice from them is just as good as any "official" notice. If the courts are involved, at least you know that The System, such as it is, is getting involved in the process, and you're not just handing information over to some corrupt, money-grubbing organization. This is The Way It Should Be.
Now, I'll still say that the actual prosecution of filesharers is ridiculous, but at least if they're going through the court system I don't have to be pissed off that they're using police-like activities sanctioned by some piece of horrible horrible legislation.
Yeah, where I used to work we had a private IRC server set up inside the corporate network, so you either had to be physically on our network or connected up through the VPN. We didn't bother with nickservs or chanservs or anything like that, 'cause since it was just us nobody had any interest in pretending to be someone else. Worked out perfectly fine.
Of course, then we started writing bots to emulate our presence on the channel when we were gone ("How's the new release looking?") and the company went bankrupt, but that's beside the point.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Well, technically this one's not a *slashdot* april fool's joke, as the RFC linked to actually *is* an RFC...
So yeah, that'd be great.
As for the quality of Windoze autodetection, perhaps I am a bit out of touch for that. I've used a few win2k boxes back at the old job I mentioned, and they always did a fantastic job, but perhaps XP is different.
Well, the end user probably wouldn't. But the end user would certainly care which distro to use, and the distro determines windowing system, etc, etc... Have you ever taken it upon yourself to write a graphical app for Linux? Of course it does. Different software will behave differently. Of course it does. Even if you just say "I'll accept whatever Fedora's defaults are," you're making the choice to use those options. Yeah, I dig it. I never said I liked windoze better, or even that in the end windoze makes for a better desktop environment. I've been using nothing but Linux as a desktop for a long time now and I can't imagine going back. I find Windoze completely loathsome, impossible to debug, and generally frustrating. All I'm saying is that I've seen what people want out of a computing system when they're not geeks. In my experience, some end user sits down at a system, they want The One System. The want to learn this One System and be able to go to another computer on the other end of the building and use it the same way. I've seen people try to get into Linux and run away from it because what they learn on one distro, on one window manager, on one desktop environment, may not let them get by at all on someone else's computer.Now, I've just completely veered away from the XFree/XOrg thing, but I'm just saying that that's *one more thing* that's helping fragment the System As A Whole, and I still believe that's going to harm acceptance of Linux as a desktop system.
I was more referring to the mindset of Joe User who's walking in off the street saying, "Hey, I'd like to get a computer. What version of windows should I get?" To which the Guy At The Store will say "the latest, XP." There's no decision to be made, there's no thought that has to happen, and until Linux can become as simple, it won't "conquer the desktop."Anwyay, I should probably stop before I repeat myself any more than I already am. :P
I didn't say that we won't get better-quality software out there, I just implied that Linux will never come close to conquering the desktop market while there's contention about the basic building blocks of the desktop experience. And I'll stand by that. The software will undoubtedly get better, but that kind of basic, low-level choice is both a stength and, in the case of the desktop market, a large weakness.
... no cellphones allowed at work? Sounds perfectly lovely.
(yes, I know that X is hardly Linux-specific...)
eom
Just because you feel guilty about causing some 1s and 0s to look like they're running over a prostitute doesn't mean that someone else can't enjoy it without realizing that the only thing happening is a bunch of 1s and 0s flipping on and off. (And remember, nothing in the game requires you to do so; your decision to do that was entirely your own, you don't even get bonus points for it, and there are far easier ways to make money in the game.) I'm all for depravity, and I'm all for the non-depravity too. I don't care. Just make it fun, and I'll play it. I don't have problems discerning the difference between what's on the CRT in front of me and the real world just a few feet away in every direction.
Very strange, at any rate.
lol... Have you seen the bikerchicks4u.com page when you click on the link from Slashdot? Hilarious.
By your logic, practically nothing runs on Linux. Want xchat? Well gosh, you've gotta install GTK, X Windows, perhaps some other GNU libs... What's wrong with requiring dependencies? This has nothing to do with "GNU radicals" and everything to do with the fact that, well, you can run Gimp in OSX.
I hate hearing about that damned settlement. CDs are luxury items, and as such they're worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Obviously however much you've been paying for CDs is all right for you, otherwise you wouldn't be buying the CDs. That's why I haven't bought as much music since prices have been going up; they're generally not worth it to me. If you feel like you've been taken advantage of, then think about who was willing to pay the damned price. You were. The RIAA does a lot of despicable things, but charging what consumers are willing to pay for entertainment certainly isn't one of them. I'd be ashamed to get one of those rebate checks.
I mean, in all fairness, he *does* own the copyrights for this stuff, but it sucks for those of us who have been buying Mayfair's stuff forever now and like playing online too.
Excellent. I'm hoping it'll be easy to get a list of the people involved in the class action. Those are those jerks who have been encouraging spammers by replying to junk email. Get 'em!
Well, there is something to be said for manually typing things in. What's to stop someone from sending you something with a domain which looks very much like one you actually have an account on? Especially with recent expansions to be able to use a wider charset for domain names, it should be fairly trivial to spoof a domain name. Or even just use a .org when the site is supposed to be a .com... There's ways of making domains "look" real without resorting to the tricks you have to in IE.
Now, I'll still say that the actual prosecution of filesharers is ridiculous, but at least if they're going through the court system I don't have to be pissed off that they're using police-like activities sanctioned by some piece of horrible horrible legislation.
Of course, then we started writing bots to emulate our presence on the channel when we were gone ("How's the new release looking?") and the company went bankrupt, but that's beside the point. :P