I gotta say I generally agree... I'm on a Mac now and couldn't be happier -- got UNIX and an interface that both work rather well. This after years (nearly a decade) of going through various learning curves and "not quite ready yet" system bits. Don't get me wrong guys -- I can see progress has been generally made in lots of places, but here's my experiences...
First it was the nightmare of getting a printer and print subsystem configured to work. Oh, and share to a windows box. How many printer subsystems did we gothrough? I can't remember, but more and more low end printers now-a-days are needing drivers to really do much more than simple black-block-text. I had to give up on that particular battle years ago.
Then it was sound systems. Every kernel release brought around a new sound system, but various applications didn't quite have time to properly catch up before things moved again.
Then it was video cards/drivers... we know how much aggravation that dredges up. Either you have an old card, or you have binary drivers that don't give full card functionality, or...
Now its wireless. I did try the most recent ubuntu live CD (breezy??) on a system that had a wireless card that, from what research I did, ought to have maybe worked. Imagine my surprise otherwise.
Then the desktop environment that decided to switch up on browsers that worked but didn't switch up on file dialogs that didn't so much... or the other desktop environment that seemed to require me to memorize various device:// protocols to find things in their browser. (And $DEITY forbid I need to yank out a thumbdrive and maybe plug it back in...)
Let's not forget media... even following the directions to add dvd playback support, I never once got that to work. I don't know how many times I really, honestly tried. Or the ability to get images off my digital camera. I got that to work once... but only kinda.
So, yeah... I'm in the same position: I wouldn't dare give myself the headache to recommend anyone I know try Linux because I know I just can't stay ahead of the knowledge curve to ensure it was really functional and useful. I don't know what it'd take for things to really finally come together and start working well (hardward, devices, software, media)... but I hope it does happen. Linux for me is mostly now relegated to the role of simple file server boxes and/or net boxes.
The [button] is convenient, but leads to incompetence and dependency.
It may well happen that a basic understanding of a computer's permanent vs. volatile storage choices go down in history alongside reading, writing, and math. I could get on board with that. And, believe me, I truly appreciate 'dd' being present for the power-geeks to get to. The big limitation that a lot of people have is not a lack of access to information (as was more the case in the middle ages where the skills of reading and writing were locked up by the church) but rather a lack of time and/or interest to really gain mastery over the computer. Someone just can't be made to set aside more time and/or foster more interest... especially when they are carting kids around to their various activities, shopping, dealing with the house problem of the week, and other things. I'll never really understand all the magic that makes my car's engine work. I have some rudimentary understanding, and tools don't scare me, and I have the patience and ability to learn... I simply lack a strong enough desire to actually learn. (Cue bumper sticker "I'd rather be coding.") Likewise the people who just really don't need to know that "dd" exists are many. Lets give them a button that talks to "dd", and if we're feeling particularly slick, bring Automator over to the free OSes too.
It seems people do not want to do things that can be understood easily. They want to do things that look easy, i.e. click some button or run a programm that does a single, highly speciaalised operation and takes no parameters.
Easy with the generalizations. For what it's worth, "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsX" takes up some amount of mental storage, be it rote memory or full-out understanding. That little piece of knowledge itself is a fairly highly specialized operation. OTOH, a well designed UI with a button that says "click me, and I'll fix your problem" saves the average joe from the necessary year (or so) of learning required to have the contextual foundation to appreciate what "dd" even is, let alone how to use it.
Beyond that, Apple has done one better with their Automator tool... click-n-drag together UI representations of common user operations into a sequence chain -- kind of like piping UNIX command output together, except the UI lets the person actually specify parameters. (And they can be saved for future use every bit as much as creatng a shell script.)
After six years at a large international engineering outfit in the aerospace sector, I was very fortunate to find an IT job at a small, commercial-software-making outfit. The change in attitude and valuation of my skill set is like night and day. (Of course in favor of the small company.) That being said, opportunities in such companies aren't all that common, and you may trade some of the perks that larger companies can provide you. I took a $5k/year cut from the previous job, and my insurance coverage isn't quite as favorable in the smaller company, but I wouldn't think of going back since my input and experience is very much needed and appreciated here. Yes, I got d*mn lucky. Not all hope is lost.
I'd like to request that such "concept viruses" as this have "NSFW" encoded in their names... w32.ooBasic.NSFW (or something). That'd be really handy.;-)
They won't have to even "convince" anybody. As someone else has already pointed out, the default windows digital camera wizard could (theoretically) convert photos to this format by default (or else, using creative wording, by a more appealing sounding option to J. Random Soccermom). Likewise, frontpage express (and related "don't make me learn" tools) could either convert to this or offer the conversion as a way to "save precious space/bandwidth". Suddenly the web and email inboxes get flooded with the new format.:/
Makes sense... I heard a rumor Duke Nukem' Forever is finally debuting as the easter egg in the upcoming version of MS Excel. You'll want the graphics muscle to be able to do your spreadsheets.;-)
A lot of the usefulness bonjour (zeroconf/whatever) provides that the user sees must be provided in the applications themselves. The underlying protocol that allows apps to advertise they provide, say, "httpd" -- and allows other apps to request a list of.local address that provide a given service -- won't do squat for the user unless apache and firefox (etc) add code to make use of it.
That said, last time I looked into this (last year, but fairly intently) the protocol is available on Linux that allow machines to trade their info, but no user-level apps did anything with it.
I've tried the whole Sunbird thing off an on for over a year, and I give major props to J. Haller for his Portable versions of the mozilla tools. However, Sunbird itself needs major work at the interface level to make it a viable product. It seems to handle the actual iCal (*.ics) format well enough, but the user experience has been sorely lacking for quite some time, and I've not ever noticed much effort thrown into this project that improves upon it in the time I've been watching. Sure, it can be made to work, but it's like you have to learn a series of hoops to jump through to get there... not anything I'd ever dream of getting my wife and/or non-tech-peers to try to understand. Fortunately (for me and my small circle of influence) google calendar is out now and seems to work rather nicely. If they (or someone else) get plugins working for outlook, Mac iSync, etc, I think it really stands a nice chance.
ASCII text is an "open data format".. and all word processors support that.
You went for the humor mod, and there's nothing wrong with that, but once you unzip an ODF file, you actually have ASCII text. (Well, strictly, something like utf8-encoded XML files, but notepad/wordpad handles them decently... smart-quotes notwithstanding, but they're evil anyway.;)
I keep seeing these stories about governments deciding to legislate the internal usage of ODF. Is the standard really ready for prime time?
I'm far from any real expert on the format, but at my job, I have done some fairly non-trivial conversions of technical documentation (in DITA XML, if anyone cares) into ODF, and while what I'm doing is fairly rough (it's an in-house use sort of thing) the format does seem to support all the basic concepts of a word processing document... page layouts, running headers/footers, tables, frames, images, multi-column sections, bulleted and/or numbered lists, and other things I know I haven't had to worry about yet. The upshot with ODF is that it is really a zip file containing a bunch of XML files, so processing it around later is fairly easy (that is, nearly trivial when compared to a non-documented and binary *.doc file).
Amusing.:) Personally, at work, I'd prefer to measure "hours since win 2000 explorer shell crash" but it'd be a real hassle resetting the counter all the time. Perhaps I should invert it to "fewest minutes since crash"... just this morning it went in the toilet three times in less than two minutes.:/
It isn't like this is a hard-to-implement feature or Apple accidentally forgot to include it. They deliberately set up roadblocks in iTunes and the iPod file system in order to make it difficult to move songs from iPods to computers. Let's call a spade a spade, and crippleware crippleware.
My reply to this may sound more argumentative than I mean to; apologies if that's the case. I sympathize that a small percentage of users (power-users or whatever) might have a need to off-load songs from their iPod... but in all honestly, the only place I hear this ever being a problem is/. posts. We're a pretty niche collection of people who just Know Too Much (tm). You may have a unique need here; IMO that's fair. Apple, bowing slightly to recording industry pressure about "piracy" (yeah, I know), choose not to add that in; IMO that's also fair. But the biggest point I'm trying to raise here is that, based on non-/. people I've talked with, this "issue" isn't even on the radar screen; this goes beyond any sentiment of "ignorance is bliss" on their part too. Of the small fraction "power-user" crew, the majority know they can drag-and-drop *.mp3 files (or whatever floats their boat) into and out of disk mode. For the small fraction of that small fraction for which this isn't good enough for, well, sorry; it just sucks.
Beyond that, there are [allegedly] tools that can pull the music files off the music portion of an iPod's file system and work out the song info (given the file name is hashed). I haven't looked into them b/c this isn't anything I need. True enough that if you step outside the shiny playground Apple makes, you'll have to do some of your own heavy lifting. That's a spade I'm willing to agree with you on... but I really can't get on board with calling it "crippleware". No doubt we'll just disagree on that.
Just to continue the 'joe average' argument... "more than one computer in house" means you have iTunes on all of them and then share the playlists between (and/or get an AirTunes receiver -- yeah, its not cheap and not the perfectly golden solution for all people). At work, and this is a preference, just use the earbuds (or get a dock player of some variety). For friends, if you must share, iPods do serve as a USB mass storage discs... what's the problem of sharing things that way? It's likely to be a one-time deal until you/friends are all in sync w/ each other.
Now... that's not to say an iPod is in fact perfect for all people (different strokes fer different folks) but the argument that always comes out about how limiting the iPod is b/c you cannot copy the songs out of [the music playing portion of] it is just not a real problem.
Ever try using iTunes to move songs from your iPod to a computer?
Taking the 'joe user' perspective about this... my music is already on my computer. The question is rather moot. The iPod is a portable extension of what my computer has on it.::puzzled::
> Normally wanting something + getting it at a useless time = irony.
No, that's just bad luck / bad timing. That's not irony. I will say that one song would sound a little funny with the chorus line being "Isn't it a poor-timed set of happenstances, don't you think?".
I, too, was always leery of the mouse "feel" using demo Mac boxes at, say, CompUSA, because it did feel like mousing through mud. On the other hand, once I owned one (my wife just went ahead and got one for the house) and spent a couple days with it, it isn't a big deal. You're fighting against the muscle memory from a windows-based mouse feel; trust me it'll be okay. The upshot is that, now being acclimated to the Mac mouse feel, I have yet to *overshoot* my target and click the wrong thing. [shrug]
Wondering out loud... if the "noise" is a machine-unique watermark which is being phoned home back to sony, it'd give them a way to trace back instances of a given P2P'ed rip to someone's machine.
Pardon my limited knowledge of VB stuff... seems like "delegates" are little more than function pointers, of a sort. That VB uses them for GUI event stuff seemed interesting to me when I read through that section of a quick-learn tutorial, but coming from the Java side of the fence, they don't seem to be necessary... at least, I created the usual "FooListener" interface concept and passed that to an event-generating object (all this of my own creation) and the event callback worked just fine w/o resorting to the delegate model. (Now, if anyone points out the pro/con of doing this in VB, I'll of course listen with interest. I'm not saying delegates are useless or anything, I'm curious why they chose that for GUI event stuff.)
Properties seem to be an interesting syntactic sugar on private member vars and public getter/setters. Actually, from what little I saw in VB land, I can't see the coder is saved any real effort to go that route, except that possible there might be uses for the compiler explicitly marking the member variable as a "property".
Just a couple random thoughts. Do take an evening to back through the newer features added to java lately. The new "annotations" was interesting after I saw an example of using the reflections API on a class to list various methods with a given annotation (say, "@test") and then run those methods... think poor-mans unit tests.
Slashdot Mirror
I gotta say I generally agree... I'm on a Mac now and couldn't be happier -- got UNIX and an interface that both work rather well. This after years (nearly a decade) of going through various learning curves and "not quite ready yet" system bits. Don't get me wrong guys -- I can see progress has been generally made in lots of places, but here's my experiences...
First it was the nightmare of getting a printer and print subsystem configured to work. Oh, and share to a windows box. How many printer subsystems did we gothrough? I can't remember, but more and more low end printers now-a-days are needing drivers to really do much more than simple black-block-text. I had to give up on that particular battle years ago.
Then it was sound systems. Every kernel release brought around a new sound system, but various applications didn't quite have time to properly catch up before things moved again.
Then it was video cards/drivers... we know how much aggravation that dredges up. Either you have an old card, or you have binary drivers that don't give full card functionality, or...
Now its wireless. I did try the most recent ubuntu live CD (breezy??) on a system that had a wireless card that, from what research I did, ought to have maybe worked. Imagine my surprise otherwise.
Then the desktop environment that decided to switch up on browsers that worked but didn't switch up on file dialogs that didn't so much... or the other desktop environment that seemed to require me to memorize various device:// protocols to find things in their browser. (And $DEITY forbid I need to yank out a thumbdrive and maybe plug it back in...)
Let's not forget media... even following the directions to add dvd playback support, I never once got that to work. I don't know how many times I really, honestly tried. Or the ability to get images off my digital camera. I got that to work once... but only kinda.
So, yeah... I'm in the same position: I wouldn't dare give myself the headache to recommend anyone I know try Linux because I know I just can't stay ahead of the knowledge curve to ensure it was really functional and useful. I don't know what it'd take for things to really finally come together and start working well (hardward, devices, software, media) ... but I hope it does happen. Linux for me is mostly now relegated to the role of simple file server boxes and/or net boxes.
It may well happen that a basic understanding of a computer's permanent vs. volatile storage choices go down in history alongside reading, writing, and math. I could get on board with that. And, believe me, I truly appreciate 'dd' being present for the power-geeks to get to. The big limitation that a lot of people have is not a lack of access to information (as was more the case in the middle ages where the skills of reading and writing were locked up by the church) but rather a lack of time and/or interest to really gain mastery over the computer. Someone just can't be made to set aside more time and/or foster more interest... especially when they are carting kids around to their various activities, shopping, dealing with the house problem of the week, and other things. I'll never really understand all the magic that makes my car's engine work. I have some rudimentary understanding, and tools don't scare me, and I have the patience and ability to learn... I simply lack a strong enough desire to actually learn. (Cue bumper sticker "I'd rather be coding.") Likewise the people who just really don't need to know that "dd" exists are many. Lets give them a button that talks to "dd", and if we're feeling particularly slick, bring Automator over to the free OSes too.
Easy with the generalizations. For what it's worth, "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsX" takes up some amount of mental storage, be it rote memory or full-out understanding. That little piece of knowledge itself is a fairly highly specialized operation. OTOH, a well designed UI with a button that says "click me, and I'll fix your problem" saves the average joe from the necessary year (or so) of learning required to have the contextual foundation to appreciate what "dd" even is, let alone how to use it.
Beyond that, Apple has done one better with their Automator tool... click-n-drag together UI representations of common user operations into a sequence chain -- kind of like piping UNIX command output together, except the UI lets the person actually specify parameters. (And they can be saved for future use every bit as much as creatng a shell script.)
That isn't cryptic either... and stop calling Dubya a dwarf! ;-)
Moderation:
+1: Respected elder
-1: Up hill both ways...
After six years at a large international engineering outfit in the aerospace sector, I was very fortunate to find an IT job at a small, commercial-software-making outfit. The change in attitude and valuation of my skill set is like night and day. (Of course in favor of the small company.) That being said, opportunities in such companies aren't all that common, and you may trade some of the perks that larger companies can provide you. I took a $5k/year cut from the previous job, and my insurance coverage isn't quite as favorable in the smaller company, but I wouldn't think of going back since my input and experience is very much needed and appreciated here. Yes, I got d*mn lucky. Not all hope is lost.
I'd like to request that such "concept viruses" as this have "NSFW" encoded in their names... w32.ooBasic.NSFW (or something). That'd be really handy. ;-)
They won't have to even "convince" anybody. As someone else has already pointed out, the default windows digital camera wizard could (theoretically) convert photos to this format by default (or else, using creative wording, by a more appealing sounding option to J. Random Soccermom). Likewise, frontpage express (and related "don't make me learn" tools) could either convert to this or offer the conversion as a way to "save precious space/bandwidth". Suddenly the web and email inboxes get flooded with the new format. :/
Makes sense... I heard a rumor Duke Nukem' Forever is finally debuting as the easter egg in the upcoming version of MS Excel. You'll want the graphics muscle to be able to do your spreadsheets. ;-)
I live in Houston, you insensitive clod! ;)
A lot of the usefulness bonjour (zeroconf/whatever) provides that the user sees must be provided in the applications themselves. The underlying protocol that allows apps to advertise they provide, say, "httpd" -- and allows other apps to request a list of .local address that provide a given service -- won't do squat for the user unless apache and firefox (etc) add code to make use of it.
That said, last time I looked into this (last year, but fairly intently) the protocol is available on Linux that allow machines to trade their info, but no user-level apps did anything with it.
I've tried the whole Sunbird thing off an on for over a year, and I give major props to J. Haller for his Portable versions of the mozilla tools. However, Sunbird itself needs major work at the interface level to make it a viable product. It seems to handle the actual iCal (*.ics) format well enough, but the user experience has been sorely lacking for quite some time, and I've not ever noticed much effort thrown into this project that improves upon it in the time I've been watching. Sure, it can be made to work, but it's like you have to learn a series of hoops to jump through to get there... not anything I'd ever dream of getting my wife and/or non-tech-peers to try to understand. Fortunately (for me and my small circle of influence) google calendar is out now and seems to work rather nicely. If they (or someone else) get plugins working for outlook, Mac iSync, etc, I think it really stands a nice chance.
You went for the humor mod, and there's nothing wrong with that, but once you unzip an ODF file, you actually have ASCII text. (Well, strictly, something like utf8-encoded XML files, but notepad/wordpad handles them decently... smart-quotes notwithstanding, but they're evil anyway. ;)
I'm far from any real expert on the format, but at my job, I have done some fairly non-trivial conversions of technical documentation (in DITA XML, if anyone cares) into ODF, and while what I'm doing is fairly rough (it's an in-house use sort of thing) the format does seem to support all the basic concepts of a word processing document... page layouts, running headers/footers, tables, frames, images, multi-column sections, bulleted and/or numbered lists, and other things I know I haven't had to worry about yet. The upshot with ODF is that it is really a zip file containing a bunch of XML files, so processing it around later is fairly easy (that is, nearly trivial when compared to a non-documented and binary *.doc file).
Amusing. :) Personally, at work, I'd prefer to measure "hours since win 2000 explorer shell crash" but it'd be a real hassle resetting the counter all the time. Perhaps I should invert it to "fewest minutes since crash" ... just this morning it went in the toilet three times in less than two minutes. :/
5. Because we get kickbacks from Ballmer if you do.
... and chairbacks from Ballmer if you don't. ;-)
Never before has number 13 sucked so hard.
Borrowing shamelessly a quote in military training camps (and elsewhere to be sure)...
"Know what 13th place is? The first loser."
I'm glad I play WoW and can understand that, otherwise the connotations could have been awful.
;-)
Speaking as someone who never has played WoW, let me assure you... they are indeed.
My reply to this may sound more argumentative than I mean to; apologies if that's the case. I sympathize that a small percentage of users (power-users or whatever) might have a need to off-load songs from their iPod... but in all honestly, the only place I hear this ever being a problem is
Beyond that, there are [allegedly] tools that can pull the music files off the music portion of an iPod's file system and work out the song info (given the file name is hashed). I haven't looked into them b/c this isn't anything I need. True enough that if you step outside the shiny playground Apple makes, you'll have to do some of your own heavy lifting. That's a spade I'm willing to agree with you on... but I really can't get on board with calling it "crippleware". No doubt we'll just disagree on that.
Just to continue the 'joe average' argument... "more than one computer in house" means you have iTunes on all of them and then share the playlists between (and/or get an AirTunes receiver -- yeah, its not cheap and not the perfectly golden solution for all people). At work, and this is a preference, just use the earbuds (or get a dock player of some variety). For friends, if you must share, iPods do serve as a USB mass storage discs... what's the problem of sharing things that way? It's likely to be a one-time deal until you/friends are all in sync w/ each other.
Now... that's not to say an iPod is in fact perfect for all people (different strokes fer different folks) but the argument that always comes out about how limiting the iPod is b/c you cannot copy the songs out of [the music playing portion of] it is just not a real problem.
Taking the 'joe user' perspective about this... my music is already on my computer. The question is rather moot. The iPod is a portable extension of what my computer has on it.
> Normally wanting something + getting it at a useless time = irony.
No, that's just bad luck / bad timing. That's not irony. I will say that one song would sound a little funny with the chorus line being "Isn't it a poor-timed set of happenstances, don't you think?".
I, too, was always leery of the mouse "feel" using demo Mac boxes at, say, CompUSA, because it did feel like mousing through mud. On the other hand, once I owned one (my wife just went ahead and got one for the house) and spent a couple days with it, it isn't a big deal. You're fighting against the muscle memory from a windows-based mouse feel; trust me it'll be okay. The upshot is that, now being acclimated to the Mac mouse feel, I have yet to *overshoot* my target and click the wrong thing. [shrug]
Wondering out loud ... if the "noise" is a machine-unique watermark which is being phoned home back to sony, it'd give them a way to trace back instances of a given P2P'ed rip to someone's machine.
Pardon my limited knowledge of VB stuff... seems like "delegates" are little more than function pointers, of a sort. That VB uses them for GUI event stuff seemed interesting to me when I read through that section of a quick-learn tutorial, but coming from the Java side of the fence, they don't seem to be necessary... at least, I created the usual "FooListener" interface concept and passed that to an event-generating object (all this of my own creation) and the event callback worked just fine w/o resorting to the delegate model. (Now, if anyone points out the pro/con of doing this in VB, I'll of course listen with interest. I'm not saying delegates are useless or anything, I'm curious why they chose that for GUI event stuff.)
Properties seem to be an interesting syntactic sugar on private member vars and public getter/setters. Actually, from what little I saw in VB land, I can't see the coder is saved any real effort to go that route, except that possible there might be uses for the compiler explicitly marking the member variable as a "property".
Just a couple random thoughts. Do take an evening to back through the newer features added to java lately. The new "annotations" was interesting after I saw an example of using the reflections API on a class to list various methods with a given annotation (say, "@test") and then run those methods... think poor-mans unit tests.