Which isn't a point at all. A linux user, at least an intelligent one, would never say something like that. The fact that Microsoft is, essentially, saying that about Google just illustrates how retarded they are.
It's because a lot of people really want to believe in homeopathic medicine, even though it completely contradicts most of our current scientific models. If there is any possibility that "water has memory" people will jump on it....
I'm not so sure about that. Protein folding is mostly a computational problem. Simplifying the computation is what will be needed to improve those models. Maybe this will help, but I'm not sure. It sounds like it might actually make the computation more complicated, which definitely won't help.
Lets see, Google is giving people access to use their "Free" DNS service, I ask why? there is not charitable reason for this. It's simple you get enough market control over peoples DNS and you can start calling your own shots, Microsoft even tried this one on once upon a time.
Completely speculative. Wait until they actually do something with it before complaining about it. It would be difficult for them to do something without anybody noticing, and everybody would switch really quick if they did.
Google, is notorious for sneaking in IP grabs on peoples data when using their Cloud services, granted they get caught out then play the "oh how did that get in the fine print? must be some sort of mistake" but the fact remains they still try it on.
First: what do you mean? This makes no sense the way you have said it. Second: provide an example (even just one would be good), otherwise it is just rumor and anecdote, which is worthless
Google grabs your personal data and sells it to advertising companies? Not evil?
You mean when you use on their free services, they index the data you put into their service for the purpose of advertising. Yes, and they are very clear about that. No, it is not evil. There are other free services you can use if you don't like that, and if you think they are being more honest than Google about what they are doing with your data.
If you use, Google desktop, Google toolbar, Google web history, or Google analytics (or a combination of any of these apps) and blamo you cant move on the web without Google knowing exactly every move you make. Yet, us geeks will weed out every other privacy concern on the internet and point the finger to the culprit and call them evil but Google? again seems to get another free ride.
All optional programs. None of them required to use any of the Google web services. None of them sneakily bundled with other apps that trick you into installing them (I'm looking at you Yahoo! toolbar). None of them hijack your browser and redirect everything through Google (I'm looking at you Bing toolbar). Also, they are very clear about what they are indexing. Some have very customizable options. All of them can be blocked completely with a good firewall.
Look, does Google do everything perfectly? No. If you are going to criticize them, China is a good topic. But they are a good company. They seek profit, yes, but they make a strong effort to behave in an ethical way. Something a lot of companies stopped doing a long time ago. And they make good products and useful developer tools. All in all, they have had a positive influence on the development of the Web.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
I'm sorry, when has a linux proponent ever said anything like that? Even here on Slashdot, where discussion can turn stupid really fast, I've never seen somebody say that.
Nonsense. Food shortages were front page news. The possible/probable causes were a divisive issue. From your own article,
US Agriculture Secretary Edward T. Schafer argued that shifting to biofuels has reduced American dependence on oil while not endangering corn supplies because of a recent string of bumper crops. He said the shift accounts for no more than 3 percent of the spike in food prices. UN . agencies put the cost at up to 10 times that.
"We recognize that biofuels are a factor in the inflation of prices," Schafer said in a briefing with reporters, "but the real cause is energy and demand."
Seriously, there are some land issues to be worked out, but panic-stricken reactions to food shortages neither identify the actual problem nor provide useful solutions.
Ok, so I read the article--unsurprisingly it was light on the details. The sieve idea is good, but a few questions come to mind,
1) How are you going to do the actual virus identification? Most of the current techniques require an amplification step because you need enough signal to measure. It is great to be able to isolate small amounts, but not if you can't do anything with it. Morphological identification is one way to go, but you can only get species information that way (sometimes). You can't get strain information (ie: you know you have a flu virus, but which one?).
2) On the same line as 1), if you are going to amplify it to do some kind of test, how are you going to do that? Some viruses replicate easily (ie: in bacteria). Others don't. Almost all viruses are fairly fragile, so will they still be viable after being gathered on the chip?
3) How are you going to use this for diagnostic purposes. You can't just squirt blood onto this thing. You would need to prepare the sample in some way (to precipitate proteins, organelles, and structure polysaccharides) or else you will gunk up the chip and have a large background signal.
An interesting technology for sure, but this sort of stuff needs to be thought through if it is going to be useful in any kind of clinical way.
Not necessarily. We aren't talking about doing transition state searches or anything like that. Simply using it as a visual tool can help students to better understand the Lennard-Jones potential, the van der Waals radius, and their implications on bonding. The geometry optimizations and electrostatic potential calculations allow you to explore the predictions made by MO theory. You don't have to understand the quantum mechanics to know that a higher energy conformation is less favorable than a lower energy conformation. So when you are learning about dihedral angles and conformational isomers, being able to do the energy calculations can help you understand the concept better.
Spartan is a very good program for molecular visualization. It will calculate ground state energies, electrostatic surface areas, and orbital energies. It is a very useful supplement when you are talking about lowest energy conformations and bonding. It's a bit expensive, though, even for educational use. Most departments I have been to have one or two dedicated copies that the students have to share. There are some alternatives listed here,
Most of them involve getting something like Cambridgesoft's Chem3D and using it as a frontend for GAMESS or Guassian. Both are also very good programs....
If you're looking for something more low-key, any kind of kinetics experiment usually involves some sort of regression analysis. It's a good opportunity to teach them something like R or Matlab. And SciFinder scholar is also a good program for doing database searches for compounds and reactions reported in the literature. Despite some of the other replies you have had already, it is important to know what tools are available and be familiar with them if you are interested in any kind of future in research. It also helps ground you in the fundamental concepts you learn in a textbook, but probably don't get much chance to apply otherwise.
Yes, of course IE6 is outdated and I agree nobody should running it. IE6 is riddled with security problems and there is no reason to not run something better. I disagree about XP and UAC, though. Vista was a terrible upgrade option for a lot of people. It broke hardware compatibility, software compatibility, it was slow, it had a lot of bugs. I haven't met anybody who has liked Vista, and a lot of OEMs had the option of keeping XP instead of getting Vista with a new computer. If we were talking about Win98, I think the old argument is valid. But XP was a pretty decent operating system by SP3. It certainly does everything I need it to, and I don't see any advantage to the essentially aesthetic improvements of Vista. In fact, I would have to buy a new computer to run it, and the laptop battery life really sucks because it is so resource intensive all of the time.
Likewise with UAC. It is a completely asinine and retarded way to improve security. The only thing it does is train users to click Ok without reading the security warning, like they already do with a lot of other things. The privilege escalation in Linux and MacOSX is a much better way to handle it, and there is no reason why they couldn't have added it to Vista. They just wanted to be different, and it sucks. So, in Win7 it is tolerable, but in Vista people disable it.
It is pointless to argue about hypothetically secure configurations. I can create the most secure OS in the world by not including a TCP/IP stack. Nobody would use it, though, because it lacks the functionality they need/want. Secure programs and operating systems have to find ways to be secure while, at the same time, staying out of the way and providing the functionality users want. It's a difficult problem, which is why it hasn't been completely solved yet.
If I were bitching about OSX 10.0 with IE for Mac you would laugh your ass off at me for my program selection.
10.0, yes probably, but only because it was a very incomplete OS at that point. But 10.3 (over 6 years old) is a great operating system. Why pay to upgrade (along with the required expensive hardware upgrade) if it does everything you need. Snow Leapord has a lot of great things in it, but you don't need it. Other old software that may be perfectly fine if it does everything you want/need: Apache 1.3x, Linux (the kernel) 2.4x, Office2003 (or even Office97), Photoshop 7, Windows Media Player 9. If you want/need the new features, obviously you have to upgrade. But if the old software works fine, why not continue using it?
Ok, first of all, being old has nothing to do with anything. Plenty of old products can be used perfectly fine and are in use in many places. Equating "secure and usable" with "newest shiny" is exactly what marketing PHBs want from you so they can always sell you their newest products. And, in fact, what you are calling old is still in common use today. While IE7 has been out for a while now, Windows 7 has not. A lot of people are still using XP because they refused to upgrade to Vista.
Second, the point the grandparent was making was not that secure products don't exist. It was that common configurations of widely used products are not secure. If someone is using IE8 on WinXP, that's not secure. If someone is using IE8 on Vista with UAC disabled that's not secure. See the point?
Internet Explorer is not an integral component of the OS, and it is removable in Windows 7.
It has been an integral component for as long as I have used Windows, and Windows 7 isn't out yet. Sure, if you want MacGyver your system and thereby void any kind of support you may have received from either Microsoft or a vendor, sure go ahead. But there is no way to go to Add/Remove programs, remove Internet Explorer, and have it actually removed (in XP it just removes the desktop icon and start menu entry; I haven't bothered with Vista). To me, that makes it an integral component.
Since Messenger is an optional component from Live Essentials
Uh, Messenger is installed by default, and, again, you can disable access to it, but you can't remove it, at least not easily. And Media Player is the same. I guess you can actually remove it now (you used to not be able to), but it is still not a trivial process, although I will concede it is easy enough if you are determined and know what you are doing.
Also Windows Update isn't dependent on IE.
Really? Do tell. How do you get your updates from windowsupdate.com in Firefox? What's that? You can't because you need ActiveX? Sure the background updater utility will run without IE, but you are missing at least half of the functionality you get if you go directly to the website, which is what I prefer to do.
Anyway, all the nitpicks aside, the original point was that Microsoft doesn't "just bundle software like everybody else." They package their own software in a way that locks you in and competitors out. If that's what they want to do, fine, I avoid Windows as much as I can so I don't care. But then the reputation they get as a result is their fault, and they can't complain about people being biased against them. People are naturally suspicious and untrusting of anything Microsoft may try to do because they have a history of being entirely self-serving. That's the PR problem they now have to deal with.
Well, I would generally agree, if this was identical to your car analogy, but there are a few problems with that point of view:
1) Microsoft doesn't just bundle. Components like IE, Media Player, and Windows Messenger are integral components to the OS. Some of them, like Messenger, can be disabled, but that's about it. They cannot be removed. And personally, I don't want IE on my system. I hate it. I don't want badly programmed software using it instead of my renderer of choice. I don't want Windows Update to be dependent on it. I don't want it constantly bugging me and trying to trick me into making it the default browser. I want it removed, but it can't be done.
2) Microsoft is very well known for strong-arming vendors. If shops want to bundle Firefox with their OEM Windows, they will be threatened with marked up prices. And at the slim margins of white box sales, that's untenable.
3) Microsoft's dominance means that any defaults they choose will have huge effects on other markets. So they have to be responsible about which defaults they choose. If their defaults are very clearly self-serving (inferior buggy insecure products, but owned by them), then people will rightly complain loudly. Take Bing as the latest example. It sucks donkey balls. But Microsoft has chosen it as their default search engine because it is owned by them. And it is one thing to change the browser default, but it's not so trivial (if it's even possible, I'm not sure) for things like Windows live search, which has the nice Office integration that many people might want. So instead of competing in an equal opportunity market, where Bing wouldn't have a chance against Google or Yahoo, Microsoft is leveraging with their OS to gain a competitive advantage. Thankfully Google and Yahoo have been around long enough and have enough of an entrenched user base to not feel too threatened, but other markets haven't had that kind of success and have been squashed (no, Netscape isn't the only example, and yes, Netscape did have it's own problems; it wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault).
If Microsoft made a better attempt to "play well with others" it wouldn't have the reputation it has now, which leads people to be suspicious and to complain about everything it does. Linux distributions don't have this problem, because they don't try to stomp all over each other. Everybody has their favorite and their reasons for not liking the others, but they don't complain about business practices. They don't need to, because they are all pretty civil toward each other.
Linux has a lot of stuff going for it, but GUI responsiveness simply isn't one of them. Push it to the background with just daemon running to chew through data and it's great, but for the time being I've given up trying to use it as a desktop system, despite really wanting to.
That is certainly true. And if you've followed any of the debates with various kernel hackers and Con Kolivas, who has pushed for desktop performance patches in the kernel in the past, you're probably aware that most kernel hackers consider the desktop a low priority. Kernel preemption was a fight, the new scheduler was a fight, and there have been other things. Supposedly it is different now, but I have my doubts. There's a lot of resistance to making the kernel flexible enough to handle desktop well AND server well AND netbook well AND embedded well, mostly due to code complexity (you know what they say, "jack of all trades, master of none"). Anyway, Con Kolivas has given up, but he maintains his own patches for his own personal use and claims much better performance over the stock kernel. That said, there is some indication that the kernel lords are starting to listen....
Anyway, responsiveness is an issue, but the original point was that:
The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account.
and that's simply not true. Windows is slower at just about everything. Sure, it responds to your clicks, sometimes, when it's not doing anything in the background, or thrashing your hard disk, but actual performance/hardware is only adequate at best. The exception seems to be in accelerated 3D, mostly because driver developers spend a long time optimizing for that platform.
Not likely. If Microsoft bundled (not tied to the OS in a way that makes it impossible to remove) other software such as Firefox, OpenOffice, or GIMP, I doubt anybody would have a problem with it. The problem comes when they bundle their own software (IE, Media Player, Silverlight, etc), and offer none of the other competing alternatives.
Package management is wonderful, but we need to standardize the damn things. I vote for Apt-RPM. Choice is good and wonderful, but not when it is considering package formats. Just pick one so we can finally just post a "Linux" binary on the web that works with every package management system seamlessly. How kick ass would that be?
These two can be fixed now, and if anyone's awake at Red Hat, Debian or Canonical I suspect they will be.
No, it's not that simple. There are two major formats (deb,rpm), yes, but the actual packages across distributions are different. Mandrake and Red Hat both use rpm, for example, but their packages are completely incompatible with each other. There's a lot of info on the autopackage site about this stuff. The project is attempting to fix these sorts of cross-distribution problems. I think they've got a good start, but it remains to be seen whether they will be successful.
I agree with what you're saying about the users, but I don't think that is really the central problem. I think the developer teams of the various projects would benefit from discussing architecture aims with each other and coordinating their efforts more. Projects already do this internally to a large extent. The linux kernel, for example, has the Linux Kernel summit usually once a year.
The problem is it doesn't happen much between projects, and this is especially critical when separate independent projects need to work together to solve a problem. The problems associated with sound on linux, for example, originate in a dozen or more projects (alsa, jack, pulseaudio, gstreamer, various libraries, various media players, codecs, drivers, etc). It's not something a simple 20 line patch to a project can solve. It requires a more coordinated effort to identify the problems and come up with the best solutions.
That's fine if you want to rewrite the entire sound subsystem and associated userspace software yourself from scratch, and maintain it yourself separate from the main branch. But that's not really sustainable....
It's true, gnu/linux has come a long way following this so-called bazaar model. But if it is going to continue to be successful, more collaborative development models are going to have to be evolved from the process.
You always say the same thing over and over again, hairyfeet. It's a bit tiresome to respond to everything, so I'll respond only to this:
But you could write the same sentence as "all you have to do is give us your company and it will all be taken care of' for all the good it will do. A good 80-90% of the hardware manufacturers will NEVER EVER give you the source code, okay?
10 years ago people were saying manufacturers would never ever write drivers for linux period, or commercial software, and yet now they are. Markets change. Businesses change. People learn how to do things differently. This isn't about giving up their business or doing things for free. There are very strong business cases to be made for open source drivers and software in general. Those that have realized it are using it to their competitive advantage NOW. Those that haven't are still fighting each other tooth-and-nail for every little perceived benefit they think they can gain.
In the meantime, I will use linux and will be happy. I will help my friends use linux and they will be happy. If a special use case requires me to use Windows for some reason, fine, so be it, I will use Windows in that situation. Or if I think my friends will be better off with Windows in their situation, I will recommend they go that route. But if linux does the job, and most of the time it does, then I will go that route. The hardware and software support continues to get better with every release.
FACT- Consumers never do research on anything that costs less than a car. They buy on features/price.
Wow, glad you cleared that up. I guess you better go tell all the economists that they are wasting their time trying to figure out all the various minutia that motivate buying decisions. Hairyfeet has it all figured out, let's pack up and go home now.
There are a number of other influences in buying decisions. Among them are recommendations from friends. I am often asked for recommendations, and I often recommend the hardware I think is good quality, which incidentally usually has good linux support. For the larger linux-shipping vendors, like Dell, a simple "works with linux" sticker on popular hardware choices would probably do a lot to help their customers buy compatible hardware and not suffer the frustration of being unable to make it work.
Hmm...well, your program looks really nice. I hadn't heard of it before. But a fairly critical feature is the ability to do statistical analysis on data sets and curve fitting. As far as I can tell, your program doesn't do that. Grace does, but it's interface is rather beastly. These days I use R directly, but it doesn't have a nice GUI like SigmaPlot. Personally, I think R requires you to know a little bit more about what you are doing than SigmaPlot, which is a good thing. But it would be nice to have a program that didn't require quite the learning curve. I've toyed with the idea of writing a simple frontend to R that does just simple regression analysis (that would fit 99% of my needs), but I've never gotten around to it.
Not sure I want to join this conversation, but thought I should point out that if you are taking this stance,
I'm merely postulating that until the cause is known, the value of a vaccine will have to be obvious and immediately clear, to outweigh the risk.
with respect to vaccines, you should be taking a similar stance with every possible foreign substance: food (especially processed food), drugs (including painkillers and antibiotics), soaps/shampoos/toothpaste/mouthwash/lotion, environmental substances (ex: pollen, potential allergens), chemicals used outdoors (fertilizers, pesticides), heck even playing in the sandbox or going to the swimming pool could be potentially hazardous. I sympathise with your position, but being ultra-paranoid is not practical or beneficial.
Footnote: I'm not an advocate of ultra vaccination (like flu, etc), but I consider it an important tool in individual and public health. When used properly it can greatly benefit the overall health of the general population (ex: eradication of smallpox and mostly non-existent measles/mumps/rubella). Flu vaccines can be important in some areas (ex: working in hospitals or nursing homes), but I think it is mostly pointless for the general population considering the somewhat high morbidity but low mortality of most flu strains. Also, I grew up with a brother who has autism back in the 80's when they knew enough to diagnose it, but really didn't have the services needed to help support parents and families or help schools work with autistic children and integrate them into the classroom.
Of course, it should be noted that obesity isn't the only health problem to be worried about. A higher percentage of fat in the diet may lead to less weight gain, but, depending on the fat of course, it can also lead to a higher incidence of heart disease. We don't have a magic formula for diets yet. For me, the rule of moderation seems to apply more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Which isn't a point at all. A linux user, at least an intelligent one, would never say something like that. The fact that Microsoft is, essentially, saying that about Google just illustrates how retarded they are.
Seriously, how did this get on the front page?
It's because a lot of people really want to believe in homeopathic medicine, even though it completely contradicts most of our current scientific models. If there is any possibility that "water has memory" people will jump on it....
I'm not so sure about that. Protein folding is mostly a computational problem. Simplifying the computation is what will be needed to improve those models. Maybe this will help, but I'm not sure. It sounds like it might actually make the computation more complicated, which definitely won't help.
Lets see, Google is giving people access to use their "Free" DNS service, I ask why? there is not charitable reason for this. It's simple you get enough market control over peoples DNS and you can start calling your own shots, Microsoft even tried this one on once upon a time.
Completely speculative. Wait until they actually do something with it before complaining about it. It would be difficult for them to do something without anybody noticing, and everybody would switch really quick if they did.
Google, is notorious for sneaking in IP grabs on peoples data when using their Cloud services, granted they get caught out then play the "oh how did that get in the fine print? must be some sort of mistake" but the fact remains they still try it on.
First: what do you mean? This makes no sense the way you have said it.
Second: provide an example (even just one would be good), otherwise it is just rumor and anecdote, which is worthless
Google grabs your personal data and sells it to advertising companies? Not evil?
You mean when you use on their free services, they index the data you put into their service for the purpose of advertising. Yes, and they are very clear about that. No, it is not evil. There are other free services you can use if you don't like that, and if you think they are being more honest than Google about what they are doing with your data.
If you use, Google desktop, Google toolbar, Google web history, or Google analytics (or a combination of any of these apps) and blamo you cant move on the web without Google knowing exactly every move you make. Yet, us geeks will weed out every other privacy concern on the internet and point the finger to the culprit and call them evil but Google? again seems to get another free ride.
All optional programs. None of them required to use any of the Google web services. None of them sneakily bundled with other apps that trick you into installing them (I'm looking at you Yahoo! toolbar). None of them hijack your browser and redirect everything through Google (I'm looking at you Bing toolbar). Also, they are very clear about what they are indexing. Some have very customizable options. All of them can be blocked completely with a good firewall.
Look, does Google do everything perfectly? No. If you are going to criticize them, China is a good topic. But they are a good company. They seek profit, yes, but they make a strong effort to behave in an ethical way. Something a lot of companies stopped doing a long time ago. And they make good products and useful developer tools. All in all, they have had a positive influence on the development of the Web.
Lets put that quote to another context.
Boo-fuckin'-hoo.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
Again, boo-fuckin'-hoo. Make something useful and maybe people will use it.
I'm sorry, when has a linux proponent ever said anything like that? Even here on Slashdot, where discussion can turn stupid really fast, I've never seen somebody say that.
Nonsense. Food shortages were front page news. The possible/probable causes were a divisive issue. From your own article,
US Agriculture Secretary Edward T. Schafer argued that shifting to biofuels has reduced American dependence on oil while not endangering corn supplies because of a recent string of bumper crops. He said the shift accounts for no more than 3 percent of the spike in food prices. UN . agencies put the cost at up to 10 times that.
"We recognize that biofuels are a factor in the inflation of prices," Schafer said in a briefing with reporters, "but the real cause is energy and demand."
Seriously, there are some land issues to be worked out, but panic-stricken reactions to food shortages neither identify the actual problem nor provide useful solutions.
Ok, so I read the article--unsurprisingly it was light on the details. The sieve idea is good, but a few questions come to mind,
1) How are you going to do the actual virus identification? Most of the current techniques require an amplification step because you need enough signal to measure. It is great to be able to isolate small amounts, but not if you can't do anything with it. Morphological identification is one way to go, but you can only get species information that way (sometimes). You can't get strain information (ie: you know you have a flu virus, but which one?).
2) On the same line as 1), if you are going to amplify it to do some kind of test, how are you going to do that? Some viruses replicate easily (ie: in bacteria). Others don't. Almost all viruses are fairly fragile, so will they still be viable after being gathered on the chip?
3) How are you going to use this for diagnostic purposes. You can't just squirt blood onto this thing. You would need to prepare the sample in some way (to precipitate proteins, organelles, and structure polysaccharides) or else you will gunk up the chip and have a large background signal.
An interesting technology for sure, but this sort of stuff needs to be thought through if it is going to be useful in any kind of clinical way.
Not necessarily. We aren't talking about doing transition state searches or anything like that. Simply using it as a visual tool can help students to better understand the Lennard-Jones potential, the van der Waals radius, and their implications on bonding. The geometry optimizations and electrostatic potential calculations allow you to explore the predictions made by MO theory. You don't have to understand the quantum mechanics to know that a higher energy conformation is less favorable than a lower energy conformation. So when you are learning about dihedral angles and conformational isomers, being able to do the energy calculations can help you understand the concept better.
Spartan is a very good program for molecular visualization. It will calculate ground state energies, electrostatic surface areas, and orbital energies. It is a very useful supplement when you are talking about lowest energy conformations and bonding. It's a bit expensive, though, even for educational use. Most departments I have been to have one or two dedicated copies that the students have to share. There are some alternatives listed here,
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/local/organic/mod/software.html
Most of them involve getting something like Cambridgesoft's Chem3D and using it as a frontend for GAMESS or Guassian. Both are also very good programs....
If you're looking for something more low-key, any kind of kinetics experiment usually involves some sort of regression analysis. It's a good opportunity to teach them something like R or Matlab. And SciFinder scholar is also a good program for doing database searches for compounds and reactions reported in the literature. Despite some of the other replies you have had already, it is important to know what tools are available and be familiar with them if you are interested in any kind of future in research. It also helps ground you in the fundamental concepts you learn in a textbook, but probably don't get much chance to apply otherwise.
Yes, of course IE6 is outdated and I agree nobody should running it. IE6 is riddled with security problems and there is no reason to not run something better. I disagree about XP and UAC, though. Vista was a terrible upgrade option for a lot of people. It broke hardware compatibility, software compatibility, it was slow, it had a lot of bugs. I haven't met anybody who has liked Vista, and a lot of OEMs had the option of keeping XP instead of getting Vista with a new computer. If we were talking about Win98, I think the old argument is valid. But XP was a pretty decent operating system by SP3. It certainly does everything I need it to, and I don't see any advantage to the essentially aesthetic improvements of Vista. In fact, I would have to buy a new computer to run it, and the laptop battery life really sucks because it is so resource intensive all of the time.
Likewise with UAC. It is a completely asinine and retarded way to improve security. The only thing it does is train users to click Ok without reading the security warning, like they already do with a lot of other things. The privilege escalation in Linux and MacOSX is a much better way to handle it, and there is no reason why they couldn't have added it to Vista. They just wanted to be different, and it sucks. So, in Win7 it is tolerable, but in Vista people disable it.
It is pointless to argue about hypothetically secure configurations. I can create the most secure OS in the world by not including a TCP/IP stack. Nobody would use it, though, because it lacks the functionality they need/want. Secure programs and operating systems have to find ways to be secure while, at the same time, staying out of the way and providing the functionality users want. It's a difficult problem, which is why it hasn't been completely solved yet.
If I were bitching about OSX 10.0 with IE for Mac you would laugh your ass off at me for my program selection.
10.0, yes probably, but only because it was a very incomplete OS at that point. But 10.3 (over 6 years old) is a great operating system. Why pay to upgrade (along with the required expensive hardware upgrade) if it does everything you need. Snow Leapord has a lot of great things in it, but you don't need it. Other old software that may be perfectly fine if it does everything you want/need: Apache 1.3x, Linux (the kernel) 2.4x, Office2003 (or even Office97), Photoshop 7, Windows Media Player 9. If you want/need the new features, obviously you have to upgrade. But if the old software works fine, why not continue using it?
Ok, first of all, being old has nothing to do with anything. Plenty of old products can be used perfectly fine and are in use in many places. Equating "secure and usable" with "newest shiny" is exactly what marketing PHBs want from you so they can always sell you their newest products. And, in fact, what you are calling old is still in common use today. While IE7 has been out for a while now, Windows 7 has not. A lot of people are still using XP because they refused to upgrade to Vista.
Second, the point the grandparent was making was not that secure products don't exist. It was that common configurations of widely used products are not secure. If someone is using IE8 on WinXP, that's not secure. If someone is using IE8 on Vista with UAC disabled that's not secure. See the point?
Internet Explorer is not an integral component of the OS, and it is removable in Windows 7.
It has been an integral component for as long as I have used Windows, and Windows 7 isn't out yet. Sure, if you want MacGyver your system and thereby void any kind of support you may have received from either Microsoft or a vendor, sure go ahead. But there is no way to go to Add/Remove programs, remove Internet Explorer, and have it actually removed (in XP it just removes the desktop icon and start menu entry; I haven't bothered with Vista). To me, that makes it an integral component.
Since Messenger is an optional component from Live Essentials
Uh, Messenger is installed by default, and, again, you can disable access to it, but you can't remove it, at least not easily. And Media Player is the same. I guess you can actually remove it now (you used to not be able to), but it is still not a trivial process, although I will concede it is easy enough if you are determined and know what you are doing.
Also Windows Update isn't dependent on IE.
Really? Do tell. How do you get your updates from windowsupdate.com in Firefox? What's that? You can't because you need ActiveX? Sure the background updater utility will run without IE, but you are missing at least half of the functionality you get if you go directly to the website, which is what I prefer to do.
Anyway, all the nitpicks aside, the original point was that Microsoft doesn't "just bundle software like everybody else." They package their own software in a way that locks you in and competitors out. If that's what they want to do, fine, I avoid Windows as much as I can so I don't care. But then the reputation they get as a result is their fault, and they can't complain about people being biased against them. People are naturally suspicious and untrusting of anything Microsoft may try to do because they have a history of being entirely self-serving. That's the PR problem they now have to deal with.
Well, I would generally agree, if this was identical to your car analogy, but there are a few problems with that point of view:
1) Microsoft doesn't just bundle. Components like IE, Media Player, and Windows Messenger are integral components to the OS. Some of them, like Messenger, can be disabled, but that's about it. They cannot be removed. And personally, I don't want IE on my system. I hate it. I don't want badly programmed software using it instead of my renderer of choice. I don't want Windows Update to be dependent on it. I don't want it constantly bugging me and trying to trick me into making it the default browser. I want it removed, but it can't be done.
2) Microsoft is very well known for strong-arming vendors. If shops want to bundle Firefox with their OEM Windows, they will be threatened with marked up prices. And at the slim margins of white box sales, that's untenable.
3) Microsoft's dominance means that any defaults they choose will have huge effects on other markets. So they have to be responsible about which defaults they choose. If their defaults are very clearly self-serving (inferior buggy insecure products, but owned by them), then people will rightly complain loudly. Take Bing as the latest example. It sucks donkey balls. But Microsoft has chosen it as their default search engine because it is owned by them. And it is one thing to change the browser default, but it's not so trivial (if it's even possible, I'm not sure) for things like Windows live search, which has the nice Office integration that many people might want. So instead of competing in an equal opportunity market, where Bing wouldn't have a chance against Google or Yahoo, Microsoft is leveraging with their OS to gain a competitive advantage. Thankfully Google and Yahoo have been around long enough and have enough of an entrenched user base to not feel too threatened, but other markets haven't had that kind of success and have been squashed (no, Netscape isn't the only example, and yes, Netscape did have it's own problems; it wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault).
If Microsoft made a better attempt to "play well with others" it wouldn't have the reputation it has now, which leads people to be suspicious and to complain about everything it does. Linux distributions don't have this problem, because they don't try to stomp all over each other. Everybody has their favorite and their reasons for not liking the others, but they don't complain about business practices. They don't need to, because they are all pretty civil toward each other.
Linux has a lot of stuff going for it, but GUI responsiveness simply isn't one of them. Push it to the background with just daemon running to chew through data and it's great, but for the time being I've given up trying to use it as a desktop system, despite really wanting to.
That is certainly true. And if you've followed any of the debates with various kernel hackers and Con Kolivas, who has pushed for desktop performance patches in the kernel in the past, you're probably aware that most kernel hackers consider the desktop a low priority. Kernel preemption was a fight, the new scheduler was a fight, and there have been other things. Supposedly it is different now, but I have my doubts. There's a lot of resistance to making the kernel flexible enough to handle desktop well AND server well AND netbook well AND embedded well, mostly due to code complexity (you know what they say, "jack of all trades, master of none"). Anyway, Con Kolivas has given up, but he maintains his own patches for his own personal use and claims much better performance over the stock kernel. That said, there is some indication that the kernel lords are starting to listen....
Anyway, responsiveness is an issue, but the original point was that:
The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account.
and that's simply not true. Windows is slower at just about everything. Sure, it responds to your clicks, sometimes, when it's not doing anything in the background, or thrashing your hard disk, but actual performance/hardware is only adequate at best. The exception seems to be in accelerated 3D, mostly because driver developers spend a long time optimizing for that platform.
Not likely. If Microsoft bundled (not tied to the OS in a way that makes it impossible to remove) other software such as Firefox, OpenOffice, or GIMP, I doubt anybody would have a problem with it. The problem comes when they bundle their own software (IE, Media Player, Silverlight, etc), and offer none of the other competing alternatives.
Package management is wonderful, but we need to standardize the damn things. I vote for Apt-RPM. Choice is good and wonderful, but not when it is considering package formats. Just pick one so we can finally just post a "Linux" binary on the web that works with every package management system seamlessly. How kick ass would that be?
These two can be fixed now, and if anyone's awake at Red Hat, Debian or Canonical I suspect they will be.
No, it's not that simple. There are two major formats (deb,rpm), yes, but the actual packages across distributions are different. Mandrake and Red Hat both use rpm, for example, but their packages are completely incompatible with each other. There's a lot of info on the autopackage site about this stuff. The project is attempting to fix these sorts of cross-distribution problems. I think they've got a good start, but it remains to be seen whether they will be successful.
I agree with what you're saying about the users, but I don't think that is really the central problem. I think the developer teams of the various projects would benefit from discussing architecture aims with each other and coordinating their efforts more. Projects already do this internally to a large extent. The linux kernel, for example, has the Linux Kernel summit usually once a year.
The problem is it doesn't happen much between projects, and this is especially critical when separate independent projects need to work together to solve a problem. The problems associated with sound on linux, for example, originate in a dozen or more projects (alsa, jack, pulseaudio, gstreamer, various libraries, various media players, codecs, drivers, etc). It's not something a simple 20 line patch to a project can solve. It requires a more coordinated effort to identify the problems and come up with the best solutions.
And, of course, the more help the better.
That's fine if you want to rewrite the entire sound subsystem and associated userspace software yourself from scratch, and maintain it yourself separate from the main branch. But that's not really sustainable....
It's true, gnu/linux has come a long way following this so-called bazaar model. But if it is going to continue to be successful, more collaborative development models are going to have to be evolved from the process.
Whoops, I meant http://www.ubuntustudio.org.
Did you try Ubuntu Studio? They have an ubuntustudio-audio metapackage which, presumably, preconfigures jackd/alsa for low latency....
Just don't install ubuntustudio-desktop. That appears to have PulseAudio in it for some reason.
You are correct. The only official Gnome application that uses Mono is Tomboy. There are no core dependencies on Mono.
You always say the same thing over and over again, hairyfeet. It's a bit tiresome to respond to everything, so I'll respond only to this:
But you could write the same sentence as "all you have to do is give us your company and it will all be taken care of' for all the good it will do. A good 80-90% of the hardware manufacturers will NEVER EVER give you the source code, okay?
10 years ago people were saying manufacturers would never ever write drivers for linux period, or commercial software, and yet now they are. Markets change. Businesses change. People learn how to do things differently. This isn't about giving up their business or doing things for free. There are very strong business cases to be made for open source drivers and software in general. Those that have realized it are using it to their competitive advantage NOW. Those that haven't are still fighting each other tooth-and-nail for every little perceived benefit they think they can gain.
In the meantime, I will use linux and will be happy. I will help my friends use linux and they will be happy. If a special use case requires me to use Windows for some reason, fine, so be it, I will use Windows in that situation. Or if I think my friends will be better off with Windows in their situation, I will recommend they go that route. But if linux does the job, and most of the time it does, then I will go that route. The hardware and software support continues to get better with every release.
FACT- Consumers never do research on anything that costs less than a car. They buy on features/price.
Wow, glad you cleared that up. I guess you better go tell all the economists that they are wasting their time trying to figure out all the various minutia that motivate buying decisions. Hairyfeet has it all figured out, let's pack up and go home now.
There are a number of other influences in buying decisions. Among them are recommendations from friends. I am often asked for recommendations, and I often recommend the hardware I think is good quality, which incidentally usually has good linux support. For the larger linux-shipping vendors, like Dell, a simple "works with linux" sticker on popular hardware choices would probably do a lot to help their customers buy compatible hardware and not suffer the frustration of being unable to make it work.
Hmm...well, your program looks really nice. I hadn't heard of it before. But a fairly critical feature is the ability to do statistical analysis on data sets and curve fitting. As far as I can tell, your program doesn't do that. Grace does, but it's interface is rather beastly. These days I use R directly, but it doesn't have a nice GUI like SigmaPlot. Personally, I think R requires you to know a little bit more about what you are doing than SigmaPlot, which is a good thing. But it would be nice to have a program that didn't require quite the learning curve. I've toyed with the idea of writing a simple frontend to R that does just simple regression analysis (that would fit 99% of my needs), but I've never gotten around to it.
Not sure I want to join this conversation, but thought I should point out that if you are taking this stance,
I'm merely postulating that until the cause is known, the value of a vaccine will have to be obvious and immediately clear, to outweigh the risk.
with respect to vaccines, you should be taking a similar stance with every possible foreign substance: food (especially processed food), drugs (including painkillers and antibiotics), soaps/shampoos/toothpaste/mouthwash/lotion, environmental substances (ex: pollen, potential allergens), chemicals used outdoors (fertilizers, pesticides), heck even playing in the sandbox or going to the swimming pool could be potentially hazardous. I sympathise with your position, but being ultra-paranoid is not practical or beneficial.
Footnote: I'm not an advocate of ultra vaccination (like flu, etc), but I consider it an important tool in individual and public health. When used properly it can greatly benefit the overall health of the general population (ex: eradication of smallpox and mostly non-existent measles/mumps/rubella). Flu vaccines can be important in some areas (ex: working in hospitals or nursing homes), but I think it is mostly pointless for the general population considering the somewhat high morbidity but low mortality of most flu strains. Also, I grew up with a brother who has autism back in the 80's when they knew enough to diagnose it, but really didn't have the services needed to help support parents and families or help schools work with autistic children and integrate them into the classroom.
Of course, it should be noted that obesity isn't the only health problem to be worried about. A higher percentage of fat in the diet may lead to less weight gain, but, depending on the fat of course, it can also lead to a higher incidence of heart disease. We don't have a magic formula for diets yet. For me, the rule of moderation seems to apply more than anything else.