Actually, when you ask to boot the CD to check Linux hardware compatibility, they usually let you. I have done this at five different stores, from Best Buy to Fry's, when buying my last two computers and a couple of other stores when researching for a friend and I have never been turned down when I asked politely.
It may not be the most secure thing for those stores to allow as policy, but they don't seem to object in general.
If I would ever be turned down, I would thank the sales person and promptly leave as I won't give them a sale if I can't confirm that the hardware works. If they asked, I would explain (politely) the same.
Ubuntu's implementation of the eye-candy has been pretty reserved overall.
You can add configuration tools to take full advantage if you want, but the defaults work rather well and don't "hit you over the head" for the most part.
I think Ubuntu's community is ultimately going to be the "feature" that puts it over the edge. I have seen, time and again, people say that the free support that they have received from the community in either the forums or Launchpad's community driven Answers platform has been some of the best technical support they have EVER received.
Now, that's not always the case and to be sure there are frustrated users out there, but I still think that as the community grows (as long as it can stick to its own codes of conduct) to be able to fill the needs of helping an ever-expanding community, it will be the "feature" that new users are drawn to.
Apple has the die-hard users it does because it functions perfectly for their needs and doesn't make them do any work.
Not exactly true. The die-hard fans give Apple a pass any time there is a flaw, just as Linux fans often do with their own platform.
That's why they are the die-hard fans.
Do you ever listen to Mac Break Weekly? That's a set of die-hard fans. And even when they legitimately raise issues with some feature or process with regards to Apple at least one (and generally all) have all turned around and are singing Apple's praises by the end of the show.
There's some psychological phenomena at work there (and it applies to all die-hard fans of anything) that I can't recall at the moment.
The rest of the people that use Apple do so because they have been encouraged to do so by Marketing, friends and family who may be in the die-hard set, are influenced by celebrity users (who may or may not be die-hard fans) and/or have bought peripherals (iphone, iPod) that they have enjoyed and used those as jumping off points to put a toe in the water of Apple's computing products.
It does help that Apple maintains "high touch" stores, read the book High Tech, High Touch to understand why, but it isn't the main reason.
It's funny. My wife happily accepts my geekiness and Linux use, but has never really been interested in using it for herself.
Over the past couple of years, I have had a laptop from work that dual boots Linux (it's primary OS) and Windows (so I can support our Windows clients). By just using Linux (Ubuntu) when she borrows my laptop every now and then, she has come to really like it.
Recently, she said that she'd probably like to have Linux dual boot on her newer laptop so she can get more experience with it.
In my circles, Firefox grew after I put in on their systems and encouraged them to use it and showed them some cool things that it could do. They in turn did the same from their friends. No marketing, other than the most powerful form called "word of mouth", was involved.
I don't see penguin logos on boxes, and not everybody has a working printer and enough paper to print out a distribution's hardware compatibility list and carry it into a local computer store.
1. I don't see how a penquin logo is any different from an apple logo or an intel logo or an AMD logo. That's not holding adoption back on the hardware front. Besides Linux Compatible logos do exist and I have seen them on a number of hardware boxes. Here's an example of one on a Brother printer box ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmalonzo/1154495353/ )
2. That's the beauty of Linux Live CD's. You don't have to print out the documentation of hardware compatibility. Just burn a CD and take it into your local big-box electronics store and see what works and what doesn't. Booting into a live Linux system from a CD goes a long way towards figuring out if the system is compatible or not. That's how I bought my last two computers.
They even have a simplified database system much like EC2. That in itself is enough to scare a lot of people away due to the pain of future migration.
I wonder if you designed your app so that it separated out the database interactions, would it buy you the ability to migrate away from Google app engine? Wouldn't you be able to just re-implement that particular layer?
Who says people are going to put in their kid's email?
How does myspace know that it is MY KID'S email? Does the kid verify and if they do what's to stop them from saying "No"?
Couldn't anyone put in anyone else's email address and effectively block them from mySpace?
On top of what everyone else has said about how ubiquitous free email addresses are, how is this thing useful at all.
Does anyone want to do a countdown until someone harvests all the email addresses posted on mySpace (they're there) and then registers them with the parental control?
Why wouldn't they just cut the number going to Walmart and increase the number (at a higher price) going to retailers willing to play ball.
Everyone that I know has found their console at Best Buy, Toys R Us, and Target. None from Walmart. While not scientific, it seems like it is easier, in my experience, to get it somewhere other than Walmart.
The first 60 are hard, but the challenge is to get all 120. I think it strikes a nice balance. Playing through as luigi should be fun as well as his controls are a bit different than Mario's.
I have played through a couple of levels just to mess with the physics and see where I could get by being creative (ala the original Super Mario Bros.) It is surprising what you can get to.
But what is the percentage of the games that are out there for both systems?
The Wii, after showing strong console sales for a solid year is FINALLY convincing developers that people will actually buy the system. Until April, Wii releases were kind of sparse and were made up of a lot of stuff that was just ported from other systems (like the DS and earlier Nintendo fare). Most developers spent their investments on the PS3 and the Xbox 360, thinking the Wii was a fad.
Games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, Zak and Wiki, Legend of Zelda, and Super Paper Mario are really surprising the Developer community.
The April sales figures are telling (the only ones that I could find online). The Wii snagged 3 of the top ten selling games all by itself. More telling is that the rest of the top ten has duplicates based on the same game on two console systems (and no duplicates with Wii Titles).
Here's the list: 1. Super Paper Mario (Wii) Nintendo 2. Wii Play w/ Remote (Wii) Nintendo 3. Guitar Hero 2 w/ Guitar (Xbox 360) Red Ocatane/Activision 4. Guitar Hero 2 w/ guitar (PS2) Red Octane/Activision 5. Spider-Man 3 (Xbox 360) Activision 6. Spider-Man 3 (PS2) Activision 7. God of War II (PS2) Sony 8. MLB '07: The Show (PS2) Sony 9. Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) Nintendo 10. Major League Baseball 2K7 (Xbox 360) 2K Games
Notice that the Wii has a third of the list, it comes in second as the number one selling console platform. First isn't even a "next gen" system, it's the PS2 for Christ's sake. The 360 is last and it only has ONE game that is unique to it, the rest are also-rans against the PS2 platform.
I won't say that Wii Play is any good (it sucks, but comes with a Wii-mote, so many people make the bargain), however, the Wii stands out as having two good games in the top 10 and not a single one is an also-ran.
You are going to see more of this as more game developers move to the Wii. Good games are bought and played on the Wii and when people play them with the friends (the whole design point for the Wii), the console sells itself.
I spent the weekend playing with two friends that are avid computer and 360 gamers. We played lame games, but they were fun (I just got Super Mario Galaxy - AMAZING gameplay- and I can't decide between Metroid Prime 3, Medal of Honor Heroes 2, Star Wars Complete Saga or Mario Strikers next) and we had a blast. Both said that they wanted a Wii now to be able to play with all their friends (not just the hard core gamers). They enjoyed the camaraderie and the plain old fun of playing it together.
It could be all coincidental (the missing seat from his vehicle is strange and unexplained), but it really odd nonetheless.
Also, why isn't a confessed killer sitting behind bars while Hans is in jail? I'm not saying he shouldn't be in jail, but having a confessed mass murderer running around makes you wonder about the priorities of the police department.
The more I see Microsoft do this, the more I applaud them. I hope they continue to do more and more of this stuff. I mentioned some of these things in an earlier leaked EULA to my wife and she stated that she'd rather put Linux on our computers than be micro-managed by any software company.
Cool.
Steve, Bill. You and your engineers are doing a great job. Keep it up. Is there any way you could be more restrictive and sell it as consumer choice? If so, do it.
Ubuntuguide was really helpful for me when I first started using ubuntu and wanted multimedia support for some things. But it didn't allow me to upgrade. Thank goodness that I set up a home partition, so I just ripped Hoary out from underneath my personal files and installed Breezy.
In Breezy I tried the automatix scripts and noticed things starting to break around the time that Dapper was coming due. I was sure that the minor annoyances that I worked around on my own would blow up in my face if I tried to dist-upgrade, so I blew it away again.
This time I have stayed rather vanilla. I did use the Restricted Formats page on Ubuntu to help me figure out MP3 support which didn't seem to use anything really outlandish. It appears that Ubuntu has made more allowances for people like me who want/need these formats. I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary yet.
Still not sure if I will do a dist-upgrade or if I will just blow it away again.
I guess the submitter (I hope it wasn't the editor's) didn't realize that a heck of a lot of physicists and astronomers and other hard core scientists have been to space way before Charles Simonyi. If his point was that he was the first somewhat famous computer geek to make it into space, he would be wrong again. Simonyi was beaten to the punch years ago by Mark Shuttleworth of Thawte and Ubunutu Linux fame.
Fact is the DMCA is law that should have never been passed; it screws the consumer without any real benefit to them.
I completely agree and I was writing my senators and doing my bit to stop it from being enacted. My point is that downloading music that is now illegal because of it is not going to get it repealed. Instead, it will inculcate congress to pass even more laws of its nature in order to "protect" the RIAA and its members from those evil downloaders.
Maybe I should have brought up an example such as the fact that it's illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson.
That would have been more appropriate.
I have no problem remembering the Holocaust. I just think it cheapens those people's suffering to compare it to other more trivial endeavors (I am sure that I have been guilty of it in the past as well... but I am trying to learn and, thereby, instruct).
We then get into ideas of justified and justifiable resistance. What are you fighting exactly through illegal downloading? Does your message, if it is indeed a political act of resistance ring true, or is it muddied by all the people that are downloading because they are simply want to get something for nothing? Would it not be better to use a more direct form of resistance and starve the income of the RIAA through directed boycott's? I don't know, but I would hazard that supporting those artists and labels that understand this new paradigm is a more effectively revolutionary protest than simply illegally downloading music. Hence my suggestions.
It did not take long to make a Nazi analogy. Wow. This devolved quickly.
Let's just disregard the fact that you have no real perspective.
If you don't like the law and don't like the RIAA's tactics, don't buy music from publishers and recording companies that support it. Buy music only from groups and companies that are expressly not members and/or support file trading.
Jim's Big Ego (http://bigego.com/) is a great band and they release their music under the Creative Commons License. Only buy music from enlightened places like Magnatune (http://magnatune.com/). CDBaby (http://cdbaby.com/) works directly with artists and gives them most of the profits.
Once you have done all that, then tell the companies that you would normally buy from why you aren't going to buy from them until they leave the RIAA or reign it in. Until you do that, if you still download music that you haven't paid for and don't have permission to download, you're full of crap.
Is subjective, but as has been used in cases such as the Napster ruling, the per incident "cost" of each file traded equals up to a hell of a lot of money and is the reason that most people don't fight in the courts and choose to settle as they would lose.
The people that the RIAA are going after, by their own admission, are the "first sharers" and the "large sharers" as it can be easily argued that the "first sharers" precipitate later damages and the "large sharers" perpetuate the damages.
With the DMCA and their court victories behind them, it is a crime.
There is nothing wrong with downloading copies of music that a band or its agents have placed on a P2P network (you better be sure they authorized it though). That's why P2P isn't illegal, but using P2P to download copyrighted music that has not been given previous consent to be place on such networks is illegal.
Sure, you can keep those copies for yourself as "backups" but when you give complete copies to people on your P2P network, you are running into illegal territory.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, when you ask to boot the CD to check Linux hardware compatibility, they usually let you. I have done this at five different stores, from Best Buy to Fry's, when buying my last two computers and a couple of other stores when researching for a friend and I have never been turned down when I asked politely.
It may not be the most secure thing for those stores to allow as policy, but they don't seem to object in general.
If I would ever be turned down, I would thank the sales person and promptly leave as I won't give them a sale if I can't confirm that the hardware works. If they asked, I would explain (politely) the same.
So far, I haven't had to do that though.
YMMV
I think this is an important point. Mark and the Ubuntu team really look at trying to make reasonable defaults that are accessible out of the box.
You can see that in the evolution of desktop effects on the Ubuntu desktop.
Ubuntu seems to really be working as a focusing agent for the average user.
Ubuntu's implementation of the eye-candy has been pretty reserved overall.
You can add configuration tools to take full advantage if you want, but the defaults work rather well and don't "hit you over the head" for the most part.
I think Ubuntu's community is ultimately going to be the "feature" that puts it over the edge. I have seen, time and again, people say that the free support that they have received from the community in either the forums or Launchpad's community driven Answers platform has been some of the best technical support they have EVER received.
Now, that's not always the case and to be sure there are frustrated users out there, but I still think that as the community grows (as long as it can stick to its own codes of conduct) to be able to fill the needs of helping an ever-expanding community, it will be the "feature" that new users are drawn to.
Apple has the die-hard users it does because it functions perfectly for their needs and doesn't make them do any work.
Not exactly true. The die-hard fans give Apple a pass any time there is a flaw, just as Linux fans often do with their own platform.
That's why they are the die-hard fans.
Do you ever listen to Mac Break Weekly? That's a set of die-hard fans. And even when they legitimately raise issues with some feature or process with regards to Apple at least one (and generally all) have all turned around and are singing Apple's praises by the end of the show.
There's some psychological phenomena at work there (and it applies to all die-hard fans of anything) that I can't recall at the moment.
The rest of the people that use Apple do so because they have been encouraged to do so by Marketing, friends and family who may be in the die-hard set, are influenced by celebrity users (who may or may not be die-hard fans) and/or have bought peripherals (iphone, iPod) that they have enjoyed and used those as jumping off points to put a toe in the water of Apple's computing products.
It does help that Apple maintains "high touch" stores, read the book High Tech, High Touch to understand why, but it isn't the main reason.
And anyone who downloaded before and has been keeping their systems up-to-date has all those fixes as well.
I always wait a month after the release before upgrading anyway to make sure that last minute bugs found out in the wild are worked out.
So far, its been relatively painless.
It's funny. My wife happily accepts my geekiness and Linux use, but has never really been interested in using it for herself.
Over the past couple of years, I have had a laptop from work that dual boots Linux (it's primary OS) and Windows (so I can support our Windows clients). By just using Linux (Ubuntu) when she borrows my laptop every now and then, she has come to really like it.
Recently, she said that she'd probably like to have Linux dual boot on her newer laptop so she can get more experience with it.
In my circles, Firefox grew after I put in on their systems and encouraged them to use it and showed them some cool things that it could do. They in turn did the same from their friends. No marketing, other than the most powerful form called "word of mouth", was involved.
I don't see penguin logos on boxes, and not everybody has a working printer and enough paper to print out a distribution's hardware compatibility list and carry it into a local computer store.
1. I don't see how a penquin logo is any different from an apple logo or an intel logo or an AMD logo. That's not holding adoption back on the hardware front. Besides Linux Compatible logos do exist and I have seen them on a number of hardware boxes. Here's an example of one on a Brother printer box ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmalonzo/1154495353/ )
2. That's the beauty of Linux Live CD's. You don't have to print out the documentation of hardware compatibility. Just burn a CD and take it into your local big-box electronics store and see what works and what doesn't. Booting into a live Linux system from a CD goes a long way towards figuring out if the system is compatible or not. That's how I bought my last two computers.
Who says people are going to put in their kid's email?
How does myspace know that it is MY KID'S email? Does the kid verify and if they do what's to stop them from saying "No"?
Couldn't anyone put in anyone else's email address and effectively block them from mySpace?
On top of what everyone else has said about how ubiquitous free email addresses are, how is this thing useful at all.
Does anyone want to do a countdown until someone harvests all the email addresses posted on mySpace (they're there) and then registers them with the parental control?
Why wouldn't they just cut the number going to Walmart and increase the number (at a higher price) going to retailers willing to play ball.
Everyone that I know has found their console at Best Buy, Toys R Us, and Target. None from Walmart. While not scientific, it seems like it is easier, in my experience, to get it somewhere other than Walmart.
Isn't that a better strategy?
The first 60 are hard, but the challenge is to get all 120. I think it strikes a nice balance. Playing through as luigi should be fun as well as his controls are a bit different than Mario's.
I have played through a couple of levels just to mess with the physics and see where I could get by being creative (ala the original Super Mario Bros.) It is surprising what you can get to.
But what is the percentage of the games that are out there for both systems?
The Wii, after showing strong console sales for a solid year is FINALLY convincing developers that people will actually buy the system. Until April, Wii releases were kind of sparse and were made up of a lot of stuff that was just ported from other systems (like the DS and earlier Nintendo fare). Most developers spent their investments on the PS3 and the Xbox 360, thinking the Wii was a fad.
Games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, Zak and Wiki, Legend of Zelda, and Super Paper Mario are really surprising the Developer community.
The April sales figures are telling (the only ones that I could find online). The Wii snagged 3 of the top ten selling games all by itself. More telling is that the rest of the top ten has duplicates based on the same game on two console systems (and no duplicates with Wii Titles).
Here's the list:
1. Super Paper Mario (Wii) Nintendo
2. Wii Play w/ Remote (Wii) Nintendo
3. Guitar Hero 2 w/ Guitar (Xbox 360) Red Ocatane/Activision
4. Guitar Hero 2 w/ guitar (PS2) Red Octane/Activision
5. Spider-Man 3 (Xbox 360) Activision
6. Spider-Man 3 (PS2) Activision
7. God of War II (PS2) Sony
8. MLB '07: The Show (PS2) Sony
9. Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) Nintendo
10. Major League Baseball 2K7 (Xbox 360) 2K Games
Notice that the Wii has a third of the list, it comes in second as the number one selling console platform. First isn't even a "next gen" system, it's the PS2 for Christ's sake. The 360 is last and it only has ONE game that is unique to it, the rest are also-rans against the PS2 platform.
I won't say that Wii Play is any good (it sucks, but comes with a Wii-mote, so many people make the bargain), however, the Wii stands out as having two good games in the top 10 and not a single one is an also-ran.
You are going to see more of this as more game developers move to the Wii. Good games are bought and played on the Wii and when people play them with the friends (the whole design point for the Wii), the console sells itself.
I spent the weekend playing with two friends that are avid computer and 360 gamers. We played lame games, but they were fun (I just got Super Mario Galaxy - AMAZING gameplay- and I can't decide between Metroid Prime 3, Medal of Honor Heroes 2, Star Wars Complete Saga or Mario Strikers next) and we had a blast. Both said that they wanted a Wii now to be able to play with all their friends (not just the hard core gamers). They enjoyed the camaraderie and the plain old fun of playing it together.
I'm telling you, the thing sells itself.
It could be all coincidental (the missing seat from his vehicle is strange and unexplained), but it really odd nonetheless.
Also, why isn't a confessed killer sitting behind bars while Hans is in jail? I'm not saying he shouldn't be in jail, but having a confessed mass murderer running around makes you wonder about the priorities of the police department.
Sorry to disappoint. But I do have a wife and a child (between us) no less.
The more I see Microsoft do this, the more I applaud them. I hope they continue to do more and more of this stuff. I mentioned some of these things in an earlier leaked EULA to my wife and she stated that she'd rather put Linux on our computers than be micro-managed by any software company.
Cool.
Steve, Bill. You and your engineers are doing a great job. Keep it up. Is there any way you could be more restrictive and sell it as consumer choice? If so, do it.
Ubuntuguide was really helpful for me when I first started using ubuntu and wanted multimedia support for some things. But it didn't allow me to upgrade. Thank goodness that I set up a home partition, so I just ripped Hoary out from underneath my personal files and installed Breezy.
In Breezy I tried the automatix scripts and noticed things starting to break around the time that Dapper was coming due. I was sure that the minor annoyances that I worked around on my own would blow up in my face if I tried to dist-upgrade, so I blew it away again.
This time I have stayed rather vanilla. I did use the Restricted Formats page on Ubuntu to help me figure out MP3 support which didn't seem to use anything really outlandish. It appears that Ubuntu has made more allowances for people like me who want/need these formats. I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary yet.
Still not sure if I will do a dist-upgrade or if I will just blow it away again.
I guess the submitter (I hope it wasn't the editor's) didn't realize that a heck of a lot of physicists and astronomers and other hard core scientists have been to space way before Charles Simonyi. If his point was that he was the first somewhat famous computer geek to make it into space, he would be wrong again. Simonyi was beaten to the punch years ago by Mark Shuttleworth of Thawte and Ubunutu Linux fame.
I completely agree and I was writing my senators and doing my bit to stop it from being enacted. My point is that downloading music that is now illegal because of it is not going to get it repealed. Instead, it will inculcate congress to pass even more laws of its nature in order to "protect" the RIAA and its members from those evil downloaders.
That would have been more appropriate.
I have no problem remembering the Holocaust. I just think it cheapens those people's suffering to compare it to other more trivial endeavors (I am sure that I have been guilty of it in the past as well... but I am trying to learn and, thereby, instruct).
We then get into ideas of justified and justifiable resistance. What are you fighting exactly through illegal downloading? Does your message, if it is indeed a political act of resistance ring true, or is it muddied by all the people that are downloading because they are simply want to get something for nothing? Would it not be better to use a more direct form of resistance and starve the income of the RIAA through directed boycott's? I don't know, but I would hazard that supporting those artists and labels that understand this new paradigm is a more effectively revolutionary protest than simply illegally downloading music. Hence my suggestions.
Let's just disregard the fact that you have no real perspective.
If you don't like the law and don't like the RIAA's tactics, don't buy music from publishers and recording companies that support it. Buy music only from groups and companies that are expressly not members and/or support file trading.
Jim's Big Ego (http://bigego.com/) is a great band and they release their music under the Creative Commons License. Only buy music from enlightened places like Magnatune (http://magnatune.com/). CDBaby (http://cdbaby.com/) works directly with artists and gives them most of the profits.
Once you have done all that, then tell the companies that you would normally buy from why you aren't going to buy from them until they leave the RIAA or reign it in. Until you do that, if you still download music that you haven't paid for and don't have permission to download, you're full of crap.
"total value"
Is subjective, but as has been used in cases such as the Napster ruling, the per incident "cost" of each file traded equals up to a hell of a lot of money and is the reason that most people don't fight in the courts and choose to settle as they would lose.
The people that the RIAA are going after, by their own admission, are the "first sharers" and the "large sharers" as it can be easily argued that the "first sharers" precipitate later damages and the "large sharers" perpetuate the damages.
With the DMCA and their court victories behind them, it is a crime.
There is nothing wrong with downloading copies of music that a band or its agents have placed on a P2P network (you better be sure they authorized it though). That's why P2P isn't illegal, but using P2P to download copyrighted music that has not been given previous consent to be place on such networks is illegal.
Sure, you can keep those copies for yourself as "backups" but when you give complete copies to people on your P2P network, you are running into illegal territory.