Grandma doesn't know how to install WinXP, either. If you need mp3, it's only a part of the installation to get it. Installing NVidia support, too.
Installing Ubuntu + mp3 + nvidia binary drivers is not harder than installing XP, and least it was for me.
Plus, when installing XP, you then need to install office software, plus some pdf reader, plus AV software, in order to have a usable desktop. Does grandma know how to get those things?
Aside from that, even if lack of mp3 was a real problem, there's no reason why it should be included. If you want that kind of stuff, get SuSE, or any other distro that doesn't care about the freedom of their users. Ubuntu _is_ abaout the freedom of their users, too. Including mp3 would be encouraging the use of patented algorithms for no reason. That goes agains the freedom of the users, and this is not a time to be agnostic about that kind of thing. It is sensible to have an ideological posture.
However, obviously, asking for a confirmation on file delete still *works*, it's just not your personal preference (you prefer to delete first and undo after). Which is fine, but you're the minority. You'll have to check a box to make Windows act this way.
It doesn't work. New people need two clicks to perform an action that could require just one click. By any measure, it'almost a 100% inefficiency. But at least it has some safety, it could keep them from erasing something.
For users that get accustomed to it, it's even worse. The two-click operation becomes a single gesture, and now any safety it was supposed to give you is just lost. The delete operation becomes a single gesture, and reverting it is not only far from effortless, but it is not always possible.
I would describe the situation as "barely working". I understand that they can't change their interface into one that actually does work, becuae it could need some retraining for some people, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that the interfaces they can supply, with the premise of not changing much, are retarded.
As of me, I'm not clicking any freaking checkbox. Ubuntu (with Gnome, of course) works the way I like out of the box, thank you very much. It doesn't have the undo function I want, but I believe it could evolve into that.
That's a design problem. Any serious desktop should have a global "undo" button, that you need to learn about, before you sit at the computer. Then you could delete any file you wanted, even by accident, and then get it back. The whole problem is that it's difficult to implement a global "undo" function that works _everywhere_. It's very difficult. It's not impossible, though.
About your saying that it can be turned off, that's nonsense. Interfaces that need configuration to work are badly designed interfaces. The application should be judged with its default configuration, because that is what is available everywhere.
Uh, not they don't. They have national socialistic or facist beliefs (or at least practices) but certainly not "the opposite" which would be free market economic beliefs.
There is no such thing as a national socialistic belief. It's an oxymoron. Just because some people call themselves socialists, it doesn't make them socialists. Socialism has nothing to to with police states. Of course, people who called themselves socialists did, but calling yourself something doesn't automatically turn you into that.
So, what I trying to say is that computer science needs some fundamental theories, techniques and tools applicable in real life situations before software can be trusted by design. Till then, software engineering is just a craft, where testing, patching and the like is needed to keep the system going.
There are fundamental theories that can prove you that the software you are using does exactly what it should. You can prove your software right.
The only problem is that it's too expensive, takes too much time, and no one wants to pay for that kind of costs.
You could start your own company, selling bugfree software, but you would have to compete with Oracle. They only need to _say_ they have no bugs, actually making it a reality would be prohibitely expensive. But you could prove me wrong, of course.
Well, I respect the right of cowboys to kiss each other, but I will never pay to see that!!! I'd much rather see a Star Wars III.5, the Jar-Jar Chronicles!!
While I know that Linux and OSS can be very secure and stable, Windows can be also. If people put the time into Windows that Linux-users put into Linux/OSS (by way of customization, and finding apps and drivers), they'd have a much more reliable machine (than their current Windows install... I have no desire to compare Windows and Linux). The biggest unreliability with Windows is the stupid things that users do.
I used mswindows for years. from 3.0 to 2000, and now I even use winXP at work. Other than that, I used GNU/Linux professionally for many years, and at home primarily, since the year 2000, and exclusively since two years ago.
The times a friend asked me to install Windows XP, I spent a complete an afternoon just installing winxp, plus office, printer, drivers and stuff. I have usually installed an AVG afterwards, and told them to get a better AV software or other protection, because I honestly don't have knowledge in that area, in _my_ particular experience AV software is bad for the experience. Maybe there's some customization I could do for them, but I just don't know what customization shopul be made, and it's not easy to find out what needs to be done. I have experience on Windows, but that's just another type of knowledge, and I have asked friends, not specialists, but developers who use winXP at home, and I never got anything better than "just install Norton AntiVirus". Problably there's a way to be safe with WinXP, but it must take an specialist.
My first Ubuntu, on the other hand, arrived some months ago. I inserted the CD, and less than two hours from there, I was happily listening to my mp3 collection again (that included some customizing), and importing my previous emails and configuration. I did no "customization" to the default install other than adding more sources of software in order to get non-free software, and using the package manager to add more software.
My girlfriend has no particular knowledge about ubuntu, but she has no trouble using it for office apps, email, web, skype, amsn, gaim. I let her do as she pleases, and she didn't even break her own stuff, even. For three years. She used a heavily customized Slackware installation I had, previously, but this Ubuntu has no customization or special configuration other than mplayer and mpd, an mp3 player.
I think I didn't invest as much time protecting my system as I spent on my friends computers, but I feel much safer, maybe I'm missing something.
Of course as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for".
Do you pay for slashdot? Do you think slashdot is worthless? Why do morons keep repeating that, when there are soooo many counterexamples? the saying just has no meaning in real life. Do you pay for Linux? Do you pay for GNOME? I even didn't pay for my Ubuntu CDs, and I have a great OS!!!
Of course, you could say that things don't get made for free, magically, and that someone has to pay for stuff, always. But you don't get what you pay for. About movies, Da Vinci code's production must have paid top dollar for that Tom Hank's hairpiece, and it looks like shit. They surely didn't get what they paid for.
The whole thing against weapons it that some people think that those who feel the need to use weapons, _do_ have a problem with their character, and that's exactly why they shouldn't get them!
Sorry, I didn't know that. Copyright Infringement _is_ a crime in the US! I was shocked to find out! I knew there were crazy laws in the US, like the DMCA, but I didn't think they had gone that far. In other countries, like mine, copyright infringement is a civil issue, meaning you can sue for the breach of monopoly on distribution that you own on your copyrighted works, but you can't dream of sending someone to jail for copying stuff you created. When money is involved, then you have a case, and you can send people to prison, or at least threaten them with that.
It's not an artifact of the open source. Open source has nothing to with it. Fair licenses allow for sensible distribution, of course.
But you are making the wrong reasoning. Software distributors are responsible for the action they take. Only because it's impossible for them to have a sensible way of distributing updates in mswindows , it doesn't mean that it's ok to do it wrong. There _could_ be something like synaptic for software packages in mswindows, that gives you a console, and lets you take your own decisions if you want to, like a parallel to mswindows update.
You don't seem to realize that it's not cool to use "slashbot" as an insult, while you are posting on slashdot, with a non recent uid. You don't go to a nerd club, and call people nerds, not because of politeness, but because it's not an insult in that context, specially when you are a nerd yourself.
Aside from that, Im not the only one who thinks that piracy is robbery at sea, the wikipedia does, too. There's no disambiguation page for "piracy", and this page doesn't say anything about copyright: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy
I'm not saying that "piracy" for copyright infringement is not commonly used, I'm saying that it should be avoided. There have been lots of times where particular words were used to support a particular view on some issues. The use of "piracy" for copyright infringement might be common, but it leads to confusion, and implies that copyright infringers are criminals, when it is not the case, at least for now. That ideas tend to grow on people, and make it much easier to make laws that actually criminalize copyright infringement. And that is too much power on content owners for my taste.
Another example, much clearer, is "intellectual property". That term does lead to confusion, and makes it more difficult to understand the differences between copyrights and patents, and even trade marks. That confusion leads to stupid stuff like the DMCA, and copyright protected printer cartridges, or patents on software. The fact that people don't understand that stuff makes it much easier to promote that things. And the term "intellectual property" is useful towards the goal of making people mor eignorant about that stuff.
Well, why should I care, if I don't live in the US? well, my country, Uruguay, because of the enormous intelligence of some of its leaders, is trying to make a trade deal to sell more meat to the US, and of course the US requires in exchange that we commit to defending their crazy copyright and patent laws in our country. Now all that nonsense that I used to laugh at, could be all around me!
I think you are trying to get advantage of the fact that I am not a native english speaker, and I could misinterpret you. I'm sorry, moron, just stop insisting, I am not fucking you.
The fact that phoning home is a common practice doesn't imply that it's good!
My apps don't need to phone home to get updated. I trust the people I choose to trust for that task. I use Ubuntu, and only Ubuntu and firefox do check for upgrades. and that's because I'm using a custom Firefox version, and I want it to phone home. And I know exactly what it does.
I don't subscribe to the pov that fear of being discovered will keep Google honest. I'd much rather just have the source.
Not at home. I didn't use it for work, either, until I got a better [paying] job. At my current job I had to use windows up until now, because I had to do some light support for a VB6.0 system. Today I uninstalled Visual Studio, and it's the beggining of the end of Windows for me, it's been the longest three months in the last five years, experiencing XP. It's better than win98, the last win I used, but it's a poor experience, compared to Ubuntu 5.10. I could see some software did phone home (Google desktop at least, and it got uninstalled, I installed MSYS and locate) but at work that is the problem of the sysadmins, Eclipse is mostly what I do, I don't care if the software they make me install does phone home. At home, it's a whole other issue.
It does everybody a disservice to call copyright infringers with a term that is used for actual crimes. In fact, the DMCA does in fact make you a criminal in some copyright infringement issues, but that is just stupid. In fact, the choice of the word 'pirate' is convenient for the people who like restricted distrbution, because it implies that copyright infringers are criminals, and that kind of concept grows in people.
You got it all wrong. Open sourcing something doesn't mean that you don't charge for it, or that you let people download it.
Open source means that you give the source, in some way.
Making it free software, for example, with a BSD license, would let people who do get the software distribute it, so they can give it to friends, make changes to the software, and share their changes.
What you want is probably freeware. That has nothing to do with source, or freedom, it's about cost. You want microsoft to refrain from charging licenses for old versions of mswindows, and letting them copy it for free.
In fact, thinking about it, not even freeware is needed. The problem you are talking about doesn't even exist. If those people have already paid for their copy of mswindows, they don't need to pay again if they want to reinstall it from a cd they get from a friend or something. Maybe microsoft should let people get remplacement install cds for a small fee, but most people anyway do have some way of getting in touch with the media.
Yes, it's not very nice, I was just comparing to MSOffice. On the other hand, I have used some LaTeX before, but there's no way I could make my classmates learn it, just for an assignment. I think it's a nice middle ground for people who wouldn't touch a non-wysiwyg with a stick, but shouldn't feel the pain of winword equation editor.
There are many areas where OO.o is still lacking badly. One of them is the math editor. I still think writing a scientific document in MS Word (and not LaTeX) is a dumb idea in the first place, but OO.o is far worse than even MS Word.
When taking a Numeric Methods For Differential Equations course, I got the other students in my group to install OpenOffice exactly because of the math editor!! We would still be writing equations if we used MSOffice!!
I remember writing equations with MSOffice, and it's a PITA, hours writing simple equations. If you need to write more than half a page of equations, the clickety-click way of math writing in MSOffice is ludicrous. On OpenOffice, you have a "show source" window, plus the MSOffice toolbars, so you can start by pointing and clicking, and then just copy, paste and edit, in the source window, and produce pretty equations, with a reasonable amount of work( like writing ((sqrt(3 - 4)) over 0 ) ), not with hours and hours of clicking and clicking.
*sigh* OK, if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
Think about it as the case of an ex convicted con artist. If he doesn't try to get a job, he must be up to something. If he does, he must be doing it as part of a scam.
Given Microsoft history, that's more or less their position, they will always be suspects, they can't win, of course, but they put themselves in that position through their past actions regarding open standards. Not that they really care what I think about them, of course.
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Grandma doesn't know how to install WinXP, either.
If you need mp3, it's only a part of the installation to get it.
Installing NVidia support, too.
Installing Ubuntu + mp3 + nvidia binary drivers is not harder than installing XP, and least it was for me.
Plus, when installing XP, you then need to install office software, plus some pdf reader, plus AV software, in order to have a usable desktop. Does grandma know how to get those things?
Aside from that, even if lack of mp3 was a real problem, there's no reason why it should be included. If you want that kind of stuff, get SuSE, or any other distro that doesn't care about the freedom of their users. Ubuntu _is_ abaout the freedom of their users, too. Including mp3 would be encouraging the use of patented algorithms for no reason. That goes agains the freedom of the users, and this is not a time to be agnostic about that kind of thing. It is sensible to have an ideological posture.
However, obviously, asking for a confirmation on file delete still *works*, it's just not your personal preference (you prefer to delete first and undo after). Which is fine, but you're the minority. You'll have to check a box to make Windows act this way.
It doesn't work.
New people need two clicks to perform an action that could require just one click. By any measure, it'almost a 100% inefficiency. But at least it has some safety, it could keep them from erasing something.
For users that get accustomed to it, it's even worse. The two-click operation becomes a single gesture, and now any safety it was supposed to give you is just lost. The delete operation becomes a single gesture, and reverting it is not only far from effortless, but it is not always possible.
I would describe the situation as "barely working".
I understand that they can't change their interface into one that actually does work, becuae it could need some retraining for some people, but that doesn't take anything away from the fact that the interfaces they can supply, with the premise of not changing much, are retarded.
As of me, I'm not clicking any freaking checkbox. Ubuntu (with Gnome, of course) works the way I like out of the box, thank you very much. It doesn't have the undo function I want, but I believe it could evolve into that.
That's a design problem.
Any serious desktop should have a global "undo" button, that you need to learn about, before you sit at the computer. Then you could delete any file you wanted, even by accident, and then get it back.
The whole problem is that it's difficult to implement a global "undo" function that works _everywhere_. It's very difficult. It's not impossible, though.
About your saying that it can be turned off, that's nonsense. Interfaces that need configuration to work are badly designed interfaces. The application should be judged with its default configuration, because that is what is available everywhere.
Uh, not they don't. They have national socialistic or facist beliefs (or at least practices) but certainly not "the opposite" which would be free market economic beliefs.
There is no such thing as a national socialistic belief. It's an oxymoron. Just because some people call themselves socialists, it doesn't make them socialists.
Socialism has nothing to to with police states. Of course, people who called themselves socialists did, but calling yourself something doesn't automatically turn you into that.
So, what I trying to say is that computer science needs some fundamental theories, techniques and tools applicable in real life situations before software can be trusted by design. Till then, software engineering is just a craft, where testing, patching and the like is needed to keep the system going.
There are fundamental theories that can prove you that the software you are using does exactly what it should. You can prove your software right.
The only problem is that it's too expensive, takes too much time, and no one wants to pay for that kind of costs.
You could start your own company, selling bugfree software, but you would have to compete with Oracle. They only need to _say_ they have no bugs, actually making it a reality would be prohibitely expensive. But you could prove me wrong, of course.
Maybe sensors don't need to be flat.
Well, I respect the right of cowboys to kiss each other, but I will never pay to see that!!!
I'd much rather see a Star Wars III.5, the Jar-Jar Chronicles!!
While I know that Linux and OSS can be very secure and stable, Windows can be also. If people put the time into Windows that Linux-users put into Linux/OSS (by way of customization, and finding apps and drivers), they'd have a much more reliable machine (than their current Windows install
I used mswindows for years. from 3.0 to 2000, and now I even use winXP at work.
Other than that, I used GNU/Linux professionally for many years, and at home primarily, since the year 2000, and exclusively since two years ago.
The times a friend asked me to install Windows XP, I spent a complete an afternoon just installing winxp, plus office, printer, drivers and stuff. I have usually installed an AVG afterwards, and told them to get a better AV software or other protection, because I honestly don't have knowledge in that area, in _my_ particular experience AV software is bad for the experience. Maybe there's some customization I could do for them, but I just don't know what customization shopul be made, and it's not easy to find out what needs to be done. I have experience on Windows, but that's just another type of knowledge, and I have asked friends, not specialists, but developers who use winXP at home, and I never got anything better than "just install Norton AntiVirus". Problably there's a way to be safe with WinXP, but it must take an specialist.
My first Ubuntu, on the other hand, arrived some months ago. I inserted the CD, and less than two hours from there, I was happily listening to my mp3 collection again (that included some customizing), and importing my previous emails and configuration. I did no "customization" to the default install other than adding more sources of software in order to get non-free software, and using the package manager to add more software.
My girlfriend has no particular knowledge about ubuntu, but she has no trouble using it for office apps, email, web, skype, amsn, gaim. I let her do as she pleases, and she didn't even break her own stuff, even. For three years. She used a heavily customized Slackware installation I had, previously, but this Ubuntu has no customization or special configuration other than mplayer and mpd, an mp3 player.
I think I didn't invest as much time protecting my system as I spent on my friends computers, but I feel much safer, maybe I'm missing something.
They complained, because cartridges didn't have as much capacity, so games were supposed to be less media-rich.
Of course as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for".
Do you pay for slashdot?
Do you think slashdot is worthless?
Why do morons keep repeating that, when there are soooo many counterexamples?
the saying just has no meaning in real life.
Do you pay for Linux?
Do you pay for GNOME?
I even didn't pay for my Ubuntu CDs, and I have a great OS!!!
Of course, you could say that things don't get made for free, magically, and that someone has to pay for stuff, always. But you don't get what you pay for.
About movies, Da Vinci code's production must have paid top dollar for that Tom Hank's hairpiece, and it looks like shit. They surely didn't get what they paid for.
The whole thing against weapons it that some people think that those who feel the need to use weapons, _do_ have a problem with their character, and that's exactly why they shouldn't get them!
Sorry, I didn't know that. Copyright Infringement _is_ a crime in the US!
I was shocked to find out! I knew there were crazy laws in the US, like the DMCA, but I didn't think they had gone that far.
In other countries, like mine, copyright infringement is a civil issue, meaning you can sue for the breach of monopoly on distribution that you own on your copyrighted works, but you can't dream of sending someone to jail for copying stuff you created. When money is involved, then you have a case, and you can send people to prison, or at least threaten them with that.
It's not an artifact of the open source. Open source has nothing to with it.
Fair licenses allow for sensible distribution, of course.
But you are making the wrong reasoning. Software distributors are responsible for the action they take. Only because it's impossible for them to have a sensible way of distributing updates in mswindows , it doesn't mean that it's ok to do it wrong.
There _could_ be something like synaptic for software packages in mswindows, that gives you a console, and lets you take your own decisions if you want to, like a parallel to mswindows update.
You don't seem to realize that it's not cool to use "slashbot" as an insult, while you are posting on slashdot, with a non recent uid. You don't go to a nerd club, and call people nerds, not because of politeness, but because it's not an insult in that context, specially when you are a nerd yourself.
Aside from that, Im not the only one who thinks that piracy is robbery at sea, the wikipedia does, too. There's no disambiguation page for "piracy", and this page doesn't say anything about copyright: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy
I'm not saying that "piracy" for copyright infringement is not commonly used, I'm saying that it should be avoided. There have been lots of times where particular words were used to support a particular view on some issues.
The use of "piracy" for copyright infringement might be common, but it leads to confusion, and implies that copyright infringers are criminals, when it is not the case, at least for now. That ideas tend to grow on people, and make it much easier to make laws that actually criminalize copyright infringement. And that is too much power on content owners for my taste.
Another example, much clearer, is "intellectual property". That term does lead to confusion, and makes it more difficult to understand the differences between copyrights and patents, and even trade marks.
That confusion leads to stupid stuff like the DMCA, and copyright protected printer cartridges, or patents on software. The fact that people don't understand that stuff makes it much easier to promote that things. And the term "intellectual property" is useful towards the goal of making people mor eignorant about that stuff.
Well, why should I care, if I don't live in the US? well, my country, Uruguay, because of the enormous intelligence of some of its leaders, is trying to make a trade deal to sell more meat to the US, and of course the US requires in exchange that we commit to defending their crazy copyright and patent laws in our country. Now all that nonsense that I used to laugh at, could be all around me!
I think you are trying to get advantage of the fact that I am not a native english speaker, and I could misinterpret you.
I'm sorry, moron, just stop insisting, I am not fucking you.
The fact that phoning home is a common practice doesn't imply that it's good!
My apps don't need to phone home to get updated. I trust the people I choose to trust for that task. I use Ubuntu, and only Ubuntu and firefox do check for upgrades.
and that's because I'm using a custom Firefox version, and I want it to phone home. And I know exactly what it does.
I don't subscribe to the pov that fear of being discovered will keep Google honest.
I'd much rather just have the source.
Not at home.
I didn't use it for work, either, until I got a better [paying] job.
At my current job I had to use windows up until now, because I had to do some light support for a VB6.0 system. Today I uninstalled Visual Studio, and it's the beggining of the end of Windows for me, it's been the longest three months in the last five years, experiencing XP. It's better than win98, the last win I used, but it's a poor experience, compared to Ubuntu 5.10.
I could see some software did phone home (Google desktop at least, and it got uninstalled, I installed MSYS and locate) but at work that is the problem of the sysadmins, Eclipse is mostly what I do, I don't care if the software they make me install does phone home. At home, it's a whole other issue.
Pirates attack ships at sea.
It does everybody a disservice to call copyright infringers with a term that is used for actual crimes. In fact, the DMCA does in fact make you a criminal in some copyright infringement issues, but that is just stupid. In fact, the choice of the word 'pirate' is convenient for the people who like restricted distrbution, because it implies that copyright infringers are criminals, and that kind of concept grows in people.
It phones home, and you don't have the source, that's enough to be paranoid.
You got it all wrong.
Open sourcing something doesn't mean that you don't charge for it, or that you let people download it.
Open source means that you give the source, in some way.
Making it free software, for example, with a BSD license, would let people who do get the software distribute it, so they can give it to friends, make changes to the software, and share their changes.
What you want is probably freeware. That has nothing to do with source, or freedom, it's about cost. You want microsoft to refrain from charging licenses for old versions of mswindows, and letting them copy it for free.
In fact, thinking about it, not even freeware is needed. The problem you are talking about doesn't even exist. If those people have already paid for their copy of mswindows, they don't need to pay again if they want to reinstall it from a cd they get from a friend or something. Maybe microsoft should let people get remplacement install cds for a small fee, but most people anyway do have some way of getting in touch with the media.
And people from the US don't like to vote. And votes from Florida are very difficult to count. So results are very skewed.
Yes, it's not very nice, I was just comparing to MSOffice.
On the other hand, I have used some LaTeX before, but there's no way I could make my classmates learn it, just for an assignment. I think it's a nice middle ground for people who wouldn't touch a non-wysiwyg with a stick, but shouldn't feel the pain of winword equation editor.
When taking a Numeric Methods For Differential Equations course, I got the other students in my group to install OpenOffice exactly because of the math editor!! We would still be writing equations if we used MSOffice!!
I remember writing equations with MSOffice, and it's a PITA, hours writing simple equations. If you need to write more than half a page of equations, the clickety-click way of math writing in MSOffice is ludicrous. On OpenOffice, you have a "show source" window, plus the MSOffice toolbars, so you can start by pointing and clicking, and then just copy, paste and edit, in the source window, and produce pretty equations, with a reasonable amount of work( like writing ((sqrt(3 - 4)) over 0 ) ), not with hours and hours of clicking and clicking.
I missed the first stories, and _this_ particular dupe was of some use to me.
Maybe slashdot uses dupes to keep unloyal users informed!
*sigh* OK, if Microsoft don't implement ODF they are rejecting open standards. If they do, they're embracing and extending.
They can't win, can they?
Think about it as the case of an ex convicted con artist. If he doesn't try to get a job, he must be up to something. If he does, he must be doing it as part of a scam.
Given Microsoft history, that's more or less their position, they will always be suspects, they can't win, of course, but they put themselves in that position through their past actions regarding open standards.
Not that they really care what I think about them, of course.