I really wish they'd offered a Raptor boot drive option and an eSATA connector.
Is there something stopping you from getting a Raptor and a PCI-X eSATA card separately and installing them yourself? It would take all of five minutes. You'll probably also be able to get 750GB and larger drives long before they'll be available directly from Apple as pre-installed options. Head over to Newegg and knock yourself out.
The US has become a defacto fascist state. Much like Nazi Germany last century. Starting wars without valid reason. Protecting governments that involve in state-organized terrorism (Israel). Bush and his gang and their counterparts in Israel are committing war crimes at a rate of which Hitler would have been jealous of.
Let's have a little perspective here, Mr. AC. Too much hyperbole and nobody will take you seriously. I'm as much of a Bush-hater as just about anyone here, but I don't see the US or Israel rounding up millions of civilian men, women and children into death camps and exterminating them like rats based on their ethnicity, color or other artificially defined "defects". The US isn't doing a very good job adhering to the Geneva convention and arguably doesn't even have the right to be conducting the "war" that we are in the midst of right now, but I don't think Mr. H has anything to be jealous of quite yet.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do these two cases lead to the assumption that America is in the grip of jackbooted thugs?
Because they are far from being isolated incidents, and just as importantly they are extremely chilling incidents that relate to the personal freedom of every American citizen, like yourself for instance. I'll bet you're less likely to attempt to photograph a police officer after reading this. There are a great many instances of this sort of behavior from police officers and security guards going back years, some even before 9/11.
A very recent issue of a popular photography magazine has an article all about it, with several examples of real people who were harassed, threatened with arrest, or actually arrested simply for photographing public buildings, or bridges, or photographing in the general vicinity or direction of a police officer or police vehicle. In many instances the cops pull the terrorism card and make references to "being at war" and other such nonsense, and call in the local "terrorism squad". They search the photographer's vehicle, they search the photographer, they look through the photographer's photos. That photographer could be you.
What makes all this so scary is that there never was, and still isn't, any law against photographing anything in public, including government buildings, offices, bridges, factories, police officers or anything else that can be seen from public property. Their entire reason for harassing and arresting these people is nonexistent, made up out of thin air.
Compounding the terrifying nature of this issue is that in so many cases it's not just one officer being an idiot and not knowing the law. It's entire departments of police plus the district attorneys who back them up, who all seem to have this strange idea that it really is illegal to photograph a wide variety of public edifices and persons. Or at least that they can get away with saying so as an excuse to harass anyone with a camera, and no one will take them to task for it.
Do you really think this kind of behavior should be acceptable from the people who are supposed to be serving and protecting us? Do you really think that an apology is enough to make up for throwing you down on the sidewalk, strip searching you and arresting you when you ask why they want to look through the images on your camera? I certainly don't. I think any officer that is actually dumb enough to do this sort of thing should be suspended and re-educated (along with the entire department), and any arrest proceding from these false pretenses should be completely expunged from the victim's record.
So you want to know what's so bad about this? If you accept this sort of behavior from the authorities it is just one more step to random "paper's please" as you walk down the street minding your own business. No probable cause required. Wake up. Arrest on false pretenses is part of the very definition of a police state. This is not an isolated incident, and it needs to stop.
I too am a Mac and Windows user on a regular basis. I'd like to address your issues, and maybe help you solve them.
I mean really, is mounting a dmg file (which shows up as a drive on your Mac), then opening your application folder and dragging an icon into it really simpler than just double-clicking an executable to install it?
I think you meant "double-clicking an executable and then clicking through three to twelve installation screens". So yes, in my experience "installing" an application on Mac OS X is much simpler than a typical application installation procedure on Windows. It's also much less likely that you'll have to reinstall any particular Mac application because they don't have the insanity of the Windows Registry.
What are you supposed to do after you're done with the dmg? I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things. And I'm an experienced computer user - I've got four home-built PC's and my first computer was an Apple II. But I can't figure out how to close out these installers on my Mac at work. I eject them. I drag them to the trash. They complain every time about stuff not working if I go through with either action.
Normally you just eject the DMG after you drag the application icon into your Applications folder. If you have a DMG refusing to eject it means there is some application still accessing or otherwise holding onto a file located on that DMG image. Sometimes it's the Finder. Have you tried relaunching the Finder? Did you run any installer application from the DMG? If you did, the application you ran from the DMG would have to be closed before attempting to eject the disk image, the same as any real disk, otherwise it will refuse to eject. You do know that you aren't supposed to just run the application directly from the disk image, right? It is perfectly safe to do so and you can even run applications from removeable media like USB flash drives, but that will definitely cause you to be unable to eject the volume (drive) or disk image. Try to quit all the open applications and then see if you can eject the disk images. If you see a black triangle under the application's Dock icon that means it is still running.
No matter what the cause, logging out or rebooting the machine will definitely get rid of the mounted disk images. Since it would appear that you've tried none of the available solutions so far, at this point I would have to respectfully submit that you aren't quite the experienced computer user you think you are. Also I'd have to say there is probably something not quite right with your installation of Mac OS X and you should run some maintenance procedures on your machine (like repairing permissions with Disk Utility) and re-run the latest combined update for your version of OS X. That should help stabilize things. If you're running anything earlier than Panther you should definitely upgrade. I used two versions of OS X prior to Panther and as far as I'm concerned they were still basically public betas until Panther came along.
And to uninstall a program, while it might seem like a no-brainer to drag an application to the trash to uninstall it, that does not get rid of it if you've added it to the dock. For more advanced users that's not a big deal, but it's certainly not more "intuitive" than using an uninstall applet that gets rid of everything - start menu shortcuts and all - in one swat.
Windows uninstallers also won't remove any shortcuts they didn't create, like shortcuts you manually place in the Quick Launch toolbar or on the desktop. Accessing applications and the whole Dock idea is a bit of a weak point with OS X, but it's easy to get used to, and the problem you refer to is no different from what happens in Windows.
How about this one: let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'l
And doesn't even review the fastest cards on the market. I think they're Sandisk Extreme III, but who knows I haven't seen a review.
Depends on your camera. In my Dimage A2 there is no difference between a Lexar 80X and a Sandisk Extreme III. On the other hand, in my Olympus Evolt E-300 after applying firmware update v1.2 suddenly the write speed with Extreme III cards shot up to almost 9.5MB/s. This was independently verified by at least two other people on the DPReview forums with the same camera, card and firmware, and I also have another E-300 body that I tested before and after. Every other card tested out at 4.5MB/s or slower, including Lexar's top-of-the-line 80X write-accelerated card. That's a difference of almost 2x. As far as I know the E-300 at that point was one of the fastest cameras in the digital SLR world, and it may still be. Unfortunately this speed is made largely useless due to a limited 4-shot buffer, but it does seriously cut down on wait times between bursts. If you're shooting moving subjects 5 seconds can make a big difference.
Of course, none of this really matters, and this review is fairly useless. As I mentioned above, the speed of the card depends highly on what camera you stick it in. In some cases the card that should be fastest actually performs more slowly than "slower" cards. Every other camera has a different controller chip and firmware, and speed results are far from consistent for any particular card. They use a Canon 1D MkII in their review, but your camera may only perform at half that speed, even with the fastest card. They also use a couple of card readers, but I've seen card readers that will read one card fast and another card that is fast in the camera will read incredibly slow in the card reader.
Because of these inconsistencies among hardware a review like this is basically useless, except as a way to know which cards to definitely stay away from. Personally from all I've read at the DPReview forums and my own experience with several different cameras, I am sticking with Sandisk Extreme III cards, and Ultra II cards for older devices that don't support the full speed of the Extreme III. But the only real way to find the best card for your camera is to go to those DPReview forums, find the forum relating to your brand of camera, and search for card speed posts from other people who own your camera. There will often be a long thread somewhere consolidating all the available results from other users.
In other words, imagine two cones, both ending up in a bit of a section of a sphere. Except one is a 0.01 inch radius and the other is a 1 inch radius. What makes the first one sharp and the other one blunt? Pressure. Pressure equals force divided by surface. The surface rises with the square of that radius. So the first one needs 10,000 times less force to produce the same pressure. You can create enough pressure with your thumb to push a tack's small tip through wood, but you'd need an industrial press if you wanted to push a 1 inch steel ball into wood.
There should be a special moderation category for this kind of comment: "Score: 5, Excellent example of why Slashdot kicks Digg's ass and gets read religiously every day by hundreds of thousands of geeks even though the actual articles often suck".
I am less and less impressed every time some twit actually compares sites like Digg to Slashdot, as if they have anything in common besides posting links to geeky articles. I come to Slashdot every day to get insights from commenters who are more intelligent or more well informed than myself. I can pretty much be assured that, no matter what the subject of the article, if I read enough posts I will come away with a well-rounded understanding of it based on seeing several different well-written viewpoints.
After using nothing but Linux for a month they find they miss some app they only have on Windows (typically a game) and reboot to use it. Then they surf the web a bit with Firefox and may or may not notice how much better it runs under Windows. Reluctantly they reboot into Linux and feel the withdrawl symptoms. Soon they're installing VMware or Cedega but it's just not as good as the raw experience. A month later their Linux partition is just a big waste of harddrive space, so they delete it.
And?
Oh, I forgot, there is a standing moral imperitive that we're all supposed to be using Linux because Windows is eeevil. Yeah, I used to use Linux as a desktop too, then I found that I wanted to use things like Photoshop CS. So I moved back to Windows, and now I've moved to Mac OS X. Oddly enough, either of these operating systems suits my needs, I just happen to like OS X and dislike Windows. The fact that Linux didn't suit your gaming friends isn't their fault. You just happen to be a person who doesn't want to use your computer that way. If you were honest with yourself I'm sure you could come up with several functions or pieces of software you've simply lived without in order to keep using nothing but Linux over the years. Linux is a great alternative but it is far from perfect for many desktop users. As for me, I simply got tired of fighting with my computer to get it to do what I want.
Indeed, Airport Extreme support is HUGE
on
Linux 2.6.17 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Woohoo, Broadcom 4300 drivers! I hope they work....I wish this had been brought to my attention before 1 A.M.
I'm somewhat shocked that nobody else has pointed out the new Broadcom 43xx/Airport Extreme support. That's the one thing that grabbed my attention in the whole paragraph. Not having support for Apple's built-in wireless hardware has been a showstopper for a lot of people to even consider trying out Linux on a Mac, especially the portables. This driver will open up several million possible new computers for Linux to be installed on, since at this point the wireless hardware was about the last incompatible piece of hardware on the Mac side. This is a very big deal for anyone with Mac hardware or anyone planning to buy a Mac, and for all the geeks who are already running Linux on their Mac.
A hell of a lot of this stuff seems to me to be the sort of code that should be going into the 2.7 stream, not 2.6. The earliest days of Linux had revisions X.Y.Z. If Y was even, it was a "stable" branch, and could generally be considered safe for production work. If Y was odd, it was a "development" branch, and could break things badly.
This was a major boon for Linux: if you needed the bleeding edge, you could get it, whilst acknowledging the risks in doing so. If you needed something stable, again, you could get it. Now? It seems that the supposedly stable kernel is right out there on the bleeding edge...
The way I understand the situation is that some people were concerned that the kernel was starting to get too long in the tooth between development versions, what with technology moving along so quickly. So they decided to move some of the development stuff into the mainline kernel in order to be more flexible. There are still a lot of more dangerous experimental things going on in special branches elsewhere, but what you get in the "official" kernel should be fairly stable at any release point.
I use different colored paper sleeves. Those packs of 50 in 5 colors from Memorex are great and disposable
Paper is made of wood fibers and will scratch CD and DVD coatings. If you keep discs in paper sleeves you can end up "fogging" the disc with micro-scratches to the point where it won't be readable anymore, at least not without being repaired by something like this. (Just for reference I have had great results from that particular unit, and it doesn't leave radial lines like the "Skip Dr." units.)
Instead of paper sleeves, use non-scratching Tyvek (the same stuff they put on houses):
Just to stay totally on topic, the original poster may want to check out the complete Cyberguys catalog. They have a large number of different CD/DVD holder/case options, from quad CD jewel cases to CD/DVD carousels and other alternative storage possibilities. (Note this part of the quad CD jewel case description: "The durable, translucent polypropylene case will not break or shatter like ordinary plastic jewel cases". Interesting.) Something like this may actually be what the original submitter is looking for. No breakage and saves space but still has a readable index to make it easy to find things.
Cyberguys' prices are great on almost everything in their inventory and they have tons of "neato" geeky items that always make me wish I had more money. For basic computer items like network cables, adapters, cases of various types, testers and such, they have become my supplier of choice. For bigger stuff like hard drives, CD/DVD burners, monitors and such I still go to Newegg though. No, I don't work for them or get any kickbacks for the links, unfortunately.
Wow, seriously, wow, thanks ExtremeTech for remembering us that these 5.25" devices use the same standard 5.25" form factor that's been used since, like, the release of the first CD player for PC, we couldn't have thought about that ourselves !
(and compact? don't make me laugh, anyone who's ever built a PC knows that a standard 5.25" CD/DVD drive is nowhere near compact)
I do hope you were trying to be facetious. Don't you think they might have been talking about length rather than height? Some older 5.25" drives were an inch or two longer, making it a very tight fit in non-huge computer cases.
As to whether the companies could be smarter, that's not for you to decide. Why not walk into the GM headquarters and explain "you're not selling your stuff in the right way, I'm gonna start stealing cars off your assembly lines and selling them the ways I see fit".
See how that goes over.
This is a ridiculous reverse justification for theft.
You just made the same mistake as the poster you're replying to, comparing the theft of a physical object to copying some data.
Hypothetical question for you (with the qualifier that like the vast majority of filesharers you will be doing this only for personal use, not to sell or otherwise make money with it):
If you had a replicator device capable of taking two tons of dirt and turning it into an exact molecule-for-molecule copy of a Lamborghini Countach for a total cost to you of two dollars, would you use this device or take the "moral high road" and pay some company half a million dollars for a "legal" copy of the car? Would you support throwing people in jail for replicating a car design for personal use? Would you whine that the car manufacturer will be put out of business because several hundred million people who never could have afforded the buy the car legally are making their own copies of it? Or would you tell the car manufacturer, "Hey, the world is changing, better find a new business model or go into another business if you can't adapt"?
Think about it. Things are not always black and white, and the world is constantly evolving. Something has to adapt. Filesharing will never stop, it will just keep getting easier. So either you'll have to make us all into criminals or adapt the business models, because you sure as hell aren't going to talk millions of people who mostly can't afford 1/100th of this stuff into stopping what they're doing just because you feel like they should be paying out the nose for any copyrighted content.
Oh come on. In almost EVERY article about something open source someone complains about the naming thing. Good and well, there are some pretty dumb, ugly oder unpronouncable names, but OTOH there are also loads of pretty crappy commercial names, too:
I fail to see what is insightful about this oft-repeated idiocy, mods. By attacking the silly names of some commercial products you do nothing to disprove the fact that many open source products have silly names. Furthermore you completely ignore the fact that the commercial world is completely different from the world of open source software. In the commercial world you have a little something called marketing. Marketing can take the most ridiculous name you can think of and make it a household name. An example that is always brought up by people like you is "Excel". It may be a silly name that doesn't tell us much, but everyone knows what it refers to because Microsoft was able to make Office a de facto standard for office productivity software.
Open source software, on the other hand, must rely completely on intrinsic quality and word of mouth to spread. Projects like Firefox have marketing behind them to help overcome the fact that most people don't know what Firefox is. Other projects have nothing behind them, and so when they give themselves silly names they merely hurt their ability to spread and be discovered by new people, outside a limited circle of geeks who are somehow able to discover what things like "gkrellm" are supposed to do. There are a great many very good open source projects that could really benefit from improved names if they want to appeal to the general public.
Referring to the fact that many commercial products have similarly unhelpful names doesn't change this fact, especially when the commercial products you're referring to are mostly from completely different fields where naming often plays little part in the success of the product. I believe they call this a straw man argument, BTW.
How do you know this is the same chip the Rochester guys came up with? Seems a little soon for it to be going into consumer cameras. This new one is from Micron, and the article didn't say anything about the chip being highly power efficient.
I'd happily give up 25% of the resolution and/or pay $50 extra for the camera to get one that can take a picture in typical room lighting with no flash. But apparently that isn't something that sells to most people, because I can't find such a camera for sale.
Try the Fujifilm Finepix F30, if you can find one. 6MP compact camera with max ISO 3200, surprisingly low noise, about $350. It's predecessor, the F10/F11 had decent high ISO image quality and max ISO of 1600. It was very popular. The F30 should be even better at low-light shooting.
If you order online from New York don't buy from anyone besides B&H Photo, Adorama or Tri-State Photo, no matter how good the price seems. Check resellerratings.com for reviews before buying. Good luck.
Interesting news, but does it have improved dynamic range and low-noise high-ISO sensitivities? Because those are the main problems with digital capture these days, not resolution. I don't want a compact 8-megapixel camera that churns out 10 crappy pictures per second.
You win. Linux is _perfect_. It has no shortcomings. I don't know why I ever gave it up. I don't know where I got the crazy idea that it was too complicated for me or didn't have the applications that I wanted. I don't know why _everybody_ isn't using it already. The fools! People must be _idiots_. _I_ must be an idiot. You are teh genius. I wish I was like you.
Whatever makes you happy. I expressed a subjective opinion of my multiple experiences with Linux, you have a different subjective opinion. Learn to live with it. Or you can continue to be an ultra-defensive Linux zealot elitist. I won't be replying again. As usual I dug myself into a pointless conversation with a brick wall who thinks opinions can be proven wrong, as if they were facts.
My opinion is my opinion, just like your opinion is yours. You can't take it away from me by telling me it's wrong. My opinion is right because of the experiences I've had. Your opinion that Linux is just fine is also right, because Linux works for you. But you're going to be a very unhappy person if you can't learn to live with the fact that some people have a very low opinion of Linux in its present state. And calling anyone who has a different opinion a whiner is not going to win you (or Linux) many friends.
Again, these new laws will only deteriorate the right to privacy of innocent people, while the real criminals will be allowed to roam free doing their dirty deeds with little more trouble then a software upgrade.
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Indeed, there is a very strong parallel between this and gun control schemes. The honest people give up their guns/keys to the government, the people who are already criminals have no reason to do so. The bad guys simply get smarter at hiding what they do. Who gets screwed in the end? It's always the honest, law-abiding citizens.
Oh yeah, dear UK government, you can pry the encryption key for this post from my cold, dead hands, along with my firearm... (Although in this particular case I think it will be more difficult to get the gun than the key.)
Doesn't seem like Orwell and friends really accomplished much, does it? They showed us the future but we're just walking right smack into it anyway, eyes wide shut.
No, you quite clearly whined about the filesystem. Backpedal much?
Yeah, I did. And if you'll read my original reply to you I quite clearly said it's "just one more reason", which should imply that it was one of many reasons. That was a single post replying to your particular statement. I do have other problems with Linux and never said otherwise. Have problems with the English language much? See, I can do sarcasm too. It really doesn't improve the conversation. I would only be backpedaling if I suddenly said I don't actually have a problem with the filesystem after all. I do.
Well, I HAVE seen Linux-apps that have been sold at stores. They usually contain a nice installer not that different from those Wizards in Windows. So what is the problem here?
That's nice. Was anyone buying it? Was it called Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop Elements? Because if it wasn't something common like that the type of user I'm talking about couldn't care less. You seem to be one of those people that can't grasp that we are not talking about you or me, we're talking about a whole different class of people here. They want the same applications they use at the office, and they don't want to learn very much.
Why is it that everyone think that hunting for installers online, saving them, running them, going through wizards etc. etc. is somehow "easier" than selecting the app from a list and clicking "Apply"?
The kind of software most non-technical users install on their computer usually comes from a box. Insert disc, double-click Setup.exe. Or on Mac, insert disc, double-click installer icon or drag the application icon to the Applications folder. It really isn't that hard, even for non-technical people. Learning what a package source is, and finding the one that may or may not provide the correct version of libdvdcss et al, _that_ is hard for non-technical users. Between you and your wife, which one set up the package manager? The knowledgeable user, or the non-technical user? Try giving the non-technical person a fresh install of some "user-friendly" distro with no additional packages installed, and see what happens when they try to set up the package manager or play a DVD without any help.
More importantly, did I not just get finished pointing out that you cannot select an application that doesn't exist in your package management system? Is there something complicated about that statement? Where is the yum or apt source for Picasa? Where is the desktop publishing software that is as usable as Publisher or Pages, or is a cross-platform standard like Adobe InDesign? No, Scribus doesn't cut it. GIMP doesn't cut it. OpenOffice doesn't cut it. Not for the kind of users I am talking about. Some people can adjust to those applications, many cannot.
And if you sometime in the future decide to (for one reason or the other) decide to remove the pre-installed OEM-configured XP (which is usually full of useless crap), and reinstall plain ol' Windows, you will suddenly notice tht you can't play back your DVD's anymore. You whine how Linux doesn't play back DVD's. Well, it doesn't, you need third-party apps to do so. AND IT'S THE EXACT SAME THING WITH WINDOWS! Double-standards, anyone?
Common users don't reinstall a bare Windows XP. If they do anything at all they use the restore discs and get all the useless crap along with the necessary DVD software. Or they pull out the accessory CD that either came along with the computer or came with the DVD drive, and reinstall the DVD software. Windows and Linux are different worlds. If they are trying Linux it's because one of their geek friends installed it for them, and if they don't have problems playing DVDs it's because their geek friend already installed the right packages, something which they would have struggled with.
I fail to see how it is whining to point out that Linux has certain shortcomings for me. Do you know of anyone who has actually purchased the sole commercial DVD player application for Linux? Everyon
So basically your problem with Linux is that you _can _ go poke at folders that contain "crap", if you really want to?
No, basically my problem with Linux is that there are ten thousand little things you have to struggle with to do what comes easily with other desktop operating systems. The filesystem is just a minor piece of the puzzle.
Well you can do the same in Windows and OS X as well. Why the double-standards? you can see all kinds of "crap" in all three OS'es if you want to, yet only Linux "sucks"?
No double standards. Last time I checked a clean Windows machine will only have about three folders in the root of the main drive:
- Documents and Settings
- Program Files
- Winnt, or Windows
Mac OS X should only have four folders visible in the root:
- Applications
- Library
- System
- Users
In contrast if you look at the root of a Linux filesystem:
- bin
- dev
- etc
- root
- sbin
- tmp
- usr
- var
- so on and so forth...
From time to time even if the system is working as you say, a Linux user will stray from their home folder, for instance by directly opening the hard drive icon like they are used to doing on Windows machines. They will then be presented with a list of folders that is infinitely more confusing than what they see on Win/Mac systems.
Again, this is only one of many little user-friendliness issues I had with Linux that made me give it up after using it for years.
In Linux I have a nice package manager. I just select the apps I want to install, and I'm done with it. In OS X and Windows, I have to hunt for files in the net, copy them to my machine, run them, and maybe I have to go through some kind of wizard as well. Yes, the "linux-way" of installing apps might annoy some people. Espesially if they are accustomed to the "Windows-way". I for one dislike the windows-way, and I appreciate the elegance of package-managers.
You might dislike the "Linux-way", but that does not mean that it's objectively speaking inferior to "Windows-way". It's different, but it's not necessarily worse.
I too was once enamored with the seeming nirvana-ness of a good package manager. Problem is, you still have to configure all the obscure sources you need to obtain all the obscure packages from all over the net that are necessary to do common things like playing encrypted DVDs, something which works out of the box on Win/Mac. And there is no "apt-get install Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0".
Sorry, but desktop users want to install the desktop apps that they purchase at Best Buy, and they do not want to wade through a web tutorial for installing the latest version of Firefox that includes a friendly warning that they may screw up their computer by going outside the package management loop. True story, last time I checked Firefox 1.5 was available for a couple of months or more before it could actually be installed on a current Ubuntu machine without some hacking. That's a ridiculous situation, indicating way too much integration between the application and the OS. Way too much reliance on shared libraries and such. On Win/Mac you just download the latest version and install it.
Mac has it best, Software Update helps you keep Apple applications and the operating system up to date, and many third-party applications include built-in updaters that notify you of updates and help you download them. You've got the flexibility of installing individual applications by just dropping a single icon in the Applications folder, and part of the benefits of automatically updating your software ala a package manager.
Like I said, the user really has no reason to go outside his home-folder. But if he wants to, he could do so. I'm not telling anyone to just stay in their home-folder. And I really don't see your argument here. Linux sucks because the filesystem contains lots of stuff the user doesn't understand? Well, so does Windows-filesystem. So does OS X-filesystem. What's the problem here?
No, Linux sucks because it shows me all that crap that as a common user I will never need to access and just appears to be cluttering up my filesystem. And, in my experience, it has often been necessary to go outside the home folder to get to places like other hard drives and removable media. But then, I've been using Linux for several years, so maybe something has changed recently that I'm not aware of. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X try to FORCE the user to stay in their home folder, they just present a simplified interface to the filesystem, which is very important for your average computer user.
Mounted devices (CDROMs, USB-sticks etc.) appear on the desktop, sidebar and "places"-menu on my desktop. I have zero reason to go hunting for them in the filesystem, they are right there in the filemanager and the desktop.
On my Ubuntu-machine, I have made exactly one symlink. It was to a directory that contains my photos. It was located outside my home-directory, so my wife could access it as well. I have ZERO need to make symlinks to removable media because they appear right in my desktop, in my filemanager and in my "places"-menu. What exactly is the problem here?
When I put in a game-CD in my DVD-drive, it's displayed on the desktop with the name of the game as it's title. Same thing with DVD-movies or data-CD's. USB-sticks appear like they should. In short: they ARE mounted by their volume-label."
OK, I have just one question, what desktop environment and file manager are you using? Because I have seen none of those things occurring on the Linux distros that I have played with, even the recent Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention, being distracted by all the other problems I was having. I have never encountered a Linux file manager that presented all the hard drives and removable media on my system to me as cleanly as either Windows Explorer or the Mac OS X Finder. Explorer isn't even that great unless you're using explore view where you get the sidebar and can see all drives at the same time. Finder is by far the best at presenting all drives in an easy to access manner for non-technical people.
I tried REALLY HARD recently with Kubuntu to make KDE's file manager present me with a nice concise list of the attached drives by adding something to its sidebar, I forget what it was called, all the while wondering why that tab wasn't being shown by default. It was a mild improvement over the old days, but still horrible in comparison to Explorer and Finder. And I still keep seeing absolutely insane things happening like KDE presenting me with drive icons that are captioned with the MOUNT POINT and DEVICE NAME, which is totally nuts.
Maybe you're using GNOME and Nautilus. That would explain why I haven't really seen what you're seeing. I have been trying GNOME for years and always hated it. Its interface/paradigm is confusing to me and always has been, even though I've never really had problems with the Windows, KDE, BeOS, Mac Classic or Mac OS X interfaces. I do not know why this is, but I know I'm not alone. So if what you see can't be replicated on a KDE desktop and other desktop environments like XFce, we're still leaving at least half of the potential Linux population out in the cold.
Furthermore, I complain about drive access in Linux but that's really just a small part of the problem. There's also the availability of software, the whole software install process, support for nice thngs like sleeping when I close the lid of my laptop, support for multimedia like playing DVDs LEGALLY, WIRELESS support, and a great many other things that still keep me f
If computer science and engineering students don't have the time or ability to learn how their computers work we are in much more trouble than I thought.
I disagree. Engineers and scientists tend to be focused on a specific field. Not knowing the specifics of how a computer or a carburetor works won't stop a structural engineer from building a suspension bridge, or an astronomer from discovering that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. The computer, like a car, is just a tool. Unless they are in the field of computers there isn't really any reason why they should be forced to learn the specifics of how computers work. If you build the computer and the software right, they won't have to.
Fortunately my experience is that CompSci and EE students are amongst the most eager adopters of Linux because they don't have time to stand on the Window's event horizon and try to figure out why their data went in but never came out.
Indeed. For the same reason scientists and engineers are also among the most eager adopters of Mac OS X. I have even read many accounts of such people moving from Linux to OS X, or running both on their PowerBooks. For these people, OS X has the power of Linux with a much improved user friendliness to go along with it. That helps the computer get out of their way and let them do actual work.
The reason OSX is so popular with scientists is that it is a great implementation of an OS that they need for their work. That said, Linux offers a lot less benefit over OSX today than it did in 2000.
Agreed. Especially for the non-technical type of scientist, of which there are many. Should Linux ever manage to develop some real continuity and interface standardization, they may come back. But, I'm not holding my breath (anymore).
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I really wish they'd offered a Raptor boot drive option and an eSATA connector.
Is there something stopping you from getting a Raptor and a PCI-X eSATA card separately and installing them yourself? It would take all of five minutes. You'll probably also be able to get 750GB and larger drives long before they'll be available directly from Apple as pre-installed options. Head over to Newegg and knock yourself out.
The US has become a defacto fascist state. Much like Nazi Germany last century. Starting wars without valid reason. Protecting governments that involve in state-organized terrorism (Israel). Bush and his gang and their counterparts in Israel are committing war crimes at a rate of which Hitler would have been jealous of.
Let's have a little perspective here, Mr. AC. Too much hyperbole and nobody will take you seriously. I'm as much of a Bush-hater as just about anyone here, but I don't see the US or Israel rounding up millions of civilian men, women and children into death camps and exterminating them like rats based on their ethnicity, color or other artificially defined "defects". The US isn't doing a very good job adhering to the Geneva convention and arguably doesn't even have the right to be conducting the "war" that we are in the midst of right now, but I don't think Mr. H has anything to be jealous of quite yet.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do these two cases lead to the assumption that America is in the grip of jackbooted thugs?
Because they are far from being isolated incidents, and just as importantly they are extremely chilling incidents that relate to the personal freedom of every American citizen, like yourself for instance. I'll bet you're less likely to attempt to photograph a police officer after reading this. There are a great many instances of this sort of behavior from police officers and security guards going back years, some even before 9/11.
A very recent issue of a popular photography magazine has an article all about it, with several examples of real people who were harassed, threatened with arrest, or actually arrested simply for photographing public buildings, or bridges, or photographing in the general vicinity or direction of a police officer or police vehicle. In many instances the cops pull the terrorism card and make references to "being at war" and other such nonsense, and call in the local "terrorism squad". They search the photographer's vehicle, they search the photographer, they look through the photographer's photos. That photographer could be you.
What makes all this so scary is that there never was, and still isn't, any law against photographing anything in public, including government buildings, offices, bridges, factories, police officers or anything else that can be seen from public property. Their entire reason for harassing and arresting these people is nonexistent, made up out of thin air.
Compounding the terrifying nature of this issue is that in so many cases it's not just one officer being an idiot and not knowing the law. It's entire departments of police plus the district attorneys who back them up, who all seem to have this strange idea that it really is illegal to photograph a wide variety of public edifices and persons. Or at least that they can get away with saying so as an excuse to harass anyone with a camera, and no one will take them to task for it.
Do you really think this kind of behavior should be acceptable from the people who are supposed to be serving and protecting us? Do you really think that an apology is enough to make up for throwing you down on the sidewalk, strip searching you and arresting you when you ask why they want to look through the images on your camera? I certainly don't. I think any officer that is actually dumb enough to do this sort of thing should be suspended and re-educated (along with the entire department), and any arrest proceding from these false pretenses should be completely expunged from the victim's record.
So you want to know what's so bad about this? If you accept this sort of behavior from the authorities it is just one more step to random "paper's please" as you walk down the street minding your own business. No probable cause required. Wake up. Arrest on false pretenses is part of the very definition of a police state. This is not an isolated incident, and it needs to stop.
I too am a Mac and Windows user on a regular basis. I'd like to address your issues, and maybe help you solve them.
I mean really, is mounting a dmg file (which shows up as a drive on your Mac), then opening your application folder and dragging an icon into it really simpler than just double-clicking an executable to install it?
I think you meant "double-clicking an executable and then clicking through three to twelve installation screens". So yes, in my experience "installing" an application on Mac OS X is much simpler than a typical application installation procedure on Windows. It's also much less likely that you'll have to reinstall any particular Mac application because they don't have the insanity of the Windows Registry.
What are you supposed to do after you're done with the dmg? I've still got three dmg's mounted on my machine that complain whenever I try to unmount them. This is a serious question - I don't know how to get rid of these things. And I'm an experienced computer user - I've got four home-built PC's and my first computer was an Apple II. But I can't figure out how to close out these installers on my Mac at work. I eject them. I drag them to the trash. They complain every time about stuff not working if I go through with either action.
Normally you just eject the DMG after you drag the application icon into your Applications folder. If you have a DMG refusing to eject it means there is some application still accessing or otherwise holding onto a file located on that DMG image. Sometimes it's the Finder. Have you tried relaunching the Finder? Did you run any installer application from the DMG? If you did, the application you ran from the DMG would have to be closed before attempting to eject the disk image, the same as any real disk, otherwise it will refuse to eject. You do know that you aren't supposed to just run the application directly from the disk image, right? It is perfectly safe to do so and you can even run applications from removeable media like USB flash drives, but that will definitely cause you to be unable to eject the volume (drive) or disk image. Try to quit all the open applications and then see if you can eject the disk images. If you see a black triangle under the application's Dock icon that means it is still running.
No matter what the cause, logging out or rebooting the machine will definitely get rid of the mounted disk images. Since it would appear that you've tried none of the available solutions so far, at this point I would have to respectfully submit that you aren't quite the experienced computer user you think you are. Also I'd have to say there is probably something not quite right with your installation of Mac OS X and you should run some maintenance procedures on your machine (like repairing permissions with Disk Utility) and re-run the latest combined update for your version of OS X. That should help stabilize things. If you're running anything earlier than Panther you should definitely upgrade. I used two versions of OS X prior to Panther and as far as I'm concerned they were still basically public betas until Panther came along.
And to uninstall a program, while it might seem like a no-brainer to drag an application to the trash to uninstall it, that does not get rid of it if you've added it to the dock. For more advanced users that's not a big deal, but it's certainly not more "intuitive" than using an uninstall applet that gets rid of everything - start menu shortcuts and all - in one swat.
Windows uninstallers also won't remove any shortcuts they didn't create, like shortcuts you manually place in the Quick Launch toolbar or on the desktop. Accessing applications and the whole Dock idea is a bit of a weak point with OS X, but it's easy to get used to, and the problem you refer to is no different from what happens in Windows.
How about this one: let's try renaming a file under OSX. How do you do it? Click the file name, then click it *again* (but not too fast, mind you, or you'l
Depends on your camera. In my Dimage A2 there is no difference between a Lexar 80X and a Sandisk Extreme III. On the other hand, in my Olympus Evolt E-300 after applying firmware update v1.2 suddenly the write speed with Extreme III cards shot up to almost 9.5MB/s. This was independently verified by at least two other people on the DPReview forums with the same camera, card and firmware, and I also have another E-300 body that I tested before and after. Every other card tested out at 4.5MB/s or slower, including Lexar's top-of-the-line 80X write-accelerated card. That's a difference of almost 2x. As far as I know the E-300 at that point was one of the fastest cameras in the digital SLR world, and it may still be. Unfortunately this speed is made largely useless due to a limited 4-shot buffer, but it does seriously cut down on wait times between bursts. If you're shooting moving subjects 5 seconds can make a big difference.
Of course, none of this really matters, and this review is fairly useless. As I mentioned above, the speed of the card depends highly on what camera you stick it in. In some cases the card that should be fastest actually performs more slowly than "slower" cards. Every other camera has a different controller chip and firmware, and speed results are far from consistent for any particular card. They use a Canon 1D MkII in their review, but your camera may only perform at half that speed, even with the fastest card. They also use a couple of card readers, but I've seen card readers that will read one card fast and another card that is fast in the camera will read incredibly slow in the card reader.
Because of these inconsistencies among hardware a review like this is basically useless, except as a way to know which cards to definitely stay away from. Personally from all I've read at the DPReview forums and my own experience with several different cameras, I am sticking with Sandisk Extreme III cards, and Ultra II cards for older devices that don't support the full speed of the Extreme III. But the only real way to find the best card for your camera is to go to those DPReview forums, find the forum relating to your brand of camera, and search for card speed posts from other people who own your camera. There will often be a long thread somewhere consolidating all the available results from other users.
In other words, imagine two cones, both ending up in a bit of a section of a sphere. Except one is a 0.01 inch radius and the other is a 1 inch radius. What makes the first one sharp and the other one blunt? Pressure. Pressure equals force divided by surface. The surface rises with the square of that radius. So the first one needs 10,000 times less force to produce the same pressure. You can create enough pressure with your thumb to push a tack's small tip through wood, but you'd need an industrial press if you wanted to push a 1 inch steel ball into wood.
There should be a special moderation category for this kind of comment: "Score: 5, Excellent example of why Slashdot kicks Digg's ass and gets read religiously every day by hundreds of thousands of geeks even though the actual articles often suck".
I am less and less impressed every time some twit actually compares sites like Digg to Slashdot, as if they have anything in common besides posting links to geeky articles. I come to Slashdot every day to get insights from commenters who are more intelligent or more well informed than myself. I can pretty much be assured that, no matter what the subject of the article, if I read enough posts I will come away with a well-rounded understanding of it based on seeing several different well-written viewpoints.
Thank you for a very interesting post.
Wake me when.... they release OS X Liger.
I'd much prefer a Tigon thanks.
I'm waiting for Mac OS X 10.13: Jackabasselope
Their marketing slogan will be: "I feel like I'm passing a Volkswagon."
And?
Oh, I forgot, there is a standing moral imperitive that we're all supposed to be using Linux because Windows is eeevil. Yeah, I used to use Linux as a desktop too, then I found that I wanted to use things like Photoshop CS. So I moved back to Windows, and now I've moved to Mac OS X. Oddly enough, either of these operating systems suits my needs, I just happen to like OS X and dislike Windows. The fact that Linux didn't suit your gaming friends isn't their fault. You just happen to be a person who doesn't want to use your computer that way. If you were honest with yourself I'm sure you could come up with several functions or pieces of software you've simply lived without in order to keep using nothing but Linux over the years. Linux is a great alternative but it is far from perfect for many desktop users. As for me, I simply got tired of fighting with my computer to get it to do what I want.
I'm somewhat shocked that nobody else has pointed out the new Broadcom 43xx/Airport Extreme support. That's the one thing that grabbed my attention in the whole paragraph. Not having support for Apple's built-in wireless hardware has been a showstopper for a lot of people to even consider trying out Linux on a Mac, especially the portables. This driver will open up several million possible new computers for Linux to be installed on, since at this point the wireless hardware was about the last incompatible piece of hardware on the Mac side. This is a very big deal for anyone with Mac hardware or anyone planning to buy a Mac, and for all the geeks who are already running Linux on their Mac.
Very cool.
The way I understand the situation is that some people were concerned that the kernel was starting to get too long in the tooth between development versions, what with technology moving along so quickly. So they decided to move some of the development stuff into the mainline kernel in order to be more flexible. There are still a lot of more dangerous experimental things going on in special branches elsewhere, but what you get in the "official" kernel should be fairly stable at any release point.
I think.
I use different colored paper sleeves. Those packs of 50 in 5 colors from Memorex are great and disposable
Paper is made of wood fibers and will scratch CD and DVD coatings. If you keep discs in paper sleeves you can end up "fogging" the disc with micro-scratches to the point where it won't be readable anymore, at least not without being repaired by something like this. (Just for reference I have had great results from that particular unit, and it doesn't leave radial lines like the "Skip Dr." units.)
Instead of paper sleeves, use non-scratching Tyvek (the same stuff they put on houses):
Pack of 100
Pack of 1,000
Just to stay totally on topic, the original poster may want to check out the complete Cyberguys catalog. They have a large number of different CD/DVD holder/case options, from quad CD jewel cases to CD/DVD carousels and other alternative storage possibilities. (Note this part of the quad CD jewel case description: "The durable, translucent polypropylene case will not break or shatter like ordinary plastic jewel cases". Interesting.) Something like this may actually be what the original submitter is looking for. No breakage and saves space but still has a readable index to make it easy to find things.
Cyberguys' prices are great on almost everything in their inventory and they have tons of "neato" geeky items that always make me wish I had more money. For basic computer items like network cables, adapters, cases of various types, testers and such, they have become my supplier of choice. For bigger stuff like hard drives, CD/DVD burners, monitors and such I still go to Newegg though. No, I don't work for them or get any kickbacks for the links, unfortunately.
I think the 3.5" floppy drive SONY invented was pretty successful. You are probably sitting next to one right now.
(Looks over his room full of iMacs, eMacs, Power Macs, iBooks and PC laptops built in the last few years):
"Eh, what's a floppy drive?"
Wow, seriously, wow, thanks ExtremeTech for remembering us that these 5.25" devices use the same standard 5.25" form factor that's been used since, like, the release of the first CD player for PC, we couldn't have thought about that ourselves !
(and compact? don't make me laugh, anyone who's ever built a PC knows that a standard 5.25" CD/DVD drive is nowhere near compact)
I do hope you were trying to be facetious. Don't you think they might have been talking about length rather than height? Some older 5.25" drives were an inch or two longer, making it a very tight fit in non-huge computer cases.
As to whether the companies could be smarter, that's not for you to decide. Why not walk into the GM headquarters and explain "you're not selling your stuff in the right way, I'm gonna start stealing cars off your assembly lines and selling them the ways I see fit".
See how that goes over.
This is a ridiculous reverse justification for theft.
You just made the same mistake as the poster you're replying to, comparing the theft of a physical object to copying some data.
Hypothetical question for you (with the qualifier that like the vast majority of filesharers you will be doing this only for personal use, not to sell or otherwise make money with it):
If you had a replicator device capable of taking two tons of dirt and turning it into an exact molecule-for-molecule copy of a Lamborghini Countach for a total cost to you of two dollars, would you use this device or take the "moral high road" and pay some company half a million dollars for a "legal" copy of the car? Would you support throwing people in jail for replicating a car design for personal use? Would you whine that the car manufacturer will be put out of business because several hundred million people who never could have afforded the buy the car legally are making their own copies of it? Or would you tell the car manufacturer, "Hey, the world is changing, better find a new business model or go into another business if you can't adapt"?
Think about it. Things are not always black and white, and the world is constantly evolving. Something has to adapt. Filesharing will never stop, it will just keep getting easier. So either you'll have to make us all into criminals or adapt the business models, because you sure as hell aren't going to talk millions of people who mostly can't afford 1/100th of this stuff into stopping what they're doing just because you feel like they should be paying out the nose for any copyrighted content.
Oh come on. In almost EVERY article about something open source someone complains about the naming thing. Good and well, there are some pretty dumb, ugly oder unpronouncable names, but OTOH there are also loads of pretty crappy commercial names, too:
I fail to see what is insightful about this oft-repeated idiocy, mods. By attacking the silly names of some commercial products you do nothing to disprove the fact that many open source products have silly names. Furthermore you completely ignore the fact that the commercial world is completely different from the world of open source software. In the commercial world you have a little something called marketing. Marketing can take the most ridiculous name you can think of and make it a household name. An example that is always brought up by people like you is "Excel". It may be a silly name that doesn't tell us much, but everyone knows what it refers to because Microsoft was able to make Office a de facto standard for office productivity software.
Open source software, on the other hand, must rely completely on intrinsic quality and word of mouth to spread. Projects like Firefox have marketing behind them to help overcome the fact that most people don't know what Firefox is. Other projects have nothing behind them, and so when they give themselves silly names they merely hurt their ability to spread and be discovered by new people, outside a limited circle of geeks who are somehow able to discover what things like "gkrellm" are supposed to do. There are a great many very good open source projects that could really benefit from improved names if they want to appeal to the general public.
Referring to the fact that many commercial products have similarly unhelpful names doesn't change this fact, especially when the commercial products you're referring to are mostly from completely different fields where naming often plays little part in the success of the product. I believe they call this a straw man argument, BTW.
This is good if the enemy doesn't have a Comsat or a Science Vessel.
Don't you mean a Science Wessel?
Wessel.
Well, I thought it was funny...
How do you know this is the same chip the Rochester guys came up with? Seems a little soon for it to be going into consumer cameras. This new one is from Micron, and the article didn't say anything about the chip being highly power efficient.
I'd happily give up 25% of the resolution and/or pay $50 extra for the camera to get one that can take a picture in typical room lighting with no flash. But apparently that isn't something that sells to most people, because I can't find such a camera for sale.
Try the Fujifilm Finepix F30, if you can find one. 6MP compact camera with max ISO 3200, surprisingly low noise, about $350. It's predecessor, the F10/F11 had decent high ISO image quality and max ISO of 1600. It was very popular. The F30 should be even better at low-light shooting.
If you order online from New York don't buy from anyone besides B&H Photo, Adorama or Tri-State Photo, no matter how good the price seems. Check resellerratings.com for reviews before buying. Good luck.
Interesting news, but does it have improved dynamic range and low-noise high-ISO sensitivities? Because those are the main problems with digital capture these days, not resolution. I don't want a compact 8-megapixel camera that churns out 10 crappy pictures per second.
You win. Linux is _perfect_. It has no shortcomings. I don't know why I ever gave it up. I don't know where I got the crazy idea that it was too complicated for me or didn't have the applications that I wanted. I don't know why _everybody_ isn't using it already. The fools! People must be _idiots_. _I_ must be an idiot. You are teh genius. I wish I was like you.
Whatever makes you happy. I expressed a subjective opinion of my multiple experiences with Linux, you have a different subjective opinion. Learn to live with it. Or you can continue to be an ultra-defensive Linux zealot elitist. I won't be replying again. As usual I dug myself into a pointless conversation with a brick wall who thinks opinions can be proven wrong, as if they were facts.
My opinion is my opinion, just like your opinion is yours. You can't take it away from me by telling me it's wrong. My opinion is right because of the experiences I've had. Your opinion that Linux is just fine is also right, because Linux works for you. But you're going to be a very unhappy person if you can't learn to live with the fact that some people have a very low opinion of Linux in its present state. And calling anyone who has a different opinion a whiner is not going to win you (or Linux) many friends.
Peace.
Again, these new laws will only deteriorate the right to privacy of innocent people, while the real criminals will be allowed to roam free doing their dirty deeds with little more trouble then a software upgrade.
v'z fher v'yy trg zbqqrq qbja sbe guvf fvapr v'z rkcerffvat n ceb-crefbany-svernezf ivrjcbvag, ohg naljnl...
Indeed, there is a very strong parallel between this and gun control schemes. The honest people give up their guns/keys to the government, the people who are already criminals have no reason to do so. The bad guys simply get smarter at hiding what they do. Who gets screwed in the end? It's always the honest, law-abiding citizens.
Oh yeah, dear UK government, you can pry the encryption key for this post from my cold, dead hands, along with my firearm... (Although in this particular case I think it will be more difficult to get the gun than the key.)
Doesn't seem like Orwell and friends really accomplished much, does it? They showed us the future but we're just walking right smack into it anyway, eyes wide shut.
No, you quite clearly whined about the filesystem. Backpedal much?
Yeah, I did. And if you'll read my original reply to you I quite clearly said it's "just one more reason", which should imply that it was one of many reasons. That was a single post replying to your particular statement. I do have other problems with Linux and never said otherwise. Have problems with the English language much? See, I can do sarcasm too. It really doesn't improve the conversation. I would only be backpedaling if I suddenly said I don't actually have a problem with the filesystem after all. I do.
Well, I HAVE seen Linux-apps that have been sold at stores. They usually contain a nice installer not that different from those Wizards in Windows. So what is the problem here?
That's nice. Was anyone buying it? Was it called Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop Elements? Because if it wasn't something common like that the type of user I'm talking about couldn't care less. You seem to be one of those people that can't grasp that we are not talking about you or me, we're talking about a whole different class of people here. They want the same applications they use at the office, and they don't want to learn very much.
Why is it that everyone think that hunting for installers online, saving them, running them, going through wizards etc. etc. is somehow "easier" than selecting the app from a list and clicking "Apply"?
The kind of software most non-technical users install on their computer usually comes from a box. Insert disc, double-click Setup.exe. Or on Mac, insert disc, double-click installer icon or drag the application icon to the Applications folder. It really isn't that hard, even for non-technical people. Learning what a package source is, and finding the one that may or may not provide the correct version of libdvdcss et al, _that_ is hard for non-technical users. Between you and your wife, which one set up the package manager? The knowledgeable user, or the non-technical user? Try giving the non-technical person a fresh install of some "user-friendly" distro with no additional packages installed, and see what happens when they try to set up the package manager or play a DVD without any help.
More importantly, did I not just get finished pointing out that you cannot select an application that doesn't exist in your package management system? Is there something complicated about that statement? Where is the yum or apt source for Picasa? Where is the desktop publishing software that is as usable as Publisher or Pages, or is a cross-platform standard like Adobe InDesign? No, Scribus doesn't cut it. GIMP doesn't cut it. OpenOffice doesn't cut it. Not for the kind of users I am talking about. Some people can adjust to those applications, many cannot.
And if you sometime in the future decide to (for one reason or the other) decide to remove the pre-installed OEM-configured XP (which is usually full of useless crap), and reinstall plain ol' Windows, you will suddenly notice tht you can't play back your DVD's anymore. You whine how Linux doesn't play back DVD's. Well, it doesn't, you need third-party apps to do so. AND IT'S THE EXACT SAME THING WITH WINDOWS! Double-standards, anyone?
Common users don't reinstall a bare Windows XP. If they do anything at all they use the restore discs and get all the useless crap along with the necessary DVD software. Or they pull out the accessory CD that either came along with the computer or came with the DVD drive, and reinstall the DVD software. Windows and Linux are different worlds. If they are trying Linux it's because one of their geek friends installed it for them, and if they don't have problems playing DVDs it's because their geek friend already installed the right packages, something which they would have struggled with.
I fail to see how it is whining to point out that Linux has certain shortcomings for me. Do you know of anyone who has actually purchased the sole commercial DVD player application for Linux? Everyon
So basically your problem with Linux is that you _can _ go poke at folders that contain "crap", if you really want to?
No, basically my problem with Linux is that there are ten thousand little things you have to struggle with to do what comes easily with other desktop operating systems. The filesystem is just a minor piece of the puzzle.
Well you can do the same in Windows and OS X as well. Why the double-standards? you can see all kinds of "crap" in all three OS'es if you want to, yet only Linux "sucks"?
No double standards. Last time I checked a clean Windows machine will only have about three folders in the root of the main drive:
- Documents and Settings
- Program Files
- Winnt, or Windows
Mac OS X should only have four folders visible in the root:
- Applications
- Library
- System
- Users
In contrast if you look at the root of a Linux filesystem:
- bin
- dev
- etc
- root
- sbin
- tmp
- usr
- var
- so on and so forth...
From time to time even if the system is working as you say, a Linux user will stray from their home folder, for instance by directly opening the hard drive icon like they are used to doing on Windows machines. They will then be presented with a list of folders that is infinitely more confusing than what they see on Win/Mac systems.
Again, this is only one of many little user-friendliness issues I had with Linux that made me give it up after using it for years.
In Linux I have a nice package manager. I just select the apps I want to install, and I'm done with it. In OS X and Windows, I have to hunt for files in the net, copy them to my machine, run them, and maybe I have to go through some kind of wizard as well. Yes, the "linux-way" of installing apps might annoy some people. Espesially if they are accustomed to the "Windows-way". I for one dislike the windows-way, and I appreciate the elegance of package-managers.
You might dislike the "Linux-way", but that does not mean that it's objectively speaking inferior to "Windows-way". It's different, but it's not necessarily worse.
I too was once enamored with the seeming nirvana-ness of a good package manager. Problem is, you still have to configure all the obscure sources you need to obtain all the obscure packages from all over the net that are necessary to do common things like playing encrypted DVDs, something which works out of the box on Win/Mac. And there is no "apt-get install Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0".
Sorry, but desktop users want to install the desktop apps that they purchase at Best Buy, and they do not want to wade through a web tutorial for installing the latest version of Firefox that includes a friendly warning that they may screw up their computer by going outside the package management loop. True story, last time I checked Firefox 1.5 was available for a couple of months or more before it could actually be installed on a current Ubuntu machine without some hacking. That's a ridiculous situation, indicating way too much integration between the application and the OS. Way too much reliance on shared libraries and such. On Win/Mac you just download the latest version and install it.
Mac has it best, Software Update helps you keep Apple applications and the operating system up to date, and many third-party applications include built-in updaters that notify you of updates and help you download them. You've got the flexibility of installing individual applications by just dropping a single icon in the Applications folder, and part of the benefits of automatically updating your software ala a package manager.
Don't even get me started abou
Like I said, the user really has no reason to go outside his home-folder. But if he wants to, he could do so. I'm not telling anyone to just stay in their home-folder. And I really don't see your argument here. Linux sucks because the filesystem contains lots of stuff the user doesn't understand? Well, so does Windows-filesystem. So does OS X-filesystem. What's the problem here?
No, Linux sucks because it shows me all that crap that as a common user I will never need to access and just appears to be cluttering up my filesystem. And, in my experience, it has often been necessary to go outside the home folder to get to places like other hard drives and removable media. But then, I've been using Linux for several years, so maybe something has changed recently that I'm not aware of. Neither Windows nor Mac OS X try to FORCE the user to stay in their home folder, they just present a simplified interface to the filesystem, which is very important for your average computer user.
Mounted devices (CDROMs, USB-sticks etc.) appear on the desktop, sidebar and "places"-menu on my desktop. I have zero reason to go hunting for them in the filesystem, they are right there in the filemanager and the desktop.
On my Ubuntu-machine, I have made exactly one symlink. It was to a directory that contains my photos. It was located outside my home-directory, so my wife could access it as well. I have ZERO need to make symlinks to removable media because they appear right in my desktop, in my filemanager and in my "places"-menu. What exactly is the problem here?
When I put in a game-CD in my DVD-drive, it's displayed on the desktop with the name of the game as it's title. Same thing with DVD-movies or data-CD's. USB-sticks appear like they should. In short: they ARE mounted by their volume-label."
OK, I have just one question, what desktop environment and file manager are you using? Because I have seen none of those things occurring on the Linux distros that I have played with, even the recent Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention, being distracted by all the other problems I was having. I have never encountered a Linux file manager that presented all the hard drives and removable media on my system to me as cleanly as either Windows Explorer or the Mac OS X Finder. Explorer isn't even that great unless you're using explore view where you get the sidebar and can see all drives at the same time. Finder is by far the best at presenting all drives in an easy to access manner for non-technical people.
I tried REALLY HARD recently with Kubuntu to make KDE's file manager present me with a nice concise list of the attached drives by adding something to its sidebar, I forget what it was called, all the while wondering why that tab wasn't being shown by default. It was a mild improvement over the old days, but still horrible in comparison to Explorer and Finder. And I still keep seeing absolutely insane things happening like KDE presenting me with drive icons that are captioned with the MOUNT POINT and DEVICE NAME, which is totally nuts.
Maybe you're using GNOME and Nautilus. That would explain why I haven't really seen what you're seeing. I have been trying GNOME for years and always hated it. Its interface/paradigm is confusing to me and always has been, even though I've never really had problems with the Windows, KDE, BeOS, Mac Classic or Mac OS X interfaces. I do not know why this is, but I know I'm not alone. So if what you see can't be replicated on a KDE desktop and other desktop environments like XFce, we're still leaving at least half of the potential Linux population out in the cold.
Furthermore, I complain about drive access in Linux but that's really just a small part of the problem. There's also the availability of software, the whole software install process, support for nice thngs like sleeping when I close the lid of my laptop, support for multimedia like playing DVDs LEGALLY, WIRELESS support, and a great many other things that still keep me f
If computer science and engineering students don't have the time or ability to learn how their computers work we are in much more trouble than I thought.
I disagree. Engineers and scientists tend to be focused on a specific field. Not knowing the specifics of how a computer or a carburetor works won't stop a structural engineer from building a suspension bridge, or an astronomer from discovering that there is a black hole at the center of our galaxy. The computer, like a car, is just a tool. Unless they are in the field of computers there isn't really any reason why they should be forced to learn the specifics of how computers work. If you build the computer and the software right, they won't have to.
Fortunately my experience is that CompSci and EE students are amongst the most eager adopters of Linux because they don't have time to stand on the Window's event horizon and try to figure out why their data went in but never came out.
Indeed. For the same reason scientists and engineers are also among the most eager adopters of Mac OS X. I have even read many accounts of such people moving from Linux to OS X, or running both on their PowerBooks. For these people, OS X has the power of Linux with a much improved user friendliness to go along with it. That helps the computer get out of their way and let them do actual work.
The reason OSX is so popular with scientists is that it is a great implementation of an OS that they need for their work. That said, Linux offers a lot less benefit over OSX today than it did in 2000.
Agreed. Especially for the non-technical type of scientist, of which there are many. Should Linux ever manage to develop some real continuity and interface standardization, they may come back. But, I'm not holding my breath (anymore).