My wife uses Linux and she has never opened a console. I occasionally open it, but that's because I like to do "advanced" stuff. If I really wanted to, I could live without ever opening the console.
Good for her and good for you. Doesn't change the fact that many Linux users are basically forced into the command line to fix various little problems they encounter, or at least Googling doesn't present them with any non-command line ways of fixing the problem.
"The user doesn't care about the neat things they can get from/proc/dev and the likes. Hide these."
Well, normally they are hidden. Usually the user just sees his home-folder. Of course there are other interesting (and not so interesting) stuff lcated in/, but the user doesn't really have any reason to go poking there. If he wants to investigate, why should we try to artificially try to stop him from doing so?
The sheer idiocy of this whole "stay in your home folder, n00b" idea is just one more reason I dropped Linux as a desktop OS and would never recommend it to anyone. It's like building someone a house with a hole in the middle of the living room floor and just telling them to walk around the outside of the room to avoid falling in it. It just doesn't work.
Is my CD-ROM going to be mounted in my home folder? No. It's in/mnt or/mount or/media, or who knows where depending on your distro. Do I need to ever access those folders if I'm not an expert user? NO. That's why Apple completely hid those folders in the Finder. If you have enough knowledge to be getting into those folders there are still easy ways to get there, but the common user isn't faced with an extremely confusing proliferation of weird folders in the root of their hard drive, which they could screw up by getting into. There is a kind of user that is very common who will go around deleting files and folders they don't understand.
Staying in the home folder in Linux also doesn't work because there is no clear visible way that I've ever encountered to access removeable media, or even other drives. Apple's Finder is great because drives get mounted and automatically show up in the sidebar. Windows Explorer works just fine too, drives get mounted and show up in My Computer. With Linux you're lucky if your drive is automatically mounted at all, and doubly lucky if you can find the drive. If you're really lucky it might show up on the desktop, which isn't terribly useful if it's the only place it shows up, because you normally have the desktop covered up.
For the love of Pete, we still have Linux users commonly making symlinks by hand to places like/media/cdrom/cdrom0 for the sake of convenience because it's a total pain to get into something as common as a CD-ROM the usual way! Until we all understand why this is IN-SANE, we will never have a completely viable Linux desktop OS. And until we can drop the hubris of "well, just ignore all the confusing stuff you see in the file manager", potential switchers will still be driven away in droves. If they really want to get away from Windows, they'll go exactly where I went: Mac OS X. Until you use it, you won't understand how hard you've been working to do the simplest things. Is it really that much to ask that removable media be mounted by volume label rather than some obscure device name?
Okay, Joe Normal User has read up on yum and yum.conf and struggled through getting it setup after searching the forums and jumping on IRC (Joe is happy about an IRC client coming standard).
I was right with you up until this point. Joe Normal User won't be doing IRC. Joe Normal User won't be reading up on yum.conf and trying to get it setup. I think you're talking about Joe Semi-Geek. Joe Normal User will be throwing XP back on his computer before he ever gets to IRC, or he'll be buying an iBook or Mac mini if he wants to get away from Windows.
The big mistake that people like this reporter make is that they expect to just "switch". They don't take into account that doing things in Linux isn't necessarily harder or more difficult it's just different. Usually these people are thinking "I'll just go to Linux" assuming their work process will still be exactly the same.
Well news flash: it doesn't work like that!
News flash: for non-technical users, yes, that's exactly how it works.
I'll try to keep this short and sweet. When a non-technical person walks up to a Linux computer with an open mind, ready to get away from Windows, they almost universally find it confusing and torturous to do even the most simple "desktop" tasks. Emphasis on desktop. These people aren't programmers, they want to play DVDs and open Word documents right out of the box. They want CD-ROMs and USB drives to get mounted automatically, ready to use. To this day I have not seen a distro that can do this very well.
When those same non-technical users walk up to a Mac OS X box with an open mind, ready to get away from Windows, they almost universally find it quite simple to do most any common "desktop" task, including running Microsoft Office. CDs and USB drives are ridiculously easy to access and use.
I have been on both sides. I'm a fairly technical user, I ran Linux as a desktop for years (Debian no less), and still I find it overly complex and torturous to use as a desktop. It's only benefit to me these days is that it's free. Those people you see in the lab are not switchers. They aren't looking to escape Windows, they are looking for a Windows computer, so naturally they don't react well to seeing something different. I have always been an OS agnostic, so the moment I saw OS X years ago I found it quite simple to use, and it has only gotten better since then. I loved OS X even though I hated OS 9 and earlier. I have seen many non-technical people switch over to Mac OS X like sliding a knife through butter. It would be a cold day in The Hot Place before any of them could have used Linux as a desktop OS without major headaches. Linux is only a viable desktop for people who will never try to do anything besides a little surfing and email.
Just get over it. Linux is NOT there yet for people like this, or even for people like me. I have all the requisite technical expertise to force Linux to do my bidding, but I no longer have the patience to wrestle with it. The fact that you have a problem with that is not our fault. No one is stopping you from using Linux as much as you want. If you want the rest of us to use it, make it work the way we want: like Mac OS X.
So are we there yet? I say yes. And we have been for some time. People just can't expect to "switch" and not invest in a serious amount of relearning. If it didn't take a lot of time it wouldn't be a different system and therefore it wouldn't be worth switching to!
The fact that A) you're not listening to the guy who says Linux isn't ready, and B) you got modded +5, Insightful for this, does not bode well for the advancement of desktop Linux. If that many geeks here agree with you that nothing more needs to be done, we have a definite problem...
I think you got it more correct than the grandparent. Graphics, sound, and multimedia devices are definitely the biggest hindrance to Linux on the desktop. Last night alone I discovered that somehow Gentoo and udev had removed my/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 link to my cdrom drive so now I couldn't mount a cdrom the same way anymore. Then the copying of files to my PSP via USB failed for some unkown reason. Plus, when I mounted the thing again it was read-only and I couldn't change it. Until Linux improves it's support of the more gadgety stuff like multimedia devices and graphics hardware (don't get me started on ATI drivers), Linux on the desktop is not going to get anywhere. The problem, of course, is that this falls squarely on the shoulders of the device manufacturers. They can argue for business reasons that it's not in their interest to support a third operating system. It's a catch-22 of sorts. Linux won't gain ground until hardware support is better, and hardware support won't increase until the userbase grows a bit more.
The only way this can stop is by getting students in engineering, computer science, and information technology disciplines to learn to like Linux and see it's benefits versus other operating systems. This way, when they go to work for the device makers, they can advocate that it's good to offer support for Linux.
One little flaw here, is there any actual benefit to Linux for those users, versus either Windows or Mac OS X? Those types of people are usually wanting to use their computer as a tool to get something else done, they don't have the time to mess around getting the computer to work for them. There is a reason that Mac OS X is very popular in the scientific world these days. It Just Works[tm], right out of the box, and there is plenty of high quality, highly usable commercial and free scientific/engineering software available for scientists and engineers to use to get their jobs done efficiently. I'd bet that there aren't that many tasks where Linux provides any benefit whatsoever, besides saving some money. I'm saying this after using Linux as a desktop OS for years.
If Linux was good enough, don't you think all those people would be using it already, despite the lack of a few drivers?
Interesting... I was under the impression that even Windows XP couldn't play DVDs until you installed something from a CD when you get your DVDROM drive.
Point being that if the computer comes with a DVD drive installed it will have the DVD playing/burning software installed already, or if you buy a drive separately you do get easy to install software on a CD... for Windows. Mac OS X has the software built in, even if it doesn't come with a DVD drive initially. With Linux, even the most user-friendly distros like Ubuntu, it's still unlegal for them to include the CSS decrypting componenents, so even if you do manage to have some kind of DVD player installed you will have to somehow learn that you also need a package like libdvdcss, then you have to somehow find that package which of course can't be hosted on the usual US package servers. I am a knowledgeable Linux user and it still took me hours to get this task accomplished when I tried the latest Ubuntu just a few short months ago. This is 2006, people, not 1996. Between 2000 and 2006 I have seen basically zero improvement in this department with desktop Linux.
So many geeks seem to be totally blind to the fact that wrestling with one's computer for weeks just to get it to do the most common tasks like playing video and audio is NOT FUN for non-geeks. Hence, people like this guy do not, and will not, use Linux as a desktop OS because there are currently bet^H^H^H easier alternatives like Windows and Mac OS X. Of course, Linux is made by geeks who mostly don't understand what the problem is, and consider recompiling the kernel to be no big deal. This is the main thing holding Linux back as a desktop OS. As long as I see web tutorials 20 pages long (all text) with instructions to go to the command line (what the hell is the command line?, the common user asks) to do something simple like setting up audio or multimedia, Linux will never be able to conquer the desktop.
I say this as a former desktop Linux user (Debian/Mandrake/SuSE). Linux just isn't there yet and never will be as long as geeks don't listen to people like this and take their needs utterly seriously. Not wanting to invest dozens of hours configuring one's computer to do the most basic of desktop tasks shouldn't be a subject of derision. It should be a wake-up call, one of about a hundred thousand wake-up calls that have been completely ignored by the Linux community over the last decade.
If everybody were armed, society would be a lot more polite.
Wrong is everybody were armed society would be a lot smaller.
Right, because everyone who ever gets near any kind of weapon immediately goes around killing people.
I will never, not ever, understand this particular aspect of the insanity of anti-gun people. Are you really that frightened of yourself? What a sad, sad way to live your life, thinking that if anyone ever puts a gun in your hand you'll kill your neighbors and your family and then shoot yourself in the foot... But it's OK, you live in a civilized society, where you can rely on the police to call the coroner when they find your body about 15 minutes after some street thug robs you and shoots you with an illegal handgun. Anyways...
4. A neutron beam can be used for "imaging" similar to an x-ray... except that neutrons can pass through dense materials (like lead) quite easily and can image organic materials with better sensitivity than x-rays.
And if you image the object three times, once with a red filter, once with a blue filter, and once with a green filter, you can combine the resulting three images and get color X-rays!
The ability to run Mac OS X in virtual machine lowers the barriers to entry to test exploit code from $2000 to (effectively if you allready own a PC) $0.
Besides the fact that it still isn't very easy to run OS X in the virtual machine, there is the Mac mini which has been around for at least a year now, which lowers the hardware cost to around $600. Furthermore, I would think that if you have the means to build yourself a setup with enough CPU, RAM and disk space to store multiple copies of huge drive images and run them in VMWare or Virtual PC, spending another grand on real Apple hardware would probably be no big deal.
And as for the other part of your theory, if it's so damn easy to "port" security threats from Windows to other Intel-based operating systems, I wonder why all the Linux distros and all the BSDs aren't rife with security holes by now, simply because they share a common CPU with Windows? After all, those operating systems have been running on the Intel platforms for more than 15 years right alongside Windows. Horrors!
It's the software, not the hardware, people. Moving to Intel and increasing market share doesn't change the fact that OS X uses good security practices by default, like a typical Linux or BSD workstation. Anyone who says that [OS X|Linux|*BSD] is totally immune to all security threats doesn't understand computer security. The rest of us realize that they just do security a little better than Windows. It's the little things that count, like making the user enter the administrator password to run an application that affects the system, even if that user is already an administrator. Mac OS X has been available for six years now and there is not a single working virus out there. There are many reasons for this, and the CPU really isn't a big one.
I have to agree with the parent. I think I even remember someone pointing out back when that article was published that one of the reasons for Slashdot's success is because it's always been "ugly", i.e. it works and delivers what we want pretty efficiently without attempting to be cutesy. It's not the fastest website in the world, but it is pretty lean and mean without much crap getting in the way of getting what you want out of the site, which is content and comments. I go to so many sites that are just so visually confusing no matter how many times I've been there, even though technically they may not even have as many elements as a typical Slashdot page. Either they get the colors all wrong or the spacing or something, but whatever it is I just end up never wanting to go back there.
So, CmdrTaco, I have to vote vehemently against the "make it pretty" qualification. Like the recent/. article that reviewed the design of an Asus LCD monitor as if it mattered more than the image quality of the display, you could end up making a cute website and in the process destroying some of the reasons many people come here. I've been coming to Slashdot almost every day for at least 5 years now, and there is literally no other website that I can say that about. Please, please, do not screw up whatever dynamic is here that keeps bringing people like me back. What Slashdot needs is speed and compatibility tweaks wherever possible, not a redesign.
I have to also echo another user's comments: More important than tweaking the website is getting rid of the articles that are absolute crap, like that recent link to a review of a ho-hum LCD monitor that just happened to have a brushed metal base. Whoopty-doo, it wasn't even that cute, and what kind of geek cares more about the design of a monitor than about how it performs? Even the jaw-dropping design of Apple's monitors wouldn't matter to most of us if their screens weren't also top of the line quality-wise, and really the best thing about Apple's design is that it doesn't distract from the actual display. The medium gray brushed aluminum reduces reflections and is great for people who need to work with accurate color all day long. And what moron actually thinks it's great to have a bezel so thick that you can't realistically use multiple monitors side-by-side?
But, I digress. The point is, that article and many others never should have made it to any section of Slashdot. It was a waste of space and most of the comments here reflected that fact.
It's not the look of the site that is of major importance. Just make it so that those who care can have a custom stylesheet to change the colors a bit, and otherwise leave well enough alone.
Oh, except for one thing: In the past year or so those icons (the ones you mentioned you don't want to change) have gotten ugly enough to actually be jarring. It's really the only thing about the site that is actually ugly enough to me to be distracing at times. Used to be they were all the same size. Now we have icons that are different sizes and even rectangular with different orientations. That's insane, and oftentimes it breaks the layout now, making gaping white spaces where there shouldn't be. If anything you should reconsider redesigning those graphics and sticking to a specific size square from now on as a policy. It would certainly make designing new layouts in the future a hell of a lot easier. There is a reason that icons on your computer aren't all different sizes and irregularly shaped. Why are you doing it on your website?
I don't know what was wrong with 64x64, but if you designed your icon graphics behind the scenes in a larger size from now on, say 256x256 or even 512x512, and then used a scaled down version for the site, I don't see why you couldn't be prepared for future upgrades for the next decade or longer by simply shifting to a larger version of the graphics. If 64x64 really isn't adequate at this point then shift to 96x96 or something, then later on you can
Bonjour for Windows includes the printer wizard that lets Windows PCs discover Bonjour network printers (almost any modern printer) or any printer shared by Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Regarding networking between Mac and Windows I had similar trouble with previous versions of OS X, but Tiger seems to have improved things a bit. SMB servers always show up in the network browser now, and connecting is no problem. Tiger even seems to be able to save the login user and password for SMB servers, which Panther always had trouble with. Panther only saw about five out of eight shared folders on my file server; Tiger sees them all and can connect to them all.
Some things to look at are your firewall settings (on both ends, but especially on the Windows end). Make sure you're using Windows 2000 or later. Make sure the access permissions are correct on your Windows shares (e.g. is the share set up to allow guest users or whatever, depends on how you're trying to connect). If you're in a network where you're limited to a single workgroup you can put your Mac(s) in the same workgroup as the PCs using the Directory Access utility (in the Utilities folder). That way you don't have multiple workgroup folders cluttering up your network browser. Of course domains and Active Directory access is a whole other animal that I don't know about, but if you're doing relatively simple network sharing between Windows and Mac OS X, Tiger seems to work much better.
There are some tricks with printers, like you can print from Windows to a lot of printers shared from Mac OS X if you're using one of the CUPS drivers on the Mac side and you tell Windows that it's printing to a LaswerWriter. Things like that. I was able to set up printing from my Mac to an Epson CX6600 printer shared from Windows with no problem so far. YMMV.
So if I don't run any mac osx machines this software is useless right?
No, if you had read the release notes you'd see that you can use the Bonjour Printer Wizard to discover local Bonjour/Rendezvous printers on your network. Almost all current printers have Bonjour built-in, at least network printers. If you do happen to have any Macs on your network running at least Mac OS X 10.4 your Windows PC will also be able to access any printers shared from those Macs.
If you don't really do any printer sharing on your home network or have a laptop that you take to other locations where there might be network printers or Macs with shared printers attached to them, you probably won't see any benefit from installing this.
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want devices jumping onto my network and configuring themselves any way they like.
I think you're completely misunderstanding this whole concept.
Bonjour (aka Zeroconf) devices don't really "configure" themselves, and they won't magically jump onto your network in any way they couldn't do without Bonjour. I think there is a part of it that makes networking easier if there is no DHCP server available, like if you directly connect two computers together to share files, but if there is a DHCP server I'm sure that takes precedence over automagic network addressing.
Mostly Bonjour devices just broadcast a few packets that let other Bonjour aware devices find them, if they want to. It means that rather than having to remember the specific IP address of every device you ever connect to your network (computers, routers, network printers, file servers, network storage devices, etc.), you only have to open the appropriate type of network browser and all the discoverable devices of that type will show up.
Open up the printer setup utility on a Mac and instead of the utility asking you where the printer is that you want to connect to, it gives you a list of every discoverable printer on your network. Most current network printers have this capability built in now, so after a few seconds they just show up in the printer browser. If you've installed the driver already or its one of a few hundred drivers already built into Mac OS X, all you have to do at that point is select the printer and click "Add" and you're done. I know, scary stuff.
With Bonjour you can even use iChat to chat with your local network neighors without having any account set up with ICQ/MSN/AIM or whatever. Users that make themselves available via Bonjour simply show up in your buddy list, and you show up in theirs (if you enabled Bonjour in the preferences for that application).
It's like automatic DNS for your LAN. You do enjoy not having to find Slashdot.org by its IP address, do you not? And isn't it helpful that if Slashdot.org moves to a new IP address you can still get to it by typing in the same human-readable address? In the same way your computer can pick up any available address anytime it connects to the network, and simultaneously it will always be available at "MyComputerName.local". You can ping your computer by that name, connect to it by that name to access shared files, type that name in a web browser, etc. Bonjour doesn't stop you from restricting your DHCP server, using static addresses, running a firewall, or whatever else you want to do to keep control over your network. You can also block UDP port 5353 if you really want to deprive yourself of the benefits of Bonjour. And of course all this only works on the local network, it's not publicly accessible by anyone on the Internet.
Of course, if you really don't want a device on your network at all, there is a very simple solution: don't plug it into your network.
By the way, Bonjour (aka Rendezvous before Apple had to change the name due to trademark issues) is merely their implementation of Zeroconf, which is an open IETF standard. There are also open-source implementations for Linux, and as far as I'm concerned it's one of the best things to come to local area networking since DHCP. You might want to look into it.
Time to add D-Link to the hardware vendor blacklist. Whenever you're asked by your non-tech friends what hardware they should buy, recommend anything BUT D-Link, and tell them to actively AVOID D-Link.
I always wonder about something whenever someone suggests boycotting an entire company's products like this because of a few little problems. Namely, which perfect heart-warming angel company am I supposed to shop with from now on? Don't Linksys, Netgear, Belkin, IOGear, etc. all have their own problems? Last time I checked Belkin was building some seriously boneheaded ideas into their routers, and got burned for it pretty bad. Are we supposed to build our own routers out of Linux boxen or something to satisfy your outrage over some technical glitches? Please get over yourself unless you can provide us with a good argument that Company X is somehow immensely more evil than companies A, B, and C. We have to get our cheapo networking equipment somewhere.
As a non-computer-person hoping to shortly shift to Linux, here is what I and my fellow newbie dummies want/need:
1. Insert CD.
2. Click OK.
3. Done.
I'm sure that's pretty obvious, so the question is: how close are Linux distros to being to that level, and if the answer is 'not close' then what are the obstacles to getting there and how are they being addressed?
The sad thing here is that both of us need to preface our remarks with "this is not a troll, I swear".
Sorry to disappoint, but you will not find a single Linux distribution like that, despite what many people here will tell you. I've used Linux full-time as a desktop off and on for years, from straight Debian (hard) to Mandrake/Mandriva (fairly easy). I even tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, the most recent release. Everyone who ever says Linux is easy really has no clue what easy means to non-technical people. I mean, come on, you have to find and run a special script just to get support for playing DVDs and configure other simple things that are essential for a typical desktop user. If you're not lucky enough to have heard of this special script you get to spend hours on the web learning about obscure and difficult to find packages like libdvdcss, blah blah blah. Your typical geek will wade through it all with infinite patience, not having a clue how difficult this stuff is for non-geeks. Then they proceed to tell everyone how easy it is to use Linux for anything and everything.
If you (a non-computer-person) are serious about switching away from Windows you need to get yourself a Mac, because "desktop Linux" has a loooong way to go in terms of polish. I'll keep checking it out myself every year or so, but so far I have not been impressed with the progress and I'm sure a person like you won't be either. Of course, it's a free country, so feel free to download a couple dozen distros and find out for yourself just how ludicrous it is to say that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop.
"if you're on mushrooms, the hour long warp scene makes total sense"...and if you're not on mushrooms, it's only 5 minutes long!
Haha, funny, but actually the original that was shown in theaters was 25 minutes long if I'm remembering correctly. Apparently it was a big hit with the LSD/marijuana crowd at the time. I can't imagine watching 25 minutes of that stuff without drugs.
That's cute, but it won't run on Macs. Mine would do all that without a virtual machine, and also boot my choice of Mac OS X or LinuxPPC/LinuxIntelMac on PPC or Intel Macs. Although Windows would probably need a virtual machine setup like that because it pukes if you try to run it on different hardware than what you installed on. One of the great things about Mac OS X is that it's portable to any Mac capable of running Mac OS X, it doesn't care if the hardware changes. Same with a properly configured Linux distro like Knoppix that has good hardware detection. Totally portable as long as it's running on the right processor. So to cover all the bases you'd need three different Linux partitions (Linux for x86, Linux for PPC, Linux for Intel Mac), and two different Mac OS X partitions (Mac OS X for PPC, Mac OS X for Intel). It's a bit complicated, but I'm sure I could make it all work.
By the way, this is my first/. post from my new (used) iBook! Yay!
Am I the only one that is less excited about the Linux part than about the fact that the Intel Macs can apparently boot from USB drives? Up until now Macs have only been capable of booting from Firewire drives, something about the USB bus getting reset during the boot process. This means it will eventually be possible to carry around a single USB drive from which you can boot your choice of Windows, Linux or Mac OS X on any available computer hardware that supports booting from USB, whether it's a "PC" or a Mac. This is very cool.
But maybe I'm the only one crazy enough to imagine having a drive with bootable partitions of Windows, Linux, "LinuxIntelMac", LinuxPPC, and Mac OS X, and being able to carry around my entire computing environment without carrying any computer hardware with me. Put it on a 2.5" notebook drive in a small USB 2.0/Firewire drive enclosure and it will fit in a shirt pocket. Notebook drives go up to 120GB and 7200rpm these days too, so it's not like it would be slow. Wherever you go, you're home. I've even seen some drive enclosures with integrated fingerprint readers. The whole disk is encrypted so you wouldn't have to worry about losing information if it's stolen. Keep an identical drive in a computer at home and you can probably even keep a backup of the entire multi-OS drive with something like dd.
Someday I'm going to actually turn this from a pipe dream into a reality, just you wait.
I have seen this spelling before, and I realize it's a perfectly valid spelling on the other side of the pond, but I don't think I'll ever get used to seeing it. It looks like a dyslexic person trying to spell "goal". Absolutely bizarre.
Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try..
I wouldn't be in a hurry if I were you. I'm sure GnuCash can import your QIF file from Quicken, but you don't want to use this version of GnuCash since it's an unstable development version. Also, you don't explicitly mention what operating system you're using, but just in case do you realize GnuCash only runs on Linux? As far as I know, anyway. And I get a funny feeling you aren't using Linux and probably aren't ready to switch just to use GnuCash.
Several people have mentioned Moneydance so far in this discussion and I'm taking a close look at it myself. I would be much more interested in seeing how well a person like you and your finances get along with Moneydance. Personally I hate all platform-specific software no matter what platform it's on (especially for important things like finances). For that main reason I have never really given GnuCash much attention and Moneydance is looking good to me since it supports Mac OS X along with Windows and Linux. And it can import your Quicken QIF data, of course. On top of that it also seems to support a lot of the online features that make people stick with Quicken. So you really might want to check it out. And if you find a bug, get on the phone with them and see how they respond. That would be interesting to hear about as well.
This may sound like a plug but I don't work for them and haven't even used the software (yet). It just looks to me like a much better option especially if you are running Windows or Mac OS X. If I had a household with mixed Win/Mac/Linux computers (I do) I can't imagine using anything that isn't cross-platform for something this important. Quicken may run on Mac and Windows but have you ever tried migrating Quicken data from one platform to the other? It's a joke. Hopefully Moneydance can handle such situatiosn better.
Those people have probably already dropped Apple due to their long standing attitude toward backwards compatibility. If you know anyone who relies on 4 year old Mac software, they're either going to pay for an upgrade (if it exists), or they won't be Mac users for long.
The majority of the userbase ate the OSX upgrade without complaint. They'll eat the Intel transition in the same way.
Let's see, you're comparing people upgrading their operating system on hardware they already own to upgrading their hardware. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Like comparing apples to... refrigerators.
Apple would not survive burning tens of millions of Mac owners like you and the other guy are suggesting. But whatever. At least your nonsense ideas are probably helping to bring down the cost of PPC hardware.
most companies know and Apple certainly does that PPC and Universal binaries are a stepping stone. I doubt that if all but the most mainstream apps even pay lip service to it in a couple of years from now. PPC users will basically be left hanging out to dry and I seriously doubt Apple is going to produce a Rosetta for PPC anytime soon.
Are you insane? I buy a quad-core G5 today for $3,500+ and Apple and all the software developers in the world are going to a$$-fuck me within a couple of years because they might have to spend a few more hours on cross-platform debugging? That would be absolute madness. Do you realize how many people would drop Apple like a hot potato if that were to happen, and never buy Apple again? Do you have any clue how many MILLIONS of PPC machines there are out there and how many years it will take for the Intel side to even come close to matching that installed base? Do you have any clue how long the useful lifetime of your typical Mac is? You can run the latest Mac OS X on hardware from 1995 with a few upgrades, and it's supported going almost all the way back to the original iMac from 1999.
Apple was developing Mac OS X on Intel for YEARS before they did this public switch. Something tells me that they've found most of the potential problems already. This isn't going to be another Java fiasco, code once--debug everywhere. For 90% of software developers the difference between compiling for PPC and compiling a universal binary is checking one more checkbox in Xcode. Now that they've done one switch they've left the door open for future switches. Developers would have to lose their minds to start compiling Intel-only binaries sooner than 5 years down the line, and by that time there is no gaurtantee that Apple will still be sticking to Intel processors. After all, they only stuck with OS X on PPC for 5 years.
Furthermore, many Mac software developers have a long history of supporting earlier architectures for years after they've been obsoleted. Witness how long many binaries were available for the 680x0 chips after the PowerPC models came out. Fat binaries made that transition pretty painless too. If I'm wrong I'll eat my hat, but without contravening evidence your assertion is baseless FUD. The PowerPC platform will be supported for a long time to come, and if Intel doesn't stay on the ball Apple can switch back to PowerPC anytime. Universal binaries don't care, and Mac OS X Tiger is completely universal at this point.
And this is something I don't think anyone has pointed out yet: Apple could even offer both platforms at the same time, kind of like they're doing on their website right this very minute. *gasp* Oh noes!!!1one!!11
Gimp would get a lot more popular if... If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently.
That's exactly what they've been doing recently with their "software activation" initiative. Same with Macromedia, only they call it "product activation". Now instead of borrowing someone's CD for an afternoon you'll have to find a cracked version online somewhere. Makes it much more difficult for the common user to pirate it. Everything later than Photoshop 7 for Windows and CS on the Mac requires activation, and can't be activated with the same serial number more than once or twice. It's really pretty effective.
Oddly enough a lot of people are still going to go through all the trouble of finding and downloading a 300MB cracked version of Photoshop rather than using the GIMP. And if they don't know how to get the cracked version they will buy Photoshop Elements for $79 rather than using the GIMP. That's how bad the GIMP sucks, according to your average user. So no, I don't think GIMP is going to get more popular until it improves a LOT. GimpShop is merely a very small step in the right direction. Another great step would be to stop calling it the GIMP. That name is absolutely infantile and sounds totally ridiculous in non-geek circles.
Every year since 1998 or so was also supposed to be the year of the Linux desktop, but that hasn't happened either. There are reasons for this, people, whether you understand them or not.
OpenOffice.org is the same way. People only use OO.org when they have no way of obtaining Microsoft Office on the cheap. Either that or they are idealists. The only reason Firefox has taken off as fast as it has is because it has some great killer features that make the average person's life easier, e.g. ad blocking, popup blocking, tabbed browsing and many great extensions. If Firefox was still as rough as OO.org, the GIMP, and Linux in general, nobody would be using it. This whole idea of Linux or other open source software projects taking off like wildfire because of some external event is going to remain a pipe dream until our software gets a hell of a lot more polish. I say this as a person who has used Linux as a desktop, used OpenOffice.org and used the GIMP.
You'll know when these things no longer need to be drastically improved because you'll wake up one day and everyone you know will be using them. It's that simple.
Do you have any idea how many shots you'd need to take to recoup costs? Dont forget all the 300 GB hard drives you're going to need to store onto. And those will last 10 years. Of course by then, we'll have 5 TB storage capacities.
On the other hand, medium print negatives are good for what? couple hundred years if stored in a decent binder?
Amazingly I already took all that into account. Apparently you didn't read the linked article, where the large format photographer figures he's already spending 80% or more of the cost of the 38MB back, without getting any of the benefits of digital like faster workflow and the ability to experiment with different exposures quickly and without extra cost. He crosses his fingers with every shot, hoping he was using the right shutter speed to get the effect he wanted (for shooting moving water for instance), and takes 87 photos at $3 per shot. Meanwhile his buddy with the digital back takes home 3,000 digital images and always gets the shot he wanted because he can immediately see the results of the last shot on the screen. The film guy still has to take his film to the developer while his buddy is already at home making prints from his digital files.
I've seen other articles by pros that say the same thing. Basically if you're doing it for a living you can afford a $30,000-50,000 digital back with the payments spread over a couple of years, and you still end up making out better than when you were using film. Most photographers realize that having a digital version of the negative has huge advantages, so they convert them to digital anyway by using a $30,000-50,000 drum scanner! They either have to own one or pay someone else to do the scan to the tune of $300 per photo! But wait, that was just a 35mm negative, large format is probably much more expensive to scan. Newsflash, if you aren't just a hobbyist taking a few photos a month, photography is very expensive, especially medium and large format photography. Oddly enough if you're any good at it you can still make a pretty good living.
Digital files will last forever with proper backups. Just copy them to new media every few years. The media itself isn't supposed to last forever, and doesn't need to. Keep two or three copies in different physical locations and use an error-correction strategy like PAR2 to guard against bit-rot. The ability of a lossy analog film negative to last a hundred years before decomposing is overrated. Where is your Star Trek style replicator that you need to make a perfect, lossless copy of that negative to preserve it for another hundred years after that? By the time you're done paying for the temperature and humidity-controlled storage space to store all those negatives, a few multi-terabyte storage systems will seem like an incredible bargain in comparison. You already blew your own argument out of the water by mentioning that we will soon have affordable multi-terabyte storage solutions. And I'd like to see you run a keyword search on a roomful of boxed negatives. So what's your point? Any advantages that film used to have are rapidly disappearing. Digital is here to stay, whether we like it or not.
The KM 5D is definitely a nice option. The others don't have the image stabilization which of course gives you the extra 2-3 stops. If your subject is moving image stabilization won't help much, unfortunately. In that case the more important thing would be high ISO capability, which would probably put the D50 out in front for you. If you can keep the camera perfectly still the images stabilization is pretty useless.
You say you don't like dSLRs, but you don't say what you're trying to shoot, so I don't know if a compact digicam would suit your needs at all, but just in case I will second the above recommendation of the Fujifilm Finepix F10, which is the first consumer digicam capable of giving clean images at higher ISOs up to 1600. If you can find the F11 it is a slightly improved version with a higher resolution LCD screen and a couple of other things. It seems to only be available in Japan right now, but quite a few people on the DPReview forums have had good luck buying one from a seller on eBay called time2envy. Those are 6MP cameras, like the KM 7D/5D. Unfortunately they don't have a RAW option, or they would really be incredible cameras.
Another option is a compromise between digicam and dSLR. The Fujifilm Finepix S9000 (S9500 in EU) is one of those SLR-style digicams. It's got a 9MP chip with the same technology as the F10/F11, and a 10.7x optical zoom lense that I think starts at a nice wide 28mm. I've been looking at that one myself. The Finepix E900 is a compact counterpart with the same 9MP sensor. Both can do RAW but their high ISO images are slightly less clean than the F10/F11.
If you're willing to go ultra-compact there is also the Finepix Z1/Z2. Same technology, good high ISO performance but again not quite as clean as the F10/F11, and of course no RAW, but what do you expect from an ultra-compact under $300? The Z2 is of course a better version of the Z1 but you'll have to get it from that guy on eBay.
If you were willing to go with a dSLR and spend more than $1,000, the best option for low-light photography would probably be the Canon 20D which can give fairly clean images even at ISO 3200.
But, after saying all this I would also say that if you don't need it right now you might want to wait until after PMA 2006 to see what new wonders will be announced. Keep an eye on dpreview.com at the end of February. There have been quite a few announcements already but those Finepix models I mentioned above still seem to be the only good low-light contenders short of a real dSLR. You never know though.
Oh, and since you'll probably be working with a high ISO no matter which camera you get, you'll probably want to invest in NeatImage or NoiseNinja. They do a great job cleaning up moderate ISO noise.
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My wife uses Linux and she has never opened a console. I occasionally open it, but that's because I like to do "advanced" stuff. If I really wanted to, I could live without ever opening the console.
/proc /dev and the likes. Hide these."
/, but the user doesn't really have any reason to go poking there. If he wants to investigate, why should we try to artificially try to stop him from doing so?
/mnt or /mount or /media, or who knows where depending on your distro. Do I need to ever access those folders if I'm not an expert user? NO. That's why Apple completely hid those folders in the Finder. If you have enough knowledge to be getting into those folders there are still easy ways to get there, but the common user isn't faced with an extremely confusing proliferation of weird folders in the root of their hard drive, which they could screw up by getting into. There is a kind of user that is very common who will go around deleting files and folders they don't understand.
/media/cdrom/cdrom0 for the sake of convenience because it's a total pain to get into something as common as a CD-ROM the usual way! Until we all understand why this is IN-SANE, we will never have a completely viable Linux desktop OS. And until we can drop the hubris of "well, just ignore all the confusing stuff you see in the file manager", potential switchers will still be driven away in droves. If they really want to get away from Windows, they'll go exactly where I went: Mac OS X. Until you use it, you won't understand how hard you've been working to do the simplest things. Is it really that much to ask that removable media be mounted by volume label rather than some obscure device name?
Good for her and good for you. Doesn't change the fact that many Linux users are basically forced into the command line to fix various little problems they encounter, or at least Googling doesn't present them with any non-command line ways of fixing the problem.
"The user doesn't care about the neat things they can get from
Well, normally they are hidden. Usually the user just sees his home-folder. Of course there are other interesting (and not so interesting) stuff lcated in
The sheer idiocy of this whole "stay in your home folder, n00b" idea is just one more reason I dropped Linux as a desktop OS and would never recommend it to anyone. It's like building someone a house with a hole in the middle of the living room floor and just telling them to walk around the outside of the room to avoid falling in it. It just doesn't work.
Is my CD-ROM going to be mounted in my home folder? No. It's in
Staying in the home folder in Linux also doesn't work because there is no clear visible way that I've ever encountered to access removeable media, or even other drives. Apple's Finder is great because drives get mounted and automatically show up in the sidebar. Windows Explorer works just fine too, drives get mounted and show up in My Computer. With Linux you're lucky if your drive is automatically mounted at all, and doubly lucky if you can find the drive. If you're really lucky it might show up on the desktop, which isn't terribly useful if it's the only place it shows up, because you normally have the desktop covered up.
For the love of Pete, we still have Linux users commonly making symlinks by hand to places like
Okay, Joe Normal User has read up on yum and yum.conf and struggled through getting it setup after searching the forums and jumping on IRC (Joe is happy about an IRC client coming standard).
I was right with you up until this point. Joe Normal User won't be doing IRC. Joe Normal User won't be reading up on yum.conf and trying to get it setup. I think you're talking about Joe Semi-Geek. Joe Normal User will be throwing XP back on his computer before he ever gets to IRC, or he'll be buying an iBook or Mac mini if he wants to get away from Windows.
The big mistake that people like this reporter make is that they expect to just "switch". They don't take into account that doing things in Linux isn't necessarily harder or more difficult it's just different. Usually these people are thinking "I'll just go to Linux" assuming their work process will still be exactly the same.
Well news flash: it doesn't work like that!
News flash: for non-technical users, yes, that's exactly how it works.
I'll try to keep this short and sweet. When a non-technical person walks up to a Linux computer with an open mind, ready to get away from Windows, they almost universally find it confusing and torturous to do even the most simple "desktop" tasks. Emphasis on desktop. These people aren't programmers, they want to play DVDs and open Word documents right out of the box. They want CD-ROMs and USB drives to get mounted automatically, ready to use. To this day I have not seen a distro that can do this very well.
When those same non-technical users walk up to a Mac OS X box with an open mind, ready to get away from Windows, they almost universally find it quite simple to do most any common "desktop" task, including running Microsoft Office. CDs and USB drives are ridiculously easy to access and use.
I have been on both sides. I'm a fairly technical user, I ran Linux as a desktop for years (Debian no less), and still I find it overly complex and torturous to use as a desktop. It's only benefit to me these days is that it's free. Those people you see in the lab are not switchers. They aren't looking to escape Windows, they are looking for a Windows computer, so naturally they don't react well to seeing something different. I have always been an OS agnostic, so the moment I saw OS X years ago I found it quite simple to use, and it has only gotten better since then. I loved OS X even though I hated OS 9 and earlier. I have seen many non-technical people switch over to Mac OS X like sliding a knife through butter. It would be a cold day in The Hot Place before any of them could have used Linux as a desktop OS without major headaches. Linux is only a viable desktop for people who will never try to do anything besides a little surfing and email.
Just get over it. Linux is NOT there yet for people like this, or even for people like me. I have all the requisite technical expertise to force Linux to do my bidding, but I no longer have the patience to wrestle with it. The fact that you have a problem with that is not our fault. No one is stopping you from using Linux as much as you want. If you want the rest of us to use it, make it work the way we want: like Mac OS X.
So are we there yet? I say yes. And we have been for some time. People just can't expect to "switch" and not invest in a serious amount of relearning. If it didn't take a lot of time it wouldn't be a different system and therefore it wouldn't be worth switching to!
The fact that A) you're not listening to the guy who says Linux isn't ready, and B) you got modded +5, Insightful for this, does not bode well for the advancement of desktop Linux. If that many geeks here agree with you that nothing more needs to be done, we have a definite problem...
I think you got it more correct than the grandparent. Graphics, sound, and multimedia devices are definitely the biggest hindrance to Linux on the desktop. Last night alone I discovered that somehow Gentoo and udev had removed my /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 link to my cdrom drive so now I couldn't mount a cdrom the same way anymore. Then the copying of files to my PSP via USB failed for some unkown reason. Plus, when I mounted the thing again it was read-only and I couldn't change it. Until Linux improves it's support of the more gadgety stuff like multimedia devices and graphics hardware (don't get me started on ATI drivers), Linux on the desktop is not going to get anywhere. The problem, of course, is that this falls squarely on the shoulders of the device manufacturers. They can argue for business reasons that it's not in their interest to support a third operating system. It's a catch-22 of sorts. Linux won't gain ground until hardware support is better, and hardware support won't increase until the userbase grows a bit more.
The only way this can stop is by getting students in engineering, computer science, and information technology disciplines to learn to like Linux and see it's benefits versus other operating systems. This way, when they go to work for the device makers, they can advocate that it's good to offer support for Linux.
One little flaw here, is there any actual benefit to Linux for those users, versus either Windows or Mac OS X? Those types of people are usually wanting to use their computer as a tool to get something else done, they don't have the time to mess around getting the computer to work for them. There is a reason that Mac OS X is very popular in the scientific world these days. It Just Works[tm], right out of the box, and there is plenty of high quality, highly usable commercial and free scientific/engineering software available for scientists and engineers to use to get their jobs done efficiently. I'd bet that there aren't that many tasks where Linux provides any benefit whatsoever, besides saving some money. I'm saying this after using Linux as a desktop OS for years.
If Linux was good enough, don't you think all those people would be using it already, despite the lack of a few drivers?
Interesting... I was under the impression that even Windows XP couldn't play DVDs until you installed something from a CD when you get your DVDROM drive.
Point being that if the computer comes with a DVD drive installed it will have the DVD playing/burning software installed already, or if you buy a drive separately you do get easy to install software on a CD... for Windows. Mac OS X has the software built in, even if it doesn't come with a DVD drive initially. With Linux, even the most user-friendly distros like Ubuntu, it's still unlegal for them to include the CSS decrypting componenents, so even if you do manage to have some kind of DVD player installed you will have to somehow learn that you also need a package like libdvdcss, then you have to somehow find that package which of course can't be hosted on the usual US package servers. I am a knowledgeable Linux user and it still took me hours to get this task accomplished when I tried the latest Ubuntu just a few short months ago. This is 2006, people, not 1996. Between 2000 and 2006 I have seen basically zero improvement in this department with desktop Linux.
So many geeks seem to be totally blind to the fact that wrestling with one's computer for weeks just to get it to do the most common tasks like playing video and audio is NOT FUN for non-geeks. Hence, people like this guy do not, and will not, use Linux as a desktop OS because there are currently bet^H^H^H easier alternatives like Windows and Mac OS X. Of course, Linux is made by geeks who mostly don't understand what the problem is, and consider recompiling the kernel to be no big deal. This is the main thing holding Linux back as a desktop OS. As long as I see web tutorials 20 pages long (all text) with instructions to go to the command line (what the hell is the command line?, the common user asks) to do something simple like setting up audio or multimedia, Linux will never be able to conquer the desktop.
I say this as a former desktop Linux user (Debian/Mandrake/SuSE). Linux just isn't there yet and never will be as long as geeks don't listen to people like this and take their needs utterly seriously. Not wanting to invest dozens of hours configuring one's computer to do the most basic of desktop tasks shouldn't be a subject of derision. It should be a wake-up call, one of about a hundred thousand wake-up calls that have been completely ignored by the Linux community over the last decade.
If everybody were armed, society would be a lot more polite.
Wrong is everybody were armed society would be a lot smaller.
Right, because everyone who ever gets near any kind of weapon immediately goes around killing people.
I will never, not ever, understand this particular aspect of the insanity of anti-gun people. Are you really that frightened of yourself? What a sad, sad way to live your life, thinking that if anyone ever puts a gun in your hand you'll kill your neighbors and your family and then shoot yourself in the foot... But it's OK, you live in a civilized society, where you can rely on the police to call the coroner when they find your body about 15 minutes after some street thug robs you and shoots you with an illegal handgun. Anyways...
4. A neutron beam can be used for "imaging" similar to an x-ray... except that neutrons can pass through dense materials (like lead) quite easily and can image organic materials with better sensitivity than x-rays.
And if you image the object three times, once with a red filter, once with a blue filter, and once with a green filter, you can combine the resulting three images and get color X-rays!
Thanks folks, I'll be here all week!
The ability to run Mac OS X in virtual machine lowers the barriers to entry to test exploit code from $2000 to (effectively if you allready own a PC) $0.
Besides the fact that it still isn't very easy to run OS X in the virtual machine, there is the Mac mini which has been around for at least a year now, which lowers the hardware cost to around $600. Furthermore, I would think that if you have the means to build yourself a setup with enough CPU, RAM and disk space to store multiple copies of huge drive images and run them in VMWare or Virtual PC, spending another grand on real Apple hardware would probably be no big deal.
And as for the other part of your theory, if it's so damn easy to "port" security threats from Windows to other Intel-based operating systems, I wonder why all the Linux distros and all the BSDs aren't rife with security holes by now, simply because they share a common CPU with Windows? After all, those operating systems have been running on the Intel platforms for more than 15 years right alongside Windows. Horrors!
It's the software, not the hardware, people. Moving to Intel and increasing market share doesn't change the fact that OS X uses good security practices by default, like a typical Linux or BSD workstation. Anyone who says that [OS X|Linux|*BSD] is totally immune to all security threats doesn't understand computer security. The rest of us realize that they just do security a little better than Windows. It's the little things that count, like making the user enter the administrator password to run an application that affects the system, even if that user is already an administrator. Mac OS X has been available for six years now and there is not a single working virus out there. There are many reasons for this, and the CPU really isn't a big one.
Dear CmdrTaco,
/. article that reviewed the design of an Asus LCD monitor as if it mattered more than the image quality of the display, you could end up making a cute website and in the process destroying some of the reasons many people come here. I've been coming to Slashdot almost every day for at least 5 years now, and there is literally no other website that I can say that about. Please, please, do not screw up whatever dynamic is here that keeps bringing people like me back. What Slashdot needs is speed and compatibility tweaks wherever possible, not a redesign.
I have to agree with the parent. I think I even remember someone pointing out back when that article was published that one of the reasons for Slashdot's success is because it's always been "ugly", i.e. it works and delivers what we want pretty efficiently without attempting to be cutesy. It's not the fastest website in the world, but it is pretty lean and mean without much crap getting in the way of getting what you want out of the site, which is content and comments. I go to so many sites that are just so visually confusing no matter how many times I've been there, even though technically they may not even have as many elements as a typical Slashdot page. Either they get the colors all wrong or the spacing or something, but whatever it is I just end up never wanting to go back there.
So, CmdrTaco, I have to vote vehemently against the "make it pretty" qualification. Like the recent
I have to also echo another user's comments: More important than tweaking the website is getting rid of the articles that are absolute crap, like that recent link to a review of a ho-hum LCD monitor that just happened to have a brushed metal base. Whoopty-doo, it wasn't even that cute, and what kind of geek cares more about the design of a monitor than about how it performs? Even the jaw-dropping design of Apple's monitors wouldn't matter to most of us if their screens weren't also top of the line quality-wise, and really the best thing about Apple's design is that it doesn't distract from the actual display. The medium gray brushed aluminum reduces reflections and is great for people who need to work with accurate color all day long. And what moron actually thinks it's great to have a bezel so thick that you can't realistically use multiple monitors side-by-side?
But, I digress. The point is, that article and many others never should have made it to any section of Slashdot. It was a waste of space and most of the comments here reflected that fact.
It's not the look of the site that is of major importance. Just make it so that those who care can have a custom stylesheet to change the colors a bit, and otherwise leave well enough alone.
Oh, except for one thing: In the past year or so those icons (the ones you mentioned you don't want to change) have gotten ugly enough to actually be jarring. It's really the only thing about the site that is actually ugly enough to me to be distracing at times. Used to be they were all the same size. Now we have icons that are different sizes and even rectangular with different orientations. That's insane, and oftentimes it breaks the layout now, making gaping white spaces where there shouldn't be. If anything you should reconsider redesigning those graphics and sticking to a specific size square from now on as a policy. It would certainly make designing new layouts in the future a hell of a lot easier. There is a reason that icons on your computer aren't all different sizes and irregularly shaped. Why are you doing it on your website?
I don't know what was wrong with 64x64, but if you designed your icon graphics behind the scenes in a larger size from now on, say 256x256 or even 512x512, and then used a scaled down version for the site, I don't see why you couldn't be prepared for future upgrades for the next decade or longer by simply shifting to a larger version of the graphics. If 64x64 really isn't adequate at this point then shift to 96x96 or something, then later on you can
Bonjour for Windows includes the printer wizard that lets Windows PCs discover Bonjour network printers (almost any modern printer) or any printer shared by Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Regarding networking between Mac and Windows I had similar trouble with previous versions of OS X, but Tiger seems to have improved things a bit. SMB servers always show up in the network browser now, and connecting is no problem. Tiger even seems to be able to save the login user and password for SMB servers, which Panther always had trouble with. Panther only saw about five out of eight shared folders on my file server; Tiger sees them all and can connect to them all.
Some things to look at are your firewall settings (on both ends, but especially on the Windows end). Make sure you're using Windows 2000 or later. Make sure the access permissions are correct on your Windows shares (e.g. is the share set up to allow guest users or whatever, depends on how you're trying to connect). If you're in a network where you're limited to a single workgroup you can put your Mac(s) in the same workgroup as the PCs using the Directory Access utility (in the Utilities folder). That way you don't have multiple workgroup folders cluttering up your network browser. Of course domains and Active Directory access is a whole other animal that I don't know about, but if you're doing relatively simple network sharing between Windows and Mac OS X, Tiger seems to work much better.
There are some tricks with printers, like you can print from Windows to a lot of printers shared from Mac OS X if you're using one of the CUPS drivers on the Mac side and you tell Windows that it's printing to a LaswerWriter. Things like that. I was able to set up printing from my Mac to an Epson CX6600 printer shared from Windows with no problem so far. YMMV.
So if I don't run any mac osx machines this software is useless right?
No, if you had read the release notes you'd see that you can use the Bonjour Printer Wizard to discover local Bonjour/Rendezvous printers on your network. Almost all current printers have Bonjour built-in, at least network printers. If you do happen to have any Macs on your network running at least Mac OS X 10.4 your Windows PC will also be able to access any printers shared from those Macs.
If you don't really do any printer sharing on your home network or have a laptop that you take to other locations where there might be network printers or Macs with shared printers attached to them, you probably won't see any benefit from installing this.
Maybe, just maybe, I don't want devices jumping onto my network and configuring themselves any way they like.
I think you're completely misunderstanding this whole concept.
Bonjour (aka Zeroconf) devices don't really "configure" themselves, and they won't magically jump onto your network in any way they couldn't do without Bonjour. I think there is a part of it that makes networking easier if there is no DHCP server available, like if you directly connect two computers together to share files, but if there is a DHCP server I'm sure that takes precedence over automagic network addressing.
Mostly Bonjour devices just broadcast a few packets that let other Bonjour aware devices find them, if they want to. It means that rather than having to remember the specific IP address of every device you ever connect to your network (computers, routers, network printers, file servers, network storage devices, etc.), you only have to open the appropriate type of network browser and all the discoverable devices of that type will show up.
Open up the printer setup utility on a Mac and instead of the utility asking you where the printer is that you want to connect to, it gives you a list of every discoverable printer on your network. Most current network printers have this capability built in now, so after a few seconds they just show up in the printer browser. If you've installed the driver already or its one of a few hundred drivers already built into Mac OS X, all you have to do at that point is select the printer and click "Add" and you're done. I know, scary stuff.
With Bonjour you can even use iChat to chat with your local network neighors without having any account set up with ICQ/MSN/AIM or whatever. Users that make themselves available via Bonjour simply show up in your buddy list, and you show up in theirs (if you enabled Bonjour in the preferences for that application).
It's like automatic DNS for your LAN. You do enjoy not having to find Slashdot.org by its IP address, do you not? And isn't it helpful that if Slashdot.org moves to a new IP address you can still get to it by typing in the same human-readable address? In the same way your computer can pick up any available address anytime it connects to the network, and simultaneously it will always be available at "MyComputerName.local". You can ping your computer by that name, connect to it by that name to access shared files, type that name in a web browser, etc. Bonjour doesn't stop you from restricting your DHCP server, using static addresses, running a firewall, or whatever else you want to do to keep control over your network. You can also block UDP port 5353 if you really want to deprive yourself of the benefits of Bonjour. And of course all this only works on the local network, it's not publicly accessible by anyone on the Internet.
Of course, if you really don't want a device on your network at all, there is a very simple solution: don't plug it into your network.
By the way, Bonjour (aka Rendezvous before Apple had to change the name due to trademark issues) is merely their implementation of Zeroconf, which is an open IETF standard. There are also open-source implementations for Linux, and as far as I'm concerned it's one of the best things to come to local area networking since DHCP. You might want to look into it.
Time to add D-Link to the hardware vendor blacklist. Whenever you're asked by your non-tech friends what hardware they should buy, recommend anything BUT D-Link, and tell them to actively AVOID D-Link.
I always wonder about something whenever someone suggests boycotting an entire company's products like this because of a few little problems. Namely, which perfect heart-warming angel company am I supposed to shop with from now on? Don't Linksys, Netgear, Belkin, IOGear, etc. all have their own problems? Last time I checked Belkin was building some seriously boneheaded ideas into their routers, and got burned for it pretty bad. Are we supposed to build our own routers out of Linux boxen or something to satisfy your outrage over some technical glitches? Please get over yourself unless you can provide us with a good argument that Company X is somehow immensely more evil than companies A, B, and C. We have to get our cheapo networking equipment somewhere.
As a non-computer-person hoping to shortly shift to Linux, here is what I and my fellow newbie dummies want/need:
1. Insert CD.
2. Click OK.
3. Done.
I'm sure that's pretty obvious, so the question is: how close are Linux distros to being to that level, and if the answer is 'not close' then what are the obstacles to getting there and how are they being addressed?
The sad thing here is that both of us need to preface our remarks with "this is not a troll, I swear".
Sorry to disappoint, but you will not find a single Linux distribution like that, despite what many people here will tell you. I've used Linux full-time as a desktop off and on for years, from straight Debian (hard) to Mandrake/Mandriva (fairly easy). I even tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu, the most recent release. Everyone who ever says Linux is easy really has no clue what easy means to non-technical people. I mean, come on, you have to find and run a special script just to get support for playing DVDs and configure other simple things that are essential for a typical desktop user. If you're not lucky enough to have heard of this special script you get to spend hours on the web learning about obscure and difficult to find packages like libdvdcss, blah blah blah. Your typical geek will wade through it all with infinite patience, not having a clue how difficult this stuff is for non-geeks. Then they proceed to tell everyone how easy it is to use Linux for anything and everything.
If you (a non-computer-person) are serious about switching away from Windows you need to get yourself a Mac, because "desktop Linux" has a loooong way to go in terms of polish. I'll keep checking it out myself every year or so, but so far I have not been impressed with the progress and I'm sure a person like you won't be either. Of course, it's a free country, so feel free to download a couple dozen distros and find out for yourself just how ludicrous it is to say that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop.
- You have to stop everything on Mac OS (Linux, BSD, whatever) to get into Windows and vice versa.
True.
- Data exchange between systems is horrible (common FAT32/ext2 partition? yikes!)
Not necessarily. Windows can read/write HFS+ with some third party software.
"if you're on mushrooms, the hour long warp scene makes total sense" ...and if you're not on mushrooms, it's only 5 minutes long!
Haha, funny, but actually the original that was shown in theaters was 25 minutes long if I'm remembering correctly. Apparently it was a big hit with the LSD/marijuana crowd at the time. I can't imagine watching 25 minutes of that stuff without drugs.
That's cute, but it won't run on Macs. Mine would do all that without a virtual machine, and also boot my choice of Mac OS X or LinuxPPC/LinuxIntelMac on PPC or Intel Macs. Although Windows would probably need a virtual machine setup like that because it pukes if you try to run it on different hardware than what you installed on. One of the great things about Mac OS X is that it's portable to any Mac capable of running Mac OS X, it doesn't care if the hardware changes. Same with a properly configured Linux distro like Knoppix that has good hardware detection. Totally portable as long as it's running on the right processor. So to cover all the bases you'd need three different Linux partitions (Linux for x86, Linux for PPC, Linux for Intel Mac), and two different Mac OS X partitions (Mac OS X for PPC, Mac OS X for Intel). It's a bit complicated, but I'm sure I could make it all work.
/. post from my new (used) iBook! Yay!
By the way, this is my first
Am I the only one that is less excited about the Linux part than about the fact that the Intel Macs can apparently boot from USB drives? Up until now Macs have only been capable of booting from Firewire drives, something about the USB bus getting reset during the boot process. This means it will eventually be possible to carry around a single USB drive from which you can boot your choice of Windows, Linux or Mac OS X on any available computer hardware that supports booting from USB, whether it's a "PC" or a Mac. This is very cool.
But maybe I'm the only one crazy enough to imagine having a drive with bootable partitions of Windows, Linux, "LinuxIntelMac", LinuxPPC, and Mac OS X, and being able to carry around my entire computing environment without carrying any computer hardware with me. Put it on a 2.5" notebook drive in a small USB 2.0/Firewire drive enclosure and it will fit in a shirt pocket. Notebook drives go up to 120GB and 7200rpm these days too, so it's not like it would be slow. Wherever you go, you're home. I've even seen some drive enclosures with integrated fingerprint readers. The whole disk is encrypted so you wouldn't have to worry about losing information if it's stolen. Keep an identical drive in a computer at home and you can probably even keep a backup of the entire multi-OS drive with something like dd.
Someday I'm going to actually turn this from a pipe dream into a reality, just you wait.
then it's two years in gaol for you sonny jim
I have seen this spelling before, and I realize it's a perfectly valid spelling on the other side of the pond, but I don't think I'll ever get used to seeing it. It looks like a dyslexic person trying to spell "goal". Absolutely bizarre.
Hopefully there's a way to convert all my current data (about 50 hours of entry worth) into GnuCash's format. I'm definitely willing to give it a try..
I wouldn't be in a hurry if I were you. I'm sure GnuCash can import your QIF file from Quicken, but you don't want to use this version of GnuCash since it's an unstable development version. Also, you don't explicitly mention what operating system you're using, but just in case do you realize GnuCash only runs on Linux? As far as I know, anyway. And I get a funny feeling you aren't using Linux and probably aren't ready to switch just to use GnuCash.
Several people have mentioned Moneydance so far in this discussion and I'm taking a close look at it myself. I would be much more interested in seeing how well a person like you and your finances get along with Moneydance. Personally I hate all platform-specific software no matter what platform it's on (especially for important things like finances). For that main reason I have never really given GnuCash much attention and Moneydance is looking good to me since it supports Mac OS X along with Windows and Linux. And it can import your Quicken QIF data, of course. On top of that it also seems to support a lot of the online features that make people stick with Quicken. So you really might want to check it out. And if you find a bug, get on the phone with them and see how they respond. That would be interesting to hear about as well.
This may sound like a plug but I don't work for them and haven't even used the software (yet). It just looks to me like a much better option especially if you are running Windows or Mac OS X. If I had a household with mixed Win/Mac/Linux computers (I do) I can't imagine using anything that isn't cross-platform for something this important. Quicken may run on Mac and Windows but have you ever tried migrating Quicken data from one platform to the other? It's a joke. Hopefully Moneydance can handle such situatiosn better.
Those people have probably already dropped Apple due to their long standing attitude toward backwards compatibility. If you know anyone who relies on 4 year old Mac software, they're either going to pay for an upgrade (if it exists), or they won't be Mac users for long.
The majority of the userbase ate the OSX upgrade without complaint. They'll eat the Intel transition in the same way.
Let's see, you're comparing people upgrading their operating system on hardware they already own to upgrading their hardware. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Like comparing apples to... refrigerators.
Apple would not survive burning tens of millions of Mac owners like you and the other guy are suggesting. But whatever. At least your nonsense ideas are probably helping to bring down the cost of PPC hardware.
most companies know and Apple certainly does that PPC and Universal binaries are a stepping stone. I doubt that if all but the most mainstream apps even pay lip service to it in a couple of years from now. PPC users will basically be left hanging out to dry and I seriously doubt Apple is going to produce a Rosetta for PPC anytime soon.
Are you insane? I buy a quad-core G5 today for $3,500+ and Apple and all the software developers in the world are going to a$$-fuck me within a couple of years because they might have to spend a few more hours on cross-platform debugging? That would be absolute madness. Do you realize how many people would drop Apple like a hot potato if that were to happen, and never buy Apple again? Do you have any clue how many MILLIONS of PPC machines there are out there and how many years it will take for the Intel side to even come close to matching that installed base? Do you have any clue how long the useful lifetime of your typical Mac is? You can run the latest Mac OS X on hardware from 1995 with a few upgrades, and it's supported going almost all the way back to the original iMac from 1999.
Apple was developing Mac OS X on Intel for YEARS before they did this public switch. Something tells me that they've found most of the potential problems already. This isn't going to be another Java fiasco, code once--debug everywhere. For 90% of software developers the difference between compiling for PPC and compiling a universal binary is checking one more checkbox in Xcode. Now that they've done one switch they've left the door open for future switches. Developers would have to lose their minds to start compiling Intel-only binaries sooner than 5 years down the line, and by that time there is no gaurtantee that Apple will still be sticking to Intel processors. After all, they only stuck with OS X on PPC for 5 years.
Furthermore, many Mac software developers have a long history of supporting earlier architectures for years after they've been obsoleted. Witness how long many binaries were available for the 680x0 chips after the PowerPC models came out. Fat binaries made that transition pretty painless too. If I'm wrong I'll eat my hat, but without contravening evidence your assertion is baseless FUD. The PowerPC platform will be supported for a long time to come, and if Intel doesn't stay on the ball Apple can switch back to PowerPC anytime. Universal binaries don't care, and Mac OS X Tiger is completely universal at this point.
And this is something I don't think anyone has pointed out yet: Apple could even offer both platforms at the same time, kind of like they're doing on their website right this very minute . *gasp* Oh noes!!!1one!!11
Gimp would get a lot more popular if... If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently.
That's exactly what they've been doing recently with their "software activation" initiative. Same with Macromedia, only they call it "product activation". Now instead of borrowing someone's CD for an afternoon you'll have to find a cracked version online somewhere. Makes it much more difficult for the common user to pirate it. Everything later than Photoshop 7 for Windows and CS on the Mac requires activation, and can't be activated with the same serial number more than once or twice. It's really pretty effective.
Oddly enough a lot of people are still going to go through all the trouble of finding and downloading a 300MB cracked version of Photoshop rather than using the GIMP. And if they don't know how to get the cracked version they will buy Photoshop Elements for $79 rather than using the GIMP. That's how bad the GIMP sucks, according to your average user. So no, I don't think GIMP is going to get more popular until it improves a LOT. GimpShop is merely a very small step in the right direction. Another great step would be to stop calling it the GIMP. That name is absolutely infantile and sounds totally ridiculous in non-geek circles.
Every year since 1998 or so was also supposed to be the year of the Linux desktop, but that hasn't happened either. There are reasons for this, people, whether you understand them or not.
OpenOffice.org is the same way. People only use OO.org when they have no way of obtaining Microsoft Office on the cheap. Either that or they are idealists. The only reason Firefox has taken off as fast as it has is because it has some great killer features that make the average person's life easier, e.g. ad blocking, popup blocking, tabbed browsing and many great extensions. If Firefox was still as rough as OO.org, the GIMP, and Linux in general, nobody would be using it. This whole idea of Linux or other open source software projects taking off like wildfire because of some external event is going to remain a pipe dream until our software gets a hell of a lot more polish. I say this as a person who has used Linux as a desktop, used OpenOffice.org and used the GIMP.
You'll know when these things no longer need to be drastically improved because you'll wake up one day and everyone you know will be using them. It's that simple.
Your 38MP back costs $50,000.
Do you have any idea how many shots you'd need to take to recoup costs? Dont forget all the 300 GB hard drives you're going to need to store onto. And those will last 10 years. Of course by then, we'll have 5 TB storage capacities.
On the other hand, medium print negatives are good for what? couple hundred years if stored in a decent binder?
Amazingly I already took all that into account. Apparently you didn't read the linked article, where the large format photographer figures he's already spending 80% or more of the cost of the 38MB back, without getting any of the benefits of digital like faster workflow and the ability to experiment with different exposures quickly and without extra cost. He crosses his fingers with every shot, hoping he was using the right shutter speed to get the effect he wanted (for shooting moving water for instance), and takes 87 photos at $3 per shot. Meanwhile his buddy with the digital back takes home 3,000 digital images and always gets the shot he wanted because he can immediately see the results of the last shot on the screen. The film guy still has to take his film to the developer while his buddy is already at home making prints from his digital files.
I've seen other articles by pros that say the same thing. Basically if you're doing it for a living you can afford a $30,000-50,000 digital back with the payments spread over a couple of years, and you still end up making out better than when you were using film. Most photographers realize that having a digital version of the negative has huge advantages, so they convert them to digital anyway by using a $30,000-50,000 drum scanner! They either have to own one or pay someone else to do the scan to the tune of $300 per photo! But wait, that was just a 35mm negative, large format is probably much more expensive to scan. Newsflash, if you aren't just a hobbyist taking a few photos a month, photography is very expensive, especially medium and large format photography. Oddly enough if you're any good at it you can still make a pretty good living.
Digital files will last forever with proper backups. Just copy them to new media every few years. The media itself isn't supposed to last forever, and doesn't need to. Keep two or three copies in different physical locations and use an error-correction strategy like PAR2 to guard against bit-rot. The ability of a lossy analog film negative to last a hundred years before decomposing is overrated. Where is your Star Trek style replicator that you need to make a perfect, lossless copy of that negative to preserve it for another hundred years after that? By the time you're done paying for the temperature and humidity-controlled storage space to store all those negatives, a few multi-terabyte storage systems will seem like an incredible bargain in comparison. You already blew your own argument out of the water by mentioning that we will soon have affordable multi-terabyte storage solutions. And I'd like to see you run a keyword search on a roomful of boxed negatives. So what's your point? Any advantages that film used to have are rapidly disappearing. Digital is here to stay, whether we like it or not.
The KM 5D is definitely a nice option. The others don't have the image stabilization which of course gives you the extra 2-3 stops. If your subject is moving image stabilization won't help much, unfortunately. In that case the more important thing would be high ISO capability, which would probably put the D50 out in front for you. If you can keep the camera perfectly still the images stabilization is pretty useless.
You say you don't like dSLRs, but you don't say what you're trying to shoot, so I don't know if a compact digicam would suit your needs at all, but just in case I will second the above recommendation of the Fujifilm Finepix F10, which is the first consumer digicam capable of giving clean images at higher ISOs up to 1600. If you can find the F11 it is a slightly improved version with a higher resolution LCD screen and a couple of other things. It seems to only be available in Japan right now, but quite a few people on the DPReview forums have had good luck buying one from a seller on eBay called time2envy. Those are 6MP cameras, like the KM 7D/5D. Unfortunately they don't have a RAW option, or they would really be incredible cameras.
Another option is a compromise between digicam and dSLR. The Fujifilm Finepix S9000 (S9500 in EU) is one of those SLR-style digicams. It's got a 9MP chip with the same technology as the F10/F11, and a 10.7x optical zoom lense that I think starts at a nice wide 28mm. I've been looking at that one myself. The Finepix E900 is a compact counterpart with the same 9MP sensor. Both can do RAW but their high ISO images are slightly less clean than the F10/F11.
If you're willing to go ultra-compact there is also the Finepix Z1/Z2. Same technology, good high ISO performance but again not quite as clean as the F10/F11, and of course no RAW, but what do you expect from an ultra-compact under $300? The Z2 is of course a better version of the Z1 but you'll have to get it from that guy on eBay.
If you were willing to go with a dSLR and spend more than $1,000, the best option for low-light photography would probably be the Canon 20D which can give fairly clean images even at ISO 3200.
But, after saying all this I would also say that if you don't need it right now you might want to wait until after PMA 2006 to see what new wonders will be announced. Keep an eye on dpreview.com at the end of February. There have been quite a few announcements already but those Finepix models I mentioned above still seem to be the only good low-light contenders short of a real dSLR. You never know though.
Oh, and since you'll probably be working with a high ISO no matter which camera you get, you'll probably want to invest in NeatImage or NoiseNinja. They do a great job cleaning up moderate ISO noise.
Good luck.