How about for relatively recent Apple hardware that will run OS X poorly, like my aging 350MHz iMac?
Hi, I don't know if you realize this, but your 350Mhz iMac (slot loading?) is capable of running OS X 10.3 adequately for common desktop uses, provided you make sure it has the latest firmware update and give it plenty of RAM (Crucial.com is a good place to get RAM for Apple computers). Might want to upgrade the hard drive too, to at least 10-20GB, but that's no big deal. Couple hundred dollars and you'll have basically a new computer. Seriously, I have direct experience with a 350 that's probably the same model as yours. It runs fine with OS X, but it ran out of space after a while because I only gave it a 5GB partition on a 10GB drive. Shortsighted on my part.
Let me just reiterate the firmware thing: If you don't have the latest firmware, your Mac will die when it encounters OS X. Literally. IIRC your model MUST have firmware 4.1.9 before installing OS X. If it does, no problem. If it doesn't, don't even attempt to boot any CD that has OS X on it. Booting from any bootable OS X CD will destroy your computer, unless that firmware is up to date. Check the following Apple Support documents before doing your upgrade. After that, have fun, because it will work great! Will probably last another good 5 years. Might even work with upcoming 10.4 Tiger release, but that's iffy.
The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.
Hey, to anyone who wants to run Mac-only applications on top of YDL (or probably any Linux distro running on a PPC processor) you might want to know about Mac-on-Linux. Apparently it's capable of running pretty much any version of the Mac OS from System 7.5.2 to OS X 10.3.x, at near native speeds. I've never had the chance to try it myself but it looks pretty interesting. The site says it's not an emulator, which is why it's fairly fast. Check out the multi-session support too. You can run 2-3 different versions of Mac OS at the same time. Probably more, only limited by memory and cpu speed.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo. Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does anything more really need to be said? The GNOME developers could have easily made both camps happy, yet they have consistently chosen to stay their own course for no apparent reason besides arrogance. Thus the simple issue of spatial versus non-spatial file browsing has blown up to such proportions that even those of us who don't really follow the whole KDE vs. GNOME scene have now had to hear about it dozens of times over the last few months. That doesn't even take into account all the other issues.
The simple fact is the GNOME devs went against the wishes of enough people that a fork has been created. That's the way of things with free software. For all supporters of the new fork, GNOME just didn't "have it right". Tim is just yet another person that just stands around telling everyone GNOME is great and therefore we're all wrong. Ed says it like it is, there is a problem in the GNOME camp, and the problem is that the GNOME devs don't seem to be responsive to the users. We don't need a better reason. If you think we do, you're missing the entire point.
Manufacturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the failure age of the unit.
No, manucaturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the average failure age of the unit, adjusted for the percentage of people who ever bother to claim warranty replacements and also have kept all necessary paperwork to do so for the duration of the warranty period. Since this percentage is oftentimes small, the warranty will often be slightly longer than the actual expected life of the unit, and the few people who have kept the proper receipts and manage to claim a replacement will simply be written off as a marketing expense. Meanwhile the long warranty terms will create a partially false confidence in their products and pull customers away from their competitors who may or may not have better actual life expectancy on their products regardless of their warranty terms.
I'm glad I could be here to simplify that for you.
I'm sorry, but your comment is wrong on every count.
To begin with, space is not the opposite of the ocean. Exposure to the ocean is fatal. It's not a happy-go-lucky place even if you stick to the shore. If you're trying to cross it, you better know what you're doing and be prepared. I don't know anybody that can breathe water and survive immersion in water that is less than about 97 degrees for more than 24 hours without dying of hypothermia. If the water isn't as warm or warmer than your core body temperature, it will eventually suck enough heat from you that you won't survive. 48 hours is about the limit, even in a heated pool. If you manage to survive that long you'll soon be dying of dehydration since you can't survive by drinking saltwater.
The ocean is an alien environment. When we travel on the ocean, we take the land with us in the form of ships. We take our native land-based water with us in the form of barrels full of fresh water. We take as much food with us as possible. In modern times we take even more: communication devices, auxiliary skins (immersion suits and PFDs), auxiliary land (inflatable rafts) and auxiliary food and water (emergency rations). All this so we don't die from exposure to the native environment.
Another correction, you cannot just reach out and pull food out of the ocean just anywhere. There are vast areas of ocean where you can't find jack squat to eat, and even if you could it would mostly be fish, and surviving on fish for months at a time is not very healthy. Humans need a balanced diet of vegetables, fruits, meat (proteins), and grains or starches. Ever hear of scurvy? Lots of people have died on the ocean even when nothing else went wrong just from not having the right things to eat. All they needed was some vitamin C, but apparently you can't just pull that out of the ocean. Many ships either failed to take enough food or got stuck in the doldrums for weeks and everyone simply starved to death.
For the last thing: distance. This is the real universe, and scale does matter. It just doesn't matter as much as you think. Today, it takes us three days to reach the moon, and that's with current technology (actually it's basically 40-year-old technology now). It took sailors months or years to travel across the oceans or circumnavigate the globe. That's a difference between 5,000-10,000km and 384,000km. We have the capability today to build something that would take men to Mars and bring them back within a few months. That's a minimum distance of 54,000,000km or so, but would probably end up more like 80-120,000,000km... each way.
To top it off, the original explorers often set out with no idea where they were going or if there would be any food along the way or even an edge on the other side to keep them from falling off the earth. For all they knew it could have been a million miles to the other side. Yet they went anyway.
Comparing the exploration of our globe throughout our history as a species with exploring our solar system or even our local star systems is not a bad analogy. You're off by several orders of magnitude when you reference travelling to another galaxy, which would be very difficult unless we discover how to use wormholes or something. Nobody is talking about going to another galaxy. Technology will advance, and it may eventually be just as easy to get from here to Alpha Centauri as it was for early mariners to get from one side of the ocean to the other. And we'll have the benefit of knowing where we're going because we'll have already seen it through our telescopes.
Those who understand the ocean know that space is similar in many more ways than it is different. It's dangerous, and if you're going out there you need discipline and tenacity, but if we try hard enough we can master it just like we mastered the terrestrial oceans. Then maybe we can get off this rock and spread out, and make sure the human race is still around in another ten thousand years.
Is it just me or does this make absolutely no sense whatsoever:
You're also right in that AA is good for one thing: screenshots. I find screenshots of OS X, antialiased fonts and all, to be quite pretty. But I would never want to actually use a system with antialiased fonts--they're horribly grating on the eyes if you're doing anything but looking at a screenshot.
What exactly is the difference between looking at a screenshot of a screen and looking at the... um, screen? Hello? I don't get it. If it looks good on a screenshot, why doesn't it look good on your screen? Please elaborate.
As usual I didn't say they were idiots anywhere in my post. Which implies that you might be an idiot for thinking that I did. But it would be rude to make that implication, wouldn't it? You would know.
Micros~1 may have great coders but they are faced with a huge problem due to the fact that their software hasn't been designed properly to be stable, modular, maintainable and upgradeable without breaking a lot of things in the process. They have been fully aware for the last 20 years or so how difficult it is to upgrade software on millions of computers. They nevertheless have failed to build in robustness and easy upgradeability. I don't need to be a developer to know that with the money and talent that they have at their disposal, they could have done a much better job in the first place and then they wouldn't be faced with this gargantuan task of making SP2 work on millions of computers flawlessly.
You know, it could easily be argued that the fact that Microsoft supports all the "craziest hardware" has supported the development of crazy hardware, rather than functional hardware built to some sort of standards that would be usable everywhere, not just on Microserf operating systems. Kind of similar to the way that their support of easy infection has supported the development of viruses, trojans, spyware, malware, etc.
I have nothing to apologize for by choosing to no longer tolerate crappy software design, thankyouverymuch.
What I find most fascinating about this is that we're talking about the latest Windows operating system in the year 2004, and Micros~1 is still naming their files with the ancient DOS 8+3 format:
Once in the folder, engineers had to rename "spuninst.txt" to "spuninst.bat" and execute the batch command "batch spuninst.bat."
Mod this funny if you like but I don't find it particularly funny that the software that most of the world is being forced to use is still crippled and poorly designed to such an amazing extent. Unbelievable.
And let's see, this is RELEASE CANDIDATE 2 (TWO) of their new ultra-wonderful service pack, and the following happens to your computer when you try to install it:
After that process finished, some interesting events occurred. The rollback process uninstalled every device that existed in the PC. Network cards, video cards and all system resources were uninstalled. The PC was able to recover all of the uninstalled items, except one, upon a reboot. The graphics card, the Matrox Millennium P650, couldn't be recovered. Engineers tried to reinstall the drivers but, oddly enough, the Matrox folder was erased from the system and unable to be recovered. The only way to correct the problem was to go to Matrox's Web site and download the drivers from the support page.
Again, unbelievable. Sixty billion dollars behind them and this is the best they can do. Why the world puts up with this, I'll never fathom.
As you have just demonstrated, having a PhD/MD does not equate to intelligence. What a PhD often equates to is mere perserverence shown by the fact that someone trudged through 7-10 years of some sort of schooling and wrote a hundred page thesis with mostly complete sentences. Now, after accomplishing that, this person you've described (and many like him) has a framed certificate on his wall and a complete inability to learn how to properly use a tool that he uses every single day. This is the very definition of moron, someone who can't learn.
But probably the main problem with folks like him is that after going through 7-10 years of schooling he is now "educated" and therefore doesn't need to listen to you or anyone else or take 5 minutes to learn how to do some minor thing correctly the first time. He's got that framed certificate on the wall and his "office manager" to keep him in this "educated" frame of mind for the next 40 years. Doesn't matter how smart you are now or were in the past if your mind is closed to further learning.
If his time was so valuable he would spend an hour sometime and sit down and learn to use the tool, rather than continually breaking the tool and asking someone else to always be there to fix it.
Of course, none of this precludes the fact that 90% of the time the software could be made easier to use in the first place. But it doesn't mean a PhD is a genius. Most of them are just consistent hard workers, and there's something to be said for that too, no matter what their intelligence level.
Most pages are accessible to the blind, or mostly so. Screenreaders do text-to-speech quite well - but they are browsers themselves, and thus, since this site was only accessible with IE, blocked from Odeon's site.
Um, hi. A thought just occurred to me; maybe it's crazy, I don't know. Why would a blind person want to know what's showing at his local theater?
Imagine Microsoft making software that is so full of security holes that they are forced to release patches several times a month, every month.
Now imagine Microsoft making products that are more manageable and secure from the start, so that releasing more than one patch per quarter is an extremely rare occurance, and updating is a simple procedure that only requires rebooting your server if you're updating the core of the operating system.
I don't want free software, but I do want Free Software, and I'll pay for it if it's something I need or want. I know a lot of others will too. It's not just about getting free stuff. It's not really about money at all. It's about choices and control. As in, who gets to control my computer, my data and by extension my world and my life.
Don't get me wrong, Open Source is good is a good thing but you should pay for your codecs like everyone else does.
Any particular reason? Just because a corporation wants it that way?
Reverse engineering codecs/encryption methods without paying royalties is just as bad as software piracy.
So if someone patents a codec or algorithm that is so simple you could solve it in your head in 5 seconds, you should pay them royalties for that thought? There are many reasons that software and algorithm patents are bad. The simplest one is that patenting such things stifles innovation and damages our economy relative the rest of the world. There are much smarter people than me that have been trying to point this out for decades now.
Commercial software will be key to the success of linux on the desktop and those that stand in the way of it are only helping MS keep their hold on the market.
Commercial software is not required to be proprietary. People like free stuff, but most of us will be willing to pay for commercial software that doesn't attempt to exert unnecessary control over our computers, our data, or our lives. So yes, instead of paying for this crippled proprietary software, many of us will be waiting for a Free-as-in-speech implementation. By coincidence this usually means it will also be free-as-in-beer. Kudos to the first company that markets a Free-as-in-speech implementation of something like this and charges money for it. They will make money.
isn't this why the name was changed from 'free software' to open-source?
No, from what I understand Free Software (the capitalized version) and Open Source are two different things. Open Source may also be Free Software, in the same way that a rectangle may also be a square, but not necessarily. Software that is given away for "free" as in beer doesn't necessarily have anything to do with either Free Software or Open Source. There are all kinds of closed source and proprietary software that is given away free, but the real Free Software has always been Free Software, capitalized, and free as in speech. Its name has not been changed to Open Source, that concept is philosophically separate, even though they do often exist in the same time at the same place. There exists proprietary software that is non-free (and non-Free) and yet is Open Source. The nature of Free Software being what it is, I think that all Free Software must be Open Source. The reverse is definitely not true.
It would behoove us all to better understand the differences between these two concepts. In my humble opinion, that is.
If you compare a screenshot of KDE against one of Gnome, it's obvious that Gnome is less in-your-face than KDE.
What? Give me a break. I've seen GNOME desktop shots with ten times that much crud on the toolbars, and KDE can just as easily have a single tiny self-hiding toolbar with one button. Or none. What's so in-your-face about a single toolbar with a few buttons, in comparison to TWO toolbars "cluttering" my screen at all times?
If you're put off by the clutter and garishness of KDE then declutter it and use a different theme. There are several nice plain themes included and more available, probably even one that looks just like that GNOME desktop. KDE can be as simple as you make it. Or as complex and cluttered as you want.
Of course, I've always been put off by the GNOME icons looking too "cutesy", like they're trying to outdo the classic Mac OS and doing a bad job of it. Oh well, to each his own. But it would take a matter of two minutes to declutter that KDE desktop and tweak the panel to make it look much nicer than the GNOME desktop you use as a comparison. It's just silly to say that one is less in-your-face than the other. One is definitely easier to configure than the other (for us dummies, anyway).
It's very interesting that I can now (3:30pm AK time, July 1) search for:
microsoft microsoft sucks cat rabbit linux "something better than windows"... and get plenty of hits for each. (Reference posts above this where people were saying that they got zero or just a couple of results for those same searches.) Except for the long phrase in quotes, there seem to be plenty of results. I got tired of clicking "Next >>" to see more results. They don't give a total so it still can't be directly compared to Google's results, but it looks like there is some sort of algorithm behind the scenes that's populating the search results more completely over time as it analyzes what people are searching for. Kind of interesting.
Also interesting is that most of the search results appear to be very relevant at this point in time, even when using a single search term. All the search results for "cat" that I looked at seemed to actually be about cats, not just containing the letters c-a-t. This new search engine may not be anything to sneer at. After we get over all the self-congratulating knee-jerk reactions, that is. I'm sure it will have its flaws, but at the moment it's looking much better than initial impressions on this site would suggest.
You're very confused about something. On/. (Slashdot, this website) whenever someone says "windows" they mean Microsoft Windows, the Operating System. Doesn't matter if it's capitalized or not. You definitely can't expect proper capitalization on this website. The guy you originally replied to was most definitely talking about Microsoft Windows, not windowed interfaces in general. Now I know why your replies have made very little sense. All GUI interfaces at this time are window-based, so why would we be talking about that? That's just goofy.
And secondly, the CLI on Mac OS X (the new Mac operating system) is great. Give it a try sometime. And it's certainly better than the Microsoft Windows Operating System[tm].
Viruses are not the illegal equivalent of spyware. Viruses are anonymous. Spyware reports back to an IP address or domain.
Backdoor type trojans report back to an IP address or IRC server quite often. It spys on your computer, illegally. Thus, illegal spyware, or the illegal equivalent of spyware. So we don't go quibbling over the word virus, viruses, trojans and worms are basically in the same class.
It's not magic at all. When people realize what's being installed, they will, most of the time, hit the cancel button.
This is commonly known as wishful thinking. An objective double-blind study of human nature regarding software warnings like this will show that you are vastly overestimating the intelligence of the general population, and/or how much they actually care about protecting their information. Just because you and I care doesn't mean everyone else does. I've made this mistaken assumption often, too.
A simple government-mandated warning like "this software collect information from your computer's storage and reports it to corporation X" would probably be good enough. Is the average person confused by the government-mandated warnings on cigarette packs?
I'm betting there's no way in hell that "the government" will actually mandate something even close to that clear. Oh, and by the way, about a quarter of the population still smoke cigarettes and it didn't go down just because of that little warning, so you're not proving anything that way.
You just answered your own question with that last sentence. Guns allow stupid, weak, and slow people to take intelligent, strong, and fast people out of the gene pool -- consistently. That pretty much destroys natural selection.
No, no. You missed my whole point again, even though I tried to make it so clear. Natural selection is a big abstract process. It doesn't have any particular purpose or job, it's just a way for us to describe something that happens over time in a population. Individuals in a species get killed off, and we call that natural selection. It's job is not to pick the best organism. In many cases it utterly fails in this, even in what you would call the "natural" world. Yet the species as a whole survives. If the best organism is not picked often enough, sometimes the species dies out. That's called extinction, and it has happened a million times even before homo sapiens existed. Besides which, there are two counterpoints to your statement:
1. Guns are not mobius strips, with only one side. They will point in either direction. They let smart, strong, and fast people take out the slow, stupid, weak ones just as easily as the other way around. A gun is an inanimate object that can be used to equal effect by either type of person or anything in the middle.
2. Being smart, strong or fast is not necessarily the best way to survive. Case in point: Sharks, cockroaches and tree sloths are not smart. The tree sloth is not fast. Cockroaches are not strong. Yet these species survive because they are well adapted to their environment. It has in fact been argued by many brilliant scientists and writers that sentience may be the downfall of our species. The other 99.999999% of species on this planet get along without sentience just fine and will continue to do so for as long as the planet is capable of supporting life. Sentience is merely an abberation in the process of life trying to survive.
Desirable from the standpoint of survival of the species. There is no particular skill involved in shooting someone at close range with a pistol.
First, the only trait that is desirable from a survival standpoint is one that helps the species survive. This is one of those concepts that's so simple it's difficult to understand unless you really think about it. Survival traits for a species are not always the same as survival traits for an individual. Salmon survive as a species just fine, but the individuals spawn and then immediately
But you don't seem to understand that we are discussing spyware, not viruses, and that the law we are discussing would make illegal much of the spyware which is legal today.
But I do seem to understand. You think that making spyware illegal will stop it from happening, even though its illegal equivalent (viruses) have not been stopped in the slightest by a dozen or more laws. The illegal counterparts have been going strong for decades. Even if the law did make spyware completely illegal, there will still be spyware in the form of trojans and backdoors made by anonymous people instead of (or possibly for) corporations. But the law doesn't even go that far, it just requires the spyware to inform the user better during installation about what it will do. Spyware will not magically become extinct because of a law.
No, people and corporations are doing it. Railing against the entire universe is absurd.
Who's railing against the universe? All I ever said was that these things happen in this universe, not that the universe causes it. Yet, it an abstract way the universe does cause everything that happens, since nothing would happen if the universe didn't exist.
No, it's not particulary insightful. It's simply blaming "the universe" for the actions of a few immoral corporations and individuals.
Of course there is no guiding force behind the universe, so there can be no blame. I do not blame the universe, I simply state what is and what isn't. Not what I want and what I don't want.
"Spyware" implies clandestine activity and it's not so clandestine when the user gives informed consent. If someone wants to install software on their computer which sends every keystroke back to some major corporation, I'm not about to call for laws making that illegal.
Ok, fine, I guess from now on there will be no spyware. It will all be "monitorware", and that will be just fine and dandy and legal. How much you want to bet that this new monitorware will tell you exactly what it does behind the scenes in simple enough English to allow the common person to understand what it's doing? The level of information you'd have to make the average person read through to really understand what a sp^H^Hmonitorware app is doing makes it ridiculous to think that most people will really have an informed decision in the end.
And you're still not going to stop the already illegal "spyware" (trojans, backdoors). It's going to keep on coming regardless of this law or any other. At least, as long as the technical problems aren't solved and the users are still ignorant. You've solved nothing while creating a new class of computer software that you will have to have some intelligence to avoid installing. Monitorware, I love it. Nobody pays attention to EULAs, why would they pay any attention to a message informing them that their computer will be monitored when they're trying to install a cool new game?
[sarcasm]It would be impossible to write spyware for Linux. No way that anyone could do that.[/sarcasm] Quit blaming the OS for the malicious actions of spyware authors. There is nothing inherent in Linux or BSD that would prevent spyware from being installed on it.
I guess you've missed the fact that there are these big holes in Windows and IE that allow software to install itself on your computer without any user interaction just by going to the wrong website or previewing the wrong email, or just by being connected to the Internet. When these get fixed I'll stop "blaming" the OS for being unsafe. I don't blame the computer for the actions of spyware or virus authors, I blame the computer for letting the spyware and viruses on my computer so easily.
See how I highlighted "just"? Notice that I did not say "instead" or imply, state, or hint that these things should not be taught now.
"Just" is a very ambigous word with several different meanings. Perhaps I interpreted it differently than you meant it. That doesn't mean
"humbly begging your pardon master maxwell, but I think you'll find that..."
Oh, oh my, please stop, that's just too funny. Please, sir, may I have another? Muwahahaha! I'm going to have to remember to use that exact phrase from now on if I ever reply to fmaxwell again. Hell, that's good enough for use on anybody! Good stuff.
Thanks for the heads-up on fmaxwell. You and I are in perfect agreement. Too bad you're posting as anon.
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Wait, who are you disagreeing with? The parent or the grandparent? Sounds like you're disagreeing with the parent and agreeing with the grandparent.
How about for relatively recent Apple hardware that will run OS X poorly, like my aging 350MHz iMac?
Hi, I don't know if you realize this, but your 350Mhz iMac (slot loading?) is capable of running OS X 10.3 adequately for common desktop uses, provided you make sure it has the latest firmware update and give it plenty of RAM (Crucial.com is a good place to get RAM for Apple computers). Might want to upgrade the hard drive too, to at least 10-20GB, but that's no big deal. Couple hundred dollars and you'll have basically a new computer. Seriously, I have direct experience with a 350 that's probably the same model as yours. It runs fine with OS X, but it ran out of space after a while because I only gave it a 5GB partition on a 10GB drive. Shortsighted on my part.
Let me just reiterate the firmware thing: If you don't have the latest firmware, your Mac will die when it encounters OS X. Literally. IIRC your model MUST have firmware 4.1.9 before installing OS X. If it does, no problem. If it doesn't, don't even attempt to boot any CD that has OS X on it. Booting from any bootable OS X CD will destroy your computer, unless that firmware is up to date. Check the following Apple Support documents before doing your upgrade. After that, have fun, because it will work great! Will probably last another good 5 years. Might even work with upcoming 10.4 Tiger release, but that's iffy.
iMac (Slot Loading): Install iMac Firmware 4.1.9 Before Mac OS X 10.2
Mac OS X: Chart of Available Firmware Updates
iMac: How to Install an iMac Firmware Update
The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.
Hey, to anyone who wants to run Mac-only applications on top of YDL (or probably any Linux distro running on a PPC processor) you might want to know about Mac-on-Linux. Apparently it's capable of running pretty much any version of the Mac OS from System 7.5.2 to OS X 10.3.x, at near native speeds. I've never had the chance to try it myself but it looks pretty interesting. The site says it's not an emulator, which is why it's fairly fast. Check out the multi-session support too. You can run 2-3 different versions of Mac OS at the same time. Probably more, only limited by memory and cpu speed.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does Gnome have such a simple checkbox, that would remove all objections? Noooooooo.
Does anything more really need to be said? The GNOME developers could have easily made both camps happy, yet they have consistently chosen to stay their own course for no apparent reason besides arrogance. Thus the simple issue of spatial versus non-spatial file browsing has blown up to such proportions that even those of us who don't really follow the whole KDE vs. GNOME scene have now had to hear about it dozens of times over the last few months. That doesn't even take into account all the other issues.
The simple fact is the GNOME devs went against the wishes of enough people that a fork has been created. That's the way of things with free software. For all supporters of the new fork, GNOME just didn't "have it right". Tim is just yet another person that just stands around telling everyone GNOME is great and therefore we're all wrong. Ed says it like it is, there is a problem in the GNOME camp, and the problem is that the GNOME devs don't seem to be responsive to the users. We don't need a better reason. If you think we do, you're missing the entire point.
Manufacturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the failure age of the unit.
No, manucaturers will always give a warranty that is shorter than the average failure age of the unit, adjusted for the percentage of people who ever bother to claim warranty replacements and also have kept all necessary paperwork to do so for the duration of the warranty period. Since this percentage is oftentimes small, the warranty will often be slightly longer than the actual expected life of the unit, and the few people who have kept the proper receipts and manage to claim a replacement will simply be written off as a marketing expense. Meanwhile the long warranty terms will create a partially false confidence in their products and pull customers away from their competitors who may or may not have better actual life expectancy on their products regardless of their warranty terms.
I'm glad I could be here to simplify that for you.
I'm sorry, but your comment is wrong on every count.
To begin with, space is not the opposite of the ocean. Exposure to the ocean is fatal. It's not a happy-go-lucky place even if you stick to the shore. If you're trying to cross it, you better know what you're doing and be prepared. I don't know anybody that can breathe water and survive immersion in water that is less than about 97 degrees for more than 24 hours without dying of hypothermia. If the water isn't as warm or warmer than your core body temperature, it will eventually suck enough heat from you that you won't survive. 48 hours is about the limit, even in a heated pool. If you manage to survive that long you'll soon be dying of dehydration since you can't survive by drinking saltwater.
The ocean is an alien environment. When we travel on the ocean, we take the land with us in the form of ships. We take our native land-based water with us in the form of barrels full of fresh water. We take as much food with us as possible. In modern times we take even more: communication devices, auxiliary skins (immersion suits and PFDs), auxiliary land (inflatable rafts) and auxiliary food and water (emergency rations). All this so we don't die from exposure to the native environment.
Another correction, you cannot just reach out and pull food out of the ocean just anywhere. There are vast areas of ocean where you can't find jack squat to eat, and even if you could it would mostly be fish, and surviving on fish for months at a time is not very healthy. Humans need a balanced diet of vegetables, fruits, meat (proteins), and grains or starches. Ever hear of scurvy? Lots of people have died on the ocean even when nothing else went wrong just from not having the right things to eat. All they needed was some vitamin C, but apparently you can't just pull that out of the ocean. Many ships either failed to take enough food or got stuck in the doldrums for weeks and everyone simply starved to death.
For the last thing: distance. This is the real universe, and scale does matter. It just doesn't matter as much as you think. Today, it takes us three days to reach the moon, and that's with current technology (actually it's basically 40-year-old technology now). It took sailors months or years to travel across the oceans or circumnavigate the globe. That's a difference between 5,000-10,000km and 384,000km. We have the capability today to build something that would take men to Mars and bring them back within a few months. That's a minimum distance of 54,000,000km or so, but would probably end up more like 80-120,000,000km... each way.
To top it off, the original explorers often set out with no idea where they were going or if there would be any food along the way or even an edge on the other side to keep them from falling off the earth. For all they knew it could have been a million miles to the other side. Yet they went anyway.
Comparing the exploration of our globe throughout our history as a species with exploring our solar system or even our local star systems is not a bad analogy. You're off by several orders of magnitude when you reference travelling to another galaxy, which would be very difficult unless we discover how to use wormholes or something. Nobody is talking about going to another galaxy. Technology will advance, and it may eventually be just as easy to get from here to Alpha Centauri as it was for early mariners to get from one side of the ocean to the other. And we'll have the benefit of knowing where we're going because we'll have already seen it through our telescopes.
Those who understand the ocean know that space is similar in many more ways than it is different. It's dangerous, and if you're going out there you need discipline and tenacity, but if we try hard enough we can master it just like we mastered the terrestrial oceans. Then maybe we can get off this rock and spread out, and make sure the human race is still around in another ten thousand years.
And by god those
Thanks for getting the point.
Is it just me or does this make absolutely no sense whatsoever:
You're also right in that AA is good for one thing: screenshots. I find screenshots of OS X, antialiased fonts and all, to be quite pretty. But I would never want to actually use a system with antialiased fonts--they're horribly grating on the eyes if you're doing anything but looking at a screenshot.
What exactly is the difference between looking at a screenshot of a screen and looking at the... um, screen? Hello? I don't get it. If it looks good on a screenshot, why doesn't it look good on your screen? Please elaborate.
As usual I didn't say they were idiots anywhere in my post. Which implies that you might be an idiot for thinking that I did. But it would be rude to make that implication, wouldn't it? You would know.
Micros~1 may have great coders but they are faced with a huge problem due to the fact that their software hasn't been designed properly to be stable, modular, maintainable and upgradeable without breaking a lot of things in the process. They have been fully aware for the last 20 years or so how difficult it is to upgrade software on millions of computers. They nevertheless have failed to build in robustness and easy upgradeability. I don't need to be a developer to know that with the money and talent that they have at their disposal, they could have done a much better job in the first place and then they wouldn't be faced with this gargantuan task of making SP2 work on millions of computers flawlessly.
You know, it could easily be argued that the fact that Microsoft supports all the "craziest hardware" has supported the development of crazy hardware, rather than functional hardware built to some sort of standards that would be usable everywhere, not just on Microserf operating systems. Kind of similar to the way that their support of easy infection has supported the development of viruses, trojans, spyware, malware, etc.
I have nothing to apologize for by choosing to no longer tolerate crappy software design, thankyouverymuch.
What I find most fascinating about this is that we're talking about the latest Windows operating system in the year 2004, and Micros~1 is still naming their files with the ancient DOS 8+3 format:
Once in the folder, engineers had to rename "spuninst.txt" to "spuninst.bat" and execute the batch command "batch spuninst.bat."
Mod this funny if you like but I don't find it particularly funny that the software that most of the world is being forced to use is still crippled and poorly designed to such an amazing extent. Unbelievable.
And let's see, this is RELEASE CANDIDATE 2 (TWO) of their new ultra-wonderful service pack, and the following happens to your computer when you try to install it:
After that process finished, some interesting events occurred. The rollback process uninstalled every device that existed in the PC. Network cards, video cards and all system resources were uninstalled. The PC was able to recover all of the uninstalled items, except one, upon a reboot. The graphics card, the Matrox Millennium P650, couldn't be recovered. Engineers tried to reinstall the drivers but, oddly enough, the Matrox folder was erased from the system and unable to be recovered. The only way to correct the problem was to go to Matrox's Web site and download the drivers from the support page.
Again, unbelievable. Sixty billion dollars behind them and this is the best they can do. Why the world puts up with this, I'll never fathom.
As you have just demonstrated, having a PhD/MD does not equate to intelligence. What a PhD often equates to is mere perserverence shown by the fact that someone trudged through 7-10 years of some sort of schooling and wrote a hundred page thesis with mostly complete sentences. Now, after accomplishing that, this person you've described (and many like him) has a framed certificate on his wall and a complete inability to learn how to properly use a tool that he uses every single day. This is the very definition of moron, someone who can't learn.
But probably the main problem with folks like him is that after going through 7-10 years of schooling he is now "educated" and therefore doesn't need to listen to you or anyone else or take 5 minutes to learn how to do some minor thing correctly the first time. He's got that framed certificate on the wall and his "office manager" to keep him in this "educated" frame of mind for the next 40 years. Doesn't matter how smart you are now or were in the past if your mind is closed to further learning.
If his time was so valuable he would spend an hour sometime and sit down and learn to use the tool, rather than continually breaking the tool and asking someone else to always be there to fix it.
Of course, none of this precludes the fact that 90% of the time the software could be made easier to use in the first place. But it doesn't mean a PhD is a genius. Most of them are just consistent hard workers, and there's something to be said for that too, no matter what their intelligence level.
Most pages are accessible to the blind, or mostly so. Screenreaders do text-to-speech quite well - but they are browsers themselves, and thus, since this site was only accessible with IE, blocked from Odeon's site.
Um, hi. A thought just occurred to me; maybe it's crazy, I don't know. Why would a blind person want to know what's showing at his local theater?
Laugh, or answer the question.
Imagine Microsoft making software that is so full of security holes that they are forced to release patches several times a month, every month.
Now imagine Microsoft making products that are more manageable and secure from the start, so that releasing more than one patch per quarter is an extremely rare occurance, and updating is a simple procedure that only requires rebooting your server if you're updating the core of the operating system.
You decide which is better.
Waah, I want free software.
If you don't have money, get a real job son.
I don't want free software, but I do want Free Software, and I'll pay for it if it's something I need or want. I know a lot of others will too. It's not just about getting free stuff. It's not really about money at all. It's about choices and control. As in, who gets to control my computer, my data and by extension my world and my life.
Don't get me wrong, Open Source is good is a good thing but you should pay for your codecs like everyone else does.
Any particular reason? Just because a corporation wants it that way?
Reverse engineering codecs/encryption methods without paying royalties is just as bad as software piracy.
So if someone patents a codec or algorithm that is so simple you could solve it in your head in 5 seconds, you should pay them royalties for that thought? There are many reasons that software and algorithm patents are bad. The simplest one is that patenting such things stifles innovation and damages our economy relative the rest of the world. There are much smarter people than me that have been trying to point this out for decades now.
Commercial software will be key to the success of linux on the desktop and those that stand in the way of it are only helping MS keep their hold on the market.
Commercial software is not required to be proprietary. People like free stuff, but most of us will be willing to pay for commercial software that doesn't attempt to exert unnecessary control over our computers, our data, or our lives. So yes, instead of paying for this crippled proprietary software, many of us will be waiting for a Free-as-in-speech implementation. By coincidence this usually means it will also be free-as-in-beer. Kudos to the first company that markets a Free-as-in-speech implementation of something like this and charges money for it. They will make money.
isn't this why the name was changed from 'free software' to open-source?
No, from what I understand Free Software (the capitalized version) and Open Source are two different things. Open Source may also be Free Software, in the same way that a rectangle may also be a square, but not necessarily. Software that is given away for "free" as in beer doesn't necessarily have anything to do with either Free Software or Open Source. There are all kinds of closed source and proprietary software that is given away free, but the real Free Software has always been Free Software, capitalized, and free as in speech. Its name has not been changed to Open Source, that concept is philosophically separate, even though they do often exist in the same time at the same place. There exists proprietary software that is non-free (and non-Free) and yet is Open Source. The nature of Free Software being what it is, I think that all Free Software must be Open Source. The reverse is definitely not true.
It would behoove us all to better understand the differences between these two concepts. In my humble opinion, that is.
If you compare a screenshot of KDE against one of Gnome, it's obvious that Gnome is less in-your-face than KDE.
What? Give me a break. I've seen GNOME desktop shots with ten times that much crud on the toolbars, and KDE can just as easily have a single tiny self-hiding toolbar with one button. Or none. What's so in-your-face about a single toolbar with a few buttons, in comparison to TWO toolbars "cluttering" my screen at all times?
If you're put off by the clutter and garishness of KDE then declutter it and use a different theme. There are several nice plain themes included and more available, probably even one that looks just like that GNOME desktop. KDE can be as simple as you make it. Or as complex and cluttered as you want.
Of course, I've always been put off by the GNOME icons looking too "cutesy", like they're trying to outdo the classic Mac OS and doing a bad job of it. Oh well, to each his own. But it would take a matter of two minutes to declutter that KDE desktop and tweak the panel to make it look much nicer than the GNOME desktop you use as a comparison. It's just silly to say that one is less in-your-face than the other. One is definitely easier to configure than the other (for us dummies, anyway).
Fairly quickly, "ls" went away, but "echo *" worked fine.
/bin/sh has some built-in functions, one of which is "echo". So even if /bin/echo doesn't exist the echo command will still work.
That might be because
Hi, I'm responding to inform you that you are misspelling my name. It's Kristopher Finkenbinder, not Christopher Finke. ;)
It's very interesting that I can now (3:30pm AK time, July 1) search for:
... and get plenty of hits for each. (Reference posts above this where people were saying that they got zero or just a couple of results for those same searches.) Except for the long phrase in quotes, there seem to be plenty of results. I got tired of clicking "Next >>" to see more results. They don't give a total so it still can't be directly compared to Google's results, but it looks like there is some sort of algorithm behind the scenes that's populating the search results more completely over time as it analyzes what people are searching for. Kind of interesting.
microsoft
microsoft sucks
cat
rabbit
linux
"something better than windows"
Also interesting is that most of the search results appear to be very relevant at this point in time, even when using a single search term. All the search results for "cat" that I looked at seemed to actually be about cats, not just containing the letters c-a-t. This new search engine may not be anything to sneer at. After we get over all the self-congratulating knee-jerk reactions, that is. I'm sure it will have its flaws, but at the moment it's looking much better than initial impressions on this site would suggest.
You're very confused about something. On /. (Slashdot, this website) whenever someone says "windows" they mean Microsoft Windows, the Operating System. Doesn't matter if it's capitalized or not. You definitely can't expect proper capitalization on this website. The guy you originally replied to was most definitely talking about Microsoft Windows, not windowed interfaces in general. Now I know why your replies have made very little sense. All GUI interfaces at this time are window-based, so why would we be talking about that? That's just goofy.
And secondly, the CLI on Mac OS X (the new Mac operating system) is great. Give it a try sometime. And it's certainly better than the Microsoft Windows Operating System[tm].
Viruses are not the illegal equivalent of spyware. Viruses are anonymous. Spyware reports back to an IP address or domain.
Backdoor type trojans report back to an IP address or IRC server quite often. It spys on your computer, illegally. Thus, illegal spyware, or the illegal equivalent of spyware. So we don't go quibbling over the word virus, viruses, trojans and worms are basically in the same class.
It's not magic at all. When people realize what's being installed, they will, most of the time, hit the cancel button.
This is commonly known as wishful thinking. An objective double-blind study of human nature regarding software warnings like this will show that you are vastly overestimating the intelligence of the general population, and/or how much they actually care about protecting their information. Just because you and I care doesn't mean everyone else does. I've made this mistaken assumption often, too.
A simple government-mandated warning like "this software collect information from your computer's storage and reports it to corporation X" would probably be good enough. Is the average person confused by the government-mandated warnings on cigarette packs?
I'm betting there's no way in hell that "the government" will actually mandate something even close to that clear. Oh, and by the way, about a quarter of the population still smoke cigarettes and it didn't go down just because of that little warning, so you're not proving anything that way.
You just answered your own question with that last sentence. Guns allow stupid, weak, and slow people to take intelligent, strong, and fast people out of the gene pool -- consistently. That pretty much destroys natural selection.
No, no. You missed my whole point again, even though I tried to make it so clear. Natural selection is a big abstract process. It doesn't have any particular purpose or job, it's just a way for us to describe something that happens over time in a population. Individuals in a species get killed off, and we call that natural selection. It's job is not to pick the best organism. In many cases it utterly fails in this, even in what you would call the "natural" world. Yet the species as a whole survives. If the best organism is not picked often enough, sometimes the species dies out. That's called extinction, and it has happened a million times even before homo sapiens existed. Besides which, there are two counterpoints to your statement:
1. Guns are not mobius strips, with only one side. They will point in either direction. They let smart, strong, and fast people take out the slow, stupid, weak ones just as easily as the other way around. A gun is an inanimate object that can be used to equal effect by either type of person or anything in the middle.
2. Being smart, strong or fast is not necessarily the best way to survive. Case in point: Sharks, cockroaches and tree sloths are not smart. The tree sloth is not fast. Cockroaches are not strong. Yet these species survive because they are well adapted to their environment. It has in fact been argued by many brilliant scientists and writers that sentience may be the downfall of our species. The other 99.999999% of species on this planet get along without sentience just fine and will continue to do so for as long as the planet is capable of supporting life. Sentience is merely an abberation in the process of life trying to survive.
Desirable from the standpoint of survival of the species. There is no particular skill involved in shooting someone at close range with a pistol.
First, the only trait that is desirable from a survival standpoint is one that helps the species survive. This is one of those concepts that's so simple it's difficult to understand unless you really think about it. Survival traits for a species are not always the same as survival traits for an individual. Salmon survive as a species just fine, but the individuals spawn and then immediately
See, being from Tübingen can be Kool!!!
[Surfer Voice]: Whoa. Dude, how can being from Tübingen NOT be Kool?
But you don't seem to understand that we are discussing spyware, not viruses, and that the law we are discussing would make illegal much of the spyware which is legal today.
But I do seem to understand. You think that making spyware illegal will stop it from happening, even though its illegal equivalent (viruses) have not been stopped in the slightest by a dozen or more laws. The illegal counterparts have been going strong for decades. Even if the law did make spyware completely illegal, there will still be spyware in the form of trojans and backdoors made by anonymous people instead of (or possibly for) corporations. But the law doesn't even go that far, it just requires the spyware to inform the user better during installation about what it will do. Spyware will not magically become extinct because of a law.
No, people and corporations are doing it. Railing against the entire universe is absurd.
Who's railing against the universe? All I ever said was that these things happen in this universe, not that the universe causes it. Yet, it an abstract way the universe does cause everything that happens, since nothing would happen if the universe didn't exist.
No, it's not particulary insightful. It's simply blaming "the universe" for the actions of a few immoral corporations and individuals.
Of course there is no guiding force behind the universe, so there can be no blame. I do not blame the universe, I simply state what is and what isn't. Not what I want and what I don't want.
"Spyware" implies clandestine activity and it's not so clandestine when the user gives informed consent. If someone wants to install software on their computer which sends every keystroke back to some major corporation, I'm not about to call for laws making that illegal.
Ok, fine, I guess from now on there will be no spyware. It will all be "monitorware", and that will be just fine and dandy and legal. How much you want to bet that this new monitorware will tell you exactly what it does behind the scenes in simple enough English to allow the common person to understand what it's doing? The level of information you'd have to make the average person read through to really understand what a sp^H^Hmonitorware app is doing makes it ridiculous to think that most people will really have an informed decision in the end.
And you're still not going to stop the already illegal "spyware" (trojans, backdoors). It's going to keep on coming regardless of this law or any other. At least, as long as the technical problems aren't solved and the users are still ignorant. You've solved nothing while creating a new class of computer software that you will have to have some intelligence to avoid installing. Monitorware, I love it. Nobody pays attention to EULAs, why would they pay any attention to a message informing them that their computer will be monitored when they're trying to install a cool new game?
[sarcasm]It would be impossible to write spyware for Linux. No way that anyone could do that.[/sarcasm] Quit blaming the OS for the malicious actions of spyware authors. There is nothing inherent in Linux or BSD that would prevent spyware from being installed on it.
I guess you've missed the fact that there are these big holes in Windows and IE that allow software to install itself on your computer without any user interaction just by going to the wrong website or previewing the wrong email, or just by being connected to the Internet. When these get fixed I'll stop "blaming" the OS for being unsafe. I don't blame the computer for the actions of spyware or virus authors, I blame the computer for letting the spyware and viruses on my computer so easily.
See how I highlighted "just"? Notice that I did not say "instead" or imply, state, or hint that these things should not be taught now.
"Just" is a very ambigous word with several different meanings. Perhaps I interpreted it differently than you meant it. That doesn't mean
"humbly begging your pardon master maxwell, but I think you'll find that..."
Oh, oh my, please stop, that's just too funny. Please, sir, may I have another? Muwahahaha! I'm going to have to remember to use that exact phrase from now on if I ever reply to fmaxwell again. Hell, that's good enough for use on anybody! Good stuff.
Thanks for the heads-up on fmaxwell. You and I are in perfect agreement. Too bad you're posting as anon.
Cheers.
Windows is like an OS with AIDS, or maybe it's more like the 'boy in the bubble'.
Or maybe it's more like the baby with the baboon heart: Every minute it's still alive is a miracle...
Laugh, it's a joke!
Credits to Paul Simon, Graceland.