I really don't agree. Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place
Ok, so I admit most geeks should be smart about who they hand out their e-mail address to. However, eventually someone will get you on a list.
I've suspected that some spammers would use those machines they zombie to become relays to also harvest the e-mail addresses in the host's address book. Does anyone here have any information that would comfirm or deny this?
Also, there's all those myriad places where people can 'send this to your friend' which is a great way for all the clueless people you know to get you signed up for spam.
Ok, I guess you are right, a true geek doesn't have friends.
they either quit (but then, other games didn't lose players) or are new to the genre.
I actually suspect that the number of "new" players is actually lower than they think. While I believe a significant number of people are playing CoH as their first MMO game, I am betting most of the people they attracted were people who had already quit the existing ones. EQ has been out for a very long time. Many people have tried it, and then got tired of it. There wasn't a drop in subscription to other games because the people who wanted something different had already left and probably played other games in the meantime (Morrowind, etc)
Re:There are other examples...
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The best problem solving test I ever took was while applying for a job as a student tech. The boss put me in front of a computer with WordPerfect running on it. He said "change the background of the entire page to another color." and watched what I did for a while.
What made this an interesting problem was, despite being able to go to the menu and look at, I forget exactly, but Format -> Page or something, and having some options there for changing some things, background color was not an option. So if you are me you dig around on the menu a while.
Then you finally give up and pull up the help and search. Then you find the entry that says: To change the background color, go to Format -> Page and click on the background tab. Then select a new color. You say wtf (quietly) and go back to Format -> Page. There is no background tab. You go back to the help. Yep, that's what they told you to do.
Turns out, by default, some checkbox on the first tab of the page properties dialog disables the tab you need to get to to change the background. Some seemingly completely unrelated checkbox. I got lucky, clicked around and found it. Then changed the background color.
Turns out, I was the only person to have ever successfully completed the task. The purpose of the test was not to see if you could solve the problem. The purpose was to give an unsolvable problem, and watch the proccess you use to try and solve it. I thought that was a much better way to test skills.
Lucky me, I figured out the solution, which so impressed them that I was hired, despite them having already picked someone else for the job (they just hired both of us instead).
Try it yourself, I believe it was whatever version of WordPerfect was out in '98.
Is it just me, or is every week there an article linked to somebody 'theorizing' what google will do next.
Look, some guy who use to play D&D with a guy who works as a mail clerk at Google thinks that Google plans on releasing a magic widget.
Then, because it's posted on slashdot, Google has to release a press release or official statement saying: No, google has no current plans to enter the magic widget business.
Which leads to a follow up/. post. But in the comments there are still dozens of people saying: The evidence is clear, google will do this! They just don't want the magic widget industry to know about it until they are ready to release it in 5-7 decades.
Look, some guy at google sneezed!/. his personal blog!
It hasn't finished indexing my files yet so I can't verify, but since it supports text files, doesn't that mean it already supports trillian? Trillian logs everything in a.txt by default, so it should already 'work' with Trillian just fine.
Not too hard for the average user. I know a girl who uses it to download anime. Other than that, she is a complete ditz when it comes to computers. Really, it's not that hard. You just have to have the client installed, and it does everything for you.
At least for now, they can't call cell phones. So I don't even have a land line anymore. I didn't use it when I had it, and it's not like I can not have a cell phone for my line of work. My old land line only got calls from telemarketers, nobody who knew me used it.
If that was the case Microsoft wouldn't have a desktop monopoly to leverage into a browser monopoly in the first place
Of course you can. How many of you are developers working on production software? Microsoft has done one thing intelligently (from a dominate the software supply by dominating the development of software point of view), is provide a development environment that, while far from perfect, makes it real easy to develop software for windows. Visual Studio, and all of microsofts development libraries are the real barrier to more cross-platform programs.
People use windows because of all the software that runs on it. Developers who write windows software using microsofts toolkits, end up with code that takes a lot of work to convert to linux or some other OS. Yes, you can do it, but it takes a conscious effort on the side of the developer. And more time. Using Microsofts libraries makes certain tasks really, really easy. But once you start on that path, your stuck. Have you tried to write windows software without using Microsofts toolkits, and all the ways it makes it harder to port the code then to linux?
I'm currently writing a database front end for a client in vb.net. Actually converting their old access 97 database frontend. Why am I using.net? That's what my clients want. It's easy enough using windows forms to bind to the sqlserver database they have. My clients have no idea how long it really takes to write software well, so I've got to get as much stuff done as possible in an unrealisticly short ammount of time. The only way to get close to their expectations is to use all of microsoft's shortcuts.
Short answer: Microsoft puts a lot of effort into making it easy for a developer to follow the all microsoft route. If we want more cross-platform software, we need to work on a really good non-microsoft crossplatform development environment.
This is a huge logical fallacy to imply that Linux has anything to do with these people's intentions. They are trying to save money and so they buy very cheap pre-built computers and pirate Windows.
This is the real point. I used to work at a local computer store, and they started selling machines pre-loaded with windows. Why? Because of the overwhelming demand for linux? No. Because if they make a cheap box they can put in their big color ad, they can drop a hundred bucks off the price with a little blurb in fine printing saying pre-loaded with linux. It gets people in the store, and most of the time when you explain to the grandmother who is buying a machine for their grandchild who is starting college, they pay the extra for windows. Or get talked into a more expensive system.
So yes, often the people who buy a machine 'pre-loaded' with linux are really the people buying a machine with no OS, and install windows on their own. It just looks like a 'linux' machine because the option is there, and there's no reason (cost) for the customer to ask them to remove it, and takes too much paperwork for the employee to care. I'd say about 50% of those machines got a pirated copy of windows, and 50% got a legitimate copy from a previous computer that is now defunct.
Maybe 1 in a dozen I sold I could say was going to a person who wanted to try linux out. I know they did, cause they kept coming back and asking questions.
To some up, stores advertise linux machines to look competative with dell and everyone else. What people do with them once they leave the store has nothing to do with the store's intentions, or whether or not the machine had linux to begin with.
People use MSFT because they are already locked in.
The real reason people use it is because most people don't really care which office package they are using. I used to work in a computer store, and a high percentage of people would be shocked and amazed that office didn't come with windows. Most people either get the super trimmed down version bundled with that dell, or use it at work where the IT department supplies it to them.
On the other hand, I helped a church upgrade all of their machines as a consultant a while back. They had a very low budget, and couldn't afford a licensed copy of MS office for every machine. Their previous 'IT' person kept all of the disks (if they were ever really purchased) so the old version of office they had been using couldn't be migrated to the new machines. So we put Open Office on the new machines. We set them to save as doc files by default. Other than one person who needed to buy publisher, and another old lady who needed to be told 10 times how to make labels in OO, it went in very smoothly. I've had as much, if not more trouble, helping people move to new versions of MS office.
Short answer is, most people get confused when they are faced with something different. I can't count the times I've had calls where someone was very confused because the new version of office had a new default layout or one of the toolbars wasn't displayed. So in my experience migration issues are the same, whether it's from MS office to wordperfect, from wordperfect to open office, or any other combination you might see.
What it will really take for open office to become widespread and successful by targeting the IT department, or whoever decides what software goes on the corporate desktop. I'm betting you'll find that open office does what most people need, and the free price tag can be very convincing with even low numbers of users, let alone thousands or more which even a medium sized organization might have.
Spielburg's film will include every big name he can sign on, spend more on Special effects than the GP of most small countries,
Wait, didn't we already do this? Remember that movie called Independance Day? About the only difference between this and a modern remake of war of the worlds is that they didn't bother to tell you it was war of the worlds.
But wait, Will Smith beat the aliens with a computer virus. That's original, right? Computer virus is totally different than... wait, nevermind.
I work as an IT consultant for a number of companies. We always suggest a move toward linux whenever possible. It isn't really feasible on the desktop yet for most of our clients. However, the big growth we see in linux is at the server level. We are often putting in a linux based file server instead of a microsoft advanced server which would be overkill for most of our small business clients. Not to mention the savings the get from licensing fees.
So I've seen steady linux growth. It will take time, but it has many functions, and is flexible. I see more and more linux installs in the future.
Yeah, suuuuure it interferes with their navigation.
Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't cause interference. When a text message or incoming call is coming into my cell phone, and I have it sitting on my desk, I can tell it is coming because the monitor wavers and my speakers click for a few seconds. If it can affect that sort of equipment, I don't want to know what a plane full of cell phones would do to the instruments that are used to fly it.
Moderating and meta-moderating and karma may help weed some of the nonsense out of the user responses, but unless they pay attention to people like me the nonsense will continue in the articles themselves.
True. What we really need to do is eliminate the editors entirely. Make it so that users with high karma get to see the submissions, and moderate the news posts just like user responses (Interesting, Redundant, Innaccurate, etc). When they hit +5, they go on the front page.
The whole point of slashdot is a community driven site. The news is already submitted by the users, why not go all the way?
It's just laziness. I'd expect such from volunteers... but as I pointed out, they're getting paid well.
Are you personally paying them for this service? Slashdot has been like this for as long as I've been here. Nothings changed since they started making money. I say good for them. I hate people complaining about how slashdot isn't as good anymore. What do you mean? It's exactly what it was when it started. A place for links to other sites that have news nerds might find interesting, and a place to comment on those things. It was popular before they started making money for being the way it is, if it started changing because they now have revenue, maybe people wouldn't like it as much. Who knows. Myself, I won't complain about a resource that is free for me to use, and that I've learned a lot from over the years.
Besides, it's not like a hundred people didn't jump in to explain what screen was. Haven't used it in years myself, but hey, that's cool.
But seriously, there are a lot of apps out there pretending to be "spyware removal programs" that are actually spyware themselves. ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS!
This is very true. I do computer support for a living, and I am often called to remove spyware and viruses. A recent visit I looked at the computer, saw that it was full of spyware, and went to google to search for the download page to ad-aware. Whatever spyware program was running redirected the search to a page that looked a lot like google, and returned results to sites with "ad aware" which definitely was not produced by lavasoft.
The spyware makers have been slowly evolving more and more clever programs. Legislation won't really help, except to say yes, this really is bad. As far as I am concerned, they are all viruses anyway.
Needless to say, I now have a USB flash drive on my keychain with adaware and spybotsd on it, along with a number of symantec's virus removal tools.
Has anyone else noticed that Windows XP gives a slightly higher priority to whichever task is in focus? I've had two identical processes running, and when I switch from one to the other, the newly switched to process will have a long time left to completion, then quickly drop down to a short time. The old process will then have the time remaining shoot upwards.
I think this goes a long way to explain why XP 'feels' faster to a lot of people. It just gives a priority to whatever you are looking at at that moment.
I don't think you realize how often someone 'fixes' this problem by formatting and reinstalling windows. Then they don't realize they need to update again, and may still have a pre-SP1 XP install, or some such.
In my experience as a consultant, a user who was hit by a virus does not often learn how to protect themselves in the future. Sometimes they hire me on a monthly service contract, and as a side effect I keep them safe, but they rarely have the time or desire to learn about this stuff.
Most users, especially on the business end, have their own business they spend their time worrying about. They would rather hire me to take care of them every once in a while, and make sure 'it just works'.
Ok, the grandparent was right. It does need to be easy to setup. Not because the user will be setting it up, but because they are going to want a standard configuration that is easy to get started on. And so the tech will want a simple format and install this image to put on the machine, instead of always having to pick the same thing over and over again configuring a standard system.
If one of the distros wanted that kind of market, the first choice should be: Standard Workstation, or Costum configuration. Then if they picked standard, that's it, just wait until it comes time to enter a username like the XP install.
I have worked in a computer store as a tech before I moved on to becoming a consultant for small businesses. If someone made a linux distro that was easy to use for an average user (web browser, e-mail client, office suite), people could start using it.
I trained monkey, I mean, tech, can install linux just as easily as windows. The "average" user comes into the store or hires a consultant and pays $79+ to have windows reinstalled. The "average" user doesn't install windows at all. Or if they do, it is on a click once to restore your hard drive to factory settings sort of deal.
Sure, while a real linux power user is going to want an costumizable install, the average user needs a one-click install that is easy and intuitive to get started with.
While photoshop does a lot of things really cool, it doesn't seem to do what I need it for very well.
As a hobby I am doing some graphics for a Game Boy Advance Game. So the graphics I am working on are usually in the 8x8 or 16x16 size range. I would like the pencil tool to draw a single pixel when I click on a single pixel. But it doesn't. Maybe there is some obscure setting I am missing, but I can't seem to do pixel editing very well in photoshop. I know it's designed for high quality photos and such, but sometimes you just need to change a single pixel.
That, and when it palleted color mode, is there any easier way of selecting colors? When you are working with a 16 color pallete, you don't need to double click on the color selection and get a full range of colors. I want to choose from the 16 or 256 that are available for the graphic. I select the colors I want when setting up the pallete. Why why can't I choose my colors from that pallete?
I am not a photoshop expert, but these tasks should be easier to do and more intuitive.
GIMP isn't the only program that has UI issues. Most people have just been trained around Photoshop UI issues.
I was playing a game of Descent and my Japanese co-workers had to avert their eyes from my screen because they were getting nauseous!
Is it just me, or was Descent simply the most disorienting game ever? I've got a high tolerance for motion sickness, but even I can't watch someone else play it.
Ever wondered why there aren't a thousand bad Descent clones?
Ok, so Java is less vulnerable to buffer overrun attacks. But I think the book is on more than just hackers and virii. Spyware and Malware most often get on people's machines because their machine just asked them: Do you want to do this? And they clicked yes. You could code Gator as a Java program, and it would still be malicious. You could code a malicious e-mail worm, and users would still open up the attached executable to play the silly Java game it hides inside.
Yes, OS code should be well coded and protected from attacks. But the most secure fortress of a home does no good when the owner opens the door when the armed robber knocks.
Somebody mod parent up. My mod points ran out yesterday. There is a lot of confusion about the GPL and kernel modules, and this unconfused me quite a bit.
Are nvidia binary drivers derivative? I would guess not. Nvidia is not a stupid company, and they would have thought things through before releasing a driver. I believe they have a GPL'd kernel wrapper for a binary driver, and the binary driver is probably not much different from their windows driver.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't agree. Any respectable geek shouldn't be getting spam in the first place
Ok, so I admit most geeks should be smart about who they hand out their e-mail address to. However, eventually someone will get you on a list.
I've suspected that some spammers would use those machines they zombie to become relays to also harvest the e-mail addresses in the host's address book. Does anyone here have any information that would comfirm or deny this?
Also, there's all those myriad places where people can 'send this to your friend' which is a great way for all the clueless people you know to get you signed up for spam.
Ok, I guess you are right, a true geek doesn't have friends.
they either quit (but then, other games didn't lose players) or are new to the genre.
I actually suspect that the number of "new" players is actually lower than they think. While I believe a significant number of people are playing CoH as their first MMO game, I am betting most of the people they attracted were people who had already quit the existing ones. EQ has been out for a very long time. Many people have tried it, and then got tired of it. There wasn't a drop in subscription to other games because the people who wanted something different had already left and probably played other games in the meantime (Morrowind, etc)
The best problem solving test I ever took was while applying for a job as a student tech. The boss put me in front of a computer with WordPerfect running on it. He said "change the background of the entire page to another color." and watched what I did for a while.
What made this an interesting problem was, despite being able to go to the menu and look at, I forget exactly, but Format -> Page or something, and having some options there for changing some things, background color was not an option. So if you are me you dig around on the menu a while.
Then you finally give up and pull up the help and search. Then you find the entry that says: To change the background color, go to Format -> Page and click on the background tab. Then select a new color. You say wtf (quietly) and go back to Format -> Page. There is no background tab. You go back to the help. Yep, that's what they told you to do.
Turns out, by default, some checkbox on the first tab of the page properties dialog disables the tab you need to get to to change the background. Some seemingly completely unrelated checkbox. I got lucky, clicked around and found it. Then changed the background color.
Turns out, I was the only person to have ever successfully completed the task. The purpose of the test was not to see if you could solve the problem. The purpose was to give an unsolvable problem, and watch the proccess you use to try and solve it. I thought that was a much better way to test skills.
Lucky me, I figured out the solution, which so impressed them that I was hired, despite them having already picked someone else for the job (they just hired both of us instead).
Try it yourself, I believe it was whatever version of WordPerfect was out in '98.
Is it just me, or is every week there an article linked to somebody 'theorizing' what google will do next.
/. post. But in the comments there are still dozens of people saying: The evidence is clear, google will do this! They just don't want the magic widget industry to know about it until they are ready to release it in 5-7 decades.
/. his personal blog!
Look, some guy who use to play D&D with a guy who works as a mail clerk at Google thinks that Google plans on releasing a magic widget.
Then, because it's posted on slashdot, Google has to release a press release or official statement saying: No, google has no current plans to enter the magic widget business.
Which leads to a follow up
Look, some guy at google sneezed!
It hasn't finished indexing my files yet so I can't verify, but since it supports text files, doesn't that mean it already supports trillian? Trillian logs everything in a .txt by default, so it should already 'work' with Trillian just fine.
Not too hard for the average user. I know a girl who uses it to download anime. Other than that, she is a complete ditz when it comes to computers. Really, it's not that hard. You just have to have the client installed, and it does everything for you.
At least for now, they can't call cell phones. So I don't even have a land line anymore. I didn't use it when I had it, and it's not like I can not have a cell phone for my line of work. My old land line only got calls from telemarketers, nobody who knew me used it.
You cannot corner the supply side of software!
.net? That's what my clients want. It's easy enough using windows forms to bind to the sqlserver database they have. My clients have no idea how long it really takes to write software well, so I've got to get as much stuff done as possible in an unrealisticly short ammount of time. The only way to get close to their expectations is to use all of microsoft's shortcuts.
If that was the case Microsoft wouldn't have a desktop monopoly to leverage into a browser monopoly in the first place
Of course you can. How many of you are developers working on production software? Microsoft has done one thing intelligently (from a dominate the software supply by dominating the development of software point of view), is provide a development environment that, while far from perfect, makes it real easy to develop software for windows. Visual Studio, and all of microsofts development libraries are the real barrier to more cross-platform programs.
People use windows because of all the software that runs on it. Developers who write windows software using microsofts toolkits, end up with code that takes a lot of work to convert to linux or some other OS. Yes, you can do it, but it takes a conscious effort on the side of the developer. And more time. Using Microsofts libraries makes certain tasks really, really easy. But once you start on that path, your stuck. Have you tried to write windows software without using Microsofts toolkits, and all the ways it makes it harder to port the code then to linux?
I'm currently writing a database front end for a client in vb.net. Actually converting their old access 97 database frontend. Why am I using
Short answer: Microsoft puts a lot of effort into making it easy for a developer to follow the all microsoft route. If we want more cross-platform software, we need to work on a really good non-microsoft crossplatform development environment.
This is a huge logical fallacy to imply that Linux has anything to do with these people's intentions. They are trying to save money and so they buy very cheap pre-built computers and pirate Windows.
This is the real point. I used to work at a local computer store, and they started selling machines pre-loaded with windows. Why? Because of the overwhelming demand for linux? No. Because if they make a cheap box they can put in their big color ad, they can drop a hundred bucks off the price with a little blurb in fine printing saying pre-loaded with linux. It gets people in the store, and most of the time when you explain to the grandmother who is buying a machine for their grandchild who is starting college, they pay the extra for windows. Or get talked into a more expensive system.
So yes, often the people who buy a machine 'pre-loaded' with linux are really the people buying a machine with no OS, and install windows on their own. It just looks like a 'linux' machine because the option is there, and there's no reason (cost) for the customer to ask them to remove it, and takes too much paperwork for the employee to care. I'd say about 50% of those machines got a pirated copy of windows, and 50% got a legitimate copy from a previous computer that is now defunct.
Maybe 1 in a dozen I sold I could say was going to a person who wanted to try linux out. I know they did, cause they kept coming back and asking questions.
To some up, stores advertise linux machines to look competative with dell and everyone else. What people do with them once they leave the store has nothing to do with the store's intentions, or whether or not the machine had linux to begin with.
People use MSFT because they are already locked in.
The real reason people use it is because most people don't really care which office package they are using. I used to work in a computer store, and a high percentage of people would be shocked and amazed that office didn't come with windows. Most people either get the super trimmed down version bundled with that dell, or use it at work where the IT department supplies it to them.
On the other hand, I helped a church upgrade all of their machines as a consultant a while back. They had a very low budget, and couldn't afford a licensed copy of MS office for every machine. Their previous 'IT' person kept all of the disks (if they were ever really purchased) so the old version of office they had been using couldn't be migrated to the new machines. So we put Open Office on the new machines. We set them to save as doc files by default. Other than one person who needed to buy publisher, and another old lady who needed to be told 10 times how to make labels in OO, it went in very smoothly. I've had as much, if not more trouble, helping people move to new versions of MS office.
Short answer is, most people get confused when they are faced with something different. I can't count the times I've had calls where someone was very confused because the new version of office had a new default layout or one of the toolbars wasn't displayed. So in my experience migration issues are the same, whether it's from MS office to wordperfect, from wordperfect to open office, or any other combination you might see.
What it will really take for open office to become widespread and successful by targeting the IT department, or whoever decides what software goes on the corporate desktop. I'm betting you'll find that open office does what most people need, and the free price tag can be very convincing with even low numbers of users, let alone thousands or more which even a medium sized organization might have.
Spielburg's film will include every big name he can sign on, spend more on Special effects than the GP of most small countries,
Wait, didn't we already do this? Remember that movie called Independance Day? About the only difference between this and a modern remake of war of the worlds is that they didn't bother to tell you it was war of the worlds.
But wait, Will Smith beat the aliens with a computer virus. That's original, right? Computer virus is totally different than... wait, nevermind.
I work as an IT consultant for a number of companies. We always suggest a move toward linux whenever possible. It isn't really feasible on the desktop yet for most of our clients. However, the big growth we see in linux is at the server level. We are often putting in a linux based file server instead of a microsoft advanced server which would be overkill for most of our small business clients. Not to mention the savings the get from licensing fees.
So I've seen steady linux growth. It will take time, but it has many functions, and is flexible. I see more and more linux installs in the future.
Yeah, suuuuure it interferes with their navigation.
Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't cause interference. When a text message or incoming call is coming into my cell phone, and I have it sitting on my desk, I can tell it is coming because the monitor wavers and my speakers click for a few seconds. If it can affect that sort of equipment, I don't want to know what a plane full of cell phones would do to the instruments that are used to fly it.
Moderating and meta-moderating and karma may help weed some of the nonsense out of the user responses, but unless they pay attention to people like me the nonsense will continue in the articles themselves.
True. What we really need to do is eliminate the editors entirely. Make it so that users with high karma get to see the submissions, and moderate the news posts just like user responses (Interesting, Redundant, Innaccurate, etc). When they hit +5, they go on the front page.
The whole point of slashdot is a community driven site. The news is already submitted by the users, why not go all the way?
It's just laziness. I'd expect such from volunteers... but as I pointed out, they're getting paid well.
Are you personally paying them for this service? Slashdot has been like this for as long as I've been here. Nothings changed since they started making money. I say good for them. I hate people complaining about how slashdot isn't as good anymore. What do you mean? It's exactly what it was when it started. A place for links to other sites that have news nerds might find interesting, and a place to comment on those things. It was popular before they started making money for being the way it is, if it started changing because they now have revenue, maybe people wouldn't like it as much. Who knows. Myself, I won't complain about a resource that is free for me to use, and that I've learned a lot from over the years.
Besides, it's not like a hundred people didn't jump in to explain what screen was. Haven't used it in years myself, but hey, that's cool.
But seriously, there are a lot of apps out there pretending to be "spyware removal programs" that are actually spyware themselves. ACCEPT NO IMITATIONS!
This is very true. I do computer support for a living, and I am often called to remove spyware and viruses. A recent visit I looked at the computer, saw that it was full of spyware, and went to google to search for the download page to ad-aware. Whatever spyware program was running redirected the search to a page that looked a lot like google, and returned results to sites with "ad aware" which definitely was not produced by lavasoft.
The spyware makers have been slowly evolving more and more clever programs. Legislation won't really help, except to say yes, this really is bad. As far as I am concerned, they are all viruses anyway.
Needless to say, I now have a USB flash drive on my keychain with adaware and spybotsd on it, along with a number of symantec's virus removal tools.
Has anyone else noticed that Windows XP gives a slightly higher priority to whichever task is in focus? I've had two identical processes running, and when I switch from one to the other, the newly switched to process will have a long time left to completion, then quickly drop down to a short time. The old process will then have the time remaining shoot upwards.
I think this goes a long way to explain why XP 'feels' faster to a lot of people. It just gives a priority to whatever you are looking at at that moment.
I don't think you realize how often someone 'fixes' this problem by formatting and reinstalling windows. Then they don't realize they need to update again, and may still have a pre-SP1 XP install, or some such.
In my experience as a consultant, a user who was hit by a virus does not often learn how to protect themselves in the future. Sometimes they hire me on a monthly service contract, and as a side effect I keep them safe, but they rarely have the time or desire to learn about this stuff.
Most users, especially on the business end, have their own business they spend their time worrying about. They would rather hire me to take care of them every once in a while, and make sure 'it just works'.
Ok, the grandparent was right. It does need to be easy to setup. Not because the user will be setting it up, but because they are going to want a standard configuration that is easy to get started on. And so the tech will want a simple format and install this image to put on the machine, instead of always having to pick the same thing over and over again configuring a standard system.
If one of the distros wanted that kind of market, the first choice should be: Standard Workstation, or Costum configuration. Then if they picked standard, that's it, just wait until it comes time to enter a username like the XP install.
Easier to use, yes. Easier to set up? No.
I have worked in a computer store as a tech before I moved on to becoming a consultant for small businesses. If someone made a linux distro that was easy to use for an average user (web browser, e-mail client, office suite), people could start using it.
I trained monkey, I mean, tech, can install linux just as easily as windows. The "average" user comes into the store or hires a consultant and pays $79+ to have windows reinstalled. The "average" user doesn't install windows at all. Or if they do, it is on a click once to restore your hard drive to factory settings sort of deal.
Sure, while a real linux power user is going to want an costumizable install, the average user needs a one-click install that is easy and intuitive to get started with.
While photoshop does a lot of things really cool, it doesn't seem to do what I need it for very well.
As a hobby I am doing some graphics for a Game Boy Advance Game. So the graphics I am working on are usually in the 8x8 or 16x16 size range. I would like the pencil tool to draw a single pixel when I click on a single pixel. But it doesn't. Maybe there is some obscure setting I am missing, but I can't seem to do pixel editing very well in photoshop. I know it's designed for high quality photos and such, but sometimes you just need to change a single pixel.
That, and when it palleted color mode, is there any easier way of selecting colors? When you are working with a 16 color pallete, you don't need to double click on the color selection and get a full range of colors. I want to choose from the 16 or 256 that are available for the graphic. I select the colors I want when setting up the pallete. Why why can't I choose my colors from that pallete?
I am not a photoshop expert, but these tasks should be easier to do and more intuitive.
GIMP isn't the only program that has UI issues. Most people have just been trained around Photoshop UI issues.
I was playing a game of Descent and my Japanese co-workers had to avert their eyes from my screen because they were getting nauseous!
Is it just me, or was Descent simply the most disorienting game ever? I've got a high tolerance for motion sickness, but even I can't watch someone else play it.
Ever wondered why there aren't a thousand bad Descent clones?
This season is better than the first two, but even then, the Xindi are nothing to write home about
Am I the only one who thinks those scenes of the Xindi Council looks like something from Star Wars: Episode II?
Ok, so Java is less vulnerable to buffer overrun attacks. But I think the book is on more than just hackers and virii. Spyware and Malware most often get on people's machines because their machine just asked them: Do you want to do this? And they clicked yes. You could code Gator as a Java program, and it would still be malicious. You could code a malicious e-mail worm, and users would still open up the attached executable to play the silly Java game it hides inside.
Yes, OS code should be well coded and protected from attacks. But the most secure fortress of a home does no good when the owner opens the door when the armed robber knocks.
Somebody mod parent up. My mod points ran out yesterday. There is a lot of confusion about the GPL and kernel modules, and this unconfused me quite a bit.
Are nvidia binary drivers derivative? I would guess not. Nvidia is not a stupid company, and they would have thought things through before releasing a driver. I believe they have a GPL'd kernel wrapper for a binary driver, and the binary driver is probably not much different from their windows driver.