Grab the latest Linux Mint KDE and install it on fairly recent hardware: it "just works", as long as you have decent hardware (the more Intel parts, the better). I've never had any problems with PulseAudio, and you can avoid the whole GNOME mess by using KDE, which works just fine now. The KDE4 alpha-quality debacle was 4 years ago. Get over it.
My point is that, while Windows is probably still more vulnerable, Macs are growing in vulnerability because their popularity is growing, so having a Mac is no longer a good defense against malware, and it's only going to get worse.
That's funny, I never had to explain those things to my wife when I set her up with Linux. LibreOffice looks just like pre-ribbon versions of MS Office (or close enough that you can figure it out from the menus), KDE works much like Windows, and you don't need to know jack about UNIX filesystems or other innards to use a web browser and LibreOffice.
Re:Uh...it's still there, you know
on
The Web We Lost
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· Score: 1
I disagree. I've had an ISP since around 1995, and prices haven't gone down at all, despite the arrival of orders of magnitude more users since that time.
With the massive number of people who use the Big 3 free webmail providers, which web services these days still block those for registration? I can't think of a single one I've run across in years.
I forgot to address that USPS/UPS service (can't recall the name now): it IS really, really slow, but it is cheap for heavier boxes, at least for the one that I had delivered recently with it. Basically I was shipped a box (with a bunch of metal stuff in it: dense at about 10 pounds) for $4.99 that would cost me $12 to ship by Priority Mail or $10 by Fedex.
No, USPS is only cheaper for certain things. Basically, once you go over 4 pounds, Fedex and UPS ground get cheaper (Fedex is cheaper than UPS in my experience, but companies with special rates may have a different experience). USPS rates for heavy packages are quite high. But under 4 pounds, UPS/Fedex can't touch USPS at all. Under 13 ounces, it's a total joke: you can send it First Class Mail for next to nothing, and it gets delivered in 3 days maximum, 2 if it's somewhat close, and overnight if it's in the same metro area. The other services will cost you at least $10, and will take 4 days (less if it's really close).
So if you're only sending lightweight stuff, or small things that can fit into the Priority Mail small flat-rate box (a little bigger than a videotape, for those who remember how large those are), USPS is easily the best choice. If you're shipping really dense, heavy stuff that can fit into the larger Priority Mail flat-rate boxes, USPS will again probably end up being cheaper. If you're shipping a box that weighs 20-70 pounds and won't fit in one of those flat-rate boxes, then the other services are most likely a much better deal, unless it's all books and you can qualify for the "Media Mail" service.
In addition, since they can do DNS redirects, whenever some Cox email user (how many of those are there anyway?) goes to email.cox.com, or whatever their URL is, Cox can redirect it to a new site with a big message saying, "Sorry, but this service is down! That's what you get for trusting us with your email."
Anyone who doesn't use Cox email, or isn't visiting cox.com, doesn't need to be bothered with this news.
Google Plus sucks, granted. What's this "Smart Screen" feature? I'm not a Windows user, and certainly not a Win8 user (who is? It isn't very popular).
As far as Ubuntu going down the tubes, the Linux-oriented boards are full of people bitching about Ubuntu, Unity, Gnome3, Unity+Amazon, etc. Since Unity was pushed out by Ubuntu, other distros, especially Linux Mint, have grown greatly. Ubuntu tries to claim they're still the most popular and that everyone loves Unity, but that's probably bullshit, esp. since Mint seems to have become so popular and gets a lot of word-of-mouth support in the forums. XFCE has also gained a lot of new users. If anything, maybe you're not seeing as much bitching about Ubuntu's privacy and commercialization issues because all the users who cared about those things ditched Ubuntu when Unity was rolled out, and moved to other distros, so now they have no reason to complain loudly about these moves by Ubuntu (which came well after Unity was deployed), and instead their only comment is "ahhh, another reason I'm glad I dumped that turd and switched to $DISTRO."
Perhaps if Google and Apple would kiss and make up and form a joint venture around that...
Hell no. With Apple in there, any service they get involved in providing will only work with Macs and iDevices. I used to think Microsoft was the worst company as far as respecting open standards and working with others and pushing customers to only use their products, but Apple has surpassed them and become much worse.
No, they don't. They might use FedEx to ship their Priority Mail flat rate boxes, but the final door-to-door delivery is done by the USPS. In my experience, Priority Mail is usually one day faster than First Class, and much, much faster than either FedEx or UPS Ground.
In addition, UPS has a service where USPS does the final residential delivery.
I used to be a Cox customer until last month, because I moved across the country (to where Comcast is the cable provider, and IME they suck far, far worse than Cox, just judging by the few weeks of service I've had with Comcast versus about 7 years with Cox).
This announcement is especially annoying, because it's an outage on some stupid service that no one with a brain would ever use. Seriously, what moron actually uses ISP-provided email in this day and age? What a brilliant idea: as soon as you have to move or change providers for some reason, all your email is suddenly gone, and your email address is defunct, and if you didn't notify everyone in your address book beforehand you're screwed.
This used to be good advice, because Macs were such a small share of the market that the malware authors didn't bother with them. This isn't quite so true any more.
If you want to get them a platform that won't be targeted by malware authors for quite some time, install Linux Mint on their PC. As a bonus, it won't cost anything extra (unless they have some shitty printer that has no Linux support, but a new Linux-compatible printer is much cheaper than a new Mac). As an extra bonus, you can install the KDE version of Linux Mint and assuming they're coming from XP or Win7, they won't even have to learn a whole new GUI paradigm.
This is a good point: give me a bunch of workers (which I don't have to pay for) and I'll find all kinds of productive things for them to do.
Giving care to the elderly would be useful, however elderly people usually don't have extra money to pay people to wait on them as servants, so it doesn't get done except for rich old people, since the rest of society doesn't want to pay much for that. Smaller classes for schoolchildren would be beneficial, but that would require paying teachers more, to make teaching a more attractive profession, and paying more for school buildings and such, however society (in the USA) doesn't want to invest in that stuff since that would mean higher taxes.
If you earn enough from benefits, and your benefits reduce if you work/produce value, then why do anything useful?
With the "basic income" idea that's been floated around, this wouldn't happen. Under this scheme, everyone gets a "basic income", a paycheck from the government, for nothing. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough to live on, to keep you from being impoverished and living under a bridge and starving. Then, if you want to get a job, that's fine, you keep that money, in addition to your basic income. So you have every incentive to try to earn more money. If you get a job as a surgeon making $800k, you still get your $15k basic income even though it's a pittance in comparison to your real income.
The scheme of losing your welfare benefits if you get a (crappy, low-paying) job is indeed pretty horrible, and is a disincentive to working, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Now I have no idea if it's really economically possible for a modern industrial nation to employ this "basic income" scheme, but surely not having to have all the apparatus necessary to investigate welfare fraud would save a lot of money that could go to providing these incomes. We do have at least one example of a nation doing something like this: Norway provides a guaranteed income to all its citizens, paid from its oil and natural gas profits, and they're nearly at the top of the global standard-of-living indices.
Actually, yes. I don't see how there's any advantage in any kind of exclusivity agreement, unless there's some sort of malfeasance going on (under the table, so to speak). All these agreements do is limit competition, and that's never a good thing in a market economy.
Remember all those no-bid contracts with the US government in the middle east (such as with Halliburton)? How were those helpful to anyone besides the benefactor of the contract, and whichever politicians were getting paid off?
How will they convince public sector unions, doctors, lawyers... that their standard of living will be that of the average citizen?
There's a big problem with this social change you claim is coming (which seems to sound a lot like Marxism - "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities"):
How exactly do you convince people to put out the effort to get a better job, and deal with the longer hours and higher stress associated with that career, if they're not going to get anything in return for it, and will live in the same crappy little apartment as someone who's just a janitor, or doesn't bother to work at all?
With lots of automation (perhaps rendering janitors and waiters obsolete), there's going to be tons of people who are totally unable to work at all, because they won't have the intelligence and dedication needed to get a job as a doctor or engineer (things that can't be automated), and won't have the creativity needed to be an artist or musician. So society will either have to eliminate all these people in death camps, or provide them with a salary even though they contribute nothing to society in the way of labor. Don't forget all their kids, since these people who have no jobs will have plenty of time on their hands and will be busy having kids.
So if you can have the same standard of living either 1) working your ass off to go to medical school (which presumably is free in this brave new society), so you can work long hours as a doctor/surgeon and have a crappy marriage because you're never home, or 2) don't do shit, just party, play video games, and get pregnant, why would anyone choose #1 unless they're really driven to? I haven't done a survey, but I'm pretty sure not all doctors are doing it just because they love it that much.
I still can't figure out what the point of the AT-ATs was. We're talking about a civilization that has levitation technology: remember the landspeeder Luke ran around in on Tattooine (which couldn't have been very expensive since he was a poor moisture farmer)? If they can make those levitate, then why wouldn't top-of-the-line Imperial military ground vehicles have the same capability, instead of needing legs? Besides, the ground where we saw them operating (namely on Hoth, I'm talking about the AT-ATs here and not the AT-STs used on Endor) was smooth; a large wheeled or tracked vehicle would have been much faster and capable of carrying more weight, if we're going to ignore levitation technology.
Google's been around a lot longer than tons of non-free email services out there. Bad logic. Paying money for a service is in no way a guarantee that the company will keep offering that service, or even be around very long. People paid boatloads of money for CompuServe, and that didn't last either.
Exactly, just like this HDTV stuff looks like ass because there's way too much detail, and that omnipresent 16kHz buzz is gone. We need to bring back NTSC. And even better, we should dump the color stuff and go back to B&W, and maybe even dump sound too and go back to silent movies.
Huh? What standards? I don't see a whole lot of rallying around "standards" in Linux-land these days. We've got the Unity, Gnome, and KDE guys all going different directions (with only the KDE people really trying to establish any standardization on the desktop; remember the fighting about the notification stuff?), and users flocking to different desktops because they're sick of the big 3: XFCE has experienced a huge surge in popularity in the past few years for instance.
Then, for system initialization, whereas we used to just have SystemV scripts, now we have upstart and systemd (as well as some distros hanging onto SysV).
We don't even have good ole ifconfig any more; now they're trying to replace it with "ip", with limited success, even though it sucks.
And in video, we have some distros moving to Wayland, but only some of them, and AFAIK the X video drivers are not compatible with Wayland.
Sure, there's some people trying to push their own stuff and call it "standard", but there's no real cooperative effort towards standardization in Linux that I see. Instead, there's tons of fragmentation, perhaps moreso than there was 10 years ago.
Yep, you know things have gotten bad when people are pining for the days when you had a full cubicle to yourself, with 6-8 foot high walls, and everyone's totally forgotten the days when employees actually had real offices.
That might work for a small minority of workplaces, but it's not the norm by any means. How many companies actually care about customers and their opinions anyway? Most companies only care about the next quarter's financials, and releasing crap long before it's ready, filled with bugs, is a good way of pumping up your short-term financials. By the time the company's bad reputation catches up with it, it's some other CEO's problem.
This is a good point here, and to me personally is my #1 complaint about Gmail, namely their unwanted UI changes. Maybe someone will come up with a Greasemonkey script to fix them, but free developers seem to concentrate a lot more on things like ad-blocking than stuff like this.
obstinate lack of GnuPG or S/MIME support
This is a very unfortunate subject; it's not just Gmail that doesn't support GnuPG, it's pretty much everyone. Sure, some of the F/OSS email clients support this excellent feature, but that's it, and more importantly, it doesn't matter if your client supports it if all the people you communicate with don't use such clients. So, you might be able to exchange encrypted emails with your one Linux- and GnuPG-using friend (because lots of Linux users don't use it either), but that's it. It's really a shame this didn't catch on more; it would have made a lot of sense for sensitive business communications, for instance, but businesses don't bother, they just make their employees put some stupid legalese in their signature block saying "you're not allowed to read this if this email wasn't directed to you", like that's going to be any real protection from prying eyes.
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Oh please, you're living 10 years in the past.
Grab the latest Linux Mint KDE and install it on fairly recent hardware: it "just works", as long as you have decent hardware (the more Intel parts, the better). I've never had any problems with PulseAudio, and you can avoid the whole GNOME mess by using KDE, which works just fine now. The KDE4 alpha-quality debacle was 4 years ago. Get over it.
My point is that, while Windows is probably still more vulnerable, Macs are growing in vulnerability because their popularity is growing, so having a Mac is no longer a good defense against malware, and it's only going to get worse.
That's funny, I never had to explain those things to my wife when I set her up with Linux. LibreOffice looks just like pre-ribbon versions of MS Office (or close enough that you can figure it out from the menus), KDE works much like Windows, and you don't need to know jack about UNIX filesystems or other innards to use a web browser and LibreOffice.
Phishing != "Malware".
I disagree. I've had an ISP since around 1995, and prices haven't gone down at all, despite the arrival of orders of magnitude more users since that time.
With the massive number of people who use the Big 3 free webmail providers, which web services these days still block those for registration? I can't think of a single one I've run across in years.
I forgot to address that USPS/UPS service (can't recall the name now): it IS really, really slow, but it is cheap for heavier boxes, at least for the one that I had delivered recently with it. Basically I was shipped a box (with a bunch of metal stuff in it: dense at about 10 pounds) for $4.99 that would cost me $12 to ship by Priority Mail or $10 by Fedex.
No, USPS is only cheaper for certain things. Basically, once you go over 4 pounds, Fedex and UPS ground get cheaper (Fedex is cheaper than UPS in my experience, but companies with special rates may have a different experience). USPS rates for heavy packages are quite high. But under 4 pounds, UPS/Fedex can't touch USPS at all. Under 13 ounces, it's a total joke: you can send it First Class Mail for next to nothing, and it gets delivered in 3 days maximum, 2 if it's somewhat close, and overnight if it's in the same metro area. The other services will cost you at least $10, and will take 4 days (less if it's really close).
So if you're only sending lightweight stuff, or small things that can fit into the Priority Mail small flat-rate box (a little bigger than a videotape, for those who remember how large those are), USPS is easily the best choice. If you're shipping really dense, heavy stuff that can fit into the larger Priority Mail flat-rate boxes, USPS will again probably end up being cheaper. If you're shipping a box that weighs 20-70 pounds and won't fit in one of those flat-rate boxes, then the other services are most likely a much better deal, unless it's all books and you can qualify for the "Media Mail" service.
In addition, since they can do DNS redirects, whenever some Cox email user (how many of those are there anyway?) goes to email.cox.com, or whatever their URL is, Cox can redirect it to a new site with a big message saying, "Sorry, but this service is down! That's what you get for trusting us with your email."
Anyone who doesn't use Cox email, or isn't visiting cox.com, doesn't need to be bothered with this news.
Google Plus sucks, granted. What's this "Smart Screen" feature? I'm not a Windows user, and certainly not a Win8 user (who is? It isn't very popular).
As far as Ubuntu going down the tubes, the Linux-oriented boards are full of people bitching about Ubuntu, Unity, Gnome3, Unity+Amazon, etc. Since Unity was pushed out by Ubuntu, other distros, especially Linux Mint, have grown greatly. Ubuntu tries to claim they're still the most popular and that everyone loves Unity, but that's probably bullshit, esp. since Mint seems to have become so popular and gets a lot of word-of-mouth support in the forums. XFCE has also gained a lot of new users. If anything, maybe you're not seeing as much bitching about Ubuntu's privacy and commercialization issues because all the users who cared about those things ditched Ubuntu when Unity was rolled out, and moved to other distros, so now they have no reason to complain loudly about these moves by Ubuntu (which came well after Unity was deployed), and instead their only comment is "ahhh, another reason I'm glad I dumped that turd and switched to $DISTRO."
Perhaps if Google and Apple would kiss and make up and form a joint venture around that...
Hell no. With Apple in there, any service they get involved in providing will only work with Macs and iDevices. I used to think Microsoft was the worst company as far as respecting open standards and working with others and pushing customers to only use their products, but Apple has surpassed them and become much worse.
No, they don't. They might use FedEx to ship their Priority Mail flat rate boxes, but the final door-to-door delivery is done by the USPS. In my experience, Priority Mail is usually one day faster than First Class, and much, much faster than either FedEx or UPS Ground.
In addition, UPS has a service where USPS does the final residential delivery.
I used to be a Cox customer until last month, because I moved across the country (to where Comcast is the cable provider, and IME they suck far, far worse than Cox, just judging by the few weeks of service I've had with Comcast versus about 7 years with Cox).
This announcement is especially annoying, because it's an outage on some stupid service that no one with a brain would ever use. Seriously, what moron actually uses ISP-provided email in this day and age? What a brilliant idea: as soon as you have to move or change providers for some reason, all your email is suddenly gone, and your email address is defunct, and if you didn't notify everyone in your address book beforehand you're screwed.
This used to be good advice, because Macs were such a small share of the market that the malware authors didn't bother with them. This isn't quite so true any more.
If you want to get them a platform that won't be targeted by malware authors for quite some time, install Linux Mint on their PC. As a bonus, it won't cost anything extra (unless they have some shitty printer that has no Linux support, but a new Linux-compatible printer is much cheaper than a new Mac). As an extra bonus, you can install the KDE version of Linux Mint and assuming they're coming from XP or Win7, they won't even have to learn a whole new GUI paradigm.
This is a good point: give me a bunch of workers (which I don't have to pay for) and I'll find all kinds of productive things for them to do.
Giving care to the elderly would be useful, however elderly people usually don't have extra money to pay people to wait on them as servants, so it doesn't get done except for rich old people, since the rest of society doesn't want to pay much for that. Smaller classes for schoolchildren would be beneficial, but that would require paying teachers more, to make teaching a more attractive profession, and paying more for school buildings and such, however society (in the USA) doesn't want to invest in that stuff since that would mean higher taxes.
If you earn enough from benefits, and your benefits reduce if you work/produce value, then why do anything useful?
With the "basic income" idea that's been floated around, this wouldn't happen. Under this scheme, everyone gets a "basic income", a paycheck from the government, for nothing. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough to live on, to keep you from being impoverished and living under a bridge and starving. Then, if you want to get a job, that's fine, you keep that money, in addition to your basic income. So you have every incentive to try to earn more money. If you get a job as a surgeon making $800k, you still get your $15k basic income even though it's a pittance in comparison to your real income.
The scheme of losing your welfare benefits if you get a (crappy, low-paying) job is indeed pretty horrible, and is a disincentive to working, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Now I have no idea if it's really economically possible for a modern industrial nation to employ this "basic income" scheme, but surely not having to have all the apparatus necessary to investigate welfare fraud would save a lot of money that could go to providing these incomes. We do have at least one example of a nation doing something like this: Norway provides a guaranteed income to all its citizens, paid from its oil and natural gas profits, and they're nearly at the top of the global standard-of-living indices.
Actually, yes. I don't see how there's any advantage in any kind of exclusivity agreement, unless there's some sort of malfeasance going on (under the table, so to speak). All these agreements do is limit competition, and that's never a good thing in a market economy.
Remember all those no-bid contracts with the US government in the middle east (such as with Halliburton)? How were those helpful to anyone besides the benefactor of the contract, and whichever politicians were getting paid off?
How will they convince public sector unions, doctors, lawyers... that their standard of living will be that of the average citizen?
There's a big problem with this social change you claim is coming (which seems to sound a lot like Marxism - "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities"):
How exactly do you convince people to put out the effort to get a better job, and deal with the longer hours and higher stress associated with that career, if they're not going to get anything in return for it, and will live in the same crappy little apartment as someone who's just a janitor, or doesn't bother to work at all?
With lots of automation (perhaps rendering janitors and waiters obsolete), there's going to be tons of people who are totally unable to work at all, because they won't have the intelligence and dedication needed to get a job as a doctor or engineer (things that can't be automated), and won't have the creativity needed to be an artist or musician. So society will either have to eliminate all these people in death camps, or provide them with a salary even though they contribute nothing to society in the way of labor. Don't forget all their kids, since these people who have no jobs will have plenty of time on their hands and will be busy having kids.
So if you can have the same standard of living either 1) working your ass off to go to medical school (which presumably is free in this brave new society), so you can work long hours as a doctor/surgeon and have a crappy marriage because you're never home, or 2) don't do shit, just party, play video games, and get pregnant, why would anyone choose #1 unless they're really driven to? I haven't done a survey, but I'm pretty sure not all doctors are doing it just because they love it that much.
I still can't figure out what the point of the AT-ATs was. We're talking about a civilization that has levitation technology: remember the landspeeder Luke ran around in on Tattooine (which couldn't have been very expensive since he was a poor moisture farmer)? If they can make those levitate, then why wouldn't top-of-the-line Imperial military ground vehicles have the same capability, instead of needing legs? Besides, the ground where we saw them operating (namely on Hoth, I'm talking about the AT-ATs here and not the AT-STs used on Endor) was smooth; a large wheeled or tracked vehicle would have been much faster and capable of carrying more weight, if we're going to ignore levitation technology.
Google's been around a lot longer than tons of non-free email services out there. Bad logic. Paying money for a service is in no way a guarantee that the company will keep offering that service, or even be around very long. People paid boatloads of money for CompuServe, and that didn't last either.
Exactly, just like this HDTV stuff looks like ass because there's way too much detail, and that omnipresent 16kHz buzz is gone. We need to bring back NTSC. And even better, we should dump the color stuff and go back to B&W, and maybe even dump sound too and go back to silent movies.
Huh? What standards? I don't see a whole lot of rallying around "standards" in Linux-land these days. We've got the Unity, Gnome, and KDE guys all going different directions (with only the KDE people really trying to establish any standardization on the desktop; remember the fighting about the notification stuff?), and users flocking to different desktops because they're sick of the big 3: XFCE has experienced a huge surge in popularity in the past few years for instance.
Then, for system initialization, whereas we used to just have SystemV scripts, now we have upstart and systemd (as well as some distros hanging onto SysV).
We don't even have good ole ifconfig any more; now they're trying to replace it with "ip", with limited success, even though it sucks.
And in video, we have some distros moving to Wayland, but only some of them, and AFAIK the X video drivers are not compatible with Wayland.
Sure, there's some people trying to push their own stuff and call it "standard", but there's no real cooperative effort towards standardization in Linux that I see. Instead, there's tons of fragmentation, perhaps moreso than there was 10 years ago.
Yep, you know things have gotten bad when people are pining for the days when you had a full cubicle to yourself, with 6-8 foot high walls, and everyone's totally forgotten the days when employees actually had real offices.
That might work for a small minority of workplaces, but it's not the norm by any means. How many companies actually care about customers and their opinions anyway? Most companies only care about the next quarter's financials, and releasing crap long before it's ready, filled with bugs, is a good way of pumping up your short-term financials. By the time the company's bad reputation catches up with it, it's some other CEO's problem.
unwanted mandatory feature churn
This is a good point here, and to me personally is my #1 complaint about Gmail, namely their unwanted UI changes. Maybe someone will come up with a Greasemonkey script to fix them, but free developers seem to concentrate a lot more on things like ad-blocking than stuff like this.
obstinate lack of GnuPG or S/MIME support
This is a very unfortunate subject; it's not just Gmail that doesn't support GnuPG, it's pretty much everyone. Sure, some of the F/OSS email clients support this excellent feature, but that's it, and more importantly, it doesn't matter if your client supports it if all the people you communicate with don't use such clients. So, you might be able to exchange encrypted emails with your one Linux- and GnuPG-using friend (because lots of Linux users don't use it either), but that's it. It's really a shame this didn't catch on more; it would have made a lot of sense for sensitive business communications, for instance, but businesses don't bother, they just make their employees put some stupid legalese in their signature block saying "you're not allowed to read this if this email wasn't directed to you", like that's going to be any real protection from prying eyes.