I hear lots of friends who work retail bitch about things like this...but here's what I don't understand: why do you blame the customer and not the greedy employer who is screwing you over if you don't screw over the customers? Is it just because it's convenient to blame the people you see every day rather than the distant corporate managers who set the policy that could get you fired?
I fully agree that a lot of people are assholes to retail employees, however the blame for this situation lies with the retail employers and not the customers or the service workers. Trusting relationships between companies and their customers are basically non-existant anymore; everyone just tries to screw the other side because they know they are going to get screwed themselves otherwise. This is essentially the result of corporate sales policy that favors short-term profits over building long-term customer loyalty and goodwill towards the company. These stores just don't care what individual people think of them anymore, and the customers are aware of that. Hence they treat the employees like shit because it's often the only way to get decent treatment and deals that aren't a ripoff. It sucks, but it's true: the retail employee has been set up to take the brunt of customer wrath over these nasty policies. The situation isn't helped by the fact that the same companies prohibit their staff from showing any backbone when it comes to dealing with genuine assholes who are verbally abusive, etc.
Maybe I'm naive or not greedy enough to be an executive, but I think retailers should be treating their customers better than they do if they want to have repeat business that doesn't dry up someday when someone with even worse service (eg, Walmart) finds a way to undercut them on price. I mean, if Best Buy and Walmart are both going to treat me like shit when I go in there, then I'm just going to go to wherever is cheapest. Lately, that doesn't seem to be Best Buy as they have really been jacking up their prices lately. They also have a lot more of a "scammy", used-car-lot feel than they used to; I'm predicting that they are about to take a nosedive in popularity and quality and end up like so many of the other electronics retailers: bankrupt or limping along selling overpriced crap to the few people wealthy enough to buy electronics but too stupid to shop online for them.
I agree with you. However, I think that retail businesses need to understand that a certain segment of the population is just full of assholes and that's just the way it is. If these people cause them to lose money, then they need to change their practices to make it so their policies cannot be abused so easily.
If the rebates are so easily abused, why don't they just stop offering rebates? I don't see how they really have much room to complain about those being abused when the whole concept is pretty much just abusive marketing on the part of the retailers. Instead of just deciding to end rebates when the program ends up costing them more than they gain from it, they blame the customers. The reason is that they want to be able to continue their sleazy, misleading marketing AND stop people from trying to take advantage in return. I think it's pretty messed up for them to complain about customers who rip them off on rebates when they themselves are getting a lot of money they don't "deserve" from people who don't claim their rebates or have them denied for BS technicalities, etc. Rebates are really just a way to market something as a very low price without really losing much money from the price drop.
"Two" counts as several. And I've been using Gentoo for longer than that (I started before the 1.0 version was released). I started using it in December 2001.
Personally, I think that distcc will become more and more useless as computers get faster. My new machine (P4 2.8, 1 GB RAM, SATA drives) can compile a complete Gentoo desktop system in just about two hours. That's pretty damn cool considering that it used to take like 24 on my old laptop when I first started using Gentoo several years ago. It would probably only take about an hour to setup a server system on Gentoo on my same machine since the biggest component, X, would not need to be compiled.
Computing power is outstripping the size of source code that needs to be compiled. Soon there will be little difference in install time between the source and binary distros, and all the jokes about Gentoo's compile time will be pretty much obsolete. Already, once you have your system installed, the time required to keep current/install new apps is minimal. My system can compile any new program (except maybe OpenOffice) in under 25 minutes. Even Mozilla can be compiled in that time.
Actually, I think the reason IS that they are still afraid of Microsoft. They are afraid that the DOJ would not come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft; a reasonable assumption given their track record. MS basically has assurance now that no penalties will ever be made to stick.
Also, shipping third-party apps doesn't make much sense when you can't remove MS's versions. It just bloats the install more, since you can't wipe out IE and friends. Ideally, the DOJ would've at least shown the backbone necessary to force MS to decouple IE from Windows. I want to be able to delete every MS application program (IE, Windows Media, OE, etc) from my Windows computer with no ill effects for the operating system. I imagine it also confuses unsophisticated customers more when they have a choice of browsers available. They can't get rid of IE, so it's really the only choice available to the OEMs.
I understand what you are saying and I mostly agree. However, do you think that the near-universal availability of gcc and other compilation/linking tools on Linux poses any sort of a threat? Couldn't viruses (or more likely, trojans) just set up a routine to compile themselves and thus skirt a lot of the binary compatibility issues? After all, you could argue that the availability of source code and compilers is what makes the lack of binary compatibility not too bad of a problem for Linux distributions. I know that a lot of people remove gcc from their "secure" production machines such as servers and routers in the belief that this increases security.
Maybe Linux viruses of the future will be able to run themselves using some sort of statically linked binary known to run on a wide variety of Linux installations, and then assess their environment and recompile themselves so that they are binary compatible with a set of target programs. They might even be able to probe such programs to try to determine the more obvious optimization settings (like fomit-frame-pointer). Usage of configure seems to be pretty widespread for Linux source packages; why would viruses/malware be any different?
Oddly enough, legal drug measurements are all in milligrams in the US. Actually it's not really that odd since drug dosages all rely on scientific work that is all done in metric.
Black market drugs are whole 'nother deal and are often measured in ounces, etc.
I didn't notice it for a long time, either, but that's because I've been using the 2.6.x kernels for some time and X taking up so much of the CPU produces very little performance hit for other applications on my machine.
When I started having gkrellm2 run on my desktop, it became rather obvious on the CPU usage graph. It's possible that Firefox is affected more than the Mozilla suite, but the bug was definitely present in both of them for quite some time.
That's probably what the parent post was referring to...that bug has been in Mozilla or Acrobat Reader for Linux for a very long time. Many, many people have complained about it, but it seems it was very difficult to track down in the code. I'll be overjoyed if it's finally been fixed.
Honestly, I think breaking API compatibility is the only way for MS to actually fix the problems with Windows. A lot of the problem seems to be the large amount of old code and cruft that has been left in the name of backwards compatibility.
It's certainly a big risk to the Microsoft monopoly, but it's a necessary step for them. Now would be a good time for Linux to make a big move for the desktop.
Not to mention marketing through spam. My first tipoff that Orbitz is a shady company was when they started spamming every one of my email accounts with advertising on a semi-regular basis. This is definitely spam because I never "agreed" to anything like that. I've never even had an account on their site.
Any company who engages in all the crap they do deserves to go bankrupt and rot in corporate hell with SCO.
I think you're confusing "free as in beer" with "free as in freedom". That's what I think your parent poster meant. And Photoshop is a long shot from free as in freedom (or beer, for that matter.) As an example, look at how they do things like try to stop people from editing currency images. The answer to that problem is not to try to take away the digital tools (it's inevitable that people will get them...) but rather for society to move to more secure form of currency than pieces of paper.
Also, while I don't doubt you can control all of Photoshop from Javascript, that doesn't stop me from saying that I think JavaScript sucks. I don't know what you mean by "cludgy C", but the Gimp supports more than one powerful language for scripting including Python, Guile (Scheme), and Perl. JavaScript sucks as an API compared to all of those.
I think Photoshop is a far superior application to the Gimp, too. It's definitely better as far as ease of use and clean GUI design. But I do NOT think it wins on either of the points your parent poster made (scripting and freedom).
Not to really disagree with you about the issues you've had with your Linux, but most of those things you mention sound like configuration issues to me. I experienced a lot of the same things when I used Redhat. Once I learned a bit more about the innards of Linux I was able to resolve most of the things like that. It's simply a matter of tracking down the problems and fixing them while reading about how to do that.
Open Office: I totally agree with you on this. However I don't use it any more (have started using LaTeX exclusively.) Frankly openoffice has been horrible every time I've every tried using it. About the only thing it does better than any other Linux program is import Microsoft formats.
Hardware issues - seem to me to be distro-related. Are you using a custom kernel or some crappy precompiled monstrosity your distribtion vendor made for you? It really helps if you compile in only the support you need for the hardware you have, and do so from the official kernel source from kernel.org. I feel the official source is more trouble-free than any distribution provided kernel. Also you might want to look into things like the way your/dev directory is set up and configuration files for hotplug.
Games - you're right about the performance. This is either the fault of the applications - a lot of games (*cough* UT2k3) were designed around Windows APIs and absolutely suck under Linux by comparison since they are basically unoptimized for OpenGL. Another possibility is that you're using an ATI card - their drivers for Linux suck and are way slower than the Windows ones. NVIDIA's drivers for Linux are a lot closer to the performance of the Windows ones.
Stability - My "desktop" Linux, running on a laptop, is FAR more stable than Windows XP, and I include applications in that. However, I don't use KDE or Gnome, so I can't vouch for the stability of those lately. Another possibility is that you have a crappy distro that mismatches applications and library versions.
Audio - I agree, it still sucks. Hopefully it'll get better when more applications support ALSA natively. We still need a standard kernel software mixer though... Video - Works much better than under Windows for me. Mplayer supports more formats than Windows Media Player does without installing hard-to-find 3rd party video codecs into Windows. Windows Media is very easy to use for formats that have codecs on the Microsoft auto-download site, but it sucks royally to have to set up a more obscure format that isn't on the official site. Seriously - just compile mplayer from source and all your problems with video will go away.
Re:Gentoo in the enterprise? I don't see it.
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Gentoo Linux Musings
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes, but I believe what the Gentoo people meant by "enterprise support" is that they will be providing periodic stable forks of the Portage tree on a regular basis. The new quarterly release structure is a step towards that goal. They intend to take a snapshot of the Portage tree every 3-6 months and work on getting the packages in it very stable. Then they'll offer guaranteed support for those packages including things like security fixes for the lifetime of that "version" of Gentoo. Essentially it'll be like Redhat is now but you'll have a lot more flexibility in customizing the configuration to meet specific needs.
It's not there yet, and some things need to get worked on before they're ready for this. They may need more developer manpower too. As a Gentoo user since early 2002, I'll be interested to see what they come up with with the new non-profit foundation. A very interesting concept to me would be a nonprofit that offers paid support for these "stable" snapshots of Gentoo for enterprise customers - I think Mozilla is offering something similar.
Possibly you are right, and I'm not going to disagree necessarily. I will say however that there are several arguments you could make in the other direction.
First, as others in this discussion have pointed out, this system could end up as a way to legally remove responsibility for one's vehicle in some ways from the owner. For instance, if you are not in control of how fast your car goes and the sensor network is, then you can't be held liable for speeding. And if everyone's car was on this system then the system could safely steer cars much faster because traffic would flow at a constant rate and there would be no element of human error.
Second, what is there to say that they couldn't disable the vehicles of those who refuse to be tracked even without the sensor network? The government could force all the car manufacturers to embed a remote kill device that would shut down the guidance system or even the engine of any car they want right now. While I agree with you that a system involving a network of guidance sensors is open to abuse, I'm not so sure that such abuse is something intrinsic to that technology. It's more of a social policy issue than a technology one, because it involves the people asking the government not to invasively control out lives. They could do that already with or without such a system, and they for the most part do not because people have not been willing to accept such intrusions.
Third, such "privacy invasions" might actually benefit individual drivers if they are not abused by the authorities. For instance, driving safety could be increased, drunk driving could be virtually eliminated, and the authorities could keep unlicensed and uninsured (if those things would even be necessary any more) drivers off the roads completely. Right now in many places car insurance is very expensive because so many drivers illegally do not carry it and thus the cost of accidents caused by those drivers gets passed to those of us who do obey the law. This system could prevent that altogether and the cost of accident insurance could be evenly spread across everyone using the road.
Again, I'm not saying I disagree with you, but that there is another side to the story. Technology can and will always be abused by authorities if laws are not put in place to prevent that. That's why these systems need to have guarantees of things like privacy, but it's not a reason why the technology itself is "bad".
Somehow I think fully autonomous cars won't happen very soon unless we upgrade the road system to provide navigation support for these cars. I don't see cars being able to find their way from one place to another given the myriad of road configurations out there unless there are actual beacons and stuff embedded into the road to help them find their way. It wouldn't too hard (ok, it would be, but not impossible) to write software that could pilot a car down an interstate highway with no human intervention. But I somehow think city driving might be a lot bigger challenge, considering that even human drivers usually have to stay very alert in these situations.
You're both idiots for arguing such a stupid concept of birds carrying data. Oh c'mon, it's fun!
Yes, I was being pedantic, and the real "definition" of bandwidth is the width of the frequency spectrum a signal can use (and this is complicated by modulation schemes, etc). But a lot of people use the word "bandwidth" when they mean "throughput", as you've pointed out. I was just taking the opportunity to inform:) Don't take me too seriously, as I am an idiot as you've pointed out.
What you just defined bandwidth by is exactly the same definition I used. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted per unit time. The parent poster was only wrong about his statement that bandwidth would be halved if distance (and thus latency) were doubled. *That* is incorrect, because the rate you can transmit data at is not affected by the distance to the receiving station. He would be correct if he said that link utilization would be halved for the same amount of data. But bandwidth is constant.
I was just saying that what is doubled in this case is the pipe capacity and latency; the bandwidth part stays the same.
Incorrect. The bandwidth would remain constant - what would double if the distance doubled is what is usually called a "bandwidth-delay product". This quantity represents the pipe capacity of a given length, or in other words the amount of data in transit at any given moment. This is of course assuming you have an unlimited number of pigeons you can keep sending out.
You would be correct, using the term bandwidth loosely, if the number of pigeons stayed constant. However, using the strict definition, bandwidth is totally unrelated to line latency/round trip time.
MS is NOT just saying that Microsoft Office is the best office suite available. They are specifically comparing the two products and making some very misleading statements in the process.
Not all software vendors go out of their way to attack and discredit all their competition like Microsoft does. I think they are kinda legendary for that sort of thing, in fact.
I don't think people are personally offended by this kind of thing so much as that they offended at MS's overall pattern of behavior. They have always been a vicious, ruthless company willing to lie, cheat, and crush all that stands in their way.
Excel's graphing is nowhere near on a par with something like Matlab. It just lacks the features and flexibility needed for real scientific usage, though it might be acceptable for more basic usage like sales graphs, etc...but its chief advantage is that it is easy for dumb people to learn how to use it. On features it loses, IMHO.
The problem is that unless the superior input schemes (keyboard, mouse) actually come with every console sold, the game companies will design their games around the control instead. They don't want to artificially limit their market by only being able to sell to the few console gamers who purchase additional input devices to supplement the controllers that came with their system. So they will just design a game with a simplistic user interface instead.
Even if a major console manufacturer did include these things with their systems, I still don't believe it would be popular with the console gaming audience. These people don't want to deal with anything complicated and the keyboard and mouse makes them think of a computer. And, 3rd party console game developers would not develop for the keyboard and mouse either unless virtually all the popular consoles had it by default, since otherwise they would be limiting their ability to port the game to other consoles and increase sales.
All that said, I still think the keyboard and mouse are far superior for certain types of games than any console controller I've ever used. There are indeed fun console games that use a controller; I'm not denying that at all. I'm just saying that consoles encourage game developers to develop user interfaces with a very limited number of different controls and simplistic input methods. This can be a good thing in certain types of games, for sure. But other games suffer dramatically from it, especially in replay value. When I was really into Counter-Strike I typically had almost my whole keyboard bound to various actions so that I could memorize the locations and do things ultra-fast. Similarly, a lot of RTS games have a ton of keyboard shortcuts that can make the game a lot more enjoyable when you learn them. The keyboard shortcuts not only are more convenient but also introduce a steeper learning curve into the game that makes online matches much more competitive. It takes longer to learn the game so there is more variation in skill level online.
Yes. While the high cost of malpractice insurance is primarily the result of the explosion in lawsuits (IMHO), the massive annual increases in healthcare costs are the result of technology. As more and more expensive and effective medical technology is developed, healthcare gets more expensive. And yet everyone including the most poor individuals on welfare belive they are entitled to the latest and greatest medical treatment money can buy. Not to say that that's not a worthy goal, but I don't think it's an economically sustainable one. Eventually more than half our GDP will be funnelled into healthcare at this rate.
I think it's a much better idea to perform some sort of triage on patients who aren't paying for their healthcare. Those who have no hope of recovery shouldn't receive much treatment beyond what is necessary for them to remain comfortable and pain-free until death. And we should provide some minimum standard of healthcare for everyone but not necessarily the latest and greatest. If we continue to do that, then no one will be able to afford healthcare soon. Costs will just keep rising and the burden will be shifted onto a smaller and smaller group of individuals who can afford it as fewer people will be able to afford insurance. Eventually this will collapse like all pyramid schemes.
While Gentoo hasn't necessarily made this "easier", it is certainly more clear what is going on. I'm always nervous about some GUI installer just doing stuff to the MBR without telling me what it is, whether it is the Windows installer or the Redhat one.
And, at least for x86, GRUB IS an improvement in usability over LILO. I haven't used any version of LILO in the last two or three years since I switched to GRUB, but the main advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to remember to reinstall it into the boot sectors every time you change the config. You just edit the config file, save, and it'll work fine on the next reboot. And, it's nice because you can manually edit the config file right in the GRUB GUI...
It may have just been a coincidence, but I think they may be just forbidding links from Slashdot. I opened it in a new tab and reloaded it so I wouldn't have the Slashdot referrer and it worked instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear lots of friends who work retail bitch about things like this...but here's what I don't understand: why do you blame the customer and not the greedy employer who is screwing you over if you don't screw over the customers? Is it just because it's convenient to blame the people you see every day rather than the distant corporate managers who set the policy that could get you fired?
I fully agree that a lot of people are assholes to retail employees, however the blame for this situation lies with the retail employers and not the customers or the service workers. Trusting relationships between companies and their customers are basically non-existant anymore; everyone just tries to screw the other side because they know they are going to get screwed themselves otherwise. This is essentially the result of corporate sales policy that favors short-term profits over building long-term customer loyalty and goodwill towards the company. These stores just don't care what individual people think of them anymore, and the customers are aware of that. Hence they treat the employees like shit because it's often the only way to get decent treatment and deals that aren't a ripoff. It sucks, but it's true: the retail employee has been set up to take the brunt of customer wrath over these nasty policies. The situation isn't helped by the fact that the same companies prohibit their staff from showing any backbone when it comes to dealing with genuine assholes who are verbally abusive, etc.
Maybe I'm naive or not greedy enough to be an executive, but I think retailers should be treating their customers better than they do if they want to have repeat business that doesn't dry up someday when someone with even worse service (eg, Walmart) finds a way to undercut them on price. I mean, if Best Buy and Walmart are both going to treat me like shit when I go in there, then I'm just going to go to wherever is cheapest. Lately, that doesn't seem to be Best Buy as they have really been jacking up their prices lately. They also have a lot more of a "scammy", used-car-lot feel than they used to; I'm predicting that they are about to take a nosedive in popularity and quality and end up like so many of the other electronics retailers: bankrupt or limping along selling overpriced crap to the few people wealthy enough to buy electronics but too stupid to shop online for them.
I agree with you. However, I think that retail businesses need to understand that a certain segment of the population is just full of assholes and that's just the way it is. If these people cause them to lose money, then they need to change their practices to make it so their policies cannot be abused so easily.
If the rebates are so easily abused, why don't they just stop offering rebates? I don't see how they really have much room to complain about those being abused when the whole concept is pretty much just abusive marketing on the part of the retailers. Instead of just deciding to end rebates when the program ends up costing them more than they gain from it, they blame the customers. The reason is that they want to be able to continue their sleazy, misleading marketing AND stop people from trying to take advantage in return. I think it's pretty messed up for them to complain about customers who rip them off on rebates when they themselves are getting a lot of money they don't "deserve" from people who don't claim their rebates or have them denied for BS technicalities, etc. Rebates are really just a way to market something as a very low price without really losing much money from the price drop.
"Two" counts as several. And I've been using Gentoo for longer than that (I started before the 1.0 version was released). I started using it in December 2001.
Personally, I think that distcc will become more and more useless as computers get faster. My new machine (P4 2.8, 1 GB RAM, SATA drives) can compile a complete Gentoo desktop system in just about two hours. That's pretty damn cool considering that it used to take like 24 on my old laptop when I first started using Gentoo several years ago. It would probably only take about an hour to setup a server system on Gentoo on my same machine since the biggest component, X, would not need to be compiled.
Computing power is outstripping the size of source code that needs to be compiled. Soon there will be little difference in install time between the source and binary distros, and all the jokes about Gentoo's compile time will be pretty much obsolete. Already, once you have your system installed, the time required to keep current/install new apps is minimal. My system can compile any new program (except maybe OpenOffice) in under 25 minutes. Even Mozilla can be compiled in that time.
Actually, I think the reason IS that they are still afraid of Microsoft. They are afraid that the DOJ would not come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft; a reasonable assumption given their track record. MS basically has assurance now that no penalties will ever be made to stick.
Also, shipping third-party apps doesn't make much sense when you can't remove MS's versions. It just bloats the install more, since you can't wipe out IE and friends. Ideally, the DOJ would've at least shown the backbone necessary to force MS to decouple IE from Windows. I want to be able to delete every MS application program (IE, Windows Media, OE, etc) from my Windows computer with no ill effects for the operating system. I imagine it also confuses unsophisticated customers more when they have a choice of browsers available. They can't get rid of IE, so it's really the only choice available to the OEMs.
I understand what you are saying and I mostly agree. However, do you think that the near-universal availability of gcc and other compilation/linking tools on Linux poses any sort of a threat? Couldn't viruses (or more likely, trojans) just set up a routine to compile themselves and thus skirt a lot of the binary compatibility issues? After all, you could argue that the availability of source code and compilers is what makes the lack of binary compatibility not too bad of a problem for Linux distributions. I know that a lot of people remove gcc from their "secure" production machines such as servers and routers in the belief that this increases security.
Maybe Linux viruses of the future will be able to run themselves using some sort of statically linked binary known to run on a wide variety of Linux installations, and then assess their environment and recompile themselves so that they are binary compatible with a set of target programs. They might even be able to probe such programs to try to determine the more obvious optimization settings (like fomit-frame-pointer). Usage of configure seems to be pretty widespread for Linux source packages; why would viruses/malware be any different?
Oddly enough, legal drug measurements are all in milligrams in the US. Actually it's not really that odd since drug dosages all rely on scientific work that is all done in metric.
Black market drugs are whole 'nother deal and are often measured in ounces, etc.
I didn't notice it for a long time, either, but that's because I've been using the 2.6.x kernels for some time and X taking up so much of the CPU produces very little performance hit for other applications on my machine.
When I started having gkrellm2 run on my desktop, it became rather obvious on the CPU usage graph. It's possible that Firefox is affected more than the Mozilla suite, but the bug was definitely present in both of them for quite some time.
That's probably what the parent post was referring to...that bug has been in Mozilla or Acrobat Reader for Linux for a very long time. Many, many people have complained about it, but it seems it was very difficult to track down in the code. I'll be overjoyed if it's finally been fixed.
Honestly, I think breaking API compatibility is the only way for MS to actually fix the problems with Windows. A lot of the problem seems to be the large amount of old code and cruft that has been left in the name of backwards compatibility.
It's certainly a big risk to the Microsoft monopoly, but it's a necessary step for them. Now would be a good time for Linux to make a big move for the desktop.
Not to mention marketing through spam. My first tipoff that Orbitz is a shady company was when they started spamming every one of my email accounts with advertising on a semi-regular basis. This is definitely spam because I never "agreed" to anything like that. I've never even had an account on their site.
Any company who engages in all the crap they do deserves to go bankrupt and rot in corporate hell with SCO.
I think you're confusing "free as in beer" with "free as in freedom". That's what I think your parent poster meant. And Photoshop is a long shot from free as in freedom (or beer, for that matter.) As an example, look at how they do things like try to stop people from editing currency images. The answer to that problem is not to try to take away the digital tools (it's inevitable that people will get them...) but rather for society to move to more secure form of currency than pieces of paper.
Also, while I don't doubt you can control all of Photoshop from Javascript, that doesn't stop me from saying that I think JavaScript sucks. I don't know what you mean by "cludgy C", but the Gimp supports more than one powerful language for scripting including Python, Guile (Scheme), and Perl. JavaScript sucks as an API compared to all of those.
I think Photoshop is a far superior application to the Gimp, too. It's definitely better as far as ease of use and clean GUI design. But I do NOT think it wins on either of the points your parent poster made (scripting and freedom).
Not to really disagree with you about the issues you've had with your Linux, but most of those things you mention sound like configuration issues to me. I experienced a lot of the same things when I used Redhat. Once I learned a bit more about the innards of Linux I was able to resolve most of the things like that. It's simply a matter of tracking down the problems and fixing them while reading about how to do that.
/dev directory is set up and configuration files for hotplug.
Open Office: I totally agree with you on this. However I don't use it any more (have started using LaTeX exclusively.) Frankly openoffice has been horrible every time I've every tried using it. About the only thing it does better than any other Linux program is import Microsoft formats.
Hardware issues - seem to me to be distro-related. Are you using a custom kernel or some crappy precompiled monstrosity your distribtion vendor made for you? It really helps if you compile in only the support you need for the hardware you have, and do so from the official kernel source from kernel.org. I feel the official source is more trouble-free than any distribution provided kernel. Also you might want to look into things like the way your
Games - you're right about the performance. This is either the fault of the applications - a lot of games (*cough* UT2k3) were designed around Windows APIs and absolutely suck under Linux by comparison since they are basically unoptimized for OpenGL. Another possibility is that you're using an ATI card - their drivers for Linux suck and are way slower than the Windows ones. NVIDIA's drivers for Linux are a lot closer to the performance of the Windows ones.
Stability - My "desktop" Linux, running on a laptop, is FAR more stable than Windows XP, and I include applications in that. However, I don't use KDE or Gnome, so I can't vouch for the stability of those lately. Another possibility is that you have a crappy distro that mismatches applications and library versions.
Audio - I agree, it still sucks. Hopefully it'll get better when more applications support ALSA natively. We still need a standard kernel software mixer though...
Video - Works much better than under Windows for me. Mplayer supports more formats than Windows Media Player does without installing hard-to-find 3rd party video codecs into Windows. Windows Media is very easy to use for formats that have codecs on the Microsoft auto-download site, but it sucks royally to have to set up a more obscure format that isn't on the official site.
Seriously - just compile mplayer from source and all your problems with video will go away.
Yes, but I believe what the Gentoo people meant by "enterprise support" is that they will be providing periodic stable forks of the Portage tree on a regular basis. The new quarterly release structure is a step towards that goal. They intend to take a snapshot of the Portage tree every 3-6 months and work on getting the packages in it very stable. Then they'll offer guaranteed support for those packages including things like security fixes for the lifetime of that "version" of Gentoo. Essentially it'll be like Redhat is now but you'll have a lot more flexibility in customizing the configuration to meet specific needs.
It's not there yet, and some things need to get worked on before they're ready for this. They may need more developer manpower too. As a Gentoo user since early 2002, I'll be interested to see what they come up with with the new non-profit foundation. A very interesting concept to me would be a nonprofit that offers paid support for these "stable" snapshots of Gentoo for enterprise customers - I think Mozilla is offering something similar.
Possibly you are right, and I'm not going to disagree necessarily. I will say however that there are several arguments you could make in the other direction.
First, as others in this discussion have pointed out, this system could end up as a way to legally remove responsibility for one's vehicle in some ways from the owner. For instance, if you are not in control of how fast your car goes and the sensor network is, then you can't be held liable for speeding. And if everyone's car was on this system then the system could safely steer cars much faster because traffic would flow at a constant rate and there would be no element of human error.
Second, what is there to say that they couldn't disable the vehicles of those who refuse to be tracked even without the sensor network? The government could force all the car manufacturers to embed a remote kill device that would shut down the guidance system or even the engine of any car they want right now. While I agree with you that a system involving a network of guidance sensors is open to abuse, I'm not so sure that such abuse is something intrinsic to that technology. It's more of a social policy issue than a technology one, because it involves the people asking the government not to invasively control out lives. They could do that already with or without such a system, and they for the most part do not because people have not been willing to accept such intrusions.
Third, such "privacy invasions" might actually benefit individual drivers if they are not abused by the authorities. For instance, driving safety could be increased, drunk driving could be virtually eliminated, and the authorities could keep unlicensed and uninsured (if those things would even be necessary any more) drivers off the roads completely. Right now in many places car insurance is very expensive because so many drivers illegally do not carry it and thus the cost of accidents caused by those drivers gets passed to those of us who do obey the law. This system could prevent that altogether and the cost of accident insurance could be evenly spread across everyone using the road.
Again, I'm not saying I disagree with you, but that there is another side to the story. Technology can and will always be abused by authorities if laws are not put in place to prevent that. That's why these systems need to have guarantees of things like privacy, but it's not a reason why the technology itself is "bad".
Somehow I think fully autonomous cars won't happen very soon unless we upgrade the road system to provide navigation support for these cars. I don't see cars being able to find their way from one place to another given the myriad of road configurations out there unless there are actual beacons and stuff embedded into the road to help them find their way. It wouldn't too hard (ok, it would be, but not impossible) to write software that could pilot a car down an interstate highway with no human intervention. But I somehow think city driving might be a lot bigger challenge, considering that even human drivers usually have to stay very alert in these situations.
You're both idiots for arguing such a stupid concept of birds carrying data.
:) Don't take me too seriously, as I am an idiot as you've pointed out.
Oh c'mon, it's fun!
Yes, I was being pedantic, and the real "definition" of bandwidth is the width of the frequency spectrum a signal can use (and this is complicated by modulation schemes, etc). But a lot of people use the word "bandwidth" when they mean "throughput", as you've pointed out. I was just taking the opportunity to inform
What you just defined bandwidth by is exactly the same definition I used. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted per unit time. The parent poster was only wrong about his statement that bandwidth would be halved if distance (and thus latency) were doubled. *That* is incorrect, because the rate you can transmit data at is not affected by the distance to the receiving station. He would be correct if he said that link utilization would be halved for the same amount of data. But bandwidth is constant.
I was just saying that what is doubled in this case is the pipe capacity and latency; the bandwidth part stays the same.
Incorrect. The bandwidth would remain constant - what would double if the distance doubled is what is usually called a "bandwidth-delay product". This quantity represents the pipe capacity of a given length, or in other words the amount of data in transit at any given moment. This is of course assuming you have an unlimited number of pigeons you can keep sending out.
You would be correct, using the term bandwidth loosely, if the number of pigeons stayed constant. However, using the strict definition, bandwidth is totally unrelated to line latency/round trip time.
I'd call your logic suspect as well.
MS is NOT just saying that Microsoft Office is the best office suite available. They are specifically comparing the two products and making some very misleading statements in the process.
Not all software vendors go out of their way to attack and discredit all their competition like Microsoft does. I think they are kinda legendary for that sort of thing, in fact.
I don't think people are personally offended by this kind of thing so much as that they offended at MS's overall pattern of behavior. They have always been a vicious, ruthless company willing to lie, cheat, and crush all that stands in their way.
Excel's graphing is nowhere near on a par with something like Matlab. It just lacks the features and flexibility needed for real scientific usage, though it might be acceptable for more basic usage like sales graphs, etc...but its chief advantage is that it is easy for dumb people to learn how to use it. On features it loses, IMHO.
The problem is that unless the superior input schemes (keyboard, mouse) actually come with every console sold, the game companies will design their games around the control instead. They don't want to artificially limit their market by only being able to sell to the few console gamers who purchase additional input devices to supplement the controllers that came with their system. So they will just design a game with a simplistic user interface instead.
Even if a major console manufacturer did include these things with their systems, I still don't believe it would be popular with the console gaming audience. These people don't want to deal with anything complicated and the keyboard and mouse makes them think of a computer. And, 3rd party console game developers would not develop for the keyboard and mouse either unless virtually all the popular consoles had it by default, since otherwise they would be limiting their ability to port the game to other consoles and increase sales.
All that said, I still think the keyboard and mouse are far superior for certain types of games than any console controller I've ever used. There are indeed fun console games that use a controller; I'm not denying that at all. I'm just saying that consoles encourage game developers to develop user interfaces with a very limited number of different controls and simplistic input methods. This can be a good thing in certain types of games, for sure. But other games suffer dramatically from it, especially in replay value. When I was really into Counter-Strike I typically had almost my whole keyboard bound to various actions so that I could memorize the locations and do things ultra-fast. Similarly, a lot of RTS games have a ton of keyboard shortcuts that can make the game a lot more enjoyable when you learn them. The keyboard shortcuts not only are more convenient but also introduce a steeper learning curve into the game that makes online matches much more competitive. It takes longer to learn the game so there is more variation in skill level online.
I think it's a much better idea to perform some sort of triage on patients who aren't paying for their healthcare. Those who have no hope of recovery shouldn't receive much treatment beyond what is necessary for them to remain comfortable and pain-free until death. And we should provide some minimum standard of healthcare for everyone but not necessarily the latest and greatest. If we continue to do that, then no one will be able to afford healthcare soon. Costs will just keep rising and the burden will be shifted onto a smaller and smaller group of individuals who can afford it as fewer people will be able to afford insurance. Eventually this will collapse like all pyramid schemes.
While Gentoo hasn't necessarily made this "easier", it is certainly more clear what is going on. I'm always nervous about some GUI installer just doing stuff to the MBR without telling me what it is, whether it is the Windows installer or the Redhat one.
And, at least for x86, GRUB IS an improvement in usability over LILO. I haven't used any version of LILO in the last two or three years since I switched to GRUB, but the main advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to remember to reinstall it into the boot sectors every time you change the config. You just edit the config file, save, and it'll work fine on the next reboot. And, it's nice because you can manually edit the config file right in the GRUB GUI...
It may have just been a coincidence, but I think they may be just forbidding links from Slashdot. I opened it in a new tab and reloaded it so I wouldn't have the Slashdot referrer and it worked instantly.