No point responding to this since it's fallen off the page, but there were two separate research outfits doing very similar work on cold fusion. One was at the U of U (Pons and Fleischmann) and the less famous one was indeed from BYU.
I guess there always has to be opposition in all things. It's important to remember standing AGAINST something is not the same as standing FOR something.
But don't fret. Joseph Smith himself loved persecution:
"Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet...When they can get rid of me, the devil will also go." (History of the Church, Vol. 6, p. 408, 409)
"The official name of the church is "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints"."
And the prepositional mangling begins.
What's worse, there are several groups that claim to be "Mormons" - most notably the "Reformed LDS Church" and the polygamists [4] in southern Utah (who I think call themselves "Fundamentalist Mormons", or something like that) - who have little to do with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. For the most part these other "Mormon" churches are splinter groups formed by people who left the church (or were kicked out) because they felt that they should be leading the flock instead of the current Presidency. The legitimate leaders are understandably anxious to make a clear distinction between the real LDS church and the others that call themselves "Mormons".
The problems with this statement are going to be tough to clear up for those just joining the Mormon debates. When Joseph Smith died, he threw the proverbial boquet into the drunken bridesmaid horde. He never left clear instructions on who was to succeed him, and he had a tendency to make crazy promises to keep people happy. In short, there were about ten people who thought they should lead the Church, each with their own valid claims of authority (see "Origins of Power," by D. Michael Quinn).
Brigham Young just happened to be really charismatic, and got the majority of the early Mormons to accept his authority above other claimants (Sidney Rigdon, James Strang, Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith III). The victors rewrote the history books to demonstrate their legitimacy.
If you want a truly unambiguous name, call yourself the Brighamites. Each of the other splinter groups (gun-toting polygamists included) have every bit as much right to call themselves Mormons/Latter-day Saints as Brigham Young's followers do.
[2] Mormon was a real person, a prophet-historian who compiled the Book of Mormon. It's his book, so it's named after him.
Yes, Mormon was a real person. And the Native Americans really are dark-skinned Jews, and the early inhabitants of this continent really did use steel in large quantities, and really raised cattle and corn and wheat, and really rode horses into battle. The fact that there's no more archaeological evidence for any of these cultural items shouldn't unsettle you. After all, you have a testimony.
[3] We recognize the Bible as scripture, too. There are also a couple of other books of scripture that we use: the Doctrine and Covenants records revelations given to Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the latter days; and the Pearl of Great Price, which records revelations recived by Moses and Abraham, found and translated by Joseph Smith.
According to the Articles of Faith (also LDS scripture), Mormons believe the Bible to be the Word of God insofar as it has been translated correctly. But Mormons also believe that the modern Bible was so thoroughly mangled by "wicked and corrupt priests" that the Bible actually became a stumbling block to those who wanted to find God. Smith made numerous revisions to the Bible to make it more theologically acceptable to him (and included a prophecy of his own birth). Of course, none of these revisions match up with the earliest copies of the books of the Bible.
As a die-hard atheist, I could really care less. But Mormons get a lot of flack from mainstream Christians for minimizing the differences between themselves and traditional Christianity, especially when they smell a conversion.
Oh, the Book of Abraham--purported to have been the writings of Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel--were really an Egyptian funeral book called "The Book of Breathings," written for a man named Horus. Joseph Smith got suckered, and so did his (now 12,000,000 strong) flock.
[4] Polygamy used to be practiced by the LDS church, but was discontinued about 150 years ago. Anyone church member who practices it modernly is promptly excommunicated. So Tom Green, on trial for various sex crimes against one of his underage wives has nothing whatever to do with the LDS church, regardless of how much he may protest that he is a "Mormon".
Polygamy was actually discontinued less than 100 years ago, in 1905. Mormons generally claim that the practice ended in 1890, but plural marriages were still being approved by the President of the Church and other apostles for fifteen years afterwards. Finally, with the second Manifesto, the Church got serious. Now they don't even allow plural marriage in areas of the world where it's legal.
To make things more complicated, Mormons still believe in polygamy in the afterlife. A widower can choose to be married to a second woman "for eternity" without affecting his marriage to his first wife.
Correction: Tom Green has nothing to do with the clean-cut young men on bicycles, the pretty white buildings you see from the freeway, the 2002 Winter Olympics, the commercials on TV for a free Bible, or anything else put out by the Corporation of the President. But in their zeal to distance themselves from polygamy, your presidency ignores the fact that early LDS theology left the door wide open for the Tom Greens of the world. The word "Mormon" can and does encompass all the supposedly illegitimate splinter groups.
The basic feeling of the Corporate Church towards the term "Mormons" is as follows: You can't use it to refer to us. You can't use it to refer to anybody else. They've tried some laughable PR blitzes to change the common usage, and it's never worked.
If OO.o gets more popular, it might be worth somebody's while to start a tech support call center for it. Consider: everyone has as much access to the source as anyone else, so in theory anyone could provide support for the product.
The "There's no tech support for Open Source Software" is a glass-half-empty way of looking at it. The upside is that a situation could arise where several companies are providing support, each with their own competitive advantages. They could charge for individual cases, as well as selling service contracts to corporations.
Another idea: start a database of issues/resolutions. Any support company can use it, provided they feed back new solutions to it. It would not only lower the cost of providing service and eliminate redundancies, but it would provide the OO.o hackers with valuable data about their product.
I'm starting to like this idea, and if anyone has a few million to spare, I'll gladly implement it. Or change my name and make for the Bahamas.
I'm giving your post way more time than it warrants.
"You have no right to bitch about the quality of your medical care. A wide variety of books about medicine are freely available at the library. If you're too lazy to teach yourself to be a doctor, well then boo-hoo. You have forfeited the right to bitch because you have chosen not to do the work to fix the problem."
The article may not be terribly well-informed, and maybe even a little trollish. But your solution reminds me of a Monty Python skit: "How to rid the world of all known diseases: First, become a doctor and do something that gets the medical community to sit up and take notice. Then, when they really respect you, you can tell them exactly how to cure all diseases, and you can make sure they get everything right and don't make any mistakes."
We're not talking about a bug in XFree86's font rendering system. RPM is a popular standard. As such, it's not enough to "code around" a problem, you have to get everyone else to adopt your solution.
So try not to think of the article as an angry criticism, but as a sort of meta-bug report. If nothing else, I think he was trying to contribute constructively within the limits of his skills, and doesn't deserve your whining.
Re:Why the fuck we have to drag around libraries??
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Is RPM Doomed?
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Nice reverse psychology. Lacking a valid point, you threw in a bunch of distracting f-bombs in the hopes that everyone would assume that, underneath this inciteful harangue, you might be saying something meaningful. Fact is, you're not.
You're asserting that, because we all have broadband connections and 80 gig HDDs, there's no excuse for relying on an external package. This is a complete fallacy. There are still plenty of folks out there who are still downloading over 56K connections. They probably still outnumber broadband. There are also lots of people still using small (10G) disks. But even if everyone is running the latest and greatest, there's no reason to throw away HDD space, system memory, and downloading time by having a dozen copies of one library.
Also, as an earlier response pointed out, library systems make it easy to fix exploits. It's much easier to simply update something like the zlib package than to wait for a new version of every piece of software that uses it, and then download it. The former should be fixed within days and requires a 500K download. The latter could take months and require gigabytes.
I'll admit that the library system isn't perfect. Library developers don't always maintain backward compatability. Application developers take the easy way out by requiring "version 1.1.4b" of a library when any 1.x would have worked fine.* But your "solution" carries its own non-trivial problems which you don't seem to recognize. Or maybe you're just a troll.
* If it really does require 1.1.4b, then by all means, include it in the application.
"Large and bloated... It takes forever to load compared to IE"
Use quickstart. The reason Moz doesn't pop up almost instantly is because IE preloads itself when the OS comes up. Don't compare apples to sandpaper.
"Pages take longer to load"
I've noticed this too. Maybe it's because I use IE on a broadband connection at work and Mozilla on a 28.8 modem at home.
Or did you mean rendering speed? In that case, you're just wrong.
"Has annoying little UI bugs that keep popping up (ex. Typing in a new URL on the address bar occasionally causes the current page to reload, instead of going to the new page; focus doesn't always move to a field when you click on it, etc...)"
I've never seen either of these problems.
"Doesn't consistantly display pages correctly-I have pages that will display on my copy of Mozilla that my coworker can't get to display on his."
Repeat after me: No browser fully implements all standards. IE doesn't display every page correctly, and other pages only display properly on IE because developers have worked around its brokenness.
"The average user doesn't have the slightest dea what open source means, or care about it at all unless they have been brainwashed into being as anti-Microsoft as a lot of the people on here are."
That's a religious issue, not a criticism of the browser itself. But my ten second educational lecture goes something like this: "Right now, most everyone browses the web with IE. It's bad for everyone to be running the same software, because it means that when a security hole is found it affects everyone. Also, it allows Microsoft to create its own web standards, which means they can crush any competition and control how you experience the Internet." Not everyone is swayed, but I don't think you have to be an anti-MS bigot to understand why diversity in web browsers is important.
Yes and no. I see Windows as a much more rigid system than Linux. IOW, it makes some things very easy (the tasks that the programmers expected end users to be doing) and other things impossible (most everything else). Linux, being more flexible, probably is generally harder to deal with, but there's no steep wall in the learning curve (except arguably at the beginning).
So the question of "Is Linux or Windows more difficult" is less an either or question, and more of a zen koan.
I remember a hilarious letter to Readers Digest, complaining that they shouldn't be giving any publicity to avowed Satanist J.K. Rowling. The woman's source for her numerous quotes? You guessed it. She gave the URL of the story to anyone looking for further information.
The staff of Readers Digest was kind enough to point out the woman's error.
You know, you shouldn't draw generalized conclusions from a single data point. What about all the times when a pencil-necked, anti-social geek formats the hard drive of his heart's desire and she then sees the error of her ways? She could very well have realized the true depths of his love for her and started dating him steadily.
The frontend is pretty enough for me (depending on the theme being used, of course). But why didn't they celebrate the 1.0 milestone by giving Mozilla a nicer splash screen? The little green lizard is cute, but doesn't exactly scream, "This here's a serious browser!"
There's hope, though. Under Windows, all you have to do is throw a picture called mozilla.bmp into the folder that holds mozilla.exe. Under Linux, you have to replace splash.xpi with the pic of your choice and rebuild from source (ick).
Too easy. Start by pointing out that none of the current Internet filters on the market work on Linux, stating the fact in such a way as to imply that this is because "hackers" don't want them to work.
Then, take advantage of the confusion surrounding the GPL to imply that anyone writing such a filter would have to release the source code, thus making it trivial to bypass the filter.
Then point out that, under the Linux system, users aren't granted access to each others' home directories by default. Claim that this makes it impossible for parents to monitor their kids' surfing habits.
Finally, relate Free Software to anarchism and communism, and relate anarchism to "The Anarchist's Cookbook" and other sources of bomb schematics. Let some braindead news wire pick up the story, let some rubberstamp editors print the story, and let some uncritical readers read the story. There will be a hailstorm of FUD that no amount of corrections can repair.
As you know, everything in life can be referred back to an episode of "The Simpsons." In this case, the episode where Homer tries to become a better inventor than Thomas Edison is relevant. As he's driving down the road to use his electric hammer to bust up Edison's six-legged chair, suddenly the image of Marge floats in front of him, telling him not to. Then Marge is replaced by the image of Lisa, saying basically the same thing. Finally, she is replaced by some weird looking old guy, who urges him to break the chair.
Homer says, "Wait a minute. Who are you?"
The old guy replies, "Who cares? I'm telling you what you want to hear."
Homer keeps driving.
People can be highly uncritical of the source of information if it's telling them what they already wanted to believe. If I were to start calling myself "The Society for the Preservation of Historical Accuracy" and writing semi-coherent stuff about how the Holocaust never happened, there are certain circles where I would get a lot of positive press.
Come to think of it, I've seen some discussion groups where an individual similarly labeled himself to disguise the fact that he was just spouting off his own opinions.
I'll agree that free software, like most software I've seen, needs some help with user-friendliness. But why is there so much focus on making the install process painless? The vast majority of computer users never install their own operating systems. OEMs don't even install operating systems. All the big system manufacturers have the process completely automated. In a business environment, the only things installed by end users are illegal games and humorous screen savers.
I think that the free software movement would be better served by focusing on ease of use, with some emphasis on making it easy to install/uninstall software.
You forgot to mention: because too many people will assume that it's software for casting horoscopes. They'll be half way through the distro install before they realize, "Hey, why hasn't it asked me for my birthdate yet?" By then, their computers are completely hosed.
Astrology types are too easy to confuse as it is. No need to make life harder for them.
It's not just an Asian phenomenon, or a developing countries phenomenon. Countries like Germany and Venezuela are also jumping on the bandwagon. Countries are stepping back and looking at the exorbitant licensing fees for (primarily Microsoft) products, the forced upgrade paths, the proprietary file formats, and deciding that the lack of freedom and control just isn't worth paying hundreds of millions to some American corporation.
Enter Linux. It's good software and getting better quickly. It gives a knowledgable person complete control over his system. It generally treats common standards with respect, rather than using them as a crowbar for breaking competitor's applications. And since the source is available to everybody, any company can provide full tech support for it; millions will be saved due to competition in the tech support field alone.
There may also be some anti-American sentiment behind the recent moves. Microsoft isn't just an American corporation, it's a stereotypically American corporation: highly competitive, willing to play dirty, and happy to screw the customers for a few extra bucks. But even if there's no groundswell of resentment against Microsoft or America, it just makes economic sense for any country (especially poorer countries) to buy local rather than pumping resources towards Redmond. Under Linux, that's possible; under Microsoft, it isn't.
"Blitzkrieg Linux" would be pretty cool, except I hear the German government still downplays World War II references. So I'll put my efforts behind "Achtung (Linus Please Move Here We'll Give You Lots of Money and Possibly a Cabinet Post) Linux."
"Reglas del Linux," according to Babelfish. Not knowing German myself, I couldn't tell you if lelling this would get you a fist pump or a glassy-eyed stare in downtown Berlin.
I think the United Linux folks are shooting themselves in the foot, but it's hardly enough to warrant a rewrite of the GPL. One of the strengths of the GPL is that recipients of GPL'ed code have a great deal of leeway about how they make their work available to others. If they said "no free downloads, nobody even gets source from us without sending us $300 through PayPal and throw in a box of chicklets 'cuz I'm feeling peckish," they have every right to. And I say more power to them--I could use some chicklets right about now.
Look at this as an interesting experiment. Most likely, it'll tank because the proprietary software doesn't add sufficient value. But if it succeeds, everyone who buys it will get the source code they're entitled to. If it succeeds, it will be nice to be able to an example of people successfully selling Linux software. If not, oh well. As irksome as we might find this implementation of the GPL, rewriting the GPL every time someone finds--scratch that, tries to find--a way to make money with free software is not a viable answer.
As UnitedLinux brushes up against its customers, some of the rough edges are bound to get smoothed off. Even if they remain unbowed, there are other distros out there for the taking, and the GPL makes it very likely that the best ideas from UnitedLinux will make it to those distros as well.
Okay, an analogy. You're at a cocktail party where there are a few hundred people in the room. For some reason, everyone's feet have been glued to the floor. Instead of panicking, they try and continue their conversations.
As in every cocktail party, people soon get bored with the people next to them. They can't go visit someone else, because of the whole "feet stuck to the floor" thing.
At this point, the participants have two choices: They can either shout across the room or relay messages through third parties. If they take the shouting root, the effective bandwidth of the room drops to the point where only one or two conversations can be held at the same time. By relaying the messages through the people next to them, they can have dozens of conversations going on at the same time. Hence, a higher effective bandwidth.
So, instead of visualizing the repeaters as increasing the range, imagine them lowering the strength of the signal needed to take the message across the same range. Thus, you have a higher effective bandwidth.
If this analogy is either incorrect or just stupid, feel free to mod it into oblivion.
It may not be that the frame rate is artificially capped. It might be that WineX is having trouble handling hi-resolution textures or high polygon meshes, and the bottleneck doesn't come from rendering the actual frame. I'm not an expert on such matters, but the article did mention that Max Payne was more intensive in both areas than Q3Arena.
You bring up some interesting arguments, but the main assumption that underlies them all is that, before something can be worth doing, it has to be self-sustaining.
This thinking reminds me of a conversation from Terry Pratchett's "Maskerade." A cheese mogul has just bought the Great Opera House of Ankh-Morpork, and is suddenly realizing why it was a bad investment. The manager of the opera house takes him aside and explains [bad paraphrase follows] "Opera isn't like cheese. You don't put opera into this place so that money will flow out. You put money in, and out comes opera!"
Or something like that. Sure, economics drove the exploration of the New World. But the sheer thrill of exploration is also a factor. We didn't climb Mount Everest after running a detailed cost/benefit analysis. Nobody went to the South Pole because they wanted to be able to sell penguin pelts for $100 each.
Less exotic examples: people who spend a summer backpacking through Europe don't do it because they expect to make money off the book rights or because they hope to make connections that will increase their earning potential. People don't go to movies because they expect that they'll get a pay raise through witty banter around the water cooler the next day.
In such cases, the main reason for going is that there's something we want to see.
I want us to see Mars, and I'd pay my share of the cost even if there wasn't any benefit beyond the momentary thrill and feeling of accomplishment. Of course, in the long run, any colony would have to be able to sustain itself. But what would it hurt if we splurged just this once?
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No point responding to this since it's fallen off the page, but there were two separate research outfits doing very similar work on cold fusion. One was at the U of U (Pons and Fleischmann) and the less famous one was indeed from BYU.
I would never say that Mormons are fundamentally bad people. Too much firsthand experience to the contrary.
But don't fret. Joseph Smith himself loved persecution:
The problems with this statement are going to be tough to clear up for those just joining the Mormon debates. When Joseph Smith died, he threw the proverbial boquet into the drunken bridesmaid horde. He never left clear instructions on who was to succeed him, and he had a tendency to make crazy promises to keep people happy. In short, there were about ten people who thought they should lead the Church, each with their own valid claims of authority (see "Origins of Power," by D. Michael Quinn).
Brigham Young just happened to be really charismatic, and got the majority of the early Mormons to accept his authority above other claimants (Sidney Rigdon, James Strang, Samuel Smith, Joseph Smith III). The victors rewrote the history books to demonstrate their legitimacy.
If you want a truly unambiguous name, call yourself the Brighamites. Each of the other splinter groups (gun-toting polygamists included) have every bit as much right to call themselves Mormons/Latter-day Saints as Brigham Young's followers do.
Yes, Mormon was a real person. And the Native Americans really are dark-skinned Jews, and the early inhabitants of this continent really did use steel in large quantities, and really raised cattle and corn and wheat, and really rode horses into battle. The fact that there's no more archaeological evidence for any of these cultural items shouldn't unsettle you. After all, you have a testimony.
According to the Articles of Faith (also LDS scripture), Mormons believe the Bible to be the Word of God insofar as it has been translated correctly. But Mormons also believe that the modern Bible was so thoroughly mangled by "wicked and corrupt priests" that the Bible actually became a stumbling block to those who wanted to find God. Smith made numerous revisions to the Bible to make it more theologically acceptable to him (and included a prophecy of his own birth). Of course, none of these revisions match up with the earliest copies of the books of the Bible.
As a die-hard atheist, I could really care less. But Mormons get a lot of flack from mainstream Christians for minimizing the differences between themselves and traditional Christianity, especially when they smell a conversion.
Oh, the Book of Abraham--purported to have been the writings of Abraham, the Patriarch of Israel--were really an Egyptian funeral book called "The Book of Breathings," written for a man named Horus. Joseph Smith got suckered, and so did his (now 12,000,000 strong) flock.
Polygamy was actually discontinued less than 100 years ago, in 1905. Mormons generally claim that the practice ended in 1890, but plural marriages were still being approved by the President of the Church and other apostles for fifteen years afterwards. Finally, with the second Manifesto, the Church got serious. Now they don't even allow plural marriage in areas of the world where it's legal.
To make things more complicated, Mormons still believe in polygamy in the afterlife. A widower can choose to be married to a second woman "for eternity" without affecting his marriage to his first wife.
Correction: Tom Green has nothing to do with the clean-cut young men on bicycles, the pretty white buildings you see from the freeway, the 2002 Winter Olympics, the commercials on TV for a free Bible, or anything else put out by the Corporation of the President. But in their zeal to distance themselves from polygamy, your presidency ignores the fact that early LDS theology left the door wide open for the Tom Greens of the world. The word "Mormon" can and does encompass all the supposedly illegitimate splinter groups.
The basic feeling of the Corporate Church towards the term "Mormons" is as follows: You can't use it to refer to us. You can't use it to refer to anybody else. They've tried some laughable PR blitzes to change the common usage, and it's never worked.
If OO.o gets more popular, it might be worth somebody's while to start a tech support call center for it. Consider: everyone has as much access to the source as anyone else, so in theory anyone could provide support for the product.
The "There's no tech support for Open Source Software" is a glass-half-empty way of looking at it. The upside is that a situation could arise where several companies are providing support, each with their own competitive advantages. They could charge for individual cases, as well as selling service contracts to corporations.
Another idea: start a database of issues/resolutions. Any support company can use it, provided they feed back new solutions to it. It would not only lower the cost of providing service and eliminate redundancies, but it would provide the OO.o hackers with valuable data about their product.
I'm starting to like this idea, and if anyone has a few million to spare, I'll gladly implement it. Or change my name and make for the Bahamas.
I'm giving your post way more time than it warrants.
"You have no right to bitch about the quality of your medical care. A wide variety of books about medicine are freely available at the library. If you're too lazy to teach yourself to be a doctor, well then boo-hoo. You have forfeited the right to bitch because you have chosen not to do the work to fix the problem."
The article may not be terribly well-informed, and maybe even a little trollish. But your solution reminds me of a Monty Python skit: "How to rid the world of all known diseases: First, become a doctor and do something that gets the medical community to sit up and take notice. Then, when they really respect you, you can tell them exactly how to cure all diseases, and you can make sure they get everything right and don't make any mistakes."
We're not talking about a bug in XFree86's font rendering system. RPM is a popular standard. As such, it's not enough to "code around" a problem, you have to get everyone else to adopt your solution.
So try not to think of the article as an angry criticism, but as a sort of meta-bug report. If nothing else, I think he was trying to contribute constructively within the limits of his skills, and doesn't deserve your whining.
Nice reverse psychology. Lacking a valid point, you threw in a bunch of distracting f-bombs in the hopes that everyone would assume that, underneath this inciteful harangue, you might be saying something meaningful. Fact is, you're not.
You're asserting that, because we all have broadband connections and 80 gig HDDs, there's no excuse for relying on an external package. This is a complete fallacy. There are still plenty of folks out there who are still downloading over 56K connections. They probably still outnumber broadband. There are also lots of people still using small (10G) disks. But even if everyone is running the latest and greatest, there's no reason to throw away HDD space, system memory, and downloading time by having a dozen copies of one library.
Also, as an earlier response pointed out, library systems make it easy to fix exploits. It's much easier to simply update something like the zlib package than to wait for a new version of every piece of software that uses it, and then download it. The former should be fixed within days and requires a 500K download. The latter could take months and require gigabytes.
I'll admit that the library system isn't perfect. Library developers don't always maintain backward compatability. Application developers take the easy way out by requiring "version 1.1.4b" of a library when any 1.x would have worked fine.* But your "solution" carries its own non-trivial problems which you don't seem to recognize. Or maybe you're just a troll.
* If it really does require 1.1.4b, then by all means, include it in the application.
I've noticed this too. Maybe it's because I use IE on a broadband connection at work and Mozilla on a 28.8 modem at home.
Or did you mean rendering speed? In that case, you're just wrong.
I've never seen either of these problems.
Repeat after me: No browser fully implements all standards. IE doesn't display every page correctly, and other pages only display properly on IE because developers have worked around its brokenness.
For a few demos that work correctly on Mozilla, but are broken on IE, go to http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/demos.html.
That's a religious issue, not a criticism of the browser itself. But my ten second educational lecture goes something like this: "Right now, most everyone browses the web with IE. It's bad for everyone to be running the same software, because it means that when a security hole is found it affects everyone. Also, it allows Microsoft to create its own web standards, which means they can crush any competition and control how you experience the Internet." Not everyone is swayed, but I don't think you have to be an anti-MS bigot to understand why diversity in web browsers is important.
Yes and no. I see Windows as a much more rigid system than Linux. IOW, it makes some things very easy (the tasks that the programmers expected end users to be doing) and other things impossible (most everything else). Linux, being more flexible, probably is generally harder to deal with, but there's no steep wall in the learning curve (except arguably at the beginning).
So the question of "Is Linux or Windows more difficult" is less an either or question, and more of a zen koan.
Before doing this, please be sure and verify your backup media.
I remember a hilarious letter to Readers Digest, complaining that they shouldn't be giving any publicity to avowed Satanist J.K. Rowling. The woman's source for her numerous quotes? You guessed it. She gave the URL of the story to anyone looking for further information.
The staff of Readers Digest was kind enough to point out the woman's error.
You know, you shouldn't draw generalized conclusions from a single data point. What about all the times when a pencil-necked, anti-social geek formats the hard drive of his heart's desire and she then sees the error of her ways? She could very well have realized the true depths of his love for her and started dating him steadily.
:)
Sigh. . . maybe romance really is dead.
There's hope, though. Under Windows, all you have to do is throw a picture called mozilla.bmp into the folder that holds mozilla.exe. Under Linux, you have to replace splash.xpi with the pic of your choice and rebuild from source (ick).
Here's some places to find new splashes:
The last one has one of mine.
Or you can always roll your own!
Too easy. Start by pointing out that none of the current Internet filters on the market work on Linux, stating the fact in such a way as to imply that this is because "hackers" don't want them to work.
Then, take advantage of the confusion surrounding the GPL to imply that anyone writing such a filter would have to release the source code, thus making it trivial to bypass the filter.
Then point out that, under the Linux system, users aren't granted access to each others' home directories by default. Claim that this makes it impossible for parents to monitor their kids' surfing habits.
Finally, relate Free Software to anarchism and communism, and relate anarchism to "The Anarchist's Cookbook" and other sources of bomb schematics. Let some braindead news wire pick up the story, let some rubberstamp editors print the story, and let some uncritical readers read the story. There will be a hailstorm of FUD that no amount of corrections can repair.
As you know, everything in life can be referred back to an episode of "The Simpsons." In this case, the episode where Homer tries to become a better inventor than Thomas Edison is relevant. As he's driving down the road to use his electric hammer to bust up Edison's six-legged chair, suddenly the image of Marge floats in front of him, telling him not to. Then Marge is replaced by the image of Lisa, saying basically the same thing. Finally, she is replaced by some weird looking old guy, who urges him to break the chair.
Homer says, "Wait a minute. Who are you?"
The old guy replies, "Who cares? I'm telling you what you want to hear."
Homer keeps driving.
People can be highly uncritical of the source of information if it's telling them what they already wanted to believe. If I were to start calling myself "The Society for the Preservation of Historical Accuracy" and writing semi-coherent stuff about how the Holocaust never happened, there are certain circles where I would get a lot of positive press.
Come to think of it, I've seen some discussion groups where an individual similarly labeled himself to disguise the fact that he was just spouting off his own opinions.
I'll agree that free software, like most software I've seen, needs some help with user-friendliness. But why is there so much focus on making the install process painless? The vast majority of computer users never install their own operating systems. OEMs don't even install operating systems. All the big system manufacturers have the process completely automated. In a business environment, the only things installed by end users are illegal games and humorous screen savers.
I think that the free software movement would be better served by focusing on ease of use, with some emphasis on making it easy to install/uninstall software.
You forgot to mention: because too many people will assume that it's software for casting horoscopes. They'll be half way through the distro install before they realize, "Hey, why hasn't it asked me for my birthdate yet?" By then, their computers are completely hosed.
Astrology types are too easy to confuse as it is. No need to make life harder for them.
It's not just an Asian phenomenon, or a developing countries phenomenon. Countries like Germany and Venezuela are also jumping on the bandwagon. Countries are stepping back and looking at the exorbitant licensing fees for (primarily Microsoft) products, the forced upgrade paths, the proprietary file formats, and deciding that the lack of freedom and control just isn't worth paying hundreds of millions to some American corporation.
Enter Linux. It's good software and getting better quickly. It gives a knowledgable person complete control over his system. It generally treats common standards with respect, rather than using them as a crowbar for breaking competitor's applications. And since the source is available to everybody, any company can provide full tech support for it; millions will be saved due to competition in the tech support field alone.
There may also be some anti-American sentiment behind the recent moves. Microsoft isn't just an American corporation, it's a stereotypically American corporation: highly competitive, willing to play dirty, and happy to screw the customers for a few extra bucks. But even if there's no groundswell of resentment against Microsoft or America, it just makes economic sense for any country (especially poorer countries) to buy local rather than pumping resources towards Redmond. Under Linux, that's possible; under Microsoft, it isn't.
But does it run Linux?
"Blitzkrieg Linux" would be pretty cool, except I hear the German government still downplays World War II references. So I'll put my efforts behind "Achtung (Linus Please Move Here We'll Give You Lots of Money and Possibly a Cabinet Post) Linux."
"Reglas del Linux," according to Babelfish. Not knowing German myself, I couldn't tell you if lelling this would get you a fist pump or a glassy-eyed stare in downtown Berlin.
I think the United Linux folks are shooting themselves in the foot, but it's hardly enough to warrant a rewrite of the GPL. One of the strengths of the GPL is that recipients of GPL'ed code have a great deal of leeway about how they make their work available to others. If they said "no free downloads, nobody even gets source from us without sending us $300 through PayPal and throw in a box of chicklets 'cuz I'm feeling peckish," they have every right to. And I say more power to them--I could use some chicklets right about now.
Look at this as an interesting experiment. Most likely, it'll tank because the proprietary software doesn't add sufficient value. But if it succeeds, everyone who buys it will get the source code they're entitled to. If it succeeds, it will be nice to be able to an example of people successfully selling Linux software. If not, oh well. As irksome as we might find this implementation of the GPL, rewriting the GPL every time someone finds--scratch that, tries to find--a way to make money with free software is not a viable answer.
As UnitedLinux brushes up against its customers, some of the rough edges are bound to get smoothed off. Even if they remain unbowed, there are other distros out there for the taking, and the GPL makes it very likely that the best ideas from UnitedLinux will make it to those distros as well.
No worries, mate. No worries.
Okay, an analogy. You're at a cocktail party where there are a few hundred people in the room. For some reason, everyone's feet have been glued to the floor. Instead of panicking, they try and continue their conversations.
As in every cocktail party, people soon get bored with the people next to them. They can't go visit someone else, because of the whole "feet stuck to the floor" thing.
At this point, the participants have two choices: They can either shout across the room or relay messages through third parties. If they take the shouting root, the effective bandwidth of the room drops to the point where only one or two conversations can be held at the same time. By relaying the messages through the people next to them, they can have dozens of conversations going on at the same time. Hence, a higher effective bandwidth.
So, instead of visualizing the repeaters as increasing the range, imagine them lowering the strength of the signal needed to take the message across the same range. Thus, you have a higher effective bandwidth.
If this analogy is either incorrect or just stupid, feel free to mod it into oblivion.
It may not be that the frame rate is artificially capped. It might be that WineX is having trouble handling hi-resolution textures or high polygon meshes, and the bottleneck doesn't come from rendering the actual frame. I'm not an expert on such matters, but the article did mention that Max Payne was more intensive in both areas than Q3Arena.
You bring up some interesting arguments, but the main assumption that underlies them all is that, before something can be worth doing, it has to be self-sustaining.
This thinking reminds me of a conversation from Terry Pratchett's "Maskerade." A cheese mogul has just bought the Great Opera House of Ankh-Morpork, and is suddenly realizing why it was a bad investment. The manager of the opera house takes him aside and explains [bad paraphrase follows] "Opera isn't like cheese. You don't put opera into this place so that money will flow out. You put money in, and out comes opera!"
Or something like that. Sure, economics drove the exploration of the New World. But the sheer thrill of exploration is also a factor. We didn't climb Mount Everest after running a detailed cost/benefit analysis. Nobody went to the South Pole because they wanted to be able to sell penguin pelts for $100 each.
Less exotic examples: people who spend a summer backpacking through Europe don't do it because they expect to make money off the book rights or because they hope to make connections that will increase their earning potential. People don't go to movies because they expect that they'll get a pay raise through witty banter around the water cooler the next day.
In such cases, the main reason for going is that there's something we want to see.
I want us to see Mars, and I'd pay my share of the cost even if there wasn't any benefit beyond the momentary thrill and feeling of accomplishment. Of course, in the long run, any colony would have to be able to sustain itself. But what would it hurt if we splurged just this once?