Well, duh. Most young and teenage programmers have neither the experience nor the focus to create the kind of boring, reliable code that makes up the core of Open Source. Instead they're appealed to by more glamorous fringe projects, and the idea of shareware.
Uh, computer use doesn't END with the installation of the OS. Many Linux fans conveniently forget that most of what people want to do is impossible on Linux. Sure, they can word process, browse the web, etc...but you can do these things on a goddamn WebTV as well. You buy a PC for the power and ubiquity of the architecture. It's supposed to let you do all of these things, and while Linux CAN definitely do them, you can expect close to a hundred hours of experience before any of them becomes SIMPLE.
You can make the OS installer as easy as you like. Until there is an easy way to install a new wireless networking card, a recipe book program, a DVD player and The Sims on Linux, 95% of the computer market would be done a great disservice by installing it.
Fucking dicks like this are yet another reason why Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
SYNOPSIS OF EVERY REPLY TO A POST SAYING LINUX IS HARD: 1) Oh you just have to type PDSQWJDASH then enter then SCROLL LOCK not once not twice but thrice. Stupid. 2) Oh the docs are hard to read USE GOOGLE that will make them easier to read especially when you're trying to figure out how to get your network up. Stupid. 3) Linux is better because we have 10,000 inferior choices for every single piece of software you can imagine! Your choice is invariable wrong and mine is right! Stupid! 4) Windows sucks because three years ago Outlook Express had big holes in it! It sucked compared to thunderbird now! Stupid!
I can only imagine what my VW Bug forums would be like if these kinds of elitist pricks were trolling them. I'd have never gotten the fool thing working if every post was "Oh you should be using the 009 Bosch distributor, it's far more reliable than the stock vaccum model! Hahahaha this guy doesn't know if he has a dual or single port 1600! What a loser! The curved windshield wasn't introduced until 1973 Super! There's not way you have one in your '68 Vert! All you have to do to adjust the carburetor is adjust the bypass screw until your idle is at 850 rpm *900 for the autostick* and then turn the volume control screw counterclockwise until the engine drops about 30 rpm! It's that easy! Now get back to your water cooled engines!"
Dickheads. Linux doesn't need you and it doesn't want your half assed help.
You know, this is sort of offtopic, but I have a big problem with any case study on Linux that focuses on "My mom" or "My girlfriend." I think it's great that so many of us are getting our kin to use open source software, but these people are not, for a SECOND, a fair reflection on the consumer desktop user.
Sure, they may have the same needs, the same wants, the same money, time and education restraints, but there's a big X-factor in the equation:
Us.
We set up the OS for them. We set up their desktop for them. We show them how to use it and most of the time, we install their programs for them. We are a constant crutch and we ease them into success because we are actively supporting them. And this completely ruins the test. Because when we set up one of our relatives' PCs with a Windows or Mac OS, they're much more successful than the average Joe for the same reason. My mom's machine never got viruses or pop up windows when I was living there and was able to stop that kind of thing. When I left home, I left a vortex of knowledge behind me, and the result two years later is a PC which is unusable due to the sheer amount of crap weighing it down.
That's not Windows' fault...they didn't write the malware and they tried to make it easy to fix any problems that would come up. It's not my mom's fault...she just wants to check her email and print out letters to friends (BTW, number of stupid cutesy card making programs for Linux: 0). It's nobody's fault...home users just need somebody they can rely on to swoop in when their knowledge base falls out from underneath them.
Tell me: of those of you whose non-technical friends, relatives, etc, use Linux, how many of them rely on YOU, or another Linux Guru, to set up these machines, or for information on them? Do you know anybody who wasn't originally a "computer nut" who walked into Best Buy, grabbed a copy of Suse, and successfully dual booted without outside assistance?
This is a HUGE stumbling block. Not to be crass, but who befriends the friendless? Linux is an operating system that NEEDS a gateway...and as long as itremains so it will never be a viable alternative to OS which do most of the thinking for you.
Lindows is a good start. I wonder what their numbers are REALLY like...
Yeah, this argument was really great when I first heard it in 1990. It's a crock of shit now. After 15 years of The Simpsons and a number of moderately successful adult cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s, NOBODY thinks cartoons are immediately for children anymore. You can't walk into a video store without seeing the massive NOT FOR CHILDREN special interest anime racks. People know it's there, at least anybody that matters. When I saw Mononoke, yeah, there were people there who thought it was a kid's movie, but they were obviously very confused people. I'll bet they took their kids to see T3, too, thinking it was going to be okay because their friends had seen it.
No, the reason the public treats Anime in such a lukewarm manner is that, to most people, it is no different from any other imported film, from Hong Kong action movies to British art flicks. And if it's foreign, it's not immediately appealing. People don't know what to expect from it...you go to Finding Nemo, you'll get mildly scary scenes with a heartwarming ending. You go to Reservoir Dogs, you'll get violence followed by a bitter ending. In foreign films, cultural differences often result in extreme differences in this formula, to the point that it is not uncommon for children's movies to end unhappily, or for an action movie to take a surprising turn towards nonviolence at the end.
This is markedly different from simply having characters of ambiguous morality. Are you forgetting the popularity of ambiguous westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or of the Godfather trilogy, or anything by Quentin Tarantino? America is ready for antiheros and well meaning villains...they just don't want to have to read a companion volume on japanese culture and mythology to get them.
There's also the stigma of some of the incredibly BAD Anime that has gotten released over here. When the main exposure you get to a medium is Dragonball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh and fucking Sailor Moon idiocy, of course you're going to pass over the rate gems that medium offers. It's like people who say they hate country music but have never heard Johnny Cash.
Anyway, I'm sick of people blaming unpopularity of ANYTHING on closed mindedness. If you like it, fine, that doesn't give you the right to say everybody else is some kind of film bigot. There is a lot of anime I cannot stand and will never watch, just as there is a lot of American made and produced cinema I can't stand. If you want to open eyes you think are closed, keep being a missionary...push thoseGhibli films and Ninja Scroll and GitS and Cowboy Bebop (anything from sunshine, really). Some people have made up their mind not based on preconceptions and stereotypes, but because some Otaku forced them to watch Those Who Hunt Elves.
Here, here slashdot. I agree. I believe I shall call this new theory "tardism:" the belief that god exists, and is all powerful, but has severe learning disabilities. Hence the duckbill platypus, the flying squirrel, most if not all Mollusks, quantum mechanics and the uncircumcised human penis, which is the fucking strangest thing in the known universe.
You *can't write perfect code. Luckily, you *don't* have to write perfect code, if you write everything in a language that properly handles exceptions. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to write perfect code...just that if, like every other programmer that has ever touched a keyboard or punch card, you have bugs in your code, you're much better off if your tools are watching your back.
A good example is the number one favorite tool of the hacker, the buffer overflow. I don't care what OS you have, if you have buffers that can be overflown, you have insecure code. It doesn't matter what "user" the code is running as when it gets full access to your memory and command stack.
So use one of the dozens of languages that won't let you write unchecked code. And you can write as sloppy as you like -- nobody's going to be able to bust down that door. To be honest, i think in the next few years we'll see more of this sort of problem with LINUX than we will with Microsoft. Microsoft is trying to get everybody to write for a virtual machine in languages like C# and VB.NET (which is significantly less of a joke than you think it is). Whereas open source developers seem to pride themselves in sticking to archaic C code...shit, that language was old when I was in MIDDLE SCHOOL (in fact, the computer librarian would only let you check out books on C++). It's not "faster" in today's world, where machines are three clock cycles FASTER than the fastest common interconnect...coding in C is simply some bizarre combination of laziness and bravado. Hey, if you guys want to code in a masochist's language, there's always PERL. The rest of the time we should all be in C++ and Java wherever possible. Sorry if those overflow checks take.1% off your linpack benchies...
A feature I would love to see in Mac OS X is virtual desktops. My Red Hat/Gnome machine has become a productivity workhorse because I can have several projects -- with different apps, docs et al. -- open at the same time and switch between them as needs dictate. I think nothing of leaving apps and files open for days or even weeks on the Linux machine.
Leave things open, but not on the screen? I do this on my iBook all the time, through the use of the magical function HIDE. It's been in Apple OSs since...well, as long as I can remember, at least as far back as System 8. In fact, it's been in use so long that every program I use except Adobe Photoshop maps APPLE H and SHIFT APPLE H to hide this and hide others.
I used to use Litestep on my PC, and played with the virtual desktop function. I quickly came to the assertion that virtual desktops confuse the hell out of me, and there are only FOUR in that version of litestep. Things would always get wierd, open in other desktops, and I had to have a MAP to find shit. A freaking map, which highlighted what QUADRANT of my screen I was looking at. Pretty complex when all I really wanted was for some windows to go away so i could see my desktop. I figured it out...but it took a while, and I still didn't know quite how to manage it.
Hiding does the same thing -- removes a window from your desktop while maintaining its state -- without a lot of learning involved. You can pick up the concept of Hiding VERY quickly...even my MOM, who can't figure out how to make an email list after just making 4 of them, understands hiding.
See, Apple's interface is all about binary. It either is, or it isn't. One mouse button, etc. So if something is open, but you don't see it, it's hidden. Clicking on its representaion in the dock unhides it. Or, you can Apple-tab to it. Simple.
Why is it that some people think that ALL GUIs should be exactly the same? That OSX should have virtual desktops, Windows a Dock, etc? The whole POINT of having more than one type of GUI is that there are tons of possible GUI paradigms and none is inherently better or worse than the others. Apple tries to find a level of subtly between form and function, power and learning curve. They're more than willing to let you keep your files open for as long as you like (so's MS, by the way....next time you feel overwhelmed by windows, hit Windows-D or Windows-M and watch them ALL go away, minimized to the taskbar).
Oh I see. So all these developers were busy programming great little software programs to run music files efficiently on DSP chips. Microsoft said "Nuts to this, we want a part of it! Full colour mp3 playback with WALLPAPER, damnit!"
And the hardware vendors quake. And they redo their machines with the new software. And battery life PLUMMETS. And the iPod becomes Palm in 1999...faster, snappier, more useful and already has been for 3+ product generations.
As opposed to the Open Source Definition of Free, which is "expect to wait a long time to get obscure bugs fixed unless you're willing to put in the effort to do it yourself or bribe programmers, expect it not to work automatically the first time unless you hardware is exactly like the developer (who is invariably using hardware so obscure even the korean manual is translated poorly). expect the installer not to work and the colours to need correcting, but once you get it working, it will work forever until it finds its first unexpected error, at which point it will crash, taking your x server with it and neither will ever work again."
Er, sorry. Bad experiences with mplayer. AND xmms. AND some piece of shit from Project Mayo. Multimedia on Linux drove me back to Windows on me desktop; I'll take the easily avoidable DRM over software that doesn't work any day of the week.
Microsoft's definition of free is "added value and some added unneeded hassles." In most cases, you can work around MS' hassles using MS' own APIs (divx, mp3, shit i play AAC files on Winamp2). Apple's definition of free is "you're really paying for this with the hardware, so we'll make it relatively hassle free." My iPod is such a joy to use that I never missed the whiz bang PocketPC I traded for it. The OSS definition of free is "you can compile it yourself! change it all you like! give it to your friends!" What a fucking hassle. I don't want a philosophy, I just want to play a GOD DAMNED porno clip and all this hacking is killing my wood.
Calling me an idiot doesn't make it so, just as pretending to know something about software doesn't make you bill gates. After all, he could afford a free slashdot account...
Uh, huffman coding? RAM striping? There's all sorts of ways to prevent errors by adding bits to the problem and handshaking. This is not a con, your fucking modem has been repairing errors since the late 80s.
Wow, big scam Apple's running there, I can't even believe it. By the way, if you replace your car's radiator with a better system you made yourself and the engine block cracks, they won't cover THAT in the warranty either. I know, what dicks!
I dunno what happened...Apple used to bend over backwards with its warranty. A month ago my friend sent in his OBVIOUSLY HACKED (missing screws, broken pc boards, don't ask) laptop for hard disc service and they not only fixed his hard drive, then replaced his cracked lower case with a brand new (or at least, cleanly buffed) one.
Of course, he didn't take out his hard drive's head motor and replace it with a non standard unit because it was too noisy. I'll bet if he had, they'd have cunningly conned him out of free service to repair his hack.
Think VT'd want to do some supercomputer pulls and sell off those Supers and Radeons? Assuming $90 per card and $150 per drive, good ebay numbers, they could make $264,000. Enough to hire four new professors (or buy 88 more G5s).
Or maybe they plan on doing some LAN gaming and CD ripping in the downtime. 9.555 TFLOPS would make a NICE iTunes machine...
Don't talk to me about Liberals fighting for big government when we have a Conservative government that has increased the size, cost and level of beaurocracy more in three years than any administration since Washington's.
What you really mean when you say "Liberal" and "big government" is pervasive government. Liberals want tiny amounts of control in industry to increase equality where economic forces tend towards inequity. Take a look at exactly how Clinton acheived the budget surplus...it was by streamlining governance, not by bloating it.
People, especially Libertarians who are notorious for stratifying issues along ridiculous fault lines, who fight against this kind of regulation generally ignore the fact that it fucking works. They also generally ignore the fact that all players in a regulated industry see higher profits after regulation than before it. Sorry if allowing everybody to make money is anti-American to you. You're more than welcome to stroke your guns while you complain about how well your 401k is doing.
If it wouldn't work, it is not a fucking solution. It's about as useful as saying "The solution, as mentioned in the Ten Commandments, is not to lie or covet shit that's better than yours."
Geez. No wonder Hannity is getting across to so many people.
Fuck unions. Unions WERE the answer when they actually fought for workers. The second they started fighting for themselves, they stopped being a useful entity.
We need people willing to fight selflessly and tirelessly for people that can't fight for themselves. We had that with the unions. We had that with the activists of the 1960s. We haven't had that at all in a long time. Shit, even the ACLU is turning complacent.
Listen. If I, and six thousand of my closest friends, make a movie that is scene for scene identical to "Superman 2," we are infringing on copyright. Even if we've never SEEN "Superman 2." That's what copyright law does -- it protects the rights of the original creator from imitations.
In this respect, SCO is right. Linus IS structured, assembled, and designed to be like UNIX. To quote the Dead Milkmen, why the hell do you think they call it a UNIX-like system, anyway?
The question here is whether or not Linux users have the right, in the eyes of copyright law, to distribute the system. And that depends. Even if all the infringing code was legally obtained, that does not necessarily give you the right to reproduce the entire system. If I get the rights to distribute a Stephen King story, I can't reproduce his whole catalogue and give it away for free.
As for how much the lawyers are being paid, it's plenty. All those billable hours, mmm...
That's part of it...the other part would be, how is an independent reviewer going to rise above the fold of previewers who have had benchmarks for MONTHS by the time he gets his equipment together? Especially when, nine times out of ten, his results are exactly the same as the sites getting free hardware.
Consumer Reports is successful because so many readers have the sense to WAIT, to inform themselves. I think a lot of computer users just want REASSUREMENT that their purchase will be worthwhile. I mean, people bought the damn voodoo 3 and the radeon even as NVIDIA was slaying these cards in most benchmarks and were generally more expensive. I knew people who bought the V3 and quoted me benchmarks using mismatched drivers in games they didn't even PLAY!
Guy, have you SEEN the pool? It's a goddamn sewer! So much so, most executives probably wonder why you're trying to swim in the first place!
We've got Haliburton exploiting the presidency to increase its oil holdings. We've got Enron fucking around for years, its excutives back in executive positions in different companies after comitting crimes and bleeding people dry. There is so much GREED in this country that simple talk about ETHICS isn't going to fix anything.
We need a Teddy Roosevelt...somebody who can fix the legal standing of the corporation for good, somebody who can tax the shit out of the rich. Hey, if you're going to get fat off the exploitation of the working class, then better be ready to get slim paying for their welfare, health care and unemployment.
I'd have to say this is nothing new. Have you even HEARD of the evil conditions that led to unionizing and anti-trust acts at the beginning of the 20th century? How about inventions like the Corvair, or the pet rock?
As long as there is success to be had from sketchy processes, there will be sketchy processes. Ethics are nothing more than a form of PR. If you believe otherwise, by all means start your own company. See how far you get.
The reason why is that the expense and volume of computer hardware would require the site to be an instant success.
Think about it...a good graphics card roundup should review cards from all of the companies that make a card based on a particular chipset. If there are 8 companies making that card, at $200+ retail each, that's $1600+ per review.
Of course, I don't think it's a bad idea. Just one that will take a little bit of ingenuity. A good method MIGHT be to sell advertising space not to hardware manufacturers, but to hardware SELLERS, something Anand (and Tom, who often has to buy his hardware since bad reviews have branded him unfavorable) definitely does. There's no shortage of hardware sellers, so if you piss off one there's four more right behind him.
Of course, you can also bolster your costs by RESELLING by auction the hardware you've tested.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. Most young and teenage programmers have neither the experience nor the focus to create the kind of boring, reliable code that makes up the core of Open Source. Instead they're appealed to by more glamorous fringe projects, and the idea of shareware.
Uh, computer use doesn't END with the installation of the OS. Many Linux fans conveniently forget that most of what people want to do is impossible on Linux. Sure, they can word process, browse the web, etc...but you can do these things on a goddamn WebTV as well. You buy a PC for the power and ubiquity of the architecture. It's supposed to let you do all of these things, and while Linux CAN definitely do them, you can expect close to a hundred hours of experience before any of them becomes SIMPLE.
You can make the OS installer as easy as you like. Until there is an easy way to install a new wireless networking card, a recipe book program, a DVD player and The Sims on Linux, 95% of the computer market would be done a great disservice by installing it.
Fucking dicks like this are yet another reason why Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
SYNOPSIS OF EVERY REPLY TO A POST SAYING LINUX IS HARD:
1) Oh you just have to type PDSQWJDASH then enter then SCROLL LOCK not once not twice but thrice. Stupid.
2) Oh the docs are hard to read USE GOOGLE that will make them easier to read especially when you're trying to figure out how to get your network up. Stupid.
3) Linux is better because we have 10,000 inferior choices for every single piece of software you can imagine! Your choice is invariable wrong and mine is right! Stupid!
4) Windows sucks because three years ago Outlook Express had big holes in it! It sucked compared to thunderbird now! Stupid!
I can only imagine what my VW Bug forums would be like if these kinds of elitist pricks were trolling them. I'd have never gotten the fool thing working if every post was "Oh you should be using the 009 Bosch distributor, it's far more reliable than the stock vaccum model! Hahahaha this guy doesn't know if he has a dual or single port 1600! What a loser! The curved windshield wasn't introduced until 1973 Super! There's not way you have one in your '68 Vert! All you have to do to adjust the carburetor is adjust the bypass screw until your idle is at 850 rpm *900 for the autostick* and then turn the volume control screw counterclockwise until the engine drops about 30 rpm! It's that easy! Now get back to your water cooled engines!"
Dickheads. Linux doesn't need you and it doesn't want your half assed help.
Dude, it's slashdot, not your mom's dinner table. Just say "fuck." Unless you actually want to repair Redhat's filesystem...
You know, this is sort of offtopic, but I have a big problem with any case study on Linux that focuses on "My mom" or "My girlfriend." I think it's great that so many of us are getting our kin to use open source software, but these people are not, for a SECOND, a fair reflection on the consumer desktop user.
Sure, they may have the same needs, the same wants, the same money, time and education restraints, but there's a big X-factor in the equation:
Us.
We set up the OS for them. We set up their desktop for them. We show them how to use it and most of the time, we install their programs for them. We are a constant crutch and we ease them into success because we are actively supporting them. And this completely ruins the test. Because when we set up one of our relatives' PCs with a Windows or Mac OS, they're much more successful than the average Joe for the same reason. My mom's machine never got viruses or pop up windows when I was living there and was able to stop that kind of thing. When I left home, I left a vortex of knowledge behind me, and the result two years later is a PC which is unusable due to the sheer amount of crap weighing it down.
That's not Windows' fault...they didn't write the malware and they tried to make it easy to fix any problems that would come up. It's not my mom's fault...she just wants to check her email and print out letters to friends (BTW, number of stupid cutesy card making programs for Linux: 0). It's nobody's fault...home users just need somebody they can rely on to swoop in when their knowledge base falls out from underneath them.
Tell me: of those of you whose non-technical friends, relatives, etc, use Linux, how many of them rely on YOU, or another Linux Guru, to set up these machines, or for information on them? Do you know anybody who wasn't originally a "computer nut" who walked into Best Buy, grabbed a copy of Suse, and successfully dual booted without outside assistance?
This is a HUGE stumbling block. Not to be crass, but who befriends the friendless? Linux is an operating system that NEEDS a gateway...and as long as itremains so it will never be a viable alternative to OS which do most of the thinking for you.
Lindows is a good start. I wonder what their numbers are REALLY like...
Yeah, this argument was really great when I first heard it in 1990. It's a crock of shit now. After 15 years of The Simpsons and a number of moderately successful adult cartoons in the 1980s and 1990s, NOBODY thinks cartoons are immediately for children anymore. You can't walk into a video store without seeing the massive NOT FOR CHILDREN special interest anime racks. People know it's there, at least anybody that matters. When I saw Mononoke, yeah, there were people there who thought it was a kid's movie, but they were obviously very confused people. I'll bet they took their kids to see T3, too, thinking it was going to be okay because their friends had seen it.
No, the reason the public treats Anime in such a lukewarm manner is that, to most people, it is no different from any other imported film, from Hong Kong action movies to British art flicks. And if it's foreign, it's not immediately appealing. People don't know what to expect from it...you go to Finding Nemo, you'll get mildly scary scenes with a heartwarming ending. You go to Reservoir Dogs, you'll get violence followed by a bitter ending. In foreign films, cultural differences often result in extreme differences in this formula, to the point that it is not uncommon for children's movies to end unhappily, or for an action movie to take a surprising turn towards nonviolence at the end.
This is markedly different from simply having characters of ambiguous morality. Are you forgetting the popularity of ambiguous westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or of the Godfather trilogy, or anything by Quentin Tarantino? America is ready for antiheros and well meaning villains...they just don't want to have to read a companion volume on japanese culture and mythology to get them.
There's also the stigma of some of the incredibly BAD Anime that has gotten released over here. When the main exposure you get to a medium is Dragonball Z, Yu-Gi-Oh and fucking Sailor Moon idiocy, of course you're going to pass over the rate gems that medium offers. It's like people who say they hate country music but have never heard Johnny Cash.
Anyway, I'm sick of people blaming unpopularity of ANYTHING on closed mindedness. If you like it, fine, that doesn't give you the right to say everybody else is some kind of film bigot. There is a lot of anime I cannot stand and will never watch, just as there is a lot of American made and produced cinema I can't stand. If you want to open eyes you think are closed, keep being a missionary...push thoseGhibli films and Ninja Scroll and GitS and Cowboy Bebop (anything from sunshine, really). Some people have made up their mind not based on preconceptions and stereotypes, but because some Otaku forced them to watch Those Who Hunt Elves.
Here, here slashdot. I agree. I believe I shall call this new theory "tardism:" the belief that god exists, and is all powerful, but has severe learning disabilities. Hence the duckbill platypus, the flying squirrel, most if not all Mollusks, quantum mechanics and the uncircumcised human penis, which is the fucking strangest thing in the known universe.
Outlaws and police, you mean.
You *can't write perfect code. Luckily, you *don't* have to write perfect code, if you write everything in a language that properly handles exceptions. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to write perfect code...just that if, like every other programmer that has ever touched a keyboard or punch card, you have bugs in your code, you're much better off if your tools are watching your back.
.1% off your linpack benchies...
A good example is the number one favorite tool of the hacker, the buffer overflow. I don't care what OS you have, if you have buffers that can be overflown, you have insecure code. It doesn't matter what "user" the code is running as when it gets full access to your memory and command stack.
So use one of the dozens of languages that won't let you write unchecked code. And you can write as sloppy as you like -- nobody's going to be able to bust down that door. To be honest, i think in the next few years we'll see more of this sort of problem with LINUX than we will with Microsoft. Microsoft is trying to get everybody to write for a virtual machine in languages like C# and VB.NET (which is significantly less of a joke than you think it is). Whereas open source developers seem to pride themselves in sticking to archaic C code...shit, that language was old when I was in MIDDLE SCHOOL (in fact, the computer librarian would only let you check out books on C++). It's not "faster" in today's world, where machines are three clock cycles FASTER than the fastest common interconnect...coding in C is simply some bizarre combination of laziness and bravado. Hey, if you guys want to code in a masochist's language, there's always PERL. The rest of the time we should all be in C++ and Java wherever possible. Sorry if those overflow checks take
A feature I would love to see in Mac OS X is virtual desktops. My Red Hat/Gnome machine has become a productivity workhorse because I can have several projects -- with different apps, docs et al. -- open at the same time and switch between them as needs dictate. I think nothing of leaving apps and files open for days or even weeks on the Linux machine.
Leave things open, but not on the screen? I do this on my iBook all the time, through the use of the magical function HIDE. It's been in Apple OSs since...well, as long as I can remember, at least as far back as System 8. In fact, it's been in use so long that every program I use except Adobe Photoshop maps APPLE H and SHIFT APPLE H to hide this and hide others.
I used to use Litestep on my PC, and played with the virtual desktop function. I quickly came to the assertion that virtual desktops confuse the hell out of me, and there are only FOUR in that version of litestep. Things would always get wierd, open in other desktops, and I had to have a MAP to find shit. A freaking map, which highlighted what QUADRANT of my screen I was looking at. Pretty complex when all I really wanted was for some windows to go away so i could see my desktop. I figured it out...but it took a while, and I still didn't know quite how to manage it.
Hiding does the same thing -- removes a window from your desktop while maintaining its state -- without a lot of learning involved. You can pick up the concept of Hiding VERY quickly...even my MOM, who can't figure out how to make an email list after just making 4 of them, understands hiding.
See, Apple's interface is all about binary. It either is, or it isn't. One mouse button, etc. So if something is open, but you don't see it, it's hidden. Clicking on its representaion in the dock unhides it. Or, you can Apple-tab to it. Simple.
Why is it that some people think that ALL GUIs should be exactly the same? That OSX should have virtual desktops, Windows a Dock, etc? The whole POINT of having more than one type of GUI is that there are tons of possible GUI paradigms and none is inherently better or worse than the others. Apple tries to find a level of subtly between form and function, power and learning curve. They're more than willing to let you keep your files open for as long as you like (so's MS, by the way....next time you feel overwhelmed by windows, hit Windows-D or Windows-M and watch them ALL go away, minimized to the taskbar).
Oh I see. So all these developers were busy programming great little software programs to run music files efficiently on DSP chips. Microsoft said "Nuts to this, we want a part of it! Full colour mp3 playback with WALLPAPER, damnit!"
And the hardware vendors quake. And they redo their machines with the new software. And battery life PLUMMETS. And the iPod becomes Palm in 1999...faster, snappier, more useful and already has been for 3+ product generations.
As opposed to the Open Source Definition of Free, which is "expect to wait a long time to get obscure bugs fixed unless you're willing to put in the effort to do it yourself or bribe programmers, expect it not to work automatically the first time unless you hardware is exactly like the developer (who is invariably using hardware so obscure even the korean manual is translated poorly). expect the installer not to work and the colours to need correcting, but once you get it working, it will work forever until it finds its first unexpected error, at which point it will crash, taking your x server with it and neither will ever work again."
Er, sorry. Bad experiences with mplayer. AND xmms. AND some piece of shit from Project Mayo. Multimedia on Linux drove me back to Windows on me desktop; I'll take the easily avoidable DRM over software that doesn't work any day of the week.
Microsoft's definition of free is "added value and some added unneeded hassles." In most cases, you can work around MS' hassles using MS' own APIs (divx, mp3, shit i play AAC files on Winamp2). Apple's definition of free is "you're really paying for this with the hardware, so we'll make it relatively hassle free." My iPod is such a joy to use that I never missed the whiz bang PocketPC I traded for it. The OSS definition of free is "you can compile it yourself! change it all you like! give it to your friends!" What a fucking hassle. I don't want a philosophy, I just want to play a GOD DAMNED porno clip and all this hacking is killing my wood.
Calling me an idiot doesn't make it so, just as pretending to know something about software doesn't make you bill gates. After all, he could afford a free slashdot account...
Uh, huffman coding? RAM striping? There's all sorts of ways to prevent errors by adding bits to the problem and handshaking. This is not a con, your fucking modem has been repairing errors since the late 80s.
Wow, big scam Apple's running there, I can't even believe it. By the way, if you replace your car's radiator with a better system you made yourself and the engine block cracks, they won't cover THAT in the warranty either. I know, what dicks!
I dunno what happened...Apple used to bend over backwards with its warranty. A month ago my friend sent in his OBVIOUSLY HACKED (missing screws, broken pc boards, don't ask) laptop for hard disc service and they not only fixed his hard drive, then replaced his cracked lower case with a brand new (or at least, cleanly buffed) one.
Of course, he didn't take out his hard drive's head motor and replace it with a non standard unit because it was too noisy. I'll bet if he had, they'd have cunningly conned him out of free service to repair his hack.
Shit...hadn't even thought about that.
Think VT'd want to do some supercomputer pulls and sell off those Supers and Radeons? Assuming $90 per card and $150 per drive, good ebay numbers, they could make $264,000. Enough to hire four new professors (or buy 88 more G5s).
Or maybe they plan on doing some LAN gaming and CD ripping in the downtime. 9.555 TFLOPS would make a NICE iTunes machine...
T minus 15 minuts and 6 slashdot posts, you mean.
It'd be more if it weren't for the lameness filter. Mmmm, lameness filter, i lub you.
Don't talk to me about Liberals fighting for big government when we have a Conservative government that has increased the size, cost and level of beaurocracy more in three years than any administration since Washington's.
What you really mean when you say "Liberal" and "big government" is pervasive government. Liberals want tiny amounts of control in industry to increase equality where economic forces tend towards inequity. Take a look at exactly how Clinton acheived the budget surplus...it was by streamlining governance, not by bloating it.
People, especially Libertarians who are notorious for stratifying issues along ridiculous fault lines, who fight against this kind of regulation generally ignore the fact that it fucking works. They also generally ignore the fact that all players in a regulated industry see higher profits after regulation than before it. Sorry if allowing everybody to make money is anti-American to you. You're more than welcome to stroke your guns while you complain about how well your 401k is doing.
If it wouldn't work, it is not a fucking solution. It's about as useful as saying "The solution, as mentioned in the Ten Commandments, is not to lie or covet shit that's better than yours."
Geez. No wonder Hannity is getting across to so many people.
Fuck unions. Unions WERE the answer when they actually fought for workers. The second they started fighting for themselves, they stopped being a useful entity.
We need people willing to fight selflessly and tirelessly for people that can't fight for themselves. We had that with the unions. We had that with the activists of the 1960s. We haven't had that at all in a long time. Shit, even the ACLU is turning complacent.
Listen. If I, and six thousand of my closest friends, make a movie that is scene for scene identical to "Superman 2," we are infringing on copyright. Even if we've never SEEN "Superman 2." That's what copyright law does -- it protects the rights of the original creator from imitations.
In this respect, SCO is right. Linus IS structured, assembled, and designed to be like UNIX. To quote the Dead Milkmen, why the hell do you think they call it a UNIX-like system, anyway?
The question here is whether or not Linux users have the right, in the eyes of copyright law, to distribute the system. And that depends. Even if all the infringing code was legally obtained, that does not necessarily give you the right to reproduce the entire system. If I get the rights to distribute a Stephen King story, I can't reproduce his whole catalogue and give it away for free.
As for how much the lawyers are being paid, it's plenty. All those billable hours, mmm...
That's part of it...the other part would be, how is an independent reviewer going to rise above the fold of previewers who have had benchmarks for MONTHS by the time he gets his equipment together? Especially when, nine times out of ten, his results are exactly the same as the sites getting free hardware.
Consumer Reports is successful because so many readers have the sense to WAIT, to inform themselves. I think a lot of computer users just want REASSUREMENT that their purchase will be worthwhile. I mean, people bought the damn voodoo 3 and the radeon even as NVIDIA was slaying these cards in most benchmarks and were generally more expensive. I knew people who bought the V3 and quoted me benchmarks using mismatched drivers in games they didn't even PLAY!
Guy, have you SEEN the pool? It's a goddamn sewer! So much so, most executives probably wonder why you're trying to swim in the first place!
We've got Haliburton exploiting the presidency to increase its oil holdings. We've got Enron fucking around for years, its excutives back in executive positions in different companies after comitting crimes and bleeding people dry. There is so much GREED in this country that simple talk about ETHICS isn't going to fix anything.
We need a Teddy Roosevelt...somebody who can fix the legal standing of the corporation for good, somebody who can tax the shit out of the rich. Hey, if you're going to get fat off the exploitation of the working class, then better be ready to get slim paying for their welfare, health care and unemployment.
I'd have to say this is nothing new. Have you even HEARD of the evil conditions that led to unionizing and anti-trust acts at the beginning of the 20th century? How about inventions like the Corvair, or the pet rock?
As long as there is success to be had from sketchy processes, there will be sketchy processes. Ethics are nothing more than a form of PR. If you believe otherwise, by all means start your own company. See how far you get.
The reason why is that the expense and volume of computer hardware would require the site to be an instant success.
Think about it...a good graphics card roundup should review cards from all of the companies that make a card based on a particular chipset. If there are 8 companies making that card, at $200+ retail each, that's $1600+ per review.
Of course, I don't think it's a bad idea. Just one that will take a little bit of ingenuity. A good method MIGHT be to sell advertising space not to hardware manufacturers, but to hardware SELLERS, something Anand (and Tom, who often has to buy his hardware since bad reviews have branded him unfavorable) definitely does. There's no shortage of hardware sellers, so if you piss off one there's four more right behind him.
Of course, you can also bolster your costs by RESELLING by auction the hardware you've tested.