Since you didn't actually read what I linked to, I'll make it very clear - the tooth decay analogy makes clear why those arguments are stupid. And yes, people are actually advancing those stupid arguments.
This is separate from the question of whether or not mandatory HPV vaccination is a good idea or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but those arguments don't establish that either way.
Stephen Colbert gave the best answer to this ridiculous argument. Did you go around stabbing yourself with rusty nails after you got your tetanus shot?
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to make paps available to under served women than it is to vaccinate every woman aged 11-26 -- then every 11 year old every year...
Volume might reduce prices, and affect the economics, of course. I didn't see anything in that article (I admit I skimmed it) that discussed the expense of treating cervical cancer. It's rare, yes, but that's still a few thousand women every year (and many of them die), and I never heard that treating cancer was cheap.
But imagine someone came up with a vaccine for tooth decay, and we'll assume it was expensive, too. Would you argue that it's cheaper to provide (assumed less effective) dentistry to 'underserved' kids and adults? (Oh, and you didn't advance the 'moral' argument, but this analogy makes plain how stupid it is. How many people would argue seriously against a 'dental caries' vaccine because you can avoid tooth decay by good behavior, and it might encourage kids to eat more sweets leading to more obesity?)
"I remember saying [...] that people would spend more money on software than on hardware. We certainly haven't passed that milestone by quite a margin. But particularly as software as a service becomes a reality [that might change]." - Bill Gates, Newsweek, September 18th 2000
No, but the quotes I've seen don't really support scientific inquiry very well: "...our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;' this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God."
...you have done a admiral job of showing me that people in other parts of the country where a large company employees a large percentage of the workforce, said company can have a substantial influence on the rest of the comminity...
Sure it can. But:
...and by so doing, have backed up the parent's post quite well.
...that's a non sequitur. The 'big three' automakers aren't doing so hot, and so Michigan's economy is suffering. That's the kind of influence they can have on a "comminity". But that doesn't translate to, for example, me having inside information on lawsuits against, say, Ford, or being motivated to do clandestine PR work on their behalf.
I suppose you would be more likely to find someone willing to do covert PR work for Ford in the metro Detroit area. But that fact doesn't give you useful information of the kind you're trying for. Men are more likely to be left-handed than women, but that doesn't mean that, say, the police can assume just because a crime was committed by a left-hander that it was a man that did it.
You're saying "I don't believe that PJ is a front, and until I see an IBM paycheck with her name on it I will remain convinced of that".
Um... no, I'm not saying that. I will concede that you're saying that I'm saying that, I guess, but that's not the same thing.
What I am saying is that, given the objective fact that a lot of people feel very passionate about various open source issues and are willing to put a great deal of time into them for no particular monetary reward (how many examples do you want?), and noting that among those issues that people feel passionate about is SCO's suit (just how often has it come up as a topic on Slashdot, let alone the number of times it comes up in comments on unrelated topics?), it's perfectly reasonable to believe that someone would spend that kind of time on it. Certainly there are apparently hundreds interested enough to post regularly on that site, and thousands willing to visit it.
So, no, I don't need a paystub. But I'm going to need more than (extremely) circumstantial 'evidence' against the null hypothesis here.
Are you spending ridiculous amounts of time on a court case the most of the world doesn't even know about, and also going into "hiding", fearing for your life due to your actions?
Hmmm. By that logic, you're a troll. Just looking at your recent posting history, you're spending a ridiculous amount of time on Slashdot, and taking consistently controversial (and controversially-phrased) positions over and over. (Global warming is a scientific hoax, people object to RIAA lawsuits solely because they want to pirate music, the panic over the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" lightshows was justified, "open source people" sound like "ignorant assholes", the EU doesn't like Apple's DRM purely because they don't like a US company, etc.)
The point is that ad-hominem as such doesn't work. The only 'new' evidence for Groklaw being an IBM front you give is, basically, 'I, mungtor, wouldn't spend so much time running that particular website about that particular subject, so therefore no one else on Earth would either without being paid.'
You can see modifications of existing genetic information in an organism, but there haven't been ANY observable (seen in a lab, or in present day) mutations where brand new genetic information has been added to an organism.
Um... yeah, there has. Moreover, it's obvious - almost any mutation will add information in an information-theoretic sense to an organism.
Now, you're trying to imply that "improvements" in some sense haven't been observed. And that's false, too. There are plenty of examples of bacteria that
evolve both antibiotic resistance and compensatory mutations that
allow them to compete just fine when they aren't under pressure from
antibiotics.
This isn't a trivial point. Mutations that have the effect of
producing antibiotic resistance have been happening since long before
there were antibiotics. But much of the time they weren't advantageous
and thus never achieved much frequency. Meanwhile, mutations that
could compensate for any disadvantages of the resistance genes were
happening, too, but (a) the compensation would generally be a
disadvantage without the resistance gene, and (b) since both types of
mutations are quite uncommon, rarely (if ever) would the twain meet in
the same bacterium.
But, under massive environmental pressure, antibiotic-resistance
genes have become practically mandatory in certain environments -
environments that are otherwise attractive, like weakened people. So
in some populations practically all the individuals have resistance
genes... and these resistant strains are now competing internally. Now
the frequency of resistant genes are common enough that, when a
compensatory mutation arises, it's very likely be paired with the
resistance, unlike a century ago.
Now you've got a bacterium with (at least) two mutations, one that
confers resistance, and another that lets it compete even when the
antibiotic isn't around, with non-resistant strains. A powerful and
otherwise unlikely advantage, but one that's predicted by evolutionary
theory... and sadly we're seeing it actually happening now.
Re:What's wrong with being "a front for IBM"?
on
Groklaw No Front for IBM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if she isn't paid directly by IBM, I'm sure that she is either a former employee or has some other tight ties to the company. If I remember correctly, she lives in a part of New York state where it is pretty much impossible to swing a cat without hitting and IBM employee.
Of course, I live in a part of Michigan where it's "pretty much impossible to swing a cat without hitting" an employee of the 'big three' automakers. I know and am related to several people who work for them. And yet, I'm not a former employee nor do I have any other 'tight ties' to such a company.
Seeing as 'the place that she (apparently) lives' appears to be the only actual fact you're basing any of your conclusions on, I have to say I find your case... unconvincing.
I have some qualms about the timeline in that essay. For one thing, I don't think the pressure will really be on until the "64-bit killer app" appears. (And if I knew what that app would be, I'd be writing it now and planning how to spend my millions.) It's hard to think what a typical desktop user (or even a "power user") would do that would require more than 4GB of RAM.
And the computing market has become more diffuse and less desktop-centric. Game consoles, smartphones, web-centered apps... I think that platform transitions will become more diffuse, too.
But yeah, I think he's spot on about a strong need for a simple, legal way for people to play media on Linux. This is a net, long-term good thing, even if it has some downsides in terms of open-source purity short-term.
We have the Video Privacy Protection Act which gives better protection than almost all other data except possibly medical data.
(Well, we had that. Note that, by the strict language of the law, I'm not sure it applies to DVDs, and the Patriot Act put in a double-wide back door that lets them get your video rental records as long as they pinky-swear they're somehow fighting terrorism.)
But why can't we set the bar that high for other data?
What does.NET have to do with Win32 API? Other than.NET thunking out to it?
I didn't say "Win32 API", I said "Windows API". The current, recommended, heavily-promoted way to program Windows -.NET and so forth - is hideously complex, as I and others have pointed out.
But okay, let's limit things to just the Win32 API. I agree, you're right - it's not several orders of magnitude more complex than POSIX. However, it is more complicated. Let's consider, say, shared libraries/DLLs. On Unix, there's four functions - dlopen, dlsym, dlerror, and dlclose. Well, okay, glibc adds two extensions - dladdr and dlvsym. On Windows, there's 13 functions plus an obsolete one. (Hey... actually, that is an order of magnitude more complicated...) It's a similar story with shared memory, it's pretty easy with Unix and just much harder with Windows.
It just seems like every time I have to do something with the Windows API, it takes more code, and it takes longer to figure out which function I actually need to use, and figure out how to sort out errors, and which parameters are actually important and which ones are always NULL in any real-world case, and...
In Linux the Kernel where all those system calls go, is pretty limited compared to Windows. Where most functionality is added for developers is in shared libraries.
One reason is that the basic API (generally POSIX with a few libraries
and extensions) is objectively simpler, and in my opinion more elegant
and orthogonal, than the Windows API. The Windows API has grown
exponentially and haphazardly in many ways, and is now a monster that
almost no one fully understands:
Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?
"Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word
System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000
public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods
and properties that are inherited and not overridden... If you wrote each
of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a
little description of what it did, you'd have a stack that totaled 40
feet."
Now, we have a printed copy of the POSIX standard here. In a set of
13 binders, it's about two and a half feet across. Only 7 of those
binders actually cover the system interfaces (the equivalent of the
System API above), and the other 6 are introductions, rationales, and
descriptions of standard shell utilities. Note that this is the full
documentation suitable for reimplementing it, not just notes on a 3x5
card. I'd call that objectively simpler.
"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it." - Edmund Way Teale
There are many cases where oss does seem to be providing us with better software, many many cases, no argument there. But when you start getting more specialised, what matters is experience with the specialised target, not brute force manpower.
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Designing and implementing the software - you're right, in general. But in terms of finding bugs, frequently an outsider does better. It's practically a cliche in programmer circles that the bug you've been fruitlessly hunting for two days will be solved when a coworker looks over your shoulder for five seconds and says, "Oh, hey, there it is."
Many bugs are syntactic, not semantic. And someone who's familiar with the syntax, but not necessarily all the semantics, can spot things that others miss. Put in less technical terms, they see what the code actually does whereas someone who works with it constantly may just see what it's supposed to do.
And other bugs are related not to the problem domain per se but the way it relates to other domains. The Nvidia/Apple bug discussed here recently was due not to any deep graphics issue, but by improperly using memory - probably a signed value where an unsigned is required, so that hitting memory over 2GB does Bad Things. Yeah, I'd believe a relatively untrained programmer might spot that.
Nvidia have paid people on the job, with the relevant experience. What makes people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people, when they can't even keep their own codebases bugfree?
You were asking the right question up until the last bit. Nobody can keep their codebases "bug free". Humans make mistakes. I assume you're human, ergo you make mistakes too, right? There's probably no program on Earth bigger than twenty lines that's bug-free. Not even LaTeX, though it's been quite a while since anyone's found one.
But as to why "people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people", it's because OSS development has, when comparisons have been possible, proven to be better-written than the commercial alternatives. There are objective tests
that illustrate
this, over
and over.
(Note, I still think this Fluendo stuff or something like it is a good idea. But I still want the OSS work to go on, too.)
They'd probably be legally unable to be as good as MPlayer
That doesn't matter - that's not what this is intended for. It just has to be not much worse than the common alternatives on Windows. Linux has plenty of other advantages that make it a good choice - maintenance alone is far easier for Linux than Windows, for example.
I have much more time to visit with my parents when I'm over now that I've got them switched to Linux. I don't have to keep Windows running anymore. But I couldn't have done it (there or with my family at home) if they couldn't watch viral videos on YouTube and email. Setting that up was possible thanks to the quasi-legal packages, but not easy. Some repositories were down when I tried - twice - to use EasyUbuntu or Automatix and if I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes I couldn't have done it.
I'm not convinced that ESR has the timing right, but the general outline - that the transition from 32- to 64-bit represents a major opportunity for Linux, and being able to play (note: not edit, just play) multimedia stuff easily and legally is important - I think is spot on. See here for the oft-argued-about details.
Users with more advanced needs or less full pocketbooks (or less ethics, depending on the exact circumstances) could use the 'other' packages. But a good out-of-the-box multimedia experience is worth a lot for Linux promotion. Since the problem isn't technical, it's legal, a legal approach is unfortunately needed.
Hark! Do I hear the dull roar of a Free (as in beer) community enraged by Corporate America, worse the dreaded Music Industry, treading on the rights of the proletariat or individual?
Actually, I think you hear a chorus of people pointing out the hypocrisy of a music industry that claims to want to protect artists, and then rips them off. Just, y'know, FYI.
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take
this into account, the sooner people will start making money again."
- Bruce Schneier
Interesting. What do you do about things like, Mastercook, Sunset Western Garden Interactive Computer Guide and Problem solver, Home Planning Software, Exercise and Diet Nutrition Software, Quicken and Monopoly?
I'd presume various combinations of WINE and QEMU would work. Once they're set up, they'll run pretty much forever with no real maintenance needs, and backup is much simpler, too. QEMU's how I got my wife's greeting card program running, though she made it through the holidays without it.
I tried to get my updated linux to install some old Loki disks I bought in the late 90s along with my WordPerfect 8.0 disks, and they won't install on the newer version.
A separate issue. I dunno about WP8, never used it. But I've got three Loki games running just fine on my Ubuntu system - Myth II, Heretic II, and Descent 3. You might try running the scripts and such as "bash [install].run" instead of "sh [install].run", or maybe you could Google a bit, just like you would with an old Windows game. I couldn't get Aliens versus Predator to run stably on my Windows XP system. Some sound issue, but it would hang or play the same sounds over and over. The AvP Linux port, on the other hand, runs a treat.
I've had decent luck with stock Wine for some games. Valve's Steam runs under Wine; HL2 not so much, but HL and its mods seem fine. American McGee's Alice runs utterly flawlessly. But - as I said - games can be an issue. Feel free to put points in your column or whatever on that score.
However, a lot of people don't have family or friends who are familiar or comfortable enough with Linux to be able to solve these problems
They do if they are changing to Linux. If they are "ordinary users" they'll use what they can get support for from their friends. It's not like Windows can be operated without regular maintenance by a fairly technical admin. And one reasonably savvy Linux user can support a lot of Linux users. As I said, I have a lot more time to visit when I head over to my parents house now.
In short, Linux just isn't ready to seriously compete with Windows and OS-X for the common user, mostly because of lack of application support...
Well, you start out talking about greeting card programs and wrap up with Photoshop and Flash editing. I think your definition of the "common user" is a bit... odd.
Except for application support. This is the only real problem my parents have with Linux.
There are niche apps that aren't on Linux, you're right. But those are just that - niche apps, like the telescope drivers I mentioned.
Maybe it's true that almost everyone falls into some niche or another, but I haven't really seen that. Almost everything most people do with computers are web, email, music, and games. And Linux the first three well, and isn't so bad on the latter. My kids love the games on Linux - when my oldest son was five I found out he'd figured out how to reboot the computer to Linux so he could play Tuxracer.
Windows XP crapped out on us (again) a few months ago, and I was tired of fixing it. I got my wife to move over, the kids were no problem. She misses Word a little, but is mostly used to OpenOffice. The only sticking point is her greeting card program, which isn't quite right under Wine. I may have to QEMU that one. But that's it.
If they ran it by their grandmothers once in awhile maybe we'd make some headway...
I've had my parents on Ubuntu for over a year now. It was easy. I first got them to
move to Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, when they were getting a new computer, I set
up Ubuntu and spent a little time (maybe a hour total, spread over a week) getting
them used to it.
Their main comment? "Linux has much better screensavers."
Linux isn't a great desktop for hardcore gamers, or people with really specialized
hardware needs (like, say, higher-end telescopes or something). For the majority of
people, it's already as good as Windows. And now when I visit my parents, I
don't have to spend half the time troubleshooting their machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they are. The Catholic Medical Association's press release:"[S]upport for the vaccine, and similar vaccines in the future, should not be used to undermine support for efforts to promote chastity and to reduce extramarital sexual activity."
Since you didn't actually read what I linked to, I'll make it very clear - the tooth decay analogy makes clear why those arguments are stupid. And yes, people are actually advancing those stupid arguments.
This is separate from the question of whether or not mandatory HPV vaccination is a good idea or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but those arguments don't establish that either way.
Actually, I still like mine better.
Volume might reduce prices, and affect the economics, of course. I didn't see anything in that article (I admit I skimmed it) that discussed the expense of treating cervical cancer. It's rare, yes, but that's still a few thousand women every year (and many of them die), and I never heard that treating cancer was cheap.
But imagine someone came up with a vaccine for tooth decay, and we'll assume it was expensive, too. Would you argue that it's cheaper to provide (assumed less effective) dentistry to 'underserved' kids and adults? (Oh, and you didn't advance the 'moral' argument, but this analogy makes plain how stupid it is. How many people would argue seriously against a 'dental caries' vaccine because you can avoid tooth decay by good behavior, and it might encourage kids to eat more sweets leading to more obesity?)
"I remember saying [...] that people would spend more money on software than on hardware. We certainly haven't passed that milestone by quite a margin. But particularly as software as a service becomes a reality [that might change]." - Bill Gates, Newsweek, September 18th 2000
No, but the quotes I've seen don't really support scientific inquiry very well: "...our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;' this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God."
This is called "Occasionalism".
Sure it can. But:
I suppose you would be more likely to find someone willing to do covert PR work for Ford in the metro Detroit area. But that fact doesn't give you useful information of the kind you're trying for. Men are more likely to be left-handed than women, but that doesn't mean that, say, the police can assume just because a crime was committed by a left-hander that it was a man that did it.
Um... no, I'm not saying that. I will concede that you're saying that I'm saying that, I guess, but that's not the same thing.
What I am saying is that, given the objective fact that a lot of people feel very passionate about various open source issues and are willing to put a great deal of time into them for no particular monetary reward (how many examples do you want?), and noting that among those issues that people feel passionate about is SCO's suit (just how often has it come up as a topic on Slashdot, let alone the number of times it comes up in comments on unrelated topics?), it's perfectly reasonable to believe that someone would spend that kind of time on it. Certainly there are apparently hundreds interested enough to post regularly on that site, and thousands willing to visit it.
So, no, I don't need a paystub. But I'm going to need more than (extremely) circumstantial 'evidence' against the null hypothesis here.
Hmmm. By that logic, you're a troll. Just looking at your recent posting history, you're spending a ridiculous amount of time on Slashdot, and taking consistently controversial (and controversially-phrased) positions over and over. (Global warming is a scientific hoax, people object to RIAA lawsuits solely because they want to pirate music, the panic over the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" lightshows was justified, "open source people" sound like "ignorant assholes", the EU doesn't like Apple's DRM purely because they don't like a US company, etc.)
The point is that ad-hominem as such doesn't work. The only 'new' evidence for Groklaw being an IBM front you give is, basically, 'I, mungtor, wouldn't spend so much time running that particular website about that particular subject, so therefore no one else on Earth would either without being paid.'
Again, that's... unconvincing.
Um... yeah, there has. Moreover, it's obvious - almost any mutation will add information in an information-theoretic sense to an organism.
Now, you're trying to imply that "improvements" in some sense haven't been observed. And that's false, too. There are plenty of examples of bacteria that evolve both antibiotic resistance and compensatory mutations that allow them to compete just fine when they aren't under pressure from antibiotics.
This isn't a trivial point. Mutations that have the effect of producing antibiotic resistance have been happening since long before there were antibiotics. But much of the time they weren't advantageous and thus never achieved much frequency. Meanwhile, mutations that could compensate for any disadvantages of the resistance genes were happening, too, but (a) the compensation would generally be a disadvantage without the resistance gene, and (b) since both types of mutations are quite uncommon, rarely (if ever) would the twain meet in the same bacterium.
But, under massive environmental pressure, antibiotic-resistance genes have become practically mandatory in certain environments - environments that are otherwise attractive, like weakened people. So in some populations practically all the individuals have resistance genes... and these resistant strains are now competing internally. Now the frequency of resistant genes are common enough that, when a compensatory mutation arises, it's very likely be paired with the resistance, unlike a century ago.
Now you've got a bacterium with (at least) two mutations, one that confers resistance, and another that lets it compete even when the antibiotic isn't around, with non-resistant strains. A powerful and otherwise unlikely advantage, but one that's predicted by evolutionary theory... and sadly we're seeing it actually happening now.
Of course, I live in a part of Michigan where it's "pretty much impossible to swing a cat without hitting" an employee of the 'big three' automakers. I know and am related to several people who work for them. And yet, I'm not a former employee nor do I have any other 'tight ties' to such a company.
Seeing as 'the place that she (apparently) lives' appears to be the only actual fact you're basing any of your conclusions on, I have to say I find your case... unconvincing.
And the computing market has become more diffuse and less desktop-centric. Game consoles, smartphones, web-centered apps... I think that platform transitions will become more diffuse, too.
But yeah, I think he's spot on about a strong need for a simple, legal way for people to play media on Linux. This is a net, long-term good thing, even if it has some downsides in terms of open-source purity short-term.
(Well, we had that. Note that, by the strict language of the law, I'm not sure it applies to DVDs, and the Patriot Act put in a double-wide back door that lets them get your video rental records as long as they pinky-swear they're somehow fighting terrorism.)
But why can't we set the bar that high for other data?
I didn't say "Win32 API", I said "Windows API". The current, recommended, heavily-promoted way to program Windows - .NET and so forth - is hideously complex, as I and others have pointed out.
But okay, let's limit things to just the Win32 API. I agree, you're right - it's not several orders of magnitude more complex than POSIX. However, it is more complicated. Let's consider, say, shared libraries/DLLs. On Unix, there's four functions - dlopen, dlsym, dlerror, and dlclose. Well, okay, glibc adds two extensions - dladdr and dlvsym. On Windows, there's 13 functions plus an obsolete one. (Hey... actually, that is an order of magnitude more complicated...) It's a similar story with shared memory, it's pretty easy with Unix and just much harder with Windows.
It just seems like every time I have to do something with the Windows API, it takes more code, and it takes longer to figure out which function I actually need to use, and figure out how to sort out errors, and which parameters are actually important and which ones are always NULL in any real-world case, and...
One reason is that the basic API (generally POSIX with a few libraries and extensions) is objectively simpler, and in my opinion more elegant and orthogonal, than the Windows API. The Windows API has grown exponentially and haphazardly in many ways, and is now a monster that almost no one fully understands: Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?
"Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System, we have over 5,000 public classes that include over 45,000 public methods and 15,000 public properties, not counting those methods and properties that are inherited and not overridden... If you wrote each of those 60,000 properties and methods on a 3-by-5 index card with a little description of what it did, you'd have a stack that totaled 40 feet."
Now, we have a printed copy of the POSIX standard here. In a set of 13 binders, it's about two and a half feet across. Only 7 of those binders actually cover the system interfaces (the equivalent of the System API above), and the other 6 are introductions, rationales, and descriptions of standard shell utilities. Note that this is the full documentation suitable for reimplementing it, not just notes on a 3x5 card. I'd call that objectively simpler.
"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it." - Edmund Way Teale
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Designing and implementing the software - you're right, in general. But in terms of finding bugs, frequently an outsider does better. It's practically a cliche in programmer circles that the bug you've been fruitlessly hunting for two days will be solved when a coworker looks over your shoulder for five seconds and says, "Oh, hey, there it is."
Many bugs are syntactic, not semantic. And someone who's familiar with the syntax, but not necessarily all the semantics, can spot things that others miss. Put in less technical terms, they see what the code actually does whereas someone who works with it constantly may just see what it's supposed to do.
And other bugs are related not to the problem domain per se but the way it relates to other domains. The Nvidia/Apple bug discussed here recently was due not to any deep graphics issue, but by improperly using memory - probably a signed value where an unsigned is required, so that hitting memory over 2GB does Bad Things. Yeah, I'd believe a relatively untrained programmer might spot that.
You were asking the right question up until the last bit. Nobody can keep their codebases "bug free". Humans make mistakes. I assume you're human, ergo you make mistakes too, right? There's probably no program on Earth bigger than twenty lines that's bug-free. Not even LaTeX, though it's been quite a while since anyone's found one.
But as to why "people think that the oss community can do a better job than nvidia's own people", it's because OSS development has, when comparisons have been possible, proven to be better-written than the commercial alternatives. There are objective tests that illustrate this, over and over.
(Note, I still think this Fluendo stuff or something like it is a good idea. But I still want the OSS work to go on, too.)
That doesn't matter - that's not what this is intended for. It just has to be not much worse than the common alternatives on Windows. Linux has plenty of other advantages that make it a good choice - maintenance alone is far easier for Linux than Windows, for example.
I have much more time to visit with my parents when I'm over now that I've got them switched to Linux. I don't have to keep Windows running anymore. But I couldn't have done it (there or with my family at home) if they couldn't watch viral videos on YouTube and email. Setting that up was possible thanks to the quasi-legal packages, but not easy. Some repositories were down when I tried - twice - to use EasyUbuntu or Automatix and if I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes I couldn't have done it.
I'm not convinced that ESR has the timing right, but the general outline - that the transition from 32- to 64-bit represents a major opportunity for Linux, and being able to play (note: not edit, just play) multimedia stuff easily and legally is important - I think is spot on. See here for the oft-argued-about details.
Users with more advanced needs or less full pocketbooks (or less ethics, depending on the exact circumstances) could use the 'other' packages. But a good out-of-the-box multimedia experience is worth a lot for Linux promotion. Since the problem isn't technical, it's legal, a legal approach is unfortunately needed.
Actually, I think you hear a chorus of people pointing out the hypocrisy of a music industry that claims to want to protect artists, and then rips them off. Just, y'know, FYI.
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again." - Bruce Schneier
I'd presume various combinations of WINE and QEMU would work. Once they're set up, they'll run pretty much forever with no real maintenance needs, and backup is much simpler, too. QEMU's how I got my wife's greeting card program running, though she made it through the holidays without it.
A separate issue. I dunno about WP8, never used it. But I've got three Loki games running just fine on my Ubuntu system - Myth II, Heretic II, and Descent 3. You might try running the scripts and such as "bash [install].run" instead of "sh [install].run", or maybe you could Google a bit, just like you would with an old Windows game. I couldn't get Aliens versus Predator to run stably on my Windows XP system. Some sound issue, but it would hang or play the same sounds over and over. The AvP Linux port, on the other hand, runs a treat.
I've had decent luck with stock Wine for some games. Valve's Steam runs under Wine; HL2 not so much, but HL and its mods seem fine. American McGee's Alice runs utterly flawlessly. But - as I said - games can be an issue. Feel free to put points in your column or whatever on that score.
They do if they are changing to Linux. If they are "ordinary users" they'll use what they can get support for from their friends. It's not like Windows can be operated without regular maintenance by a fairly technical admin. And one reasonably savvy Linux user can support a lot of Linux users. As I said, I have a lot more time to visit when I head over to my parents house now.
Um, Adobe specifically made sure Photoshop would run well under WINE. I'll grant Flash authoring, but most people don't need to write it (especially not the parents of most Slashdot readers), just run it, and there are current workarounds and good future prospects for that.
Well, you start out talking about greeting card programs and wrap up with Photoshop and Flash editing. I think your definition of the "common user" is a bit... odd.
There are niche apps that aren't on Linux, you're right. But those are just that - niche apps, like the telescope drivers I mentioned.
Maybe it's true that almost everyone falls into some niche or another, but I haven't really seen that. Almost everything most people do with computers are web, email, music, and games. And Linux the first three well, and isn't so bad on the latter. My kids love the games on Linux - when my oldest son was five I found out he'd figured out how to reboot the computer to Linux so he could play Tuxracer.
Windows XP crapped out on us (again) a few months ago, and I was tired of fixing it. I got my wife to move over, the kids were no problem. She misses Word a little, but is mostly used to OpenOffice. The only sticking point is her greeting card program, which isn't quite right under Wine. I may have to QEMU that one. But that's it.
I've had my parents on Ubuntu for over a year now. It was easy. I first got them to move to Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, when they were getting a new computer, I set up Ubuntu and spent a little time (maybe a hour total, spread over a week) getting them used to it.
Their main comment? "Linux has much better screensavers."
Linux isn't a great desktop for hardcore gamers, or people with really specialized hardware needs (like, say, higher-end telescopes or something). For the majority of people, it's already as good as Windows. And now when I visit my parents, I don't have to spend half the time troubleshooting their machine.
A power fluctuation killed it a few days ago. Until I can get the time to restore it, you'll have to hip yourself via the Google cache.