Well, if this was the worst misunderstanding I got from that post, I didn't do too bad, considering I was like six shots in when I wrote it;)
Anyway, as another poster already clarified for me, no, of course my intention was not to imply that no one is using Vista. I'm sure somebody must be. Although I wouldn't even go so far as to say "most people who have bought a new PC." I'd say a lot of people who bought a new PC in the last year tried Vista for a month or so, jumped ship to XP or Ubuntu, and are now the very people trash-talking Vista and driving further adaptation down. It's become a self-feeding cycle now. But I digress.
The point of my anecdote was this: I'm in a lot of coffee shops, I see these damn hipsters every day, and not even 20% of those people are running Vista. A few of them are, certainly, but 1/5? No way. And these are the very same people you point to in your reply, the ones that "bought a new PC or laptop in the last year." These are new machines owned by non-technical people, the laptops undoubtedly came with Vista. They're not running it now, in overwhelming numbers. So if the early-adapter, "I buy a new laptop every couple years" crowd isn't running Vista, who the hell is?
And as I said, among the people I do work for, exactly zero of them are running Vista (and thank god for that). This datum, of course, only proves what we already knew, that people are not interested in "upgrading" their existing systems to Vista, so I'm not going to put too much stock in it.
The point. What was my point, again? Oh yeah. Twenty percent. No way, man. I can only speak for the people I meet, and the computers I see, in the town I live in. But they're the numbers I've got to work with, they're what I base my marketing on, so I hope they're somewhat accurate. And I'm telling you that there is no. damn. way. that 20% of these people and these computers in this city are running Windows Vista. YMMV, and obviously does.
(As an aside, I just noticed my writing sounds mostly the same whether I'm drunk or not. Does this mean I should drink more or less?)
You know, I hear this a lot, but I think you're wrong, at least in this case. Or to put it more succinctly, the plural of anecdote may not be data, but the collective of anecdote is indeed data. If every user Enderandrew knows, and every user I know, and...
I mean, how many times do you have to hear the exact same story from how many different people before you admit it's the truth? I don't know one single person who is using Vista as their home OS. Zero. Nada. None. And I work in end-user support. I talk to lots of people. It's my job. And seriously, not one. I know some people who had it for a while, and ditched it for either XP or (yes, seriously) Ubuntu Linux.
I spend a fair bit of time in hipster coffee shops (don't judge me, it's part of my job), the patrons of which I take as a fairly good bellwether of consumer tech, if only because there's a decent amount of disposable income floating around and a majority of the machines in use at such places tend to be 1 year old (yeah, lots of Macs, but even so...) And there is no way I'm going to believe that Vista is at a 20% adaptation rate, at least not in this major Midwesten metropolitan area. Absolutely not.
-p.
PS: It's 3:00 AM central time, and I have been drinking. If something up there doesn't make sense or sounds stupid, please ask me to clarify rather than modding me down. I don't usually drink and post, officer, honest:)
That's all true, but it shouldn't be the customer's problem. A business model has to have some way of dealing with dissatisfied customers, or it's not going to work in the long run. Crying "piracy!" and "processing costs!"...well, that's just too damn bad.
You bring up several good points. One of the things Ubuntuforums has been trying to do to address them is the use of "solved" tags and a "thanks" system. Which would work well if people knew to use them. And the cycle repeats.
I'd bet damn near all of them. Now, how many machines that come with Windows stay running Windows? Most of them, sure, but probably a noticeably smaller percentage.
The "YOLOTD" already happened. It was 2006, with the releases of Vista and Ubuntu 6.10, and the announcement of the Eee PC. That's when real, measurable, exponential growth in free software on the desktop began. That's when you started to occasionally see the word "Linux" in the newspaper (brief aside: my local daily had an article on the front page of the Variety section last Sunday about how to install Firefox addons). It's the year I started seeing penguin stickers on Hondas. TFA is just one more step on that road of exponential growth, but the numbers bear it out, that is indeed what's happening here.
Maybe you're waiting on the day when free software captures the majority of the market, and that'll come, but it takes a hell of a long time to bleed out a cow. The "YOLOTD" isn't the day it ends. It was the day it really began.
I recognize that intoxicating smell of underdog heroics is diminished when considering this problem in a logical way, so I completely understand that you so desperately want to keep the "us vs. them" status quo and "don't give a shit".
Go ahead an imply my immaturity. I've had way worse ad hominem attacks, it doesn't bother me.
It's been 14 years since I first heard about open source and how it was going to like totally kill Microsoft...
And it is working, very much so. You may have missed it, but that's the discussion topic here. Yesterday it was the shareholders' report, today it's this new tactic of "but we LURV open source, please be our friend!" They're scared shitless over there right now, of little old us, and they have no idea how to deal with it, so they're trying every ham-fisted schtick they can think of. Kinda flattering, in a way.
Bottom line: We're kicking their asses. Quality, ease-of-use, aesthetic appeal, price, interoperability, portability, you name it, we're whipping them in it. What do they have that we don't? Market share. That's it, and that's starting to slip too. Slowly slowly slowly, but it's happening right now. Yeah, it may very well take 14 more years, it takes a long time to bleed out a cow. What of it? Time's our friend and their enemy.
If you're still waiting on "The Year of Linux on the Desktop," I've news for you, it was 2006.
I hate to barge in on the fun here, but after years of calling them "Micro$haft" and "Windoze" and lame outdated jokes about Bob and Clippy, not to mention the massive FUD campaign against Vista, do you really wonder why they'd trust you at all?
I don't see how that's relevant here.
You're not going to get rid of Microsoft...
Oh, no shit you say? For our next trick, we will show you how 20,000 toothpicks can kill a cow. Stay tuned.
My personal perception - admittedly a limited view of a slice of the company as viewed from the outside - is that the rank and file are more and more aware of the need to play fair in order to compete effectively. They know that they have some really good software, but they have to justify the costs that go with it. Interoperability is one way to do that, as long as it's in everybody's interest and not just theirs.
I think you may be correct here. Corporate culture change is a slow thing. But even if you're right, we are under no compulsion to give a shit.
You can either give it a chance, or continue down the same path.
Okay, then. I'll go with "same path." I'm glad we're on the same page here.
It didn't have the contextual menu bar that Apple added to the top of the screen
I'm certainly not old enough to have ever seen an Alto, I used to run a first-model Docutech when I was in commercial printing, and it had a top menu bar pretty much exactly like Apple's. Hell of a machine. Twelve feet long, four feet tall, put out heat like you would not believe, buggy as heck, incredibly prone to jamming and the heat binder never worked, but man, it was twenty years old and still running like a horse. On old maimed horse, but a stubborn, stubborn horse. Probably still is./nostalgia
Microsoft is a single entity in one sense, but it is also a community, or a political organisation, if you will, comprised of lots of people with differing agendas and varying levels of "evilness". Adhering to a militant stance as a stated policy and assuming defiance as a fixed position is not just very lazy, it is short sighted, counter-productive and stupid. *snip* Yeah, I've come across this approach personally many times, and it's never been successful for the militants in the long term. It tends to be one of those behaviour patterns that intelligent teenagers grow out of. Sometimes it's just the militants who lose, mostly it's everyone. *also snipping the totally ridiculous Nazi comment, thanks*
I will take as the main thrust of your argument the sentence, "Adhering to a militant stance as a stated policy and assuming defiance as a fixed position is not just very lazy, it is short sighted, counter-productive, and stupid." And I think you're as wrong as wrong can be.
That has indeed largely been the policy of "the movement." And it's been working, slowly slowly slowly, but undeniably working. We're beating their ass on quality, we're changing the public perception with projects like Firefox and Ubuntu, and it's starting to show up in market share. We're really starting to eat their lunch. Sure, right now it's just a bite of the yogurt, but by this time next year, maybe it's the whole cup. The year after, maybe it's the cookie too. This is because of the confrontational nature of the movement, not in spite of it. We're all up in people's faces with this shit. We're gonna have our say, we're gonna be heard. And we're gonna keep rolling out release after release that kick's the competition's ass, and then we're gonna talk a bunch of shit about it, and do it again. Stay tuned. The fun part's still coming.
I think Xmms2 (or cmus, if you're feeling froggy, I really like it) is probably the one for you if your needs are simple. Amarok isn't "just a music player, it's a music player/manager/search tool/visualizer/tagger/et cetera. It's supposed to have the kitchen sink, that's what its users expect.
I'm not saying you're wrong to want what you want, but you are wrong if you expect Amarok to give you that. That's not what it's there for.
I am presently using Kontact 1.3 on KDE 4.1. This is just the "port to Qt4" release, it doesn't really take advantage of the new KDE desktop technologies like Nepomuk. But it's pretty stable, and KMail seems to handle IMAP better (I have no justification for this other than my personal experience). But overall, it's just like you remember it.
Sorry, my original reply was kind of a drive-by. Let me flesh that out a little more.
Speed: I find that Gnome/Compiz (configured to my liking) is about on par with KDE3/Kwin (ditto). Both of them seem to have a very slight edge on KDE4 at the moment. I don't expect that to last as the KDE code continues to mature. KDE 4.0.0 was dog-slow on my machine, KDE 4.1.0 is pretty damn snappy.
Stability: I'll give you this one. I find new and creative ways to make KDE barf every day.
Simplicity: This is where you really lost me. I find KDE (3.5.x or 4.x) much more coherent and integrated than Gnome. I don't want to get bogged down with examples, but here's one little one that I notice every time I use Gnome. The "System" menu in Gnome is a fucking mess. The divide between Preferences and Administration is nebulous at best, and the idea of putting all that crap in two huge and unwieldy drop-down menus was just bad. Compare to KDE's System Settings. It opens as one window with about a dozen categorical icons on it. Click an icon, it expands to all the relevant options for that category. Configure to taste, click the back button. Rinse, lather, repeat. (Yeah, that's right, I just said KDE's configuration settings were easier to deal with than Gnome's. Total heresy, I know.)
Bullshit. To wit: When I'm installing Ubuntu for someone, I will typically install N packages that aren't there out-of-box. The equivalent of "throwing a bunch of paper all over my desk," to use your (bad) analogy. Guess what? My "desk"(-top computer, har har) sorts it for me! Holy shit, what will they think of next?
How can you read that into what's happening here? I have heard no argument from within the KDE camp about all this. There haven't been any high-profile schisms, no bitter blog posts, none of that. It's just a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the project pissing and moaning and spreading ill-founded opinions on Slashdot. Par for the course, really.
Parent is not a troll. Parent is misled. Items of note:
1. Amarok is in a separate development cycle, it's managed by totally different people. I'm running the Amarok 2 development version and it's all right. Still lacking some of the features of the 1.x cycle, but they're trying to port it to entirely an entirely new framework. Good work so far. Check it out.
2. If it's not enough for you, there's nothing stopping you from running KDE 3 applications on KDE 4.
Not exactly on-topic here, but I just wanted to say that I really like that you take the time to read and reply to/. comments on your stories. When the/. crowd doesn't like a story it can turn into a shark-filled swimming pool real fast, with the story (and by extension the writer) getting shredded by the groupthink mafia, as indeed some of your past stories have been treated in this space. Thank you for braving the waters and taking the time to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if this was the worst misunderstanding I got from that post, I didn't do too bad, considering I was like six shots in when I wrote it ;)
Anyway, as another poster already clarified for me, no, of course my intention was not to imply that no one is using Vista. I'm sure somebody must be. Although I wouldn't even go so far as to say "most people who have bought a new PC." I'd say a lot of people who bought a new PC in the last year tried Vista for a month or so, jumped ship to XP or Ubuntu, and are now the very people trash-talking Vista and driving further adaptation down. It's become a self-feeding cycle now. But I digress.
The point of my anecdote was this: I'm in a lot of coffee shops, I see these damn hipsters every day, and not even 20% of those people are running Vista. A few of them are, certainly, but 1/5? No way. And these are the very same people you point to in your reply, the ones that "bought a new PC or laptop in the last year." These are new machines owned by non-technical people, the laptops undoubtedly came with Vista. They're not running it now, in overwhelming numbers. So if the early-adapter, "I buy a new laptop every couple years" crowd isn't running Vista, who the hell is?
And as I said, among the people I do work for, exactly zero of them are running Vista (and thank god for that). This datum, of course, only proves what we already knew, that people are not interested in "upgrading" their existing systems to Vista, so I'm not going to put too much stock in it.
The point. What was my point, again? Oh yeah. Twenty percent. No way, man. I can only speak for the people I meet, and the computers I see, in the town I live in. But they're the numbers I've got to work with, they're what I base my marketing on, so I hope they're somewhat accurate. And I'm telling you that there is no. damn. way. that 20% of these people and these computers in this city are running Windows Vista. YMMV, and obviously does.
(As an aside, I just noticed my writing sounds mostly the same whether I'm drunk or not. Does this mean I should drink more or less?)
best wishes
-p.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
You know, I hear this a lot, but I think you're wrong, at least in this case. Or to put it more succinctly, the plural of anecdote may not be data, but the collective of anecdote is indeed data. If every user Enderandrew knows, and every user I know, and...
I mean, how many times do you have to hear the exact same story from how many different people before you admit it's the truth? I don't know one single person who is using Vista as their home OS. Zero. Nada. None. And I work in end-user support. I talk to lots of people. It's my job. And seriously, not one. I know some people who had it for a while, and ditched it for either XP or (yes, seriously) Ubuntu Linux.
I spend a fair bit of time in hipster coffee shops (don't judge me, it's part of my job), the patrons of which I take as a fairly good bellwether of consumer tech, if only because there's a decent amount of disposable income floating around and a majority of the machines in use at such places tend to be 1 year old (yeah, lots of Macs, but even so...) And there is no way I'm going to believe that Vista is at a 20% adaptation rate, at least not in this major Midwesten metropolitan area. Absolutely not.
-p.
PS: It's 3:00 AM central time, and I have been drinking. If something up there doesn't make sense or sounds stupid, please ask me to clarify rather than modding me down. I don't usually drink and post, officer, honest :)
But you can't get blood (money) from a stone (college student).
I read this as: "You can't get blood money from a stoned college student." I was very confused for a moment.
That's all true, but it shouldn't be the customer's problem. A business model has to have some way of dealing with dissatisfied customers, or it's not going to work in the long run. Crying "piracy!" and "processing costs!"...well, that's just too damn bad.
You bring up several good points. One of the things Ubuntuforums has been trying to do to address them is the use of "solved" tags and a "thanks" system. Which would work well if people knew to use them. And the cycle repeats.
I'd bet damn near all of them. Now, how many machines that come with Windows stay running Windows? Most of them, sure, but probably a noticeably smaller percentage.
The "YOLOTD" already happened. It was 2006, with the releases of Vista and Ubuntu 6.10, and the announcement of the Eee PC. That's when real, measurable, exponential growth in free software on the desktop began. That's when you started to occasionally see the word "Linux" in the newspaper (brief aside: my local daily had an article on the front page of the Variety section last Sunday about how to install Firefox addons). It's the year I started seeing penguin stickers on Hondas. TFA is just one more step on that road of exponential growth, but the numbers bear it out, that is indeed what's happening here.
Maybe you're waiting on the day when free software captures the majority of the market, and that'll come, but it takes a hell of a long time to bleed out a cow. The "YOLOTD" isn't the day it ends. It was the day it really began.
Go ahead an imply my immaturity. I've had way worse ad hominem attacks, it doesn't bother me.
And it is working, very much so. You may have missed it, but that's the discussion topic here. Yesterday it was the shareholders' report, today it's this new tactic of "but we LURV open source, please be our friend!" They're scared shitless over there right now, of little old us, and they have no idea how to deal with it, so they're trying every ham-fisted schtick they can think of. Kinda flattering, in a way.
Bottom line: We're kicking their asses. Quality, ease-of-use, aesthetic appeal, price, interoperability, portability, you name it, we're whipping them in it. What do they have that we don't? Market share. That's it, and that's starting to slip too. Slowly slowly slowly, but it's happening right now. Yeah, it may very well take 14 more years, it takes a long time to bleed out a cow. What of it? Time's our friend and their enemy.
If you're still waiting on "The Year of Linux on the Desktop," I've news for you, it was 2006.
I don't see how that's relevant here.
Oh, no shit you say? For our next trick, we will show you how 20,000 toothpicks can kill a cow. Stay tuned.
I think you may be correct here. Corporate culture change is a slow thing. But even if you're right, we are under no compulsion to give a shit.
Okay, then. I'll go with "same path." I'm glad we're on the same page here.
Wait a minute. Does that mean I have to give this money back?
It didn't have the contextual menu bar that Apple added to the top of the screen
I'm certainly not old enough to have ever seen an Alto, I used to run a first-model Docutech when I was in commercial printing, and it had a top menu bar pretty much exactly like Apple's. Hell of a machine. Twelve feet long, four feet tall, put out heat like you would not believe, buggy as heck, incredibly prone to jamming and the heat binder never worked, but man, it was twenty years old and still running like a horse. On old maimed horse, but a stubborn, stubborn horse. Probably still is. /nostalgia
I will take as the main thrust of your argument the sentence, "Adhering to a militant stance as a stated policy and assuming defiance as a fixed position is not just very lazy, it is short sighted, counter-productive, and stupid." And I think you're as wrong as wrong can be.
That has indeed largely been the policy of "the movement." And it's been working, slowly slowly slowly, but undeniably working. We're beating their ass on quality, we're changing the public perception with projects like Firefox and Ubuntu, and it's starting to show up in market share. We're really starting to eat their lunch. Sure, right now it's just a bite of the yogurt, but by this time next year, maybe it's the whole cup. The year after, maybe it's the cookie too. This is because of the confrontational nature of the movement, not in spite of it. We're all up in people's faces with this shit. We're gonna have our say, we're gonna be heard. And we're gonna keep rolling out release after release that kick's the competition's ass, and then we're gonna talk a bunch of shit about it, and do it again. Stay tuned. The fun part's still coming.
I think Xmms2 (or cmus, if you're feeling froggy, I really like it) is probably the one for you if your needs are simple. Amarok isn't "just a music player, it's a music player/manager/search tool/visualizer/tagger/et cetera. It's supposed to have the kitchen sink, that's what its users expect.
I'm not saying you're wrong to want what you want, but you are wrong if you expect Amarok to give you that. That's not what it's there for.
I am presently using Kontact 1.3 on KDE 4.1. This is just the "port to Qt4" release, it doesn't really take advantage of the new KDE desktop technologies like Nepomuk. But it's pretty stable, and KMail seems to handle IMAP better (I have no justification for this other than my personal experience). But overall, it's just like you remember it.
Sorry, my original reply was kind of a drive-by. Let me flesh that out a little more.
Speed: I find that Gnome/Compiz (configured to my liking) is about on par with KDE3/Kwin (ditto). Both of them seem to have a very slight edge on KDE4 at the moment. I don't expect that to last as the KDE code continues to mature. KDE 4.0.0 was dog-slow on my machine, KDE 4.1.0 is pretty damn snappy.
Stability: I'll give you this one. I find new and creative ways to make KDE barf every day.
Simplicity: This is where you really lost me. I find KDE (3.5.x or 4.x) much more coherent and integrated than Gnome. I don't want to get bogged down with examples, but here's one little one that I notice every time I use Gnome. The "System" menu in Gnome is a fucking mess. The divide between Preferences and Administration is nebulous at best, and the idea of putting all that crap in two huge and unwieldy drop-down menus was just bad. Compare to KDE's System Settings. It opens as one window with about a dozen categorical icons on it. Click an icon, it expands to all the relevant options for that category. Configure to taste, click the back button. Rinse, lather, repeat. (Yeah, that's right, I just said KDE's configuration settings were easier to deal with than Gnome's. Total heresy, I know.)
best regards
-p.
Bullshit. To wit: When I'm installing Ubuntu for someone, I will typically install N packages that aren't there out-of-box. The equivalent of "throwing a bunch of paper all over my desk," to use your (bad) analogy. Guess what? My "desk"(-top computer, har har) sorts it for me! Holy shit, what will they think of next?
How can you read that into what's happening here? I have heard no argument from within the KDE camp about all this. There haven't been any high-profile schisms, no bitter blog posts, none of that. It's just a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the project pissing and moaning and spreading ill-founded opinions on Slashdot. Par for the course, really.
Oh, I get it now. You're one of these people, aren't you? Yeah, Windows is probably the place for you. Quit pissing in our pool.
Parent is not a troll. Parent is misled. Items of note:
1. Amarok is in a separate development cycle, it's managed by totally different people. I'm running the Amarok 2 development version and it's all right. Still lacking some of the features of the 1.x cycle, but they're trying to port it to entirely an entirely new framework. Good work so far. Check it out.
2. If it's not enough for you, there's nothing stopping you from running KDE 3 applications on KDE 4.
3. Yeah, Dolphin sucks.
Oh, so you're talking about applications that were made >3 years ago. I thought we were discussing the news. My mistake.
No, really. They don't. They've already got your money, sucker. Transaction complete. It's called a limited liability corporation.
Like Dolphin, and Dragon Player, and Gwenview? Yeah, they don't do that anymore. Next caller, please!
But then I am probably in the small minority that I like speed, stability, and simplicity over flash.
So you went back to... Gnome? You lost me there.
Not exactly on-topic here, but I just wanted to say that I really like that you take the time to read and reply to /. comments on your stories. When the /. crowd doesn't like a story it can turn into a shark-filled swimming pool real fast, with the story (and by extension the writer) getting shredded by the groupthink mafia, as indeed some of your past stories have been treated in this space. Thank you for braving the waters and taking the time to do this.
You know what? You can have all that! It's an exciting new project called KDE 3! Check it out (and stop wasting everyone's time with this blather)!