You're assuming the parents know better, which is pretty fucking stupid if you look at the state of society and the people that same society holds dear (Sara Palin and Osama Bin Laden to name two examples).
I'm a Mac user and fortunately not a mindless one (honest, promise!). That Apple has been extremely lucky in not being overrun in exploited machines has more to do with the normal target area for exploiters being windows due to marketshare, but Macs have a big enough marketshare these days to make it worthwhile for crackers. I'm pretty sure that the time will come when Macs will be running dubious AV products like most Windows people do.
Thanks for the measured response. While I agree absolutely that Unity is currently far more usable than Gnome shell is, and on top of that the fact that Gnome 3.0 has the potential to be as divisive as the Python 3/2 split was, my biggest worry is that Mark Shutteworth is so obsessed with Apple's OSX and iOS that he is taking his particular platform down that road on systems where there is no need or want for it.
Linux needs professional software in addition to committed volunteers. It's things like the Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice etc not being on par with their commercial competitors that hinder a professional uptake of the platform. And it's not the functionality of the applications that is really the problem but the lack of uniformity in their interfaces and the way they interact with the underlying OS that is the problem.
Mark Shuttleworth has gone off the deep end recently with a lot of his decisions for Ubuntu. Dropping Gnome for Unity, and in future even dropping X for Wayland. All in the name of some vague future usability bonus, but at the same time alienating a lot of software developers and Linux community members.
Granted, a lot of what Ubuntu has done has Ubuntu one of the most user friendly distros, and I think Mark Shuttleworth has been heavily influenced by Apple's OSX originally and iOS later on, with Shuttleworth being particularly enamoured of Steve Jobs' go it alone pioneering approach. This has garnered Ubuntu the biggest user base on Linux desktops, but it has now started to lead Ubuntu into territory where it stands to lose the support of those who matter, the developers.
Canonical has been making no profit ever since it came into existence, and that is probably a big irritation for Shuttleworth who probably had the idea that people would come running to his company for support services for the fantastic distro so they could use it professionally in their company's. Except it hasn't, at least not in any size enough to pay Canonical's bills and Shuttleworth still has his dream that he can get people to use Linux because it has a nice user friendly Desktop.
Canonical in general, and Shuttleworth in particular have messed it up because they couldn't get what really makes an OS popular: software. Instead of taking a more measured approach and working with those developers to get them to improve the uniformity and functionality of their software, he decided that he could do an iPhone/app store approach on the Linux community.
This is not going to end well.
And that is why Debian, as conservative as it is, will still be around after Ubuntu and Canonical have been forgotten about by most.
Adding to my comment above, something that rally irks me about Mark Shuttleworth is his current lack of originality. The move of the window buttons to the left hand side of the window was seen by many as something that was meant to badly imitate Mac OSX. Back then Shuttleworth said it was so that the buttons would not conflict with the applets on the top right hand side (or something, the justification was about some feature that is rarely used). Then, they came up with Unity which, as a Mac OSX user, is an embarrassingly obvious attempt by Shuttleworth to ape Mac OSX's Dock spring up folders.
This is why Unity is predestined to fail. When they took Nautilus out of the default install (hey fuckers, how am I supposed to connect to network shares?), it was the last straw for me personally. Ubuntu might be a popular distro,but it's trying too hard to be different.
I have really like Ubuntu ever since I first used it in the 7.x days, but, for me, the real problem is Mark Shuttleworth's direction. Unity is fine for Netbooks (although with Netbooks being a dying breed, one has to ask what the point is), but it is simply terrible for desktops and not ideal for notebooks. Canonical's increasingly erratic ventures, like Ubuntu One are also things I do not really understand as they simply do not have the clout to grab enough users from other online portals and music sharing services.
I think that Canonical should perhaps refocus its business on less radical changes and more solid improvements and working better with other OSes and distros, as those are not going away and paradigm breaking rubbish like Unity only serves to alienate people.
Also, if Canonical needs money, then they are only proving the rule that small esoteric devices and services rarely work with their current path. Taking a social approach to improving Linux by working with software developers instead of fighting them would really help things as well.
Best post I've read on this topic. It takes more than engineers, it takes people able to see and implement the big picture. Microsoft's biggest problem is their departmentalisation.
An example, today, after god knows how many years of using Windows, I discovered that Windows doesn't natively support more than 4 styles of one font. This is 2011 and that isn't rocket science. I was simply appalled. It's no wonder that creatives flock to the Mac.
This is appalling. What makes it worse is that this happens almost daily in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and no one cares because the body count is already so high. And all because of religion as well.
God, you Americans make me laugh sometimes. You were all about how amazing your military was back in 2001 when you invaded Afghanistan, and you were even more over the top when you invaded Iraq. A few trillion dollars several thousand dead soldiers and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead civilians later, you got out of Iraq without much to show for it (Moqtada Sadr returned there this week), and you're losing the war in Afghanistan or at least not winning it. Your economy is an absolute basket case with not much hope of a quick recovery and you're printing money like 3rd world 1000% inflation countries did. You've got a major crackpot political movement whose main aim is more to disrupt than actually do anything productive and a large percentage of the population who still think the bible trumps science and everything else (just like the people you're fighting in Afghanistan).
Almost all of your technological equipment is made in China, yet you have the gall to claim the Chinese couldn't build a modern 5th generation plane, and that right after they built a modern 4th generation plane (the J-10)?
China has its own, indigenously developed manned space programme, and the US currently has none.
And you think you'd beat China in a war? Would you really be willing to go nuclear over Taiwan if China invaded it in a massive one day operation?
And you make wild claims about American aircraft superiority (F-22 and F-35 vs the Su-T50) when Russian aircraft had helmet mounted sights on all its new fighters 20 years before you did (and those same Mig-29s handily beat F-16s in mock combat when flown by well trained German pilots back in the 90s and Indian Su-30s handily beat comparable F-15s in joint exercises in India)?
You haven't fought a large comparably armed opponent since the Korean war and that war wasn't won by any side.
Less hubris and a little bit of humble reality would do you the world of good.
While I personally have the feeling that Wikileaks has more to do with Julian Assange's ego than with freedom of information, I find myself stuck in a paradox with respect to Wikileaks. On the one hand I find it highly offensive and wrong that wikileaks seems to only publish secret information on the US, given to Assange by disgruntled individuals in the US. On the other, I find it great that finally, someone is screwing over the governments like they screwed us over.
However, for Wikileaks to maintain its credibility, it'll need to find someone to give it North Korean state secrets on Kim Jong Il's bong collection, info on Osama Bin Laden's guilty pleasures and Chinese plans for the invasion of Taiwan.
As of OSX 10.7 and the soon arriving Mac App Store I think developers will be in the same boat as they now are with the iPad and iPhone App Store. Of course, developers can still develop natively for OSX without the Mac App Store, but where do you think all the app sales will be? In the Mac App Store. Apparently Microsoft want to do this as well with Windows 8. I'm beginning to despair and I'm pretty glad that at least on Linux I can do what I want.
Your government seesm happy enough to spend money it doesn't have and then make more paper money when it runs out of the money it didn't have, so it's possible that there will be an increase in scanners across your country.
But you know what? I, for one, will not even consider visiting the US as it currently stands, because I'm not interested in being treated like crap for no reason at all.
Tourism to the US is declining due to this treatment above the already ridiculous fingerprint and iris scanning.
And then you have Janet Napolitano publicly wondering about the "psychology" of terrorists. I suppose that it didn't occur to her to, you know, just ask them.
It seems like the terrorists have already won.
P.S. You want Afghanistan to stop being a hotbed of stone age fanaticism? Invite the Chinese to police the place. The Chinese would do to Afghanistan what they did to Tibet and Xingjiang; introduce draconian laws applying to native traditions, enforce them by mass arrests and bring in tens of millions of Chinese immigrants. I don't think the muslim fanatics are people you can negotiate with and they are never going to surrender as long as their cause is half way popular, so you either need to do the modern equivalent of ethnic cleansing/genocide or get out.
That's right. I don't. Now fuck off. XBox is not a democracy, it's a business, and it has a vested interest in making sure that it pleases the majority of its customers and keeps within what is commonly held to be social norms. Wankers like you are too interested in being little internet VIPs to compensate for your stupidity in real life.
I would really like to see a citation, a.k.a. reference, because, I think you're classing things like military spending as social services and the rest of us don't really think that's valid.;)
Ah, Sweden, that bastion of freedom that has the US's dick so far up its collective ass that they trump up a charge on Julian Assange to make him become a fugitive while discrediting him (regardless of Assange's reportedly crappy personality), where the media is now tripping over its collective feet to be even more draconian than the US with regard to IP laws. It's a shame, used to be a nice country before it became a little banana republic police state that will do anything the US tells it to.
I'm the system admin for a large design company (4 Xservers and one XRaid that replaced 4 Linux boxes about 4 years ago). This is pretty fucking awful news for us, and I'll lay out the reasons:
1. Apple's servers are very easy to manage. Much easier than Windows or Linux machines.
2. Apple's Workgroup management features are much easier to use than the Windows or Linux equivalents.
3. Apple File Sharing being able to mix AFP/SMB and NFS seamlessly was world class.
All of this led to large productivity gains in that much less time was being spent on admin tasks than necessary.
So now that's gone.
Shit.
And, what worries me more is that I can see Apple killing traditional OSX on Macs in favour of iOS as well.
I think Apple just lost a customer in us because we can't trust them anymore.
This Tea Party circus reminds me so much of the Taliban in its rabid extremism and lack of real ideas on how to save your country. I used to work for the USAF many years ago and met many Americans that I liked, but honestly, I don't see many signs of the American people being able to dig themselves out of this hole in the near future. What I do see is a people in abject terror because their traditional ways of doing things are not working anymore and they are grasping at straws instead of buckling down to go through the process of fixing all the things that are broken in the USA.
Some of those things are: The national infrastructure in the USA is simply catastrophic. There is not enough money being invested to avert the negative effect that this has on your economy. The American health system, even though it spends more per person than any other country, is a disaster. You have death rates that are on par with developing nations. You eat food that is so high in calories and so low in nutritional value that you are amongst the world's fattest people. The education system is terrible and becoming worse. Your universities are the world's best but it seems that the majority of the students are from India or China in fields which produce graduates that then go out and produce economic growth instead of graduates that go out and work in the service industry. You spend a fortune on wars that have nothing to do with you and which you haven't and will not win. Your political parties, their agendas and their supporters have become empty vessels that spend more than any other political parties on earth on expensive campaigns that are nothing but circuses and theatre, that produce nothing but more hysteria and fear. Your people are behaving like stereotypical uneducated 3rd world peasants who believe that so-called "moral values", like penalising abortion and the American version of Christianity will save your country. Your industry produces almost nothing anymore. All the production capacity has been sent overseas to where it is cheaper, but which has a long term negative effect on your country. That a country like Germany which has vastly higher taxes and benefits can produce more should be a point worth thinking about. Instead your American politicians try to tell the Germans that they should consume more. Your consumption of goods and services remained at levels from the days when American industry was still strong, and was sustained only by increasingly high levels of debt, all of which culminated in the catastrophic crash of 2008. One of the results of this is that property foreclosures are higher than they have ever been. The level of abject poverty in your country is higher than almost any other developed nation.
This Republican victory will do no more to improve your country's economy than the Democratic one before it.
To make a real and lasting change you Americans would have to start using your brains and start thinking pragmatically, spending less on empty promises and consuming less and producing more.
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No, Gnome.org, just like the trendy hipsters at Ubuntu think that we all want iOS/Android like interfaces on our desktops and Laptops.
Dear Gnome.Org (and Ubuntu, for that matter): If I wanted a cheap, shitty iOS/Android rip-off on my fucking desktop, you cunts, I would run Symbian.
Apple is going in exactly the same direction as Gnome and Ubuntu are with Mac OSX 10.7.
Fuck that,
Fuck you,
Fuck Apple
You're assuming the parents know better, which is pretty fucking stupid if you look at the state of society and the people that same society holds dear (Sara Palin and Osama Bin Laden to name two examples).
If I were to have seen MS management on the beach in the face of an incoming tsunami, I don't think I would rush out to save them.
I'm a Mac user and fortunately not a mindless one (honest, promise!). That Apple has been extremely lucky in not being overrun in exploited machines has more to do with the normal target area for exploiters being windows due to marketshare, but Macs have a big enough marketshare these days to make it worthwhile for crackers. I'm pretty sure that the time will come when Macs will be running dubious AV products like most Windows people do.
What's it like to work at UPS? Do you fail to see the relationship between your abuse of customers' property and their perception of you?
Thanks for the measured response. While I agree absolutely that Unity is currently far more usable than Gnome shell is, and on top of that the fact that Gnome 3.0 has the potential to be as divisive as the Python 3/2 split was, my biggest worry is that Mark Shutteworth is so obsessed with Apple's OSX and iOS that he is taking his particular platform down that road on systems where there is no need or want for it.
Linux needs professional software in addition to committed volunteers. It's things like the Gimp, Inkscape, LibreOffice etc not being on par with their commercial competitors that hinder a professional uptake of the platform. And it's not the functionality of the applications that is really the problem but the lack of uniformity in their interfaces and the way they interact with the underlying OS that is the problem.
Mark Shuttleworth has gone off the deep end recently with a lot of his decisions for Ubuntu. Dropping Gnome for Unity, and in future even dropping X for Wayland. All in the name of some vague future usability bonus, but at the same time alienating a lot of software developers and Linux community members.
Granted, a lot of what Ubuntu has done has Ubuntu one of the most user friendly distros, and I think Mark Shuttleworth has been heavily influenced by Apple's OSX originally and iOS later on, with Shuttleworth being particularly enamoured of Steve Jobs' go it alone pioneering approach. This has garnered Ubuntu the biggest user base on Linux desktops, but it has now started to lead Ubuntu into territory where it stands to lose the support of those who matter, the developers.
Canonical has been making no profit ever since it came into existence, and that is probably a big irritation for Shuttleworth who probably had the idea that people would come running to his company for support services for the fantastic distro so they could use it professionally in their company's. Except it hasn't, at least not in any size enough to pay Canonical's bills and Shuttleworth still has his dream that he can get people to use Linux because it has a nice user friendly Desktop.
Canonical in general, and Shuttleworth in particular have messed it up because they couldn't get what really makes an OS popular: software. Instead of taking a more measured approach and working with those developers to get them to improve the uniformity and functionality of their software, he decided that he could do an iPhone/app store approach on the Linux community.
This is not going to end well.
And that is why Debian, as conservative as it is, will still be around after Ubuntu and Canonical have been forgotten about by most.
Adding to my comment above, something that rally irks me about Mark Shuttleworth is his current lack of originality. The move of the window buttons to the left hand side of the window was seen by many as something that was meant to badly imitate Mac OSX. Back then Shuttleworth said it was so that the buttons would not conflict with the applets on the top right hand side (or something, the justification was about some feature that is rarely used). Then, they came up with Unity which, as a Mac OSX user, is an embarrassingly obvious attempt by Shuttleworth to ape Mac OSX's Dock spring up folders.
This is why Unity is predestined to fail. When they took Nautilus out of the default install (hey fuckers, how am I supposed to connect to network shares?), it was the last straw for me personally. Ubuntu might be a popular distro,but it's trying too hard to be different.
I have really like Ubuntu ever since I first used it in the 7.x days, but, for me, the real problem is Mark Shuttleworth's direction. Unity is fine for Netbooks (although with Netbooks being a dying breed, one has to ask what the point is), but it is simply terrible for desktops and not ideal for notebooks. Canonical's increasingly erratic ventures, like Ubuntu One are also things I do not really understand as they simply do not have the clout to grab enough users from other online portals and music sharing services.
I think that Canonical should perhaps refocus its business on less radical changes and more solid improvements and working better with other OSes and distros, as those are not going away and paradigm breaking rubbish like Unity only serves to alienate people.
Also, if Canonical needs money, then they are only proving the rule that small esoteric devices and services rarely work with their current path. Taking a social approach to improving Linux by working with software developers instead of fighting them would really help things as well.
I said, ok.
Best post I've read on this topic. It takes more than engineers, it takes people able to see and implement the big picture. Microsoft's biggest problem is their departmentalisation.
An example, today, after god knows how many years of using Windows, I discovered that Windows doesn't natively support more than 4 styles of one font. This is 2011 and that isn't rocket science. I was simply appalled. It's no wonder that creatives flock to the Mac.
David Gerwitz was getting outraged by a speech by Barak Hussein Obama. How surprising.....
This is appalling. What makes it worse is that this happens almost daily in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and no one cares because the body count is already so high. And all because of religion as well.
God, you Americans make me laugh sometimes. You were all about how amazing your military was back in 2001 when you invaded Afghanistan, and you were even more over the top when you invaded Iraq. A few trillion dollars several thousand dead soldiers and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead civilians later, you got out of Iraq without much to show for it (Moqtada Sadr returned there this week), and you're losing the war in Afghanistan or at least not winning it. Your economy is an absolute basket case with not much hope of a quick recovery and you're printing money like 3rd world 1000% inflation countries did. You've got a major crackpot political movement whose main aim is more to disrupt than actually do anything productive and a large percentage of the population who still think the bible trumps science and everything else (just like the people you're fighting in Afghanistan).
Almost all of your technological equipment is made in China, yet you have the gall to claim the Chinese couldn't build a modern 5th generation plane, and that right after they built a modern 4th generation plane (the J-10)?
China has its own, indigenously developed manned space programme, and the US currently has none.
And you think you'd beat China in a war? Would you really be willing to go nuclear over Taiwan if China invaded it in a massive one day operation?
And you make wild claims about American aircraft superiority (F-22 and F-35 vs the Su-T50) when Russian aircraft had helmet mounted sights on all its new fighters 20 years before you did (and those same Mig-29s handily beat F-16s in mock combat when flown by well trained German pilots back in the 90s and Indian Su-30s handily beat comparable F-15s in joint exercises in India)?
You haven't fought a large comparably armed opponent since the Korean war and that war wasn't won by any side.
Less hubris and a little bit of humble reality would do you the world of good.
Stieg Larsson was right, perhaps....
While I personally have the feeling that Wikileaks has more to do with Julian Assange's ego than with freedom of information, I find myself stuck in a paradox with respect to Wikileaks. On the one hand I find it highly offensive and wrong that wikileaks seems to only publish secret information on the US, given to Assange by disgruntled individuals in the US. On the other, I find it great that finally, someone is screwing over the governments like they screwed us over.
However, for Wikileaks to maintain its credibility, it'll need to find someone to give it North Korean state secrets on Kim Jong Il's bong collection, info on Osama Bin Laden's guilty pleasures and Chinese plans for the invasion of Taiwan.
As of OSX 10.7 and the soon arriving Mac App Store I think developers will be in the same boat as they now are with the iPad and iPhone App Store. Of course, developers can still develop natively for OSX without the Mac App Store, but where do you think all the app sales will be? In the Mac App Store. Apparently Microsoft want to do this as well with Windows 8. I'm beginning to despair and I'm pretty glad that at least on Linux I can do what I want.
Your government seesm happy enough to spend money it doesn't have and then make more paper money when it runs out of the money it didn't have, so it's possible that there will be an increase in scanners across your country.
But you know what? I, for one, will not even consider visiting the US as it currently stands, because I'm not interested in being treated like crap for no reason at all.
Tourism to the US is declining due to this treatment above the already ridiculous fingerprint and iris scanning.
And then you have Janet Napolitano publicly wondering about the "psychology" of terrorists. I suppose that it didn't occur to her to, you know, just ask them.
It seems like the terrorists have already won.
P.S. You want Afghanistan to stop being a hotbed of stone age fanaticism? Invite the Chinese to police the place. The Chinese would do to Afghanistan what they did to Tibet and Xingjiang; introduce draconian laws applying to native traditions, enforce them by mass arrests and bring in tens of millions of Chinese immigrants. I don't think the muslim fanatics are people you can negotiate with and they are never going to surrender as long as their cause is half way popular, so you either need to do the modern equivalent of ethnic cleansing/genocide or get out.
That's right. I don't. Now fuck off. XBox is not a democracy, it's a business, and it has a vested interest in making sure that it pleases the majority of its customers and keeps within what is commonly held to be social norms. Wankers like you are too interested in being little internet VIPs to compensate for your stupidity in real life.
I would really like to see a citation, a.k.a. reference, because, I think you're classing things like military spending as social services and the rest of us don't really think that's valid. ;)
You learnt grammar from science fiction books? Oh man, that is really sad.
Ah, Sweden, that bastion of freedom that has the US's dick so far up its collective ass that they trump up a charge on Julian Assange to make him become a fugitive while discrediting him (regardless of Assange's reportedly crappy personality), where the media is now tripping over its collective feet to be even more draconian than the US with regard to IP laws. It's a shame, used to be a nice country before it became a little banana republic police state that will do anything the US tells it to.
I'm the system admin for a large design company (4 Xservers and one XRaid that replaced 4 Linux boxes about 4 years ago). This is pretty fucking awful news for us, and I'll lay out the reasons:
1. Apple's servers are very easy to manage. Much easier than Windows or Linux machines.
2. Apple's Workgroup management features are much easier to use than the Windows or Linux equivalents.
3. Apple File Sharing being able to mix AFP/SMB and NFS seamlessly was world class.
All of this led to large productivity gains in that much less time was being spent on admin tasks than necessary.
So now that's gone.
Shit.
And, what worries me more is that I can see Apple killing traditional OSX on Macs in favour of iOS as well.
I think Apple just lost a customer in us because we can't trust them anymore.
This Tea Party circus reminds me so much of the Taliban in its rabid extremism and lack of real ideas on how to save your country. I used to work for the USAF many years ago and met many Americans that I liked, but honestly, I don't see many signs of the American people being able to dig themselves out of this hole in the near future. What I do see is a people in abject terror because their traditional ways of doing things are not working anymore and they are grasping at straws instead of buckling down to go through the process of fixing all the things that are broken in the USA.
Some of those things are:
The national infrastructure in the USA is simply catastrophic. There is not enough money being invested to avert the negative effect that this has on your economy.
The American health system, even though it spends more per person than any other country, is a disaster. You have death rates that are on par with developing nations. You eat food that is so high in calories and so low in nutritional value that you are amongst the world's fattest people.
The education system is terrible and becoming worse. Your universities are the world's best but it seems that the majority of the students are from India or China in fields which produce graduates that then go out and produce economic growth instead of graduates that go out and work in the service industry.
You spend a fortune on wars that have nothing to do with you and which you haven't and will not win.
Your political parties, their agendas and their supporters have become empty vessels that spend more than any other political parties on earth on expensive campaigns that are nothing but circuses and theatre, that produce nothing but more hysteria and fear.
Your people are behaving like stereotypical uneducated 3rd world peasants who believe that so-called "moral values", like penalising abortion and the American version of Christianity will save your country.
Your industry produces almost nothing anymore. All the production capacity has been sent overseas to where it is cheaper, but which has a long term negative effect on your country. That a country like Germany which has vastly higher taxes and benefits can produce more should be a point worth thinking about. Instead your American politicians try to tell the Germans that they should consume more.
Your consumption of goods and services remained at levels from the days when American industry was still strong, and was sustained only by increasingly high levels of debt, all of which culminated in the catastrophic crash of 2008. One of the results of this is that property foreclosures are higher than they have ever been.
The level of abject poverty in your country is higher than almost any other developed nation.
This Republican victory will do no more to improve your country's economy than the Democratic one before it.
To make a real and lasting change you Americans would have to start using your brains and start thinking pragmatically, spending less on empty promises and consuming less and producing more.
Welcome to the rest of the world.