The real problem is that Mac OSX (and most other systems) have a fundementally sound architecture, while none of the the current Windows do.
Not quite.
In the NT kernel, most (all?) objects have ACLs associated with them which allows much finer granularity than under a traditional UNIX-y kernel.
Imagine UNIX with finer-grained security. Now run many network-enabled services without the end-user's knowledge. Add automatic execution of downloaded code in the form of ActiveX controls, and remove the ability of those running the binaries to examine the source code.
Now revise everything in the system several times, adding new APIs while keeping existing ones more or less intact. Don't worry about establishing system-wide conventions among development teams -- they have better things to do.
Add the need to throw in nifty technologies to dethrone competitors.(1)
Now stop and think about how you've gained your acceptance. Realize that what people like to use at home will carry across to work. Realize further that people don't want to deal with permissions, or ACLs, not having administrative access, and not being able to play the latest-greatest game.
To gain home acceptance, ship a home edition of your operating system which allows the default user to do damned near anything on the machine. Make auditing of running services difficult and obscure. Above all else, don't confuse the user, or ask them to slow down even enough to realize that certain actions may compromise system security more than others.
Now stop and think about how little having finer-grained security really did to make the OS more secure overall.
The problem isn't that Windows lacks a "fundamentally sound architecture." The problem is all of the extra crap that gets thrown on top without really thinking things through.
1) I'll see your Java sandbox and raise you an ActiveX control!
Here's my take on the topic of whether NVidia's release of binary modules is a good thing. It's a little late for the mods to catch it, but what the hell.
A few years ago, I Matrox released the specs for the G200. GLX drivers were quickly written for the current X server, and later XFree86 4 was released and had nice support as well.
Matrox cards are also well-supported by the kernel -- having a native framebuffer driver for your video card is REALLY NICE. Both framebuffer and GLX drivers were quite stable surprisingly quickly after the specs were made available by Matrox.
Then, NVidia came along with some kick-ass hardware and binary-only drivers. Q3A players all bought NVidia hardware, and Matrox was ignored by anyone serious about 3D performance. They still produce cards, but the last thing I'd really heard about them was that they'd decided to focus on making "business hardware", which I loosely interpret as "non-gamer-oriented hardware".
Years later, I still hear of quirks and problems with the NVidia binary-only drivers, including complaints of lockups and general instability.
Would I consider putting a Matrox card into a vital machine? Sure. Would I consider putting an NVidia card into a vital machine? Hell no.
This is why I don't buy NVidia hardware. Unfortunately, too many people out there are in the "stability would be nice, but I want (current-3d-shooter) now!" camp for NVidia to really gain a bad reputation.
Maybe the XBox was a much, much smarter move for Microsoft than I'd thought previously. If you look at NVidia, tons of Slashdotters would be quite unhappy with them as a company, except that they'd trade ideological comfort for a kick-ass gaming rig any day, so instead of bashing NVidia for being slimy they applaud them for the fact that their half-assed drivers work at all.
I'm led to wonder how many former MS-bashers own an XBox today...
IE reportedly does, although I don't think they can be applied on a per-site basis. Its support is meant for accessibility, such as bolding everything, using higher-contract colors, or making fonts larger by default.
Thanks for the kinds words, and your own comments on the subject. You raised one question, however, in my mind:
[R]adio stations generally need not get permission to play music... However, they do pay for the priveledge of playing the music.
I'm a little unclear on this.
If a radio station does not have to obtain permission to play a song, I would assume that they already have the priveledge of playing it.
However, if they must pay for the priveledge, doesn't this mean that permission must be obtained in some manner? Whether they obtain permission by paying for it, I'd think that permission still must be granted by some relevant party.
As I see it, and I have a feeling that the founders of this country might agree, excessive copyright terms steal works from the public domain.
Copyright is supposedly a limited monopoly on distribution of a given work granted by the public in return for the owner's courtesy of sharing their work. This was meant to encourage creators to share their work widely, as it would enrich the public domain when the clock ran out on the limited monopoly.
However, copyright terms have been getting longer and longer. Since the moment distribution of recorded music became commercially possible, new works have stopped entering the public domain.
Add this to the fact that the RIAA does do an incredible job of promoting their own music, but doesn't do such a good job of making it clear that their music is used with permission. Usually the use of music in a movie is mentioned late in the credits, when most of the audience has wandered out. Listening to the radio spew out song after song at no cost to me other than the time spent dealing with (listening to or avoiding) commercials, I hear no legal notices explaining that the songs were used with permission from the relevant parties. Stations have to pause periodically for identification. Perhaps it would clarify to the general public that the music is used with permission if they would pause from time to time in a similar manner to explain whose permission allowed them to play such music and to remind the public that the music is a tightly controlled resource.
When you see a trademark used in print, there's a little symbol used to explain to people that the symbol in question is, indeed, trademarked. The fact that copyrighted works require no similar annotation allows the RIAA to dangle their music in front of our noses before slapping us the minute we start to believe that they're actually giving it to us for free.
All of this has lead to a public which doesn't understand why the radio can redistribute music, but we the people cannot. The situation also leads me to believe that the public is attempting to get a refund for the time-limited monopoly it has granted.
To put it in real-world terms, if I agree to let you borrow my car for a few hours in exchange for you washing it for me, that is a reasonable deal. You have exclusive possession of my car, but I benefit in the end.
However, if you were to try to extend the term beyond hours to days or even weeks without offering me significantly more benefit, I'd definitely reconsider the arrangement.
The RIAA hasn't brought the car back yet, and Congress keeps telling them that they can extend the joyride longer and longer. Decades beyond the death of the creator is too long, and the public is saying that the RIAA needs to wash the damned car and bring it back to the public with whom it belongs.
And that, my friend, is what separates those fine men and women from the retards. That is your answer. Those had the basic mental skills to figure that out. The old lady didn't. _That_ is what makes her an idiot.
I notice you haven't addressed my question about whether she'd still be "an idiot" if she'd been sitting in a booth inside of McDonald's and suffered the same fate (third-degree burns) due to an unsafe product.
But hey, it's easier just to call other people trolls, eh?
Did a MacDonald employee come over and pour coffee on her? No. She did it to herself.
...which as the parent poster had pointed out, the courts recognized.
Did a MacDonald employee advise her to hold the cup tight with her thighs? No. It was her own idiocy.
I see. So it's idiotic to expect that a major company would not distribute products intended for immediate consumption which would not cause extensive damage upon contact with one's skin?
Did MacDonald ever advertise their coffee as being at room temperature? No.
I like the whole, ask a rediculous question, then give an obvious answer thing. Coffee is never served at room temperature (which is generally defined as 68F or thereabouts). I doubt that you can find anyone who would expect coffee to be safe at room temperature.
Now, are you implying that fast-food customers are idiots for expecting that their food and beverages would be safe for consumption? That they should "simply know" that they are expected to wait several minutes before trying to drink their coffee?
Let's see... You can walk into Starbuck's and get coffee which is safe to drink, immediately. If you get coffee at a 7-11, it is safe to drink, immediately. McDonald's coffee at the time of this lawsuit would literally cause burns to the mouth when one tried to drink it immediately. I worked at McDonald's in high school, and before I learned exactly how hot the coffee that we served was, I did burn my lips on the coffee simply because I expected it to be safe to drink.
I suppose I'm an idiot, then, too.
Would you condemn the elderly woman as vehemently had she entered the restaurant, sat at a table, and spilled the coffee on her while adding sugar to it at the table?
The same situation would have occurred. As mentioned, the court considered her 20% at fault for having held the drink between her legs. However, had she spilled the coffee on herself inside the store, she could have burned herself just the same. This is why the judgement was granted -- because McDonald's knowingly put its customers at risk of severe burns. Their product was unsafe, as it could easily cause harm to the consumer.
But hey, it's easier to troll and call an old woman an idiot for having burned herself on an unsafe product than to consider that maybe companies shouldn't just hand out containers which are completely filled with water just short of boiling.
I agree, however, that Mickey D's was liable for this. I don't agree, however, that stupidity should be rewarded.
Chances are, a significant portion of her "reward" were used to repay her medical bills.
As the parent poster mentioned, and you seem to have ignored, much of the treatment involved skin grafts to her inner thighs and sexual parts. If you consider having McDonald's pay somebody to scrub the remains of scalded flesh from your genitals and inner thighs to be a "reward", then I suppose your post is quite on-topic, since you'd probably get quite a lot of pleasure from paying SCO their $699 per CPU.
If not, you're a troll, because calling an 80-year-old woman "stupid" because she spilled some coffee while trying to remove the lid is just plain asinine. I've known and dealt with many older people, and it is quite common among people who are more advanced in years not to have the steadiest hands. Would you call anyone with a MedicAlert badge an idiot as well, since they may fall and need assistance? This was an elderly woman, and you condemn her for her physical problems.
She didn't sue because she spilled her coffee. She sued because of the third-degree burns which resulted from McDonald's decision to keep the coffee at a dangerous temperature.
...except that what qualifies as a "borderline" case varies from person to person, and corpus to corpus.
Links in "obvious" spam won't get spidered, since the point of spidering links is to help decide borderline cases. It's easier for spammers to use viruses or other malware to harm "bystanders" than for them to try to craft messages indended to be classified as borderline spam.
That's a major benefit of filters which tailor themselves to an individual's idea of spam, as opposed to software such as Spamassassin (without the Bayesian option) which applies fixed rules to rate a message -- a filter's response to a given message cannot be so easily predicted.
I believe there was a note about only doing this for messages which are near the spam threshold -- if it's obviously something you'd consider to be spam, it just dumps it. If it's obviously good mail, it just accepts it. If the filter isn't sure, it crawls any links in the message and considers their contents using the same criteria used to classify the email.
Seriously, you're just going to turn your kids into sneaky liars. Realize that they'll be adults soon, and allow them to prepare for adulthood as much as they can while they're under your wing.
Birds practice flying before leaving the nest for good. Let them have their practice.
They did actually add this question to the installer. As mentioned in the article, you can switch to different keyboard layouts, and the language selection screen simply causes a reasonable default to be selected.
Given the screenshots, I can imagine that you can even select a new keyboard layout using none other than the arrow keys, enter, and perhaps a function key or two. In other words, even if it selects the wrong layout, you can still use the keyboard to select the correct layout without even having to guess about which keys to press.
Any bug report can be useful, more so if a valid return email address is supplied. Even a vague bug report can be an indicator that error messages produced should be clarified or that a program did not behave in a way that the user expected, which can indicate a UI design flaw.
Even if no immediate problem is identified, at least a developer's attention has been drawn towards something relevant to end-users, which is a benefit in itself. Few people ever get to watch many end-users interact with their programs, so such reports can provide feedback to the developers which they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
When people working on the distribution support users, it takes away from the time that they could be spending to improve the distribution. Therefore, it makes sense for them to not make Debian open for anybody to install.
Bullshit.
More users ==> more bug reports ==> more things fixed ==> improved distribution.
Debian's installer isn't actively kept down; anyone can become a contributor and make it better. I'd say that a lot of the "problem" is that Debian tends to be reinstalled much less often than other distros.
I know that (at least in the past) to upgrade from one release of Redhat to the next one had to run the installer. Debian's installer was never meant to upgrade the system, since there are already robust tools made for that task. Since Debian users only use the installer when actually installing the OS, and since many Debian developers have likely been using the same installation of Debian they've had for years, the lack of an elegant installer is not something which annoys the developers often enough to justify spending time on.
OSS programmers develop because they want the program which they are writing; if none of the people writing the code need to use the installer very often, it won't bother them enough to spend tons of time fixing.
Because I was pointing out a fallacy in your argument. Your citing counterexamples did nothing to change the fact that you were incorrect.
That's also why cell phones, VCRs, and microwaves turn on instantly instead of having to boot up; Their functionality is usually fixed.
Look, you said that devices with fixed functionality "turn on instantly instead of having to boot up." I provided examples which disproved your statement; you can provide examples of some devices which seem to turn on "instantly", but since the general statement "cell phones... turn on instantly" applies to all cell phones, all I have to do is find a single cell phone which does not turn on "instantly" in order to prove the falsehood of your generalization.
Since I have one such phone myself, I've disproved your general assertion. It's done, it's over.
Imagine this exchange:
You> Cars are blue. Me> My car isn't blue. In fact, it's red. Maybe some cars are blue, but "cars are blue" speaks for all cars. You> But I have a blue car! Cars are blue!
Now you can go on about how "cell phones... turn on instantly", but that doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. Not all devices with fixed functionality turn on instantly. You've lost -- you're wrong. It's okay, it happens to lots of men. Just take your toys and go home, will you? The horse is dead, and if you keep flogging it it's going to really start to smell.
Maybe you should buy better equipment if you have to sit and wait so long for it all to come on.
I'm glad that you're familiar enough with my usage patterns of the devices I've listed to recommend me wasting more money on more crap I'll rarely use anyways.
This all has nothing to do with your argument that GUIs map well to the way the system actually functions, but thanks for playing.
As for calling Stallman, it's clearly to deal with the counter-claims re: the GPL, which IBM brought to the table. Certainly Stallman is worth questioning if the GPL is being challenged or used as a point of attack.
Perhaps SCO execs should actually talk to their lawyers regarding the GPL.
That's why legalese is used in licenses in the first place -- code licensed under the GPL is subject to the rules specified in the GPL as interpreted by the U.S. judicial system, not as interpreted by RMS. If SCO wants to know more about what the GPL does and does not allow then they should talk to an attorney who specializes in copyright law, not to some hippie programmer.
I still don't see why this idea came around where they HAVE to store all your information on someone's server somewhere. Why not have it all be stored client-side and just have the user click a button to send everything? It can be heavily encrypted on the hard drive and over the connection, and you won't have to worry about someone hacking the server and stealing everything or worry about unwanted information sharing.
I already keep this information stored in a device I already carry around with me. It's so far proven impossible to extract data from. It's possible to teach the device new passwords and information -- in fact, it uses a neural net to acquire and store new information, and works with any computer equipped with a keyboard.
That's right, the human brain. Go ahead -- try to steal mine and decode the information stored within.
In fact, pulling it off would probably net you a Nobel prize to call your very own!
I never said that Microsoft didn't steal code -- I just said that you haven't provided anything to suggest that they had.
I use and enjoy Linux, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to accuse every other OS vendor of every possible wrongdoing.
I do encourage you to either find compelling evidence to suggest that code might have been stolen, or to stop making accusations which make Linux users look fanatical.
Keep in mind, showing lists of features which existed before Linux does not support your claims well.
Nah, I'm no grammar Nazi, and your point regarding the fact that your comments are freely given is a good one.
You did proofreading for a living?!? How can you stand to read anything? I used to help design flyers and newsletters for a non-profit organization, and even that little bit of experience often causes me to cringe at bad design choices, even minor ones, that I see in published materials. I'd hate to have serious proofreading experience, as I'd no doubt find it hard not to be annoyed by stupid mistakes.
Besides, misuse of "it's" bothers me simply because it's so widespread.
I have offered abundant and compelling reasons for holding those suspicions.
Unless you consider listing similar features to be "compelling", then no you haven't.
You have yet to explain which features are implemented similarly enough to cause suspicion of code theft.
I never said that since you don't have the source code in question that you're like SCO. I said that you're making claims which don't seem to be supported by available evidence, and suggesting that MS should have to disclose information to prove their innocence.
Showing similar feature lists is not compelling evidence -- many operating systems tout the features which you've mentioned, and share lineage with neither Linux nor Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
He suggests the Canadian method?
Whew. I thought the U.S. was going completely to crap, but at least one state gets it right.
Way to go, Canada!
Not quite.
In the NT kernel, most (all?) objects have ACLs associated with them which allows much finer granularity than under a traditional UNIX-y kernel.
Imagine UNIX with finer-grained security. Now run many network-enabled services without the end-user's knowledge. Add automatic execution of downloaded code in the form of ActiveX controls, and remove the ability of those running the binaries to examine the source code.
Now revise everything in the system several times, adding new APIs while keeping existing ones more or less intact. Don't worry about establishing system-wide conventions among development teams -- they have better things to do.
Add the need to throw in nifty technologies to dethrone competitors.(1)
Now stop and think about how you've gained your acceptance. Realize that what people like to use at home will carry across to work. Realize further that people don't want to deal with permissions, or ACLs, not having administrative access, and not being able to play the latest-greatest game.
To gain home acceptance, ship a home edition of your operating system which allows the default user to do damned near anything on the machine. Make auditing of running services difficult and obscure. Above all else, don't confuse the user, or ask them to slow down even enough to realize that certain actions may compromise system security more than others.
Now stop and think about how little having finer-grained security really did to make the OS more secure overall.
The problem isn't that Windows lacks a "fundamentally sound architecture." The problem is all of the extra crap that gets thrown on top without really thinking things through.
1) I'll see your Java sandbox and raise you an ActiveX control!
Here's my take on the topic of whether NVidia's release of binary modules is a good thing. It's a little late for the mods to catch it, but what the hell.
A few years ago, I Matrox released the specs for the G200. GLX drivers were quickly written for the current X server, and later XFree86 4 was released and had nice support as well.
Matrox cards are also well-supported by the kernel -- having a native framebuffer driver for your video card is REALLY NICE. Both framebuffer and GLX drivers were quite stable surprisingly quickly after the specs were made available by Matrox.
Then, NVidia came along with some kick-ass hardware and binary-only drivers. Q3A players all bought NVidia hardware, and Matrox was ignored by anyone serious about 3D performance. They still produce cards, but the last thing I'd really heard about them was that they'd decided to focus on making "business hardware", which I loosely interpret as "non-gamer-oriented hardware".
Years later, I still hear of quirks and problems with the NVidia binary-only drivers, including complaints of lockups and general instability.
Would I consider putting a Matrox card into a vital machine? Sure. Would I consider putting an NVidia card into a vital machine? Hell no.
This is why I don't buy NVidia hardware. Unfortunately, too many people out there are in the "stability would be nice, but I want (current-3d-shooter) now!" camp for NVidia to really gain a bad reputation.
Maybe the XBox was a much, much smarter move for Microsoft than I'd thought previously. If you look at NVidia, tons of Slashdotters would be quite unhappy with them as a company, except that they'd trade ideological comfort for a kick-ass gaming rig any day, so instead of bashing NVidia for being slimy they applaud them for the fact that their half-assed drivers work at all.
I'm led to wonder how many former MS-bashers own an XBox today...
If you think that's bad, you should check out the Linux kernel source sometime. Not only is it full of adds, but bit-shifting and bit masks too!
Such abuse of arithmetic logic in an OS is not to be tolerated.
IE reportedly does, although I don't think they can be applied on a per-site basis. Its support is meant for accessibility, such as bolding everything, using higher-contract colors, or making fonts larger by default.
I'm a little unclear on this.
If a radio station does not have to obtain permission to play a song, I would assume that they already have the priveledge of playing it.
However, if they must pay for the priveledge, doesn't this mean that permission must be obtained in some manner? Whether they obtain permission by paying for it, I'd think that permission still must be granted by some relevant party.
Could you clarify?
As I see it, and I have a feeling that the founders of this country might agree, excessive copyright terms steal works from the public domain.
Copyright is supposedly a limited monopoly on distribution of a given work granted by the public in return for the owner's courtesy of sharing their work. This was meant to encourage creators to share their work widely, as it would enrich the public domain when the clock ran out on the limited monopoly.
However, copyright terms have been getting longer and longer. Since the moment distribution of recorded music became commercially possible, new works have stopped entering the public domain.
Add this to the fact that the RIAA does do an incredible job of promoting their own music, but doesn't do such a good job of making it clear that their music is used with permission. Usually the use of music in a movie is mentioned late in the credits, when most of the audience has wandered out. Listening to the radio spew out song after song at no cost to me other than the time spent dealing with (listening to or avoiding) commercials, I hear no legal notices explaining that the songs were used with permission from the relevant parties. Stations have to pause periodically for identification. Perhaps it would clarify to the general public that the music is used with permission if they would pause from time to time in a similar manner to explain whose permission allowed them to play such music and to remind the public that the music is a tightly controlled resource.
When you see a trademark used in print, there's a little symbol used to explain to people that the symbol in question is, indeed, trademarked. The fact that copyrighted works require no similar annotation allows the RIAA to dangle their music in front of our noses before slapping us the minute we start to believe that they're actually giving it to us for free.
All of this has lead to a public which doesn't understand why the radio can redistribute music, but we the people cannot. The situation also leads me to believe that the public is attempting to get a refund for the time-limited monopoly it has granted.
To put it in real-world terms, if I agree to let you borrow my car for a few hours in exchange for you washing it for me, that is a reasonable deal. You have exclusive possession of my car, but I benefit in the end.
However, if you were to try to extend the term beyond hours to days or even weeks without offering me significantly more benefit, I'd definitely reconsider the arrangement.
The RIAA hasn't brought the car back yet, and Congress keeps telling them that they can extend the joyride longer and longer. Decades beyond the death of the creator is too long, and the public is saying that the RIAA needs to wash the damned car and bring it back to the public with whom it belongs.
But hey, it's easier just to call other people trolls, eh?
I see. So it's idiotic to expect that a major company would not distribute products intended for immediate consumption which would not cause extensive damage upon contact with one's skin?
I like the whole, ask a rediculous question, then give an obvious answer thing. Coffee is never served at room temperature (which is generally defined as 68F or thereabouts). I doubt that you can find anyone who would expect coffee to be safe at room temperature.
Now, are you implying that fast-food customers are idiots for expecting that their food and beverages would be safe for consumption? That they should "simply know" that they are expected to wait several minutes before trying to drink their coffee?
Let's see... You can walk into Starbuck's and get coffee which is safe to drink, immediately. If you get coffee at a 7-11, it is safe to drink, immediately. McDonald's coffee at the time of this lawsuit would literally cause burns to the mouth when one tried to drink it immediately. I worked at McDonald's in high school, and before I learned exactly how hot the coffee that we served was, I did burn my lips on the coffee simply because I expected it to be safe to drink.
I suppose I'm an idiot, then, too.
Would you condemn the elderly woman as vehemently had she entered the restaurant, sat at a table, and spilled the coffee on her while adding sugar to it at the table?
The same situation would have occurred. As mentioned, the court considered her 20% at fault for having held the drink between her legs. However, had she spilled the coffee on herself inside the store, she could have burned herself just the same. This is why the judgement was granted -- because McDonald's knowingly put its customers at risk of severe burns. Their product was unsafe, as it could easily cause harm to the consumer.
But hey, it's easier to troll and call an old woman an idiot for having burned herself on an unsafe product than to consider that maybe companies shouldn't just hand out containers which are completely filled with water just short of boiling.
As the parent poster mentioned, and you seem to have ignored, much of the treatment involved skin grafts to her inner thighs and sexual parts. If you consider having McDonald's pay somebody to scrub the remains of scalded flesh from your genitals and inner thighs to be a "reward", then I suppose your post is quite on-topic, since you'd probably get quite a lot of pleasure from paying SCO their $699 per CPU.
If not, you're a troll, because calling an 80-year-old woman "stupid" because she spilled some coffee while trying to remove the lid is just plain asinine. I've known and dealt with many older people, and it is quite common among people who are more advanced in years not to have the steadiest hands. Would you call anyone with a MedicAlert badge an idiot as well, since they may fall and need assistance? This was an elderly woman, and you condemn her for her physical problems.
She didn't sue because she spilled her coffee. She sued because of the third-degree burns which resulted from McDonald's decision to keep the coffee at a dangerous temperature.
...except that what qualifies as a "borderline" case varies from person to person, and corpus to corpus.
Links in "obvious" spam won't get spidered, since the point of spidering links is to help decide borderline cases. It's easier for spammers to use viruses or other malware to harm "bystanders" than for them to try to craft messages indended to be classified as borderline spam.
That's a major benefit of filters which tailor themselves to an individual's idea of spam, as opposed to software such as Spamassassin (without the Bayesian option) which applies fixed rules to rate a message -- a filter's response to a given message cannot be so easily predicted.
I believe there was a note about only doing this for messages which are near the spam threshold -- if it's obviously something you'd consider to be spam, it just dumps it. If it's obviously good mail, it just accepts it. If the filter isn't sure, it crawls any links in the message and considers their contents using the same criteria used to classify the email.
Seriously, you're just going to turn your kids into sneaky liars. Realize that they'll be adults soon, and allow them to prepare for adulthood as much as they can while they're under your wing.
Birds practice flying before leaving the nest for good. Let them have their practice.
They did actually add this question to the installer. As mentioned in the article, you can switch to different keyboard layouts, and the language selection screen simply causes a reasonable default to be selected.
Given the screenshots, I can imagine that you can even select a new keyboard layout using none other than the arrow keys, enter, and perhaps a function key or two. In other words, even if it selects the wrong layout, you can still use the keyboard to select the correct layout without even having to guess about which keys to press.
Any bug report can be useful, more so if a valid return email address is supplied. Even a vague bug report can be an indicator that error messages produced should be clarified or that a program did not behave in a way that the user expected, which can indicate a UI design flaw.
Even if no immediate problem is identified, at least a developer's attention has been drawn towards something relevant to end-users, which is a benefit in itself. Few people ever get to watch many end-users interact with their programs, so such reports can provide feedback to the developers which they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
More users ==> more bug reports ==> more things fixed ==> improved distribution.
Debian's installer isn't actively kept down; anyone can become a contributor and make it better. I'd say that a lot of the "problem" is that Debian tends to be reinstalled much less often than other distros.
I know that (at least in the past) to upgrade from one release of Redhat to the next one had to run the installer. Debian's installer was never meant to upgrade the system, since there are already robust tools made for that task. Since Debian users only use the installer when actually installing the OS, and since many Debian developers have likely been using the same installation of Debian they've had for years, the lack of an elegant installer is not something which annoys the developers often enough to justify spending time on.
OSS programmers develop because they want the program which they are writing; if none of the people writing the code need to use the installer very often, it won't bother them enough to spend tons of time fixing.
And your lack of ability to stick to the main thread of this discussion doesn't do much for your appearances either.
Now, if you'd like to discuss something, how about responding to my comments about GUIs not mapping well to the way a system actually operates?
Look, you said that devices with fixed functionality "turn on instantly instead of having to boot up." I provided examples which disproved your statement; you can provide examples of some devices which seem to turn on "instantly", but since the general statement "cell phones... turn on instantly" applies to all cell phones, all I have to do is find a single cell phone which does not turn on "instantly" in order to prove the falsehood of your generalization.
Since I have one such phone myself, I've disproved your general assertion. It's done, it's over.
Imagine this exchange:
You> Cars are blue.
Me> My car isn't blue. In fact, it's red. Maybe some cars are blue, but "cars are blue" speaks for all cars.
You> But I have a blue car! Cars are blue!
Now you can go on about how "cell phones... turn on instantly", but that doesn't change the fact that you're wrong. Not all devices with fixed functionality turn on instantly. You've lost -- you're wrong. It's okay, it happens to lots of men. Just take your toys and go home, will you? The horse is dead, and if you keep flogging it it's going to really start to smell.
This all has nothing to do with your argument that GUIs map well to the way the system actually functions, but thanks for playing.
That's why legalese is used in licenses in the first place -- code licensed under the GPL is subject to the rules specified in the GPL as interpreted by the U.S. judicial system, not as interpreted by RMS. If SCO wants to know more about what the GPL does and does not allow then they should talk to an attorney who specializes in copyright law, not to some hippie programmer.
That's right, the human brain. Go ahead -- try to steal mine and decode the information stored within.
In fact, pulling it off would probably net you a Nobel prize to call your very own!
I never said that Microsoft didn't steal code -- I just said that you haven't provided anything to suggest that they had.
I use and enjoy Linux, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to accuse every other OS vendor of every possible wrongdoing.
I do encourage you to either find compelling evidence to suggest that code might have been stolen, or to stop making accusations which make Linux users look fanatical.
Keep in mind, showing lists of features which existed before Linux does not support your claims well.
Hah -- nice reply ;)
Nah, I'm no grammar Nazi, and your point regarding the fact that your comments are freely given is a good one.
You did proofreading for a living?!? How can you stand to read anything? I used to help design flyers and newsletters for a non-profit organization, and even that little bit of experience often causes me to cringe at bad design choices, even minor ones, that I see in published materials. I'd hate to have serious proofreading experience, as I'd no doubt find it hard not to be annoyed by stupid mistakes.
Besides, misuse of "it's" bothers me simply because it's so widespread.
You have yet to explain which features are implemented similarly enough to cause suspicion of code theft.
I never said that since you don't have the source code in question that you're like SCO. I said that you're making claims which don't seem to be supported by available evidence, and suggesting that MS should have to disclose information to prove their innocence.
Showing similar feature lists is not compelling evidence -- many operating systems tout the features which you've mentioned, and share lineage with neither Linux nor Windows.