I have, and it's freaking horrible, like interacting with a schizophrenic with multiple retarded personalities. I offer as an example: the multiple control panels with disjoint feature sets. I wanted to add a network printer to my son's Christmas Win8 laptop a couple of weeks ago and was amazed that the Win7-style printer control panel and the Win8-style version had different and non-overlapping features. Getting the job done required bouncing between the two because neither one could do all of the job by itself.
As a second example: my son is 12 and doesn't have much previous computer experience. He's played with my Mac laptop, our Win7 game system, and my daughter's Ubuntu laptop, but isn't much of an expert in any of them. The last thing I wanted to do was prejudice him against his Christmas present, so I didn't say anything to him other than "this has the new version of Windows on it. See what you think!" Well, a couple of days ago he asked me to "upgrade it to Windows 7" (his words, not mine). Why? Because he can't find anything and "it's just dumb. Why'd they break it?"
So many of your Win8 apologist peers like to crow about how it's not worse, it's just different, as though all the people who don't like it are just too stuck in their ways to learn something new. How does that explain a 12-year-old kid who likes learning new things and doesn't have much previous "lock in" who still thinks it sucks and wants to get rid of it?
Yeah, I've used Win8. Yeah, it's as awful as everyone said. And no, "just instead Github Launcher ProPlusPlus" is not a viable alternative for 99% of people using it. You write off Metro like it's just a silly little thing you can ignore on your way to the real UI. Well, it's not. If you'd used Windows 8 as much as you claim, you'd know that.
No, but in any case it can't actually make the picture any sharper. It can only blur it in more aesthetically pleasing ways. I'd still much rather have a native-resolution display than look at the output of even the best upsampler.
Then let me tempt fate: everything else from the AppleTV to the Xbox 360 to an OTA antenna looks crystal clear. Wii looks terrible on my TV, although the component cables made a huge difference over the stock composites and I highly recommend them.
In fairness to your point, it's not just the Linux kernel. Linux distro package management is light years ahead of what Windows and even OS X have (yes: I use, love, and contribute to homebrew). Also, I develop software that runs on Linux servers and some of it is barely above kernel level. Running Linux means that I can test a lot of my work more quickly than if I had to deploy it to a development server after every save. But more than that, I genuinely love Linux. It's been good to me and I enjoy using it.
Still, I strongly prefer the OS X desktop. It's not from lack of trying the various FOSS offerings. I started off on Windowmaker and Enlightenment, then worked my way through the various Gnome epochs, KDE 2/3/4, a few tiling WMs (I wrote the semi-official Qtile-on-Ubuntu guide a couple of years ago), LXDE, and several others I'm sure I've forgotten along the way. OS X seems to be what Gnome tried and failed to achieve: a nice-looking, comfortable desktop without a million config knobs that most people can use out of the box. As much as I like Linux-the-OS, I like using OS-X-the-Desktop.
graphics are rarely a factor for me in which title I play.
Graphics aren't, but I admit that resolution is. We have our 480p Wii feeding into a 720p TV via component cables (which are abundantly sufficient to carry the Wii's low-res graphics in near-perfect detail), and it looks expectedly awful and blurry. I don't care about trillions of polygons or infinite FPS, but it'd be nice to run it at my TV's native resolution. I can imagine how it'd look on a newer 1280 line display, and my mental image isn't pretty.
Not to threadjack, but my sole reason for disliking debian in a prod environment is support - how do you guys get support from the vendor when shit breaks at 3am on a sunday morning?
That's kind of hypothetical, because I've never seen Debian break in a production environment, ever. There's a reason it's much beloved by sysadmins.
No one has ever proven or even credibly suggested that Windows or OSX is easier to use than Linux
I love Linux. I'm typing this on Linux. I make my living writing services that run on Linux. That said, holy hells, I miss the OS X desktop whenever I'm on a Linux desktop. It's not so much that OS X is easier to use (although it is) as that all progress on Linux desktops seems to have stalled. KDE is powerful and pretty but there are a million knobs I have to dick around with to get it to work like I want it to. Gnome has gone off the deep end into stark insanity and is a throwaway now, as far as I'm concerned. I'm most comfortable these days with Mint's Cinnamon desktop (great job! seriously!), but it still feels clunky and hard to configure in comparison to OS X.
My ideal development environment would be the OS X interface on top of a Linux system. Since I can't have that, I use Linux for development and OS X at home when I just want to use my laptop without screwing around with settings ad infinitum.
This places Illinois on equal footing with Syria, China, and China. I mean that sincerely: if China were advancing this bill, there'd be a huge outcry over the obvious human rights violations.
There is nothing in the Constitution that grants government the power to register or regulate all of your speech, and the first amendment explicitly states that it can't. Why do these little dictator wanna-bes keep insisting that this time it's different?
This is the primary reason I use Chrome: so that I don't have to bother with a system-wide Flash. I can still watch cat videos (by clicking on them), but my word processor can't be infected through software that's not installed.
At the time I needed a bootable USB image (so I could use it to flash a BIOS), there wasn't one. I ended up writing up how I made one and Jim posted the end result at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/virtualbox/ for others to download. If you want to try FreeDOS without going through the installation process yourself - or if you don't have the facilities to do so because the $#@()! server is down and your boss is freaking out and screaming and you're out of time - then enjoy!
Maybe my employer and yours should split their business across multiple banks such that no one failure can bring the whole thing crashing down. We have redundant power supplies, networks, backups, and datacenters, and we accept that each of those are inconvenient but necessary evils. Why would the exact same logic not apply to cash accounts?
Plus if flying out of AMS on a USA-based airline, a contract employee asking you the stupid questions that they stopped asking in the USA 10 years ago. "Who packed your bag?", etc.
In all honest, Blackberry even as it stands now has better integration, infrastructure, and toe-holds in the enterprise market for mobile than Microsoft will ever get with respect to mobile.
First, I'm not remotely a Windows fan. I like my iPhone and I could be happy with an Android, but I have zero interest in Windows Portable Tiny or whatever the official name is this month. That said, you really think BB could have better enterprise - read: "Exchange" - integration than Microsoft could (if they decided they wanted to pursue it)? It would be pretty easy for MS to market themselves as the "real" messaging provider, not the knockoff who just piggybacks off their stuff. Or more simply, "why play with toys like BES when you can integrate directly with your Exchange server?"
BES and its ecosystem survives because MS had no reason to kill or out-compete it before. They have one now.
Flickr is one of Yahoo!'s only profitable services. They have free hosting for whoever wants it, plus pro accounts with access to higher-resolution pictures, larger libraries, etc. That seems like a legitimate business model - and one that doesn't require them to sell out their users.
So now you have to keep two separate codebases in lockstep, with one documenting how the other should work. I think you're far better of thoroughly documenting why the optimized version does what it does and deleting the un-optimized original.
Electric/hybrid vehicles should pay less per mile as they do less damage to the roads. An engineer friend told me that road damage is proportional to the fourth power of the weight, so an SUV that weighs 5500 pounds will wear the roads approximately 10 times faster than a hybrid that weights 3000 pounds. It's only fair and reasonable that the Escalade driver pays 10 times the gas taxes, assuming that lawmakers are being honest about what those taxes are used for. Yeah, I know; I had a hard time typing that last part with a straight face.
I enthusiastically second this. I have an older Drobo 4-bay unit plugged into our Airport Extreme router. Wired access is pretty snappy. Wireless access is easily fast enough to stream video in realtime to far ends of the house.
I'm writing Python in Sublime Text 2 and use the SublimeLinter plugin. Follow basic coding standards like Python's PEP-8 or pylint is trivial as uncompliant code is highlighted as I type. When it's so easy to comply, why on earth not?
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I'm imagining the DLC for "Rock Band featuring Rihanna".
Really? Have you guys even used Windows 8?
I have, and it's freaking horrible, like interacting with a schizophrenic with multiple retarded personalities. I offer as an example: the multiple control panels with disjoint feature sets. I wanted to add a network printer to my son's Christmas Win8 laptop a couple of weeks ago and was amazed that the Win7-style printer control panel and the Win8-style version had different and non-overlapping features. Getting the job done required bouncing between the two because neither one could do all of the job by itself.
As a second example: my son is 12 and doesn't have much previous computer experience. He's played with my Mac laptop, our Win7 game system, and my daughter's Ubuntu laptop, but isn't much of an expert in any of them. The last thing I wanted to do was prejudice him against his Christmas present, so I didn't say anything to him other than "this has the new version of Windows on it. See what you think!" Well, a couple of days ago he asked me to "upgrade it to Windows 7" (his words, not mine). Why? Because he can't find anything and "it's just dumb. Why'd they break it?"
So many of your Win8 apologist peers like to crow about how it's not worse, it's just different, as though all the people who don't like it are just too stuck in their ways to learn something new. How does that explain a 12-year-old kid who likes learning new things and doesn't have much previous "lock in" who still thinks it sucks and wants to get rid of it?
Yeah, I've used Win8. Yeah, it's as awful as everyone said. And no, "just instead Github Launcher ProPlusPlus" is not a viable alternative for 99% of people using it. You write off Metro like it's just a silly little thing you can ignore on your way to the real UI. Well, it's not. If you'd used Windows 8 as much as you claim, you'd know that.
Um... "package management" on OS X is mostly a case of drag/drop app bundle.
What's the OS X action for "upgrade every piece of software on my system at once"?
Package management on unix is a farce - packages drop configuration files wherever they like, executables wherever they like,
That's an interesting and novel assertion. Got any evidence that this has every happened?
pull in dependencies you don't want, etc.
By definition, you want dependencies as your stuff won't work without them.
No, but in any case it can't actually make the picture any sharper. It can only blur it in more aesthetically pleasing ways. I'd still much rather have a native-resolution display than look at the output of even the best upsampler.
Then let me tempt fate: everything else from the AppleTV to the Xbox 360 to an OTA antenna looks crystal clear. Wii looks terrible on my TV, although the component cables made a huge difference over the stock composites and I highly recommend them.
In fairness to your point, it's not just the Linux kernel. Linux distro package management is light years ahead of what Windows and even OS X have (yes: I use, love, and contribute to homebrew). Also, I develop software that runs on Linux servers and some of it is barely above kernel level. Running Linux means that I can test a lot of my work more quickly than if I had to deploy it to a development server after every save. But more than that, I genuinely love Linux. It's been good to me and I enjoy using it.
Still, I strongly prefer the OS X desktop. It's not from lack of trying the various FOSS offerings. I started off on Windowmaker and Enlightenment, then worked my way through the various Gnome epochs, KDE 2/3/4, a few tiling WMs (I wrote the semi-official Qtile-on-Ubuntu guide a couple of years ago), LXDE, and several others I'm sure I've forgotten along the way. OS X seems to be what Gnome tried and failed to achieve: a nice-looking, comfortable desktop without a million config knobs that most people can use out of the box. As much as I like Linux-the-OS, I like using OS-X-the-Desktop.
graphics are rarely a factor for me in which title I play.
Graphics aren't, but I admit that resolution is. We have our 480p Wii feeding into a 720p TV via component cables (which are abundantly sufficient to carry the Wii's low-res graphics in near-perfect detail), and it looks expectedly awful and blurry. I don't care about trillions of polygons or infinite FPS, but it'd be nice to run it at my TV's native resolution. I can imagine how it'd look on a newer 1280 line display, and my mental image isn't pretty.
Not to threadjack, but my sole reason for disliking debian in a prod environment is support - how do you guys get support from the vendor when shit breaks at 3am on a sunday morning?
That's kind of hypothetical, because I've never seen Debian break in a production environment, ever. There's a reason it's much beloved by sysadmins.
No one has ever proven or even credibly suggested that Windows or OSX is easier to use than Linux
I love Linux. I'm typing this on Linux. I make my living writing services that run on Linux. That said, holy hells, I miss the OS X desktop whenever I'm on a Linux desktop. It's not so much that OS X is easier to use (although it is) as that all progress on Linux desktops seems to have stalled. KDE is powerful and pretty but there are a million knobs I have to dick around with to get it to work like I want it to. Gnome has gone off the deep end into stark insanity and is a throwaway now, as far as I'm concerned. I'm most comfortable these days with Mint's Cinnamon desktop (great job! seriously!), but it still feels clunky and hard to configure in comparison to OS X.
My ideal development environment would be the OS X interface on top of a Linux system. Since I can't have that, I use Linux for development and OS X at home when I just want to use my laptop without screwing around with settings ad infinitum.
This places Illinois on equal footing with Syria, China, and China. I mean that sincerely: if China were advancing this bill, there'd be a huge outcry over the obvious human rights violations.
There is nothing in the Constitution that grants government the power to register or regulate all of your speech, and the first amendment explicitly states that it can't. Why do these little dictator wanna-bes keep insisting that this time it's different?
I haven't added value in years, but people keep replying to me.
This is the primary reason I use Chrome: so that I don't have to bother with a system-wide Flash. I can still watch cat videos (by clicking on them), but my word processor can't be infected through software that's not installed.
At the time I needed a bootable USB image (so I could use it to flash a BIOS), there wasn't one. I ended up writing up how I made one and Jim posted the end result at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/virtualbox/ for others to download. If you want to try FreeDOS without going through the installation process yourself - or if you don't have the facilities to do so because the $#@()! server is down and your boss is freaking out and screaming and you're out of time - then enjoy!
Maybe my employer and yours should split their business across multiple banks such that no one failure can bring the whole thing crashing down. We have redundant power supplies, networks, backups, and datacenters, and we accept that each of those are inconvenient but necessary evils. Why would the exact same logic not apply to cash accounts?
Plus if flying out of AMS on a USA-based airline, a contract employee asking you the stupid questions that they stopped asking in the USA 10 years ago. "Who packed your bag?", etc.
"al'Paqa One-Way Trip Preparers, Inc. Why?"
BB10 supports ActiveSync. So BES will no longer be needed for email integration with Exchange.
Making BB yet another Exchange client among many. What does it bring to the table here?
In all honest, Blackberry even as it stands now has better integration, infrastructure, and toe-holds in the enterprise market for mobile than Microsoft will ever get with respect to mobile.
First, I'm not remotely a Windows fan. I like my iPhone and I could be happy with an Android, but I have zero interest in Windows Portable Tiny or whatever the official name is this month. That said, you really think BB could have better enterprise - read: "Exchange" - integration than Microsoft could (if they decided they wanted to pursue it)? It would be pretty easy for MS to market themselves as the "real" messaging provider, not the knockoff who just piggybacks off their stuff. Or more simply, "why play with toys like BES when you can integrate directly with your Exchange server?"
BES and its ecosystem survives because MS had no reason to kill or out-compete it before. They have one now.
Flickr is one of Yahoo!'s only profitable services. They have free hosting for whoever wants it, plus pro accounts with access to higher-resolution pictures, larger libraries, etc. That seems like a legitimate business model - and one that doesn't require them to sell out their users.
I'm 60
From your stories, I had you pegged at 73. Now I feel lost, like I need to recalibrate my worldview.
So now you have to keep two separate codebases in lockstep, with one documenting how the other should work. I think you're far better of thoroughly documenting why the optimized version does what it does and deleting the un-optimized original.
If that hypothesis were true, a woman wearing high heeled shoes would break the road in half.
Electric/hybrid vehicles should pay less per mile as they do less damage to the roads. An engineer friend told me that road damage is proportional to the fourth power of the weight, so an SUV that weighs 5500 pounds will wear the roads approximately 10 times faster than a hybrid that weights 3000 pounds. It's only fair and reasonable that the Escalade driver pays 10 times the gas taxes, assuming that lawmakers are being honest about what those taxes are used for. Yeah, I know; I had a hard time typing that last part with a straight face.
I enthusiastically second this. I have an older Drobo 4-bay unit plugged into our Airport Extreme router. Wired access is pretty snappy. Wireless access is easily fast enough to stream video in realtime to far ends of the house.
I'm writing Python in Sublime Text 2 and use the SublimeLinter plugin. Follow basic coding standards like Python's PEP-8 or pylint is trivial as uncompliant code is highlighted as I type. When it's so easy to comply, why on earth not?
Interesting that you're attacking a position that I never claimed to have. I just reported factual information on the subject.