Just a side note (I totally agree with you in concept) is that most of the things that you've listed have an impact on you in one way or another regardless of your preference. Your active choice of not doing something won't mitigate the effects of it upon your life:
Gay Marriage: Most likely won't directly affect you (unless you're gay of course).
Murder: Will affect you (or friends/family) if you do it or not.
Apple Store: The majority position of a system incompatible with one you choose to use means there are fewer chances that you'll get applications that you really want.
France: Pretty low affect besides trade deficits
Math: Your ignorance of math will only make you less valuable as a potential employee if everyone else knows it.
Enron: Caused such a big stink not just because a single company failed. It affected investor confidence in all American companies.
Sub Prime: Pretty much ditto of Enron. The irresponsible were punished along with the responsible.
I think we (Slashdot readers) get it by now what Apple's application development policies are. We don't need a weekly refresher of why Apple's policies suck. Please don't feed the trolls because this article much like the few before it contains contains nothing new that we shouldn't have known already. Someone makes a yes/no decision and you have to live with it.
Either two things will happen: Apple doesn't change their policies and we can assume as always that most applications that are perfectly legitimate but against Apple's corporate objectives will be canned, or that Apple decided that their policies are causing more harm than good and decide to change them. If the second case happens then please be my guess and post it.
This constant rhetoric over what should and what shouldn't be allowed is just fuelling a fire of debate that is ultimately as subjective as Apple's corporate policies.
With older film stock, its more important to deal with the loss of colour, ISO levels, the acceptable level of noise when the show was recorded, etc..
They can digitally clean up the picture to make the scenes more clear, but really, does cleaning up the picture on Star Trek TOS really improve the viewing experience? I mean really, the sets weren't exactly rocket science.
At least if they decided to remaster TNG, they could bring up the CGI to modern day levels making it more palitable to the younger generation without sacrificing the spirit of the source.
Not terribly applicable, since all said professions use large arbitrary motions, but I do feel for the human statues. I think they'd be in the same boat as the users of said system.
2000 and XP were released a year apart with next to 100% API compatibility with one another. I fail to see how an app would ever choose to disable the ability to run on 2k.
If you want this in today's standards, imagine a company 5 years from now deciding to develop an application for Windows 7 and not allow it to be run on Windows Vista. Simply idiotic since API wise, they're basically the same.
Finally, if 2000 was anything like Win9x generation or maybe NT4 which lacks many common hardware profiles, there's no good reason for the platform to die at all. If MS wasn't out to just make money, they should've left 2k as the sole windows OS and simply build bigger and better features around them in the form of paid add-ons.
No, instead they send you through the upgrade treadmill so that everyone along the way can collect their checks for something that in the end will not improve end user productivity.
Their replacements would do the same thing over and over ad-infinitum, so what are you really advocating? I've worked in industry long enough to know that people don't change unless their forced to.
Even if every one of these companies did crash and burn, the executives still walk away filthy rich with the middle and lower tiers completely fucked. I fail to see how this encourages good business practices for those sitting in these positions of power.
PS: Capitalism may be an ideal that people aspire to, but I can't think of anywhere more than tiny island nations (embezzlement) that practice laissez faire capitalism. If anything, its been propped up by cold war paranoia as the bastion of human accomplishment. Too bad there wasn't a cheesy 70's exaggeration movie to exemplify the possible problems. Oh wait, there's rollerball...
They could sell each additional bundle offering separately, but people wouldn't buy them. But, if they call it Windows Ultimate, all the guys that need 'the best' OS will fork over the gold for it.
PS: I know friends that did that exactly with Vista...
Don't use it. Its pretty simple folks. If you want to fight against software patents you will:
1. Boycott companies that actively engage in patent litigation (Against open source doubly) 2. Tell all your friends to stop using said companies products. Tell them why its bad for you in the end, and tell them alternative products / technologies that aren't stifling external creativity 3. Write a well worded letter to said company and detail why you have qualms with them. Make special note in the letter to outline: - Your grievances - How many friends you've convinced to stop using their product - Alternative products / technologies that don't do whatever your grievance is - Solutions - How to turn your utter bile hatred in said company into a customer again
Pointing out that you like their products but still refuse to respect their behaviour will make sure to whomever reads the letter that your hatred of their company is not out of some bias, but based purely on said behaviour.
> slow warm-up times I have several bulbs at home I've never really paid attention to the 'warm-up times' problem. It could be a matter of the 'gold plated audio cables' syndrome where 99.9% of the population can't tell the difference and don't give a damn, but obviously the article poster has a rant to unleash.
> lower-than-advertised lifetimes There will always be bulbs that fall below the standard estimated lifetime, so I don't know if this is just a matter of standard failure rates deviation, or a blatant lie by manufacturers. As for me, I've never had a dead CFL yet (several years of casual use), so here's hoping...
> hassles of disposing the mercury-containing bulbs See last point
I'm a firefox user AND I've been using index2 for a while (Don't know how it got activated, just showed up one day). Should I assume the behaviours is about the same as now, but faster? If so, good job!
It takes some time to get used to the new timer thing, but one used to it everything is all good. The only recommendation I could makes is that when you pop-up the resume due to inactivity dialogue, that the resume is an image, larger, centre justified, and maybe a brief description of why you're 'pausing the web page'
PS: I'm so NOT used to the whole streaming of new data thing that I still refresh excessively.
I can't tell you about KDE, but F10 in general has been leaps and bounds better for me in terms of HW support and application behaviour. Pulse seems to be pretty much plug and play except for the 2-3 places that you have to navigate in order to get everything wired right.
Just a note that -may- be applicable to you, I've had issues with my 'Audigy 1' in Fedora 10. switching to my on-board card made all issues disappear. Are you sure this isn't a driver issue, or maybe an erroneous assumption on the part of the driver providers?
I wish that this is addressed, by someone, but in the mean-time no Audigy for me.
PS: The issue crept up when upgrading and it affects both ALSA 5.1 (a52enc from self-compiled sources) and 2.0 stereo out. Playing through any media player, I would get skips of either the audio or video. Once switching to the Onboard card "VIA Technologies, Inc. VT1708/A [Azalia HDAC] (VIA High Definition Audio Controller)", there has never been a skip playing back anything. That is sending raw 5.1 through mini-dins which I'd rather not use, but thats life.
I would hope that anyone -informed- who want to use 'Free Redhat' would use Centos. Anyone using Fedora should realize that the OS is a testbed for enterprise Redhat Linux. That said, within a few weeks of a new release, they generally fix ~90% of the issues I have with it.
At work, my F10 PC has a performance problem with the Kernel Modeset free ATI drivers, so I had to turn those off.
At home, my Sound Blaster Audigy 1 card was causing all types of horrible performance problems which made my video playback almost unusable. Switching to my Mobo's internal audio eliminated the problem completely, so I suppose the card drivers are flaky.
Besides those listed, F10 is really really good. Its getting to the point that if I never played games, I wouldn't even bother having windows for anything.
Instead of polishing your knob in an article about how good you are, why not just TELL US what features makes the product so innovative than say 0.9.8, or 0.9.7, etc..
In terms of the poster's 'I'm the best' position, I'd say they fall flat in that regard as well.
1. For windows nothing can beat Media Player Classic. Nothing. It has just enough GUI to do what it was designed for, to play videos. It has all the configuration you'll ever need in the background, and if you don't it generally works out of the box for 90% of the things you want.
As for codecs, you have several options on how to get all the needed codecs, and you can bet that a large number of them support DxVA (where applicable) out of the box, which means you have a fast low overhead media player that plays pretty much everything you throw at it.
For Linux, that's a different story. Linux's equivalent of DirectShow(The decoding pipeline for media content) is gstreamer, but it suffers from a serious lack of adoption. We have Totem, but lets admit that if there's anything you need outside of the totem defaults, you're screwed.
The alternative is to use all-in-one-package media players. The obviously suffer in that if the codec / format / playback feature you're looking for isn't supported by the player, the whole stack becomes useless. But, this is sadly exactly what you're stuck with. Our options are: VLC/Xine/Mplayer and gui variants thereof.
VLC is fine, but its never had specifically good support on my hardware, and there are -many- videos that fail to play where other players can.
Xine is why software developers should never be put in charge of UI design. The UI stinks so badly, that the only time I ever open it is when all other players fail to play properly.
Mplayer is probably the most codec compatible player out there, but then again, there's no GUI for people to interact with. Unless you're a keyboard/command line nazi, you'll most likely decide that there's no point in Mplayer without one of its many available front-ends. I've tried a few over the years, and the only one that (finally) met my happy path requirements for > 80% of the time was SMPlayer. It is a great frontend to Mplayer, and gets my thumbs up. It keeps the complexity of selecting appropriate devices within the preferences if I really care to tweak them, but the out of box experience is also pretty good.
For anyone reading this post who is actually a contributor to these projects, PLEASE try to focus on supporting a pipelined system like gstreamer, or writing codecs that can be plugged in willy nilly instead of monolithic all-in.
I think a real winner on linux would be: 1. A user interface akin to SMPlayer, in terms of its toolbars, layouts, config (in general) 2. A container/codec glue that is well understood and powerful enough to support codecs, overlays, user input, etc.. I think gstreamer is this tool, but maybe it needs work on the input side of things *shrugs* 3. A set of simple codec/container implementations with simple APIs so that they can be plugged into any pipeline without gratuitous hacks. Ideally, these implementations could be interchangeable and upgradable without requiring recompilation of their glue layer
Apple, case closed. Having GPL 'protects' projects from corporate abuse is valid depending on your philosophical views. Really, BSD guys may not have cared about its use in macs, but maybe some did feel sad about it. At least the GPL protects against companies complete 'stealing/borrowing/whatever' of the base code without providing any functional enhancements that said company added to the base product.
You may be right that many Linux hackers don't care about their end users (or at least their obscure problems), but take companies like Redhat help to fill in the gaps. I use Fedora on a regular basis and love it. They (and all the other companies in this space) definitely fill in the gaps that a purely enthusiast OS wouldn't.
> like development
What exactly are you implying? If you're saying there aren't any good development tools, I'd say there are better developer tools on Linux than any other OS-specific tools, period.
IDE's are an issue, you have alternatives: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/ides.html As a 90% Java/10% C developer, I find eclipse better than anything else out there. Even their C development tools are beginning to rock. What exactly is lacking?
> reading email Last time I checked, this was a non-issue with all modern OS's, or do macs give you the extra reach around? What exactly is lacking?
> writing documents
OpenOffice 3.0 has all but replaced even my Windows Office installations. Once again, talking about absolute non-issues for all modern OS's.. keep trolling. What exactly is lacking?
> scanning documents I can't say for sure since I never scan documents, but I'm sure this is also taken care of. What exactly is lacking?
> VOIP *shrugs* I dunno, I don't use VOIP, but I know there's Skype and at least one other SIP dialer. What exactly is lacking?
Read about internationalized macros in Excel. They may have changed them recently to use opcodes, but I believe in earlier editions, Excel macros were stored in the native language of the document creator.
If you took a North American Excel doc and say read it in some parts of Europe or Asia, the macros wouldn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to cut it to you, but NAT is here to stay. As a security paradigm, there's no surface attack to a user's PC that isn't even visible.
Just a side note (I totally agree with you in concept) is that most of the things that you've listed have an impact on you in one way or another regardless of your preference. Your active choice of not doing something won't mitigate the effects of it upon your life:
Gay Marriage: Most likely won't directly affect you (unless you're gay of course).
Murder: Will affect you (or friends/family) if you do it or not.
Apple Store: The majority position of a system incompatible with one you choose to use means there are fewer chances that you'll get applications that you really want.
France: Pretty low affect besides trade deficits
Math: Your ignorance of math will only make you less valuable as a potential employee if everyone else knows it.
Enron: Caused such a big stink not just because a single company failed. It affected investor confidence in all American companies.
Sub Prime: Pretty much ditto of Enron. The irresponsible were punished along with the responsible.
I think we (Slashdot readers) get it by now what Apple's application development policies are. We don't need a weekly refresher of why Apple's policies suck. Please don't feed the trolls because this article much like the few before it contains contains nothing new that we shouldn't have known already. Someone makes a yes/no decision and you have to live with it.
Either two things will happen: Apple doesn't change their policies and we can assume as always that most applications that are perfectly legitimate but against Apple's corporate objectives will be canned, or that Apple decided that their policies are causing more harm than good and decide to change them. If the second case happens then please be my guess and post it.
This constant rhetoric over what should and what shouldn't be allowed is just fuelling a fire of debate that is ultimately as subjective as Apple's corporate policies.
With older film stock, its more important to deal with the loss of colour, ISO levels, the acceptable level of noise when the show was recorded, etc..
They can digitally clean up the picture to make the scenes more clear, but really, does cleaning up the picture on Star Trek TOS really improve the viewing experience? I mean really, the sets weren't exactly rocket science.
At least if they decided to remaster TNG, they could bring up the CGI to modern day levels making it more palitable to the younger generation without sacrificing the spirit of the source.
Hello Gnutella... ack, we've gone full circle!
Not terribly applicable, since all said professions use large arbitrary motions, but I do feel for the human statues. I think they'd be in the same boat as the users of said system.
Um, LDAP definitely exists on Windows 2000 since was the first Active Directory Operating system.
IPv6 isn't -in- the OS, but MS did allow an add-on to 2k that supported it. Since ipv6 adoption is as it is, this is hardly a selling / losing point.
Even on a 5 year plan today, I would not consider the lack of IPv6 to be a drawback of any given technology. It just isn't gathering tread.
2000 and XP were released a year apart with next to 100% API compatibility with one another. I fail to see how an app would ever choose to disable the ability to run on 2k.
If you want this in today's standards, imagine a company 5 years from now deciding to develop an application for Windows 7 and not allow it to be run on Windows Vista. Simply idiotic since API wise, they're basically the same.
Finally, if 2000 was anything like Win9x generation or maybe NT4 which lacks many common hardware profiles, there's no good reason for the platform to die at all. If MS wasn't out to just make money, they should've left 2k as the sole windows OS and simply build bigger and better features around them in the form of paid add-ons.
No, instead they send you through the upgrade treadmill so that everyone along the way can collect their checks for something that in the end will not improve end user productivity.
Their replacements would do the same thing over and over ad-infinitum, so what are you really advocating? I've worked in industry long enough to know that people don't change unless their forced to.
Even if every one of these companies did crash and burn, the executives still walk away filthy rich with the middle and lower tiers completely fucked. I fail to see how this encourages good business practices for those sitting in these positions of power.
PS: Capitalism may be an ideal that people aspire to, but I can't think of anywhere more than tiny island nations (embezzlement) that practice laissez faire capitalism. If anything, its been propped up by cold war paranoia as the bastion of human accomplishment. Too bad there wasn't a cheesy 70's exaggeration movie to exemplify the possible problems. Oh wait, there's rollerball...
They could sell each additional bundle offering separately, but people wouldn't buy them. But, if they call it Windows Ultimate, all the guys that need 'the best' OS will fork over the gold for it.
PS: I know friends that did that exactly with Vista...
Sounds like a class action suit just waiting to happen =)
Since most people (non business) bought perpetual licenses to XP, this will not happen period.
All discs should work as long as there aren't errors on the disc. If there are, make sure to get dd to skip errors. I believe this should work out.
There's still CSS on the ISO, so you'll need to play it through a player that can decrypt it, or find a tool to strip them out.
Don't use it. Its pretty simple folks. If you want to fight against software patents you will:
1. Boycott companies that actively engage in patent litigation (Against open source doubly)
2. Tell all your friends to stop using said companies products. Tell them why its bad for you in the end, and tell them alternative products / technologies that aren't stifling external creativity
3. Write a well worded letter to said company and detail why you have qualms with them. Make special note in the letter to outline:
- Your grievances
- How many friends you've convinced to stop using their product
- Alternative products / technologies that don't do whatever your grievance is
- Solutions - How to turn your utter bile hatred in said company into a customer again
Pointing out that you like their products but still refuse to respect their behaviour will make sure to whomever reads the letter that your hatred of their company is not out of some bias, but based purely on said behaviour.
> slow warm-up times
I have several bulbs at home I've never really paid attention to the 'warm-up times' problem. It could be a matter of the 'gold plated audio cables' syndrome where 99.9% of the population can't tell the difference and don't give a damn, but obviously the article poster has a rant to unleash.
> lower-than-advertised lifetimes
There will always be bulbs that fall below the standard estimated lifetime, so I don't know if this is just a matter of standard failure rates deviation, or a blatant lie by manufacturers. As for me, I've never had a dead CFL yet (several years of casual use), so here's hoping...
> hassles of disposing the mercury-containing bulbs
See last point
I'm a firefox user AND I've been using index2 for a while (Don't know how it got activated, just showed up one day). Should I assume the behaviours is about the same as now, but faster? If so, good job!
It takes some time to get used to the new timer thing, but one used to it everything is all good. The only recommendation I could makes is that when you pop-up the resume due to inactivity dialogue, that the resume is an image, larger, centre justified, and maybe a brief description of why you're 'pausing the web page'
PS: I'm so NOT used to the whole streaming of new data thing that I still refresh excessively.
I can't tell you about KDE, but F10 in general has been leaps and bounds better for me in terms of HW support and application behaviour. Pulse seems to be pretty much plug and play except for the 2-3 places that you have to navigate in order to get everything wired right.
Just a note that -may- be applicable to you, I've had issues with my 'Audigy 1' in Fedora 10. switching to my on-board card made all issues disappear. Are you sure this isn't a driver issue, or maybe an erroneous assumption on the part of the driver providers?
I wish that this is addressed, by someone, but in the mean-time no Audigy for me.
PS: The issue crept up when upgrading and it affects both ALSA 5.1 (a52enc from self-compiled sources) and 2.0 stereo out. Playing through any media player, I would get skips of either the audio or video. Once switching to the Onboard card "VIA Technologies, Inc. VT1708/A [Azalia HDAC] (VIA High Definition Audio Controller)", there has never been a skip playing back anything. That is sending raw 5.1 through mini-dins which I'd rather not use, but thats life.
I would hope that anyone -informed- who want to use 'Free Redhat' would use Centos. Anyone using Fedora should realize that the OS is a testbed for enterprise Redhat Linux. That said, within a few weeks of a new release, they generally fix ~90% of the issues I have with it.
At work, my F10 PC has a performance problem with the Kernel Modeset free ATI drivers, so I had to turn those off.
At home, my Sound Blaster Audigy 1 card was causing all types of horrible performance problems which made my video playback almost unusable. Switching to my Mobo's internal audio eliminated the problem completely, so I suppose the card drivers are flaky.
Besides those listed, F10 is really really good. Its getting to the point that if I never played games, I wouldn't even bother having windows for anything.
Instead of polishing your knob in an article about how good you are, why not just TELL US what features makes the product so innovative than say 0.9.8, or 0.9.7, etc..
In terms of the poster's 'I'm the best' position, I'd say they fall flat in that regard as well.
1. For windows nothing can beat Media Player Classic. Nothing. It has just enough GUI to do what it was designed for, to play videos. It has all the configuration you'll ever need in the background, and if you don't it generally works out of the box for 90% of the things you want.
As for codecs, you have several options on how to get all the needed codecs, and you can bet that a large number of them support DxVA (where applicable) out of the box, which means you have a fast low overhead media player that plays pretty much everything you throw at it.
For Linux, that's a different story. Linux's equivalent of DirectShow(The decoding pipeline for media content) is gstreamer, but it suffers from a serious lack of adoption. We have Totem, but lets admit that if there's anything you need outside of the totem defaults, you're screwed.
The alternative is to use all-in-one-package media players. The obviously suffer in that if the codec / format / playback feature you're looking for isn't supported by the player, the whole stack becomes useless. But, this is sadly exactly what you're stuck with. Our options are: VLC/Xine/Mplayer and gui variants thereof.
VLC is fine, but its never had specifically good support on my hardware, and there are -many- videos that fail to play where other players can.
Xine is why software developers should never be put in charge of UI design. The UI stinks so badly, that the only time I ever open it is when all other players fail to play properly.
Mplayer is probably the most codec compatible player out there, but then again, there's no GUI for people to interact with. Unless you're a keyboard/command line nazi, you'll most likely decide that there's no point in Mplayer without one of its many available front-ends. I've tried a few over the years, and the only one that (finally) met my happy path requirements for > 80% of the time was SMPlayer. It is a great frontend to Mplayer, and gets my thumbs up. It keeps the complexity of selecting appropriate devices within the preferences if I really care to tweak them, but the out of box experience is also pretty good.
For anyone reading this post who is actually a contributor to these projects, PLEASE try to focus on supporting a pipelined system like gstreamer, or writing codecs that can be plugged in willy nilly instead of monolithic all-in.
I think a real winner on linux would be:
1. A user interface akin to SMPlayer, in terms of its toolbars, layouts, config (in general)
2. A container/codec glue that is well understood and powerful enough to support codecs, overlays, user input, etc.. I think gstreamer is this tool, but maybe it needs work on the input side of things *shrugs*
3. A set of simple codec/container implementations with simple APIs so that they can be plugged into any pipeline without gratuitous hacks. Ideally, these implementations could be interchangeable and upgradable without requiring recompilation of their glue layer
Ack, that's about it.
Yes
Apple, case closed. Having GPL 'protects' projects from corporate abuse is valid depending on your philosophical views. Really, BSD guys may not have cared about its use in macs, but maybe some did feel sad about it. At least the GPL protects against companies complete 'stealing/borrowing/whatever' of the base code without providing any functional enhancements that said company added to the base product.
You may be right that many Linux hackers don't care about their end users (or at least their obscure problems), but take companies like Redhat help to fill in the gaps. I use Fedora on a regular basis and love it. They (and all the other companies in this space) definitely fill in the gaps that a purely enthusiast OS wouldn't.
> like development
What exactly are you implying? If you're saying there aren't any good development tools, I'd say there are better developer tools on Linux than any other OS-specific tools, period.
IDE's are an issue, you have alternatives:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/ides.html
As a 90% Java/10% C developer, I find eclipse better than anything else out there. Even their C development tools are beginning to rock.
What exactly is lacking?
> reading email
Last time I checked, this was a non-issue with all modern OS's, or do macs give you the extra reach around? What exactly is lacking?
> writing documents
OpenOffice 3.0 has all but replaced even my Windows Office installations. Once again, talking about absolute non-issues for all modern OS's.. keep trolling. What exactly is lacking?
> scanning documents
I can't say for sure since I never scan documents, but I'm sure this is also taken care of. What exactly is lacking?
> VOIP
*shrugs* I dunno, I don't use VOIP, but I know there's Skype and at least one other SIP dialer. What exactly is lacking?
> Linux sucks
Thanks for playing.
Too silly to be real; Too real to be fake; Too fake to be silly. So really, where does that leave the story?
Nope. I've got a few fans and I'm not a maker. Did you ever submit a story? That'd be my guess.
Read about internationalized macros in Excel. They may have changed them recently to use opcodes, but I believe in earlier editions, Excel macros were stored in the native language of the document creator.
If you took a North American Excel doc and say read it in some parts of Europe or Asia, the macros wouldn't work.