Just a question, what other games are there in that "etc etc" you ended with? You pretty much listed all of them right there, and they're just a series of 3D shooters.
Is it such an absurd concept for you that some people might actually prefer GNU/Linux to OS X for whatever reason?
No.
Seriously, could someone explain to me why similar remarks about Windows aren't modded up on stories about x86 hardware?
Sure. Because it's stupid to pay the money for Mac hardware only to not run OS X. You should have just bought a PC instead (Linux is all about the x86).
What's so special about OS X? Sure, it's a nice OS but in no way is it equal or better than Linux in every possible aspect and for everyone.
This question is irrelevant. The point is, it's stupid for someone to go out and buy Apple hardware that comes with OS X just to install Linu on it, when Linux will happily run on any cheap old PC you throw it at.
Linux has many things going for it that OS X does not. And even if it didn't, some people would use it just for the freedom. I personally have an iBook running Ubuntu and my sister is dual booting Fedora & OS X. I also have a friend using debian exclusively on his iBook for many years.
You know a lot of silly people! They could have bought cheap $700 laptops and installed the same software and saved a ton of cash, as well as getting support for x86 apps for which a lot more exist out there than for PPC.
Is it really such an amazing question to ask why someone would, instead of buying cheap commodity PC hardware, pay the extra money for integrated Apple hardware only to put Linux on it which could have easily run on the cheaper PC? What a waste.
No offense, but that makes it sound like you care more about ideology than about functionality. Which is cool if that's your thing, but for me, I'm not thinking about idealism when I need to get work done on a UNIX system. I just need something that actually works.
"The Death of the Music CD." Come on. We've been hearing that since 2000. Meanwhile, CD sales increase yearly.
The only thing I see that is successful enough to kill CDs is the iTunes Music Store. I'd love for DVD-Audio to take off for the increased audio resolution, though.
Dave Hyatt, who writes a blog about his development on Apple's Safari, has an amusing anecdote about developing CSS2 support in Safari, and how IE's piss-poor support of standards forced him to remove it in Safari.
From the blog:
"Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain.
While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario.
Lets say you have a div that is set to 300 pixels in CSS. You then put a 250 pixel wide float inside that div. Immediately after that you have a 100 pixel wide overflow:hidden div. All sizes have been specified in CSS.
Now here's the pop quiz. What do you think the layout should be? Should the overflow div: (a) Be on the same line with the float and spill out of the enclosing 300 pixel div (b) Be placed underneath the float, automatically clearing it because there is insufficient space for the overflow div next to the float
Before I give an answer, lets see what the CSS specification has to say on this issue. Section 9.5 on floats, fifth paragraph.
'The margin box of a table or an element in the normal flow that establishes a new block formatting context (such as an element with 'overflow' other than 'visible') must not overlap any floats in the same block formatting context as the element itself. If necessary, implementations should clear the said element by placing it below any preceding floats, but may place it adjacent to such floats if there is sufficient space.'
My interpretation of this language is that there must be sufficient space for the table or overflow:hidden element to fit within the containing block. If not, you should clear. That's what I implemented. So in my opinion the correct answer to the question above is (b).
I decided to see what other browsers did. I started with Gecko. Gecko chose (a). Gecko always does (a). It is at least consistent if - in my humble opinion - incorrect. Gecko chooses (a) regardless of whether you pick strict, almost strict or quirks mode.
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Naively I opted to implement (b) and to hope for the best. Unfortunately the bugs immediately started pouring in. finance.yahoo.com was broken for example because it used an old-style align table and relied on it not wrapping underneath the float. Undaunted, I simply added a strict mode/quirks mode check and opted to do (a) in quirks mode and (b) in strict mode.
The bugs kept coming in though. Next was versiontracker.com, a page that is actually in strict mode and relies on an overflow:hidden div to spill out of a containing block rather than wrapping.
So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can't be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.
It's a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either."
In a recent Fortune interview, Steve Jobs basically laughs this off and outright says Napster will fail. People want to "own" their music. Apple has actually done some research into how people form part of their identity through their music collection, and how distraught they are when they lose it due to losing their iPod, hardware failure, etc. People will feel like they're being forced to pay Napster forever to hear music they feel they already own. And because of the aforementioned identity issue, people will take it personally.
This is going to completely die. Apple has the right idea. Just pay $0.99 and you've got the song, even if you never buy another song from iTunes again. I don't want to feel tied down to Napster forever.
Windows succeeded for a very simple reason. Cheap PC clones. You had "PC-compatible" computers (remember that phrase?) that were getting cheaper because they were clones, and they were appearing everywhere. Windows was a cheap and easy GUI to place on them. I still remember my first thoughts when running Windows 3.1--"Cool, this is like the Macintosh but for PCs."
Windows is only everywhere because PCs were everywhere, and therefore Microsoft made enough money to finally release a good version of Windows some ten years later. And they're still patching it.
The reaction to that comment was so great, Kerry's official website pulled their link to the site with a statement that they didn't agree with such opinions.
Like with poor software, open source journalism also means having the freedom to say really stupid things (and delete the post later and backtrack about it).
Although I am a little surprised such a politically-minded website as DailyKos gets free press on Slashdot like that. I've never seen a link to LittleGreenFootballs or Powerline, even as they broke the biggest "closed source" journalism scam of the year--CBSNews' phony documents. If there was ever a case of open source journalism cracking open the flaws of closed source journalism, that would be it. But Slashdot rejected submissions about it. D'oh.
Translation: "I don't agree with the results of the test, so I'm just going to arbitrarily dismiss them for no other reason than I don't like Firefox being slower than Internet Explorer! So I'm just going to claim Firefox would rape Internet Explorer to placate my viewpoint."
The Moox Firefox install is actually slower than the standard Firefox versions distributed from Mozilla.org, even though it is supposedly optimised for my particular processor.
Surprisingly, Mozilla is now faster at most tasks than Firefox.
Again, I ask--what exactly is the point of Firefox these days? When it was being billed as the replacement for Mozilla's browser, it made more sense. But Firefox is neither faster or slimmer than the official Mozilla browser, and now it seems it's actually slower too!
I'm just curious what the incentive is supposed to be to use it over Mozilla.
No offense, but I think you're using a lot of fancy words to tapdance around the (commonly accepted) fact that Opera is the fastest browser, followed by IE due to its native ties with the system, followed by Firefox because it reimplements all its own widgets in XUL, etc.
I really don't think there's much more to it. I use Opera on Windows specifically because it is faster and uses half the memory footprint Firefox does.
No system is perfectly secure, but probably the best reason not to use Windows would be that you have to run with full administrator privileges most any app. Not that way on Linux, and even on OS X when you have an Admin account, you're not actually running as root.
Frankly, I'm surprised that after ten years of development on the NT product line by some very smart people, the introduction of it as the consumer codebase with Windows XP still required administrator privileges for just about everything. Granted, a lot of it was a problem of how the applications were written, but they should have then implemented some sort of protective sandbox for older apps. Microsoft never pushed the idea of moving things into a non-admin account. I'm not sure if they're doing it for Longhorn, either (I haven't heard anything, and I follow the news on Longhorn).
How I appear busy at work while fulfilling myself with my "distractions":
1.) Keep a floating command prompt open running netstat. It makes it look busy and important.
2.) Once in a while, ping 127.0.0.1. This makes me look like I'm typing something really important and examining very important output.
3.) Fire up a new browser window that opens the company website, then randomly click shit with an intense frown on your face as though looking for something important.
4.) Keep random sticky notes and papers sprawled around your keyboard, and randomly look over at them as though for reference. This is particularly useful when typing messageboard posts where people can hear your keyboard clacking away. You're not slacking; you're doing something important. You have scattered papers you keep looking at!
5.) Keep a spindle for your paper messages. Collect them on this spindle and situate it beside your monitor for a quick and easy "busily cluttered" look to your desk that makes you look slightly more busy.
6.) Have an old keyboard or other computer peripherals lying around at home? Bring them to the office and place them out of the way but in visible sight around your office/cubicle computer. Various important-looking computer parts, like an old non-functioning printer or a second keyboard "connected" to nothing, make you look like you're doing lots of crazy and important computer shit. For an added bonus, occasionally move your chair over and start clacking away on the non-functioning keyboard while looking at your monitor. Do an intense frown, say "hmm" importantly, and move back to your real keyboard and browse Slashdot some more.
7.) Try walking around a lot in a hurry. This makes you look busy and determined. The best strategy is to go the bathroom a lot and just pace for a minute inside. My strategy is to go to the water cooler a lot. Not only does this saturate me, but I'm seen moving all over the office busily and importantly when really I'm just taking a mental break at the water cooler and fantasizing about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.
I have more tips, and I'm sure you do, so let's share.
Whenever someone points out how fragmented Linux desktop is, people reference Freedesktop. But these interviews show that Freedesktop is barely making a difference. The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation, and the XFCE guy outright stats that they don't pay a lot of attention to it.
With this kind of lazy attitude towards a desktop standard, it'll be another five years from now that people will be claiming "2010 is the year of Linux on the desktop!" I'm sorry, but it's true.
A slanted E and an Intel logo are completely different from a big, red cartoon character devil. You're moronic if you think there is any similarity whatsoever.
Family photos have absolutely nothing to do with this, because those go on people's office desks, often out of the way, or in cubicle walls where customers don't see them anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a question, what other games are there in that "etc etc" you ended with? You pretty much listed all of them right there, and they're just a series of 3D shooters.
Is it such an absurd concept for you that some people might actually prefer GNU/Linux to OS X for whatever reason?
No.
Seriously, could someone explain to me why similar remarks about Windows aren't modded up on stories about x86 hardware?
Sure. Because it's stupid to pay the money for Mac hardware only to not run OS X. You should have just bought a PC instead (Linux is all about the x86).
What's so special about OS X? Sure, it's a nice OS but in no way is it equal or better than Linux in every possible aspect and for everyone.
This question is irrelevant. The point is, it's stupid for someone to go out and buy Apple hardware that comes with OS X just to install Linu on it, when Linux will happily run on any cheap old PC you throw it at.
Linux has many things going for it that OS X does not. And even if it didn't, some people would use it just for the freedom. I personally have an iBook running Ubuntu and my sister is dual booting Fedora & OS X. I also have a friend using debian exclusively on his iBook for many years.
You know a lot of silly people! They could have bought cheap $700 laptops and installed the same software and saved a ton of cash, as well as getting support for x86 apps for which a lot more exist out there than for PPC.
Is it really such an amazing question to ask why someone would, instead of buying cheap commodity PC hardware, pay the extra money for integrated Apple hardware only to put Linux on it which could have easily run on the cheaper PC? What a waste.
Ha, I can probably fit four Mac minis in my suitcase. Four UNIX servers! Will that get me a front page advertisement on Slashdot, too?
No offense, but that makes it sound like you care more about ideology than about functionality. Which is cool if that's your thing, but for me, I'm not thinking about idealism when I need to get work done on a UNIX system. I just need something that actually works.
"The Death of the Music CD." Come on. We've been hearing that since 2000. Meanwhile, CD sales increase yearly.
The only thing I see that is successful enough to kill CDs is the iTunes Music Store. I'd love for DVD-Audio to take off for the increased audio resolution, though.
You sound like every old parent from every decade stretching back to the 1940s. Just replace "random bits" with "random noise." ;-)
Dave Hyatt, who writes a blog about his development on Apple's Safari, has an amusing anecdote about developing CSS2 support in Safari, and how IE's piss-poor support of standards forced him to remove it in Safari.
From the blog:
"Sometimes trying to support the standards can be a real pain.
While trying to improve our CSS2 compliance, I recently did a big cleanup of our block layout code, including the code for handling floats. I made what I believed to be a fairly innocuous correction to follow the CSS2 specification. Here's the scenario.
Lets say you have a div that is set to 300 pixels in CSS. You then put a 250 pixel wide float inside that div. Immediately after that you have a 100 pixel wide overflow:hidden div. All sizes have been specified in CSS.
Now here's the pop quiz. What do you think the layout should be? Should the overflow div:
(a) Be on the same line with the float and spill out of the enclosing 300 pixel div
(b) Be placed underneath the float, automatically clearing it because there is insufficient space for
the overflow div next to the float
Before I give an answer, lets see what the CSS specification has to say on this issue. Section 9.5 on floats, fifth paragraph.
'The margin box of a table or an element in the normal flow that establishes a new block formatting context (such as an element with 'overflow' other than 'visible') must not overlap any floats in the same block formatting context as the element itself. If necessary, implementations should clear the said element by placing it below any preceding floats, but may place it adjacent to such floats if there is sufficient space.'
My interpretation of this language is that there must be sufficient space for the table or overflow:hidden element to fit within the containing block. If not, you should clear. That's what I implemented. So in my opinion the correct answer to the question above is (b).
I decided to see what other browsers did. I started with Gecko. Gecko chose (a). Gecko always does (a). It is at least consistent if - in my humble opinion - incorrect. Gecko chooses (a) regardless of whether you pick strict, almost strict or quirks mode.
Next I tried WinIE, and this is the part that blew my mind. Depending on whether the float was an image or a table, the float was left or right aligned, the table specified that it floated via the align attribute or the float CSS property, and on whether or not the normal flow element was declared as a sibling or not of the float, I could get completely different results! The level of inconsistency was astonishing.
I was able to watch WinIE do clipping in one case, to wrap in a second case, to not wrap in a third case, to overwrite content in a fourth case, all by just tweaking the parameters outlined above. It's no wonder Web designers have no idea how to code a page to standards when they have to deal with a layout engine that is so horribly inconsistent and buggy.
Naively I opted to implement (b) and to hope for the best. Unfortunately the bugs immediately started pouring in. finance.yahoo.com was broken for example because it used an old-style align table and relied on it not wrapping underneath the float. Undaunted, I simply added a strict mode/quirks mode check and opted to do (a) in quirks mode and (b) in strict mode.
The bugs kept coming in though. Next was versiontracker.com, a page that is actually in strict mode and relies on an overflow:hidden div to spill out of a containing block rather than wrapping.
So now I really have no choice. This is an example of where the CSS2 standard simply can't be followed because buggy layout engines have set a bad precedent that the rest of us have no choice but to follow.
It's a shame that Gecko does not do the right thing in strict mode at least, but I suppose they had no choice in the matter either."
Anything to appear relevant after all the IBM Cell buzz, I guess.
"I pronounce this DOA."
In a recent Fortune interview, Steve Jobs basically laughs this off and outright says Napster will fail. People want to "own" their music. Apple has actually done some research into how people form part of their identity through their music collection, and how distraught they are when they lose it due to losing their iPod, hardware failure, etc. People will feel like they're being forced to pay Napster forever to hear music they feel they already own. And because of the aforementioned identity issue, people will take it personally.
This is going to completely die. Apple has the right idea. Just pay $0.99 and you've got the song, even if you never buy another song from iTunes again. I don't want to feel tied down to Napster forever.
Windows succeeded for a very simple reason. Cheap PC clones. You had "PC-compatible" computers (remember that phrase?) that were getting cheaper because they were clones, and they were appearing everywhere. Windows was a cheap and easy GUI to place on them. I still remember my first thoughts when running Windows 3.1--"Cool, this is like the Macintosh but for PCs."
Windows is only everywhere because PCs were everywhere, and therefore Microsoft made enough money to finally release a good version of Windows some ten years later. And they're still patching it.
The reaction to that comment was so great, Kerry's official website pulled their link to the site with a statement that they didn't agree with such opinions.
Like with poor software, open source journalism also means having the freedom to say really stupid things (and delete the post later and backtrack about it).
Although I am a little surprised such a politically-minded website as DailyKos gets free press on Slashdot like that. I've never seen a link to LittleGreenFootballs or Powerline, even as they broke the biggest "closed source" journalism scam of the year--CBSNews' phony documents. If there was ever a case of open source journalism cracking open the flaws of closed source journalism, that would be it. But Slashdot rejected submissions about it. D'oh.
From the article:
The performance of K-Meleon and Epiphany was similar to the performance of Mozilla and Firefox on the same platform.
Translation: "I don't agree with the results of the test, so I'm just going to arbitrarily dismiss them for no other reason than I don't like Firefox being slower than Internet Explorer! So I'm just going to claim Firefox would rape Internet Explorer to placate my viewpoint."
As far as "cold starts," keep in mind that 90% of IE loads into memory when Windows boots up
This is a myth. I can fire up IE5 under Wine on Suse 9.2, and it is still faster than Firefox.
In addition, there are preload options for Mozilla/Firefox anyway.
From the article:
The Moox Firefox install is actually slower than the standard Firefox versions distributed from Mozilla.org, even though it is supposedly optimised for my particular processor.
From the article:
Surprisingly, Mozilla is now faster at most tasks than Firefox.
Again, I ask--what exactly is the point of Firefox these days? When it was being billed as the replacement for Mozilla's browser, it made more sense. But Firefox is neither faster or slimmer than the official Mozilla browser, and now it seems it's actually slower too!
I'm just curious what the incentive is supposed to be to use it over Mozilla.
No offense, but I think you're using a lot of fancy words to tapdance around the (commonly accepted) fact that Opera is the fastest browser, followed by IE due to its native ties with the system, followed by Firefox because it reimplements all its own widgets in XUL, etc.
I really don't think there's much more to it. I use Opera on Windows specifically because it is faster and uses half the memory footprint Firefox does.
...this:
In a follow-up to yesterday's story
Sheesh.
No system is perfectly secure, but probably the best reason not to use Windows would be that you have to run with full administrator privileges most any app. Not that way on Linux, and even on OS X when you have an Admin account, you're not actually running as root.
Frankly, I'm surprised that after ten years of development on the NT product line by some very smart people, the introduction of it as the consumer codebase with Windows XP still required administrator privileges for just about everything. Granted, a lot of it was a problem of how the applications were written, but they should have then implemented some sort of protective sandbox for older apps. Microsoft never pushed the idea of moving things into a non-admin account. I'm not sure if they're doing it for Longhorn, either (I haven't heard anything, and I follow the news on Longhorn).
How I appear busy at work while fulfilling myself with my "distractions":
1.) Keep a floating command prompt open running netstat. It makes it look busy and important.
2.) Once in a while, ping 127.0.0.1. This makes me look like I'm typing something really important and examining very important output.
3.) Fire up a new browser window that opens the company website, then randomly click shit with an intense frown on your face as though looking for something important.
4.) Keep random sticky notes and papers sprawled around your keyboard, and randomly look over at them as though for reference. This is particularly useful when typing messageboard posts where people can hear your keyboard clacking away. You're not slacking; you're doing something important. You have scattered papers you keep looking at!
5.) Keep a spindle for your paper messages. Collect them on this spindle and situate it beside your monitor for a quick and easy "busily cluttered" look to your desk that makes you look slightly more busy.
6.) Have an old keyboard or other computer peripherals lying around at home? Bring them to the office and place them out of the way but in visible sight around your office/cubicle computer. Various important-looking computer parts, like an old non-functioning printer or a second keyboard "connected" to nothing, make you look like you're doing lots of crazy and important computer shit. For an added bonus, occasionally move your chair over and start clacking away on the non-functioning keyboard while looking at your monitor. Do an intense frown, say "hmm" importantly, and move back to your real keyboard and browse Slashdot some more.
7.) Try walking around a lot in a hurry. This makes you look busy and determined. The best strategy is to go the bathroom a lot and just pace for a minute inside. My strategy is to go to the water cooler a lot. Not only does this saturate me, but I'm seen moving all over the office busily and importantly when really I'm just taking a mental break at the water cooler and fantasizing about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.
I have more tips, and I'm sure you do, so let's share.
NOD32 provides the best antivirus protection and has consistently won numerous awards that Norton can't even touch.
Want evidence of how solid it is? NOD32 is the antivirus app used on Microsoft's corporate networks...
Whenever someone points out how fragmented Linux desktop is, people reference Freedesktop. But these interviews show that Freedesktop is barely making a difference. The KDE mentions a little bit of cooperation, and the XFCE guy outright stats that they don't pay a lot of attention to it.
With this kind of lazy attitude towards a desktop standard, it'll be another five years from now that people will be claiming "2010 is the year of Linux on the desktop!" I'm sorry, but it's true.
A slanted E and an Intel logo are completely different from a big, red cartoon character devil. You're moronic if you think there is any similarity whatsoever.
Family photos have absolutely nothing to do with this, because those go on people's office desks, often out of the way, or in cubicle walls where customers don't see them anyway.
Next.
Oh, give me a break. The Windows logo and the Apple logo are WORLDS APART from a big, red cartoon character devil with a pitchfork.
Again, it's no different from having Bugs Bunny eating a carrot.
I don't need to be "ashamed" for not wanting a cartoon character on the computers our clients see every day.
Next.