Actually, a lot of code from OpenBSD ends up in FreeBSD. Look at the PF firewall, many WLAN drivers, etc.
Indeed it does, and if you were to have read my comment, you might note that I was careful to point out project management. Whether the product is shared or not is largely moot since the entire objective of this thread was over how a project is managed.
BSD has terrible driver support compared to Linux.
First, I don't intend to suggest you're wrong. I am curious as to why you have arrived at this conclusion. My own personal experiences have been a bit different. (Although, I have only used FreeBSD on servers and under a very limited capacity on the desktop--I assume that's where your gripe exists.)
Perhaps Alan can come over to the FreeBSD camp where we are a bit more friendly. He's a good guy and will compliment any project he latches onto.
Oh boy, I can't agree more with this statement. I realize this is anecdotal, but here's my own personal experience...
In the Gentoo Freenode channel, it was difficult to so much as type without bumping into someone's ego. Participants were generally rude, crude, and--perhaps most ironically--threatened to kick people for using swear words. I have no idea if this has changed at all in the 4 or 5 years since I last joined... but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Contrasted with the various FreeBSD channels I used to join infrequently, the experience was on the whole much better. People were friendlier, had a sense of humor, were helpful, and didn't get their underpants in a dozen knots over something incidental like a single, mostly unoffensive swear word. Again, it's been years since I participated in that as well and perhaps the FreeBSD channels have changed...
Personally, I doubt it. It's a cultural difference, I think. The BSD crowds seem more product-driven (let's get Y done) versus some Linux distros that seem process-driven (I don't like how you're doing X and it doesn't matter if we're making Y).
This, of course, is purely anecdotal. You don't have to agree with it because it was my personal experience, and as such, FreeBSD folks have come off to me as MUCH more friendly and cooperative.
If you refuse to use software developed by a person who flamed someone else, then I assume you're not familiar with Theo de Raadt?
The OP wasn't specific about which BSD variant he would switch to; neither is de Raadt representative of how all the BSDs are managed. FreeBSD's governance structure has worked marvelously well over the years, so I would say it's unfair to implicitly lump every BSD under the same umbrella as OpenBSD and its management.
(I realize that may not have been your intent, but you used the same generalizations as the OP. Just being fair here.:)
There actually are a lot of very interesting transformations that a warming earth could bring us, many of which are arguably positive (making much more of Canada, Russia and Scandinavia accessible to large-scale habitation; increased access to existing tundra for growing; etc.)
Although, if we enter a drastic cooling period (even a mini ice age as has happened before), those same location will suddenly become much less appealing.
You could have asked Google before discounting his claim entirely. After about a 5 minutes' search, I found at least tworesources of note. Here's a blurb you might find interesting:
Although the Vikings could not know it, their movement north during the Medieval Warm Period of AD 1000-1400 represented a pattern that had occurred many times before in the human past. Throughout prehistory and history, peoples have shifted their range northward in response to improved climates. Conversely, they have sometimes retreated from higher latitudes during phases of colder climate.
Although I was not able to find any references that the Vikings made use of a northern route into Siberia, the general understanding is that a warm period occurred during this time that would have (potentially) opened up parts of the northern sea routes to curious travelers.
Naturally, this doesn't fit in well with the notion that never before has enough warming occurred to have accomplished this. It's telling that the parent is rated +5, insightful when he could have spent a couple of minutes (just as I did) in effort to disprove the original poster's claim.
I'm not suggesting whether the original poster is correct as I haven't found evidence to prove it, but near as I can tell from the resources available from Google, it appears he may very well be correct.
If it reboots non-instantly and not with a blue screen, just exactly the same way that it would if you pressed the power button, and it wasn't a virus, I would have narrows it down to the power switch awfully quickly.
Except if it's blown caps on the video card.
I had exactly that situation happen with my desktop, and it was the most unusual thing. The machine was working fine until it mysteriously rebooted while I was working on some code. At first, I wasn't quite sure what was happening; being as I was in Windows at the time, I attributed it to a faulty driver (Creative sucks) minus the BSoD. So, I booted it back up, typed in my password--annnnnd... Down it went again. At that point, I figured it was something wrong with Windows. I booted to Gentoo--X loaded, I typed in my password, and it did precisely the same thing.
Of course, when two OSes presented identical behaviors, I began to suspect it was hardware. If I had the foresight to realize that it only happened after higher video modes were displayed for greater than 5-10 seconds, I suppose I would have suspected the video card was at fault. To be honest, though, I wasn't sure exactly what component was the culprit. It was also very late (and very dark), and after a couple of tries, the machine stopped booting completely.
It wasn't until the following morning when I was getting ready to remove the RAM that I discovered the fault. I pulled the video card out and noticed a tell-tale brown stain coating the tops of four caps and the mystery immediately fell into place. Adding insult to injury, I had heard a couple of loud pops about a month prior to the incident, checked for blown caps on the motherboard and completely ignored the video card. Lesson learned, I suppose, but the interesting thing is that sometimes electrical faults can be misleading as to the cause without careful examination. My initial inclination after realizing the fault wasn't software was, in rough order, 1) power supply, 2) memory, 3) CPU. Wrong? Yeah, probably. I'm not a repair guy by trade, but I've had my share of weird problems and managed a fair bit of hardware. Finding the caps was something of a stroke of luck.
I'd definitely believe that your story is common across the country, and here's why:
My father is an electrical engineer and worked for the defense industry. While he made rather good money, every engineer in his department was nearing retirement age. No new engineers were being hired--period. Sure, you could move to another area and work for the Army or the likes--but how long would that last? Most places have been laying engineers off, if they haven't retired, and new hires are likely to be technicians that are there exclusively to do the customer's bidding (like Boeing who has their own engineers anyway!).
And then we wonder why we're having such a hard time in math and science... No one goes into engineering now because the demand is so low! That we "don't need" engineers seems to be something of a cop out, and I suspect we're going to regret it in a few years.
(Sorry for my bad english. I am an amateur after all;) )
I know you were jesting, but I feel the need to tell you that your English is far, far better than that of most native speakers. I've always admired those who can speak my native tongue far better than I could ever hope to speak theirs.
I disagree - with the exception of religious conservatives, sex almost always comes first.
I was going to answer your comment based upon the prospect that it appear to imply religious conservatives as anti-sex until I realized upon closer inspection that you're probably referring to the "sex first, marriage later" behavior that is rather common in our society. In that case, you are correct.
However, (and please don't feel that I'm picking on you in particular--I have no idea what your beliefs are since that one statement doesn't tell enough to share with me your ideologies) there are some individuals who mistakenly believe that religious conservatives are anti-sex, anti-birth control and see it exclusively as a tool for procreation. While there are some who do genuinely believe this--I know of a few who truly do believe this line of reasoning--not all of us do. There are some of us (perhaps a small minority) that see utility in birth control--albeit within the context of marriage. Reading Paul's letters to the Corinthians sheds an interesting light on the notion of sex and its role, and it grows much more difficult to argue the "sex for procreation only" stance. To this extent, I disagree with those who believe sex is exclusively the domain of procreation even if I may be politically aligned with their beliefs.
Along these lines, this is one such thing that has often surprised with some religious conservatives (many of whom are NOT Catholic but protestant). Many of them agree with and believe many of the ideals that started in the Catholic church--including some the Pope has rescinded! It's amazing what a difference it makes to read the religious texts for yourself!
But no, I don't think it's fair to tar all of us with the same brush as some people are wont to do. Perhaps those who feel as I do would be considered more socially liberal (particularly with sex and its kin), although I can't say I'd be particularly fond of that label.;)
Detonating a giant fucking space bomb over the ocean to "save lives" seems a bit silly. It's not like they're launching it in downtown Pittsburgh with a flight path over Manhattan.
Depending on how the rocket has failed, it isn't guaranteed to be flying over the ocean. It could very well be flying out of control heading west.
a) If you are a "Desktop Linux" user running actual Desktop applications, that means you lose most of your unsaved work (if there is a way to not lose the unsaved work, please let me know). b) If you use X as just a way to run screen/vi/emacs and browsers, then you are less affected.
Basically if I let my mom/uncle/aunt use "Desktop Linux" and X locks up, it's effectively as bad as a BSOD for them.
Thank you for point this out. That was more or less what I was hoping readers would have garnered from my statements, but evidently they're too busy focusing on slightly incorrect (I'll admit it it!) semantics in my choice of words. Never mind, as you said, the end result is identical for end users who haven't a clue how X works.
I deeply appreciate that you have the insight to have caught this and clarified in terms I could not. Thank you.
That's not a "complete freeze". When the machine literally hangs (infinite loop in a driver or something) or shuts off spontaneously or kernel panics and halts, that's a complete freeze.
This is ridiculous. If we're going to split hairs over semantics, then I would suggest that the OP should have stated that he was suffering from kernel panics. You'll notice that I didn't specify what "completely froze." Had I the foresight to consider that a number of posters would be complaining about my choice of words, I would have specified a "complete freeze of X."
OTOH I've had beachballs where ssh wasn't working, too.
To be honest, I've very seldom had kernel panics that weren't the result of my omission of something important, like building a controller module into the kernel. I think the last panic I suffered as a result of some driver weirdness was probably in 2000-2001. My current Gentoo install has only suffered a "complete freeze" as a result of borked NVIDIA drivers.
But yes, complaining about semantics aside, I agree. My choice of words could have been better.
It's ironic in the sense that while you may have lost all of your work, you still have access to the machine to (hopefully) correct the problem that caused it.
Thank goodness someone else understands. I'm curious if you suffer from the same affliction as I: Do you tend to open nearly anything that looks remotely interesting on the off-chance you might go back to it later? I've done that more often than I care to admit, though most of my tabs tend to be related to documentation and the likes. Oh, and probably about 20-30 forgotten Google searches.
It's probably none of my business, but I'm really rather curious what habits other "tab mongers" have! (My meager all-time-high of 330 tabs is pale in contrast to yours!)
Has anyone notice performance degradation in 3.5? Opening a slew of bookmarked pages into tabs tends to make it feel like my internet connection has slowed down. Yet when all the tabs load, they all respond snappily.
I have, especially with > 200 tabs open at a time. But, that's more an artifact of my insanity and less a representation of a common use case among users. I know of others who tend to have in excess of 400 open, but I don't imagine they're more than 1% of the user base.
Lockups I have seen, too, in both linux and windows. Lots of cases is hardware problems, but your problem sounds like a driver issue. Using proprietary drivers, perhaps?
This is true. I've had my share of complete freezes under Linux. Ironically though, SSH access to the box still typically works and I can kill X if ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work. It's rare to have a freeze that completely evicts all sense of response from the system (though I've had this happen before).
Interestingly, the last unusual behavior I had under Linux was when a video card blew 4 out of 7 or 8 capacitors. That was a real treat.
I really don't understand this. I mean, all you have to do is plug it in. That's it. Nothing more.
That's it? iTunes will magically know all of the songs the user wants to copy to the iPod without any user input whatsoever? C'mon now, that's exaggerating just a little. (Yes, I realize iTunes can manage your music collection for you--which is an awful feature--but for individuals who have 20-100GiB of music, it's impossible to add it all to an iPod with a capacity of As I type this I've just picked up the iPhone and docked it. I get a 'Sync in progress' message on the phone, and then it goes away. All done. Total time about 13 seconds.
How much easier can it be ?
I'd imagine you're using OS X.
Aside from that, it's interesting that only the synchronization issue in my brief rant is what you elected to respond to. I refuse to reinstall iTunes, but I would certainly hope that it was resolved. Then again, I have a first generation Nano, so perhaps it's also a hardware issue.;)
Regardless, if I can't teach my mum how to use the iTunes interface for adding songs to her iPod, what use is it? You can argue 'til you have a coronary about how vastly superior the software is, but until you are aware that some users have different expectations of software based upon past experience, it won't really matter much. Maybe you'll grant me that much, yes?
And I don't think anyone's going to argue there's a different corporate culture at Ford than Toyota and it translates directly to the products those respective brands produce.
Yes, there's a different corporate culture, but it has less to do with the product than with the fact that Ford and Toyota are for profit institutions. Although, be they for profit or not, that still doesn't negate the OP's point (I'll quote the whole thing since you only quoted his last sentence and some readers might be entertained to take it out of context):
The points he discusses in his video revolve around conducting adequate testing of the product and having the developers use the to-be-released system rather than throwing something out as a release and moving on. His points about managing the release process are just as valid if they were applied to manufacturing and releasing cars, paper products, or skateboards as they are to operating systems.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you're implicating the OP was incorrect in suggesting that Theo's points are applicable to industry as a whole? The part I quoted (emphasis mine) seems to be good advice for any firm, regardless of product, service, or creed. I'd appreciate clarification if you would be so kind.
Isn't that grasping a bit? Her answer to Gibson, which you conveniently forgot to include, was:
GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?
PALIN: Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it's in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.
What's so wrong with that? Besides cherry-picking your quotes, of course.;)
I suspect going into lots of details is too far off-topic for this discussion, but if you search the Slashdot archives for stories in this area, we've definitely had much deeper exploration of this topic in the past.
Although I use GiMP for a lot of things, I'd like to add that their bump mapping plugins--and a few other plugins (yes, including clouds)--are really sub-par compared to Photoshop.
Typgraphical work has gotten markedly better in GiMP over the years, but even using "force auto-hinter" on some glyphs just doesn't look quite right.
In response to the OP (not you, ABG): GiMP can do some amazing things for a F/OSS project, but it's also sorely lacking. I use it regularly, and I absolutely enjoy certain aspects of the UI that I wish would be borrowed by other applications (the densely packed right-click menu was originally something I though undesirable, but I find myself right-clicking in OpenOffice sometimes, expecting to see things that exist in the top-level menus). There are some things, however, that GiMP really cannot do. Citation needed? No problem: Look up stone textures. There are quite a few really incredible ones for Photoshop out there that look realistic. You can't achieve the same results in GiMP because the plugin (bump maps!) sucks. Yes, I've tried, and no, it doesn't work nearly as well.
It's anecdotal, I know, but among my circle of contacts, I can't think of anyone who actually likes iTunes. It's a bloated, awful piece of software.
it just happens to be the easiest way of syncing your iPod,
...If by "just happens," you mean "was designed for the express purpose of."
Which is funny, because iPods can be synced more easily using Winamp than with iTunes. My mum can figure out how to use Winamp to sync her iPod, but it was hell trying to show her how to use iTunes. So much for Apple being king of usability.
No, most people don't know what those are. Also, they blow in comparison. Also, last I checked, WinAmp also could sync iPods, as can DoubleTwist, and probably some others. People don't use them. I know about them and know how to work them and I don't use them.
I dunno, since I discovered Winamp can sync iPods, all of my friends who own the devices have ditched iTunes. Again, totally anecdotal evidence, but I suspect that the only reason why iTunes is in as widespread use as it is for syncing iPods is because it comes with them. Given a choice and some education, I'm sure current iTunes users (under Windows) probably wouldn't use it. Most Windows users would probably stick with WMP simply because they're most familiar with it (sadly). Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with using what you're most familiar with.
Many times I've seen people fighting over the GPL/BSD issue here and not ever once they agreed beforehand what do they mean by "users", "freedom", "better", etc. - heavy object throwing took over.
I've always likened it to the BSD license being "free, as in beer"--free beer means you can do whatever you want with it, even if you want to resell it later. The GPL, on the other hand, is "free, as in speech." You can't really "sell" free speech, and anyone borrowing your ideas is doing exactly that--and they're free to build upon them.
Outrageous? Maybe. Off-base? Probably. It seems easier to use familiar analogies when explaining licenses to those who haven't any clue what this BSGPMOZWhat license cruft is in the first place.
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Indeed it does, and if you were to have read my comment, you might note that I was careful to point out project management. Whether the product is shared or not is largely moot since the entire objective of this thread was over how a project is managed.
First, I don't intend to suggest you're wrong. I am curious as to why you have arrived at this conclusion. My own personal experiences have been a bit different. (Although, I have only used FreeBSD on servers and under a very limited capacity on the desktop--I assume that's where your gripe exists.)
Oh boy, I can't agree more with this statement. I realize this is anecdotal, but here's my own personal experience...
In the Gentoo Freenode channel, it was difficult to so much as type without bumping into someone's ego. Participants were generally rude, crude, and--perhaps most ironically--threatened to kick people for using swear words. I have no idea if this has changed at all in the 4 or 5 years since I last joined... but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Contrasted with the various FreeBSD channels I used to join infrequently, the experience was on the whole much better. People were friendlier, had a sense of humor, were helpful, and didn't get their underpants in a dozen knots over something incidental like a single, mostly unoffensive swear word. Again, it's been years since I participated in that as well and perhaps the FreeBSD channels have changed...
Personally, I doubt it. It's a cultural difference, I think. The BSD crowds seem more product-driven (let's get Y done) versus some Linux distros that seem process-driven (I don't like how you're doing X and it doesn't matter if we're making Y).
This, of course, is purely anecdotal. You don't have to agree with it because it was my personal experience, and as such, FreeBSD folks have come off to me as MUCH more friendly and cooperative.
The OP wasn't specific about which BSD variant he would switch to; neither is de Raadt representative of how all the BSDs are managed. FreeBSD's governance structure has worked marvelously well over the years, so I would say it's unfair to implicitly lump every BSD under the same umbrella as OpenBSD and its management.
(I realize that may not have been your intent, but you used the same generalizations as the OP. Just being fair here. :)
Although, if we enter a drastic cooling period (even a mini ice age as has happened before), those same location will suddenly become much less appealing.
You could have asked Google before discounting his claim entirely. After about a 5 minutes' search, I found at least two resources of note. Here's a blurb you might find interesting:
Although I was not able to find any references that the Vikings made use of a northern route into Siberia, the general understanding is that a warm period occurred during this time that would have (potentially) opened up parts of the northern sea routes to curious travelers.
Naturally, this doesn't fit in well with the notion that never before has enough warming occurred to have accomplished this. It's telling that the parent is rated +5, insightful when he could have spent a couple of minutes (just as I did) in effort to disprove the original poster's claim.
I'm not suggesting whether the original poster is correct as I haven't found evidence to prove it, but near as I can tell from the resources available from Google, it appears he may very well be correct.
With this reasoning, millipedes either shouldn't exist or should have massive brains, right?
I, for one, welcome our many legged, slithering overlords!
Except if it's blown caps on the video card.
I had exactly that situation happen with my desktop, and it was the most unusual thing. The machine was working fine until it mysteriously rebooted while I was working on some code. At first, I wasn't quite sure what was happening; being as I was in Windows at the time, I attributed it to a faulty driver (Creative sucks) minus the BSoD. So, I booted it back up, typed in my password--annnnnd... Down it went again. At that point, I figured it was something wrong with Windows. I booted to Gentoo--X loaded, I typed in my password, and it did precisely the same thing.
Of course, when two OSes presented identical behaviors, I began to suspect it was hardware. If I had the foresight to realize that it only happened after higher video modes were displayed for greater than 5-10 seconds, I suppose I would have suspected the video card was at fault. To be honest, though, I wasn't sure exactly what component was the culprit. It was also very late (and very dark), and after a couple of tries, the machine stopped booting completely.
It wasn't until the following morning when I was getting ready to remove the RAM that I discovered the fault. I pulled the video card out and noticed a tell-tale brown stain coating the tops of four caps and the mystery immediately fell into place. Adding insult to injury, I had heard a couple of loud pops about a month prior to the incident, checked for blown caps on the motherboard and completely ignored the video card. Lesson learned, I suppose, but the interesting thing is that sometimes electrical faults can be misleading as to the cause without careful examination. My initial inclination after realizing the fault wasn't software was, in rough order, 1) power supply, 2) memory, 3) CPU. Wrong? Yeah, probably. I'm not a repair guy by trade, but I've had my share of weird problems and managed a fair bit of hardware. Finding the caps was something of a stroke of luck.
I'd definitely believe that your story is common across the country, and here's why:
My father is an electrical engineer and worked for the defense industry. While he made rather good money, every engineer in his department was nearing retirement age. No new engineers were being hired--period. Sure, you could move to another area and work for the Army or the likes--but how long would that last? Most places have been laying engineers off, if they haven't retired, and new hires are likely to be technicians that are there exclusively to do the customer's bidding (like Boeing who has their own engineers anyway!).
And then we wonder why we're having such a hard time in math and science... No one goes into engineering now because the demand is so low! That we "don't need" engineers seems to be something of a cop out, and I suspect we're going to regret it in a few years.
I know you were jesting, but I feel the need to tell you that your English is far, far better than that of most native speakers. I've always admired those who can speak my native tongue far better than I could ever hope to speak theirs.
I was going to answer your comment based upon the prospect that it appear to imply religious conservatives as anti-sex until I realized upon closer inspection that you're probably referring to the "sex first, marriage later" behavior that is rather common in our society. In that case, you are correct.
However, (and please don't feel that I'm picking on you in particular--I have no idea what your beliefs are since that one statement doesn't tell enough to share with me your ideologies) there are some individuals who mistakenly believe that religious conservatives are anti-sex, anti-birth control and see it exclusively as a tool for procreation. While there are some who do genuinely believe this--I know of a few who truly do believe this line of reasoning--not all of us do. There are some of us (perhaps a small minority) that see utility in birth control--albeit within the context of marriage. Reading Paul's letters to the Corinthians sheds an interesting light on the notion of sex and its role, and it grows much more difficult to argue the "sex for procreation only" stance. To this extent, I disagree with those who believe sex is exclusively the domain of procreation even if I may be politically aligned with their beliefs.
Along these lines, this is one such thing that has often surprised with some religious conservatives (many of whom are NOT Catholic but protestant). Many of them agree with and believe many of the ideals that started in the Catholic church--including some the Pope has rescinded! It's amazing what a difference it makes to read the religious texts for yourself!
But no, I don't think it's fair to tar all of us with the same brush as some people are wont to do. Perhaps those who feel as I do would be considered more socially liberal (particularly with sex and its kin), although I can't say I'd be particularly fond of that label. ;)
Depending on how the rocket has failed, it isn't guaranteed to be flying over the ocean. It could very well be flying out of control heading west.
Thank you for point this out. That was more or less what I was hoping readers would have garnered from my statements, but evidently they're too busy focusing on slightly incorrect (I'll admit it it!) semantics in my choice of words. Never mind, as you said, the end result is identical for end users who haven't a clue how X works.
I deeply appreciate that you have the insight to have caught this and clarified in terms I could not. Thank you.
This is ridiculous. If we're going to split hairs over semantics, then I would suggest that the OP should have stated that he was suffering from kernel panics. You'll notice that I didn't specify what "completely froze." Had I the foresight to consider that a number of posters would be complaining about my choice of words, I would have specified a "complete freeze of X."
To be honest, I've very seldom had kernel panics that weren't the result of my omission of something important, like building a controller module into the kernel. I think the last panic I suffered as a result of some driver weirdness was probably in 2000-2001. My current Gentoo install has only suffered a "complete freeze" as a result of borked NVIDIA drivers.
But yes, complaining about semantics aside, I agree. My choice of words could have been better.
It's ironic in the sense that while you may have lost all of your work, you still have access to the machine to (hopefully) correct the problem that caused it.
Thank goodness someone else understands. I'm curious if you suffer from the same affliction as I: Do you tend to open nearly anything that looks remotely interesting on the off-chance you might go back to it later? I've done that more often than I care to admit, though most of my tabs tend to be related to documentation and the likes. Oh, and probably about 20-30 forgotten Google searches.
It's probably none of my business, but I'm really rather curious what habits other "tab mongers" have! (My meager all-time-high of 330 tabs is pale in contrast to yours!)
I have, especially with > 200 tabs open at a time. But, that's more an artifact of my insanity and less a representation of a common use case among users. I know of others who tend to have in excess of 400 open, but I don't imagine they're more than 1% of the user base.
I love my tabs.
This is true. I've had my share of complete freezes under Linux. Ironically though, SSH access to the box still typically works and I can kill X if ctrl+alt+backspace doesn't work. It's rare to have a freeze that completely evicts all sense of response from the system (though I've had this happen before).
Interestingly, the last unusual behavior I had under Linux was when a video card blew 4 out of 7 or 8 capacitors. That was a real treat.
That's it? iTunes will magically know all of the songs the user wants to copy to the iPod without any user input whatsoever? C'mon now, that's exaggerating just a little. (Yes, I realize iTunes can manage your music collection for you--which is an awful feature--but for individuals who have 20-100GiB of music, it's impossible to add it all to an iPod with a capacity of As I type this I've just picked up the iPhone and docked it. I get a 'Sync in progress' message on the phone, and then it goes away. All done. Total time about 13 seconds.
How much easier can it be ?
I'd imagine you're using OS X.
Aside from that, it's interesting that only the synchronization issue in my brief rant is what you elected to respond to. I refuse to reinstall iTunes, but I would certainly hope that it was resolved. Then again, I have a first generation Nano, so perhaps it's also a hardware issue. ;)
Regardless, if I can't teach my mum how to use the iTunes interface for adding songs to her iPod, what use is it? You can argue 'til you have a coronary about how vastly superior the software is, but until you are aware that some users have different expectations of software based upon past experience, it won't really matter much. Maybe you'll grant me that much, yes?
Especially for the beastie daemon. I just had a rather odd mental image of him in a "naughty suit."
Yes, there's a different corporate culture, but it has less to do with the product than with the fact that Ford and Toyota are for profit institutions. Although, be they for profit or not, that still doesn't negate the OP's point (I'll quote the whole thing since you only quoted his last sentence and some readers might be entertained to take it out of context):
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you're implicating the OP was incorrect in suggesting that Theo's points are applicable to industry as a whole? The part I quoted (emphasis mine) seems to be good advice for any firm, regardless of product, service, or creed. I'd appreciate clarification if you would be so kind.
Isn't that grasping a bit? Her answer to Gibson, which you conveniently forgot to include, was:
What's so wrong with that? Besides cherry-picking your quotes, of course. ;)
Although I use GiMP for a lot of things, I'd like to add that their bump mapping plugins--and a few other plugins (yes, including clouds)--are really sub-par compared to Photoshop.
Typgraphical work has gotten markedly better in GiMP over the years, but even using "force auto-hinter" on some glyphs just doesn't look quite right.
In response to the OP (not you, ABG): GiMP can do some amazing things for a F/OSS project, but it's also sorely lacking. I use it regularly, and I absolutely enjoy certain aspects of the UI that I wish would be borrowed by other applications (the densely packed right-click menu was originally something I though undesirable, but I find myself right-clicking in OpenOffice sometimes, expecting to see things that exist in the top-level menus). There are some things, however, that GiMP really cannot do. Citation needed? No problem: Look up stone textures. There are quite a few really incredible ones for Photoshop out there that look realistic. You can't achieve the same results in GiMP because the plugin (bump maps!) sucks. Yes, I've tried, and no, it doesn't work nearly as well.
It's anecdotal, I know, but among my circle of contacts, I can't think of anyone who actually likes iTunes. It's a bloated, awful piece of software.
Which is funny, because iPods can be synced more easily using Winamp than with iTunes. My mum can figure out how to use Winamp to sync her iPod, but it was hell trying to show her how to use iTunes. So much for Apple being king of usability.
I dunno, since I discovered Winamp can sync iPods, all of my friends who own the devices have ditched iTunes. Again, totally anecdotal evidence, but I suspect that the only reason why iTunes is in as widespread use as it is for syncing iPods is because it comes with them. Given a choice and some education, I'm sure current iTunes users (under Windows) probably wouldn't use it. Most Windows users would probably stick with WMP simply because they're most familiar with it (sadly). Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with using what you're most familiar with.
I hate iTunes. It's awful.
I've always likened it to the BSD license being "free, as in beer"--free beer means you can do whatever you want with it, even if you want to resell it later. The GPL, on the other hand, is "free, as in speech." You can't really "sell" free speech, and anyone borrowing your ideas is doing exactly that--and they're free to build upon them.
Outrageous? Maybe. Off-base? Probably. It seems easier to use familiar analogies when explaining licenses to those who haven't any clue what this BSGPMOZWhat license cruft is in the first place.