Unfortunately you're right.. I run into this argument all the time when I'm talking about linux. "Sure its free/lowcost, but its not like I'm paying anything for windows or any of my commercial software now." I almost wish for a really serious crackdown on piracy by the major commercial software developers (Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia should do it).
He definitely is right. Bill Gates has a (mansionlike) home in Whistler village that my dad's colleague did the interior decorating for (to the tune of > 1 million dollars).
Your post is amusing because it proves the parent's point while you're trying to disprove it. Windows is easier for you because you grew up with it. Unix is easier for the parent because he/she grew up with it. The average person grows up with Windows so the average person finds Windows easier to use.
Excellent points. Linux is harder than windows in many respects. I've been running Debian as my desktop machine (booting into Windows less and less frequently, I think the last time was a couple months ago). Some stuff is just harder to do on Linux, file sharing with samba is a pain to set up, network printing, embedded movies in webpages are pretty flaky etc etc. And yet I still use Linux as my main machine because I can accept that tradeoff for the added power that I have using the command line, and how I haven't had to reinstall in 3 years and my system runs faster now than ever.
Has anyone else had the problem that SVG just plain doesn't work? I'm running debian unstable and SVG doesn't work anywhere. No SVG icons in gnome, mozilla doesnt display SVG graphics, and KDE's (3.2.1) konqueror doesn't display them either. All three of these have independant SVG implementations and none of them work. Any ideas?
I had the same problems with the 2.6 kernel images in Debian.. Slowness and lots of skipping which put me right off 2.6 for a while. But then I decided to compile it instead and it works great. The major thing I had to enable that was apparently not in the debian kernel images was preemptive kernel and ALSA. After that everything is great.
"Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV? Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven? Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine? Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?"
This argument comes up again and again and I fail to see how it is at all analogous to using computers. Microwaves, TVs, and DVD Players are all simple devices that only perform one function. With a computer you can do a limitless number of different things. Everyone has slightly different requirements for their computing and no "easy" OS can cater to them all. Its easy to make an OS that only does email and internet browsing and it will be very stable. But now some people will want to play movies and music and use CAD software and develop programs and edit videos and compose music and make coffee and monitor the security cameras and etc etc. You can't expect a tool that does all that to be completely intuitive! For christs sake, will people stop with the idiotic TV analogy already! If you want an easy to use tool then you're going to have to accept severely limited features.
One weird problem I've had with 2.6 is that my cd burner doesn't work at all. Forget burning, I can't even mount the damn thing. dmesg shows: hdc: HL-DT-ST GCE-8481B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive so its detecting it fine but then a few lines down it says: Unable to identify CD-ROM format. and when I go: mount -t iso9660/dev/hdc/cdrom it says: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on/dev/hdc,
or too many mounted file systems
Anyone else run into this? I tried it with ide-scsi and without but I can't even access it for reading!
How does the system know where the binaries are if you put them in application specific directories? This is one of my huge gripes with windows, you can't just type a program name in the run dialog and expect it to open (unless you add each and every program directory to your path). I love the fact that I can run any program just by typing it's name. Usually faster than hunting for it in a menu. And its great to have all configuration in/etc Then I can back it up in one fell swoop. Having it all scattered would blow goats. Having to go to 8 different directories to change configuration files.
How did you deal with upgrading the hard drive? Just curious if you managed to actually move your system to another drive and what is involved in that...
The percentage of FRESH water that goes through a reservoir at some point is much higher. (I don't know the percentage but I highly doubt your 0.0001% figure is from anywhere but your ass). Turns out, the drinking water for almost all larger cities is from reservoirs somewhere. Then there's the reservoirs for power generation. This is a significant percentage of major rivers. Rivers that many species depend on for survival.
So yes, it does have to be run through the "green" filter. Otherwise you can claim that every activity is the same. "Oh hey, well because of our oil tanker crash we polluted 1000 km^2 of ocean but.. uh.. thats like 0.000001% of the earth so who cares right?" Sheeesh, get a clue.
Theres a huge difference between this and your example on paying taxes for interstates. If I don't have a car I still benefit from roads because consumer goods can be easily transported by way of them or I can ride my bike on them.
Now why the hell should I have to pay for music that I may: a) not want b) not be able to play on something other than windows (note I said may, who knows what kind of anti-copy protection they'll slap on this)
This is absolutely idiotic and just a way for RIAA to make money.
Just a few thoughts on your APT criticisms. I don't know about some of your points since I don't run a multi-user system.
Downloads too much Are you saying that Zero-install automatically splits packages? Becuase if not you'll have the same problem, sure it might be possible to split pakckages but that doesn;t mean people will do it.
Downloads too little APT's behaviour in this case is great. It would be stupid if the gimp would get installed if you just want gqview. Maybe you have no desire to edit anything and just want to view your images. This is a limitation in gqview and not APT. gqview should hide that menu item if the gimp is not installed.
APT is not scaleable True to a certain extent. More packages require more maintainers. But your comment that the available packages only represent a small fraction of available software is misleading. Yes its a small fraction of avaliable software but it comprises the vast majority of software that is useable. Who cares if john doe's dinky little text editor is available? And what makes you think that john doe will go through the process of making his software available through zero install? It may be easier than creating a.deb but it is still more work than just throwing out the source. With APT you know that the packages you are installing are at least useable.
A lot of her complaints are of course valid but I also belive she has had phenominally bad luck. I have never seen anyone have that much trouble installing linux, be they experienced with computers or newbies.
Of course you have to realize it goes both ways, I have two pieces of hardware that work beautifully under linux and were a b*tch to set up in windows. One is a network card (3Com Etherlink III, certainly not exotic), windows refuses to recognize it and I had manually download the drivers from another computer. Windows gave me the helpful message "Would you like to connect to the internet to download drivers for this device?". Well no shit if I could connect to the internet my ethernet card would be working now wouldnt it??. Same goes for my sound card, a Diamond Monster (also quite common) which worked without a hitch in linux but required a long and painful driver search (the company doesn't exist anymore) under windows.
What if you had Knoppix on a CDRW? Would it be somehow possible to channel disk writes through a cd burning tool and save all your files directly to the cd?
Space would be at a premium I imagine but if you deleted some of the apps you dont use.... Now THAT would be pretty amazing.
?And, according to www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/cucs-022-00.p df [columbia.edu], Microsoft Terminal Svcs is only able to do 8 bits (256 colors). Is that still accurate?"
No. It does 16 bit just fine (and probably 32 as well) and it is bloody FAST. I use it at work over a standard cable connection to do testing on a server in another country all the time and you can barely tell you're not on your own machine.
Roald Dahl wrote a book about that actually. Kinda funny. "My Uncle Oswald" I believe it was called. All about them collecting the sperm (so they could later sell it) of all the royalty and famous people by feeding them this blister beetle. Yeah it's one of his stranger books. Definetly not for kids like "The Witches" and such.
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I can't wait until they have a well documented standalone XUL runtime. I would love to have more info on using XUL as a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
Also, does XUL have any vector capabilities? Or does this solely depend on the underlying graphics system's support?
Unfortunately you're right.. I run into this argument all the time when I'm talking about linux. "Sure its free/lowcost, but its not like I'm paying anything for windows or any of my commercial software now."
I almost wish for a really serious crackdown on piracy by the major commercial software developers (Microsoft, Adobe, and Macromedia should do it).
He definitely is right. Bill Gates has a (mansionlike) home in Whistler village that my dad's colleague did the interior decorating for (to the tune of > 1 million dollars).
Your post is amusing because it proves the parent's point while you're trying to disprove it.
Windows is easier for you because you grew up with it. Unix is easier for the parent because he/she grew up with it. The average person grows up with Windows so the average person finds Windows easier to use.
Excellent points. Linux is harder than windows in many respects. I've been running Debian as my desktop machine (booting into Windows less and less frequently, I think the last time was a couple months ago). Some stuff is just harder to do on Linux, file sharing with samba is a pain to set up, network printing, embedded movies in webpages are pretty flaky etc etc. And yet I still use Linux as my main machine because I can accept that tradeoff for the added power that I have using the command line, and how I haven't had to reinstall in 3 years and my system runs faster now than ever.
It's always a tradeoff.
Has anyone else had the problem that SVG just plain doesn't work? I'm running debian unstable and SVG doesn't work anywhere. No SVG icons in gnome, mozilla doesnt display SVG graphics, and KDE's (3.2.1) konqueror doesn't display them either. All three of these have independant SVG implementations and none of them work. Any ideas?
I had the same problems with the 2.6 kernel images in Debian.. Slowness and lots of skipping which put me right off 2.6 for a while. But then I decided to compile it instead and it works great. The major thing I had to enable that was apparently not in the debian kernel images was preemptive kernel and ALSA.
After that everything is great.
"Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV? Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven? Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine? Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?"
This argument comes up again and again and I fail to see how it is at all analogous to using computers. Microwaves, TVs, and DVD Players are all simple devices that only perform one function. With a computer you can do a limitless number of different things. Everyone has slightly different requirements for their computing and no "easy" OS can cater to them all. Its easy to make an OS that only does email and internet browsing and it will be very stable. But now some people will want to play movies and music and use CAD software and develop programs and edit videos and compose music and make coffee and monitor the security cameras and etc etc. You can't expect a tool that does all that to be completely intuitive!
For christs sake, will people stop with the idiotic TV analogy already! If you want an easy to use tool then you're going to have to accept severely limited features.
One weird problem I've had with 2.6 is that my cd burner doesn't work at all. Forget burning, I can't even mount the damn thing. dmesg shows: /dev/hdc /cdrom it says: /dev/hdc,
hdc: HL-DT-ST GCE-8481B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
so its detecting it fine but then a few lines down it says:
Unable to identify CD-ROM format.
and when I go:
mount -t iso9660
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on
or too many mounted file systems
Anyone else run into this? I tried it with ide-scsi and without but I can't even access it for reading!
How does the system know where the binaries are if you put them in application specific directories? This is one of my huge gripes with windows, you can't just type a program name in the run dialog and expect it to open (unless you add each and every program directory to your path). /etc Then I can back it up in one fell swoop. Having it all scattered would blow goats. Having to go to 8 different directories to change configuration files.
I love the fact that I can run any program just by typing it's name. Usually faster than hunting for it in a menu. And its great to have all configuration in
How did you deal with upgrading the hard drive? Just curious if you managed to actually move your system to another drive and what is involved in that...
No she's ugly sir!
It's not the nose, its the eyes, they're crooked!
The percentage of FRESH water that goes through a reservoir at some point is much higher. (I don't know the percentage but I highly doubt your 0.0001% figure is from anywhere but your ass).
Turns out, the drinking water for almost all larger cities is from reservoirs somewhere. Then there's the reservoirs for power generation. This is a significant percentage of major rivers. Rivers that many species depend on for survival.
So yes, it does have to be run through the "green" filter. Otherwise you can claim that every activity is the same. "Oh hey, well because of our oil tanker crash we polluted 1000 km^2 of ocean but.. uh.. thats like 0.000001% of the earth so who cares right?"
Sheeesh, get a clue.
eeewww! ben affleck splooge!
(south park in case you dont know)
Theres a huge difference between this and your example on paying taxes for interstates. If I don't have a car I still benefit from roads because consumer goods can be easily transported by way of them or I can ride my bike on them.
Now why the hell should I have to pay for music that I may:
a) not want
b) not be able to play on something other than windows (note I said may, who knows what kind of anti-copy protection they'll slap on this)
This is absolutely idiotic and just a way for RIAA to make money.
ah.. good old party balloon gas.. the second element on the periodic table, right after the conventional chemistry class gas.
Just a few thoughts on your APT criticisms. I don't know about some of your points since I don't run a multi-user system.
.deb but it is still more work than just throwing out the source. With APT you know that the packages you are installing are at least useable.
Downloads too much
Are you saying that Zero-install automatically splits packages? Becuase if not you'll have the same problem, sure it might be possible to split pakckages but that doesn;t mean people will do it.
Downloads too little
APT's behaviour in this case is great. It would be stupid if the gimp would get installed if you just want gqview. Maybe you have no desire to edit anything and just want to view your images. This is a limitation in gqview and not APT. gqview should hide that menu item if the gimp is not installed.
APT is not scaleable
True to a certain extent. More packages require more maintainers. But your comment that the available packages only represent a small fraction of available software is misleading. Yes its a small fraction of avaliable software but it comprises the vast majority of software that is useable. Who cares if john doe's dinky little text editor is available? And what makes you think that john doe will go through the process of making his software available through zero install? It may be easier than creating a
funny that. I'm not a subscriber and downloaded it at 411 kb/s.
I would think SMP support would be much superior on Solaris. Since it routinely runs on 32+ processor systems..
"tons of well worded emails coming from intellegent people"
:)
Oh! now I get it! and I thought you were trying to be serious...
A lot of her complaints are of course valid but I also belive she has had phenominally bad luck. I have never seen anyone have that much trouble installing linux, be they experienced with computers or newbies.
Of course you have to realize it goes both ways, I have two pieces of hardware that work beautifully under linux and were a b*tch to set up in windows. One is a network card (3Com Etherlink III, certainly not exotic), windows refuses to recognize it and I had manually download the drivers from another computer.
Windows gave me the helpful message "Would you like to connect to the internet to download drivers for this device?". Well no shit if I could connect to the internet my ethernet card would be working now wouldnt it??.
Same goes for my sound card, a Diamond Monster (also quite common) which worked without a hitch in linux but required a long and painful driver search (the company doesn't exist anymore) under windows.
What if you had Knoppix on a CDRW? Would it be somehow possible to channel disk writes through a cd burning tool and save all your files directly to the cd?
Space would be at a premium I imagine but if you deleted some of the apps you dont use.... Now THAT would be pretty amazing.
What?? You mean that crap was due this year? SHHHIIITT! I havent even started..
Umm. can I have an extension?
?And, according to www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/cucs-022-00.p df [columbia.edu], Microsoft Terminal Svcs is only able to do 8 bits (256 colors). Is that still accurate?"
No. It does 16 bit just fine (and probably 32 as well) and it is bloody FAST. I use it at work over a standard cable connection to do testing on a server in another country all the time and you can barely tell you're not on your own machine.
Roald Dahl wrote a book about that actually. Kinda funny. "My Uncle Oswald" I believe it was called. All about them collecting the sperm (so they could later sell it) of all the royalty and famous people by feeding them this blister beetle. Yeah it's one of his stranger books. Definetly not for kids like "The Witches" and such.