1. Right. It is also true, as you say, that it "can run for days on end"... but even running a simple bug-free widget set, it rarely runs for a week without spontaneously crashing.
2. The threading model in SK is fundamentally flawed. All widgets halt while one is updating. So if for some reason one takes a long time (network connection is down, it performs a heavy calculation, etc.) the entire SK portion of the desktop simply freezes for a length of time.
3. There is a fundamental design flaw in any system that is designed to contain objects, but which can be taken down by a buggy object.
I love the idea of SK. And I run it all the time. Right now I have 11 themes (widgets) on my desktop simply because over the course of the past few years I have found desktop widgets to so useful. But I sure hope that's it's vastly improved in KDE 4. Right now, I get embarrassed when I talk to OSX or Windows users when it comes to the subject of desktop widgets.
1. Compare XP and KDE on Linux circa 2001.
2. Compare XP and KDE on Linux in 2006.
3. Compare expectations for Vista and KDE 4 on Linux in late 2007.
4. Extrapolate the relative improvements in Windows and KDE and Linux to 2010.
I don't care what resources Redmond has. They simply cannot compete with a bunch of determined individuals. No one can. It's just a matter of time.
KDE 4 running on Windows will probably speed things up, but even without it, Windows' days are truly numbered. The people at MS aren't stupid. They know this, which is why they've started fighting Linux more coherently this past year. They must be very, very worried about what Microsoft is going to look like 10 years from now. Any sensible person in their position would be.
Ditto and likewise. No problem here at all, and I would definitely notice it (and have noticed it in the past, within less than an hour of a problem occurring). So maybe Earthlink is losing a ton of e-mail on some accounts, but it seems to be working fine for others. I really can't believe that the problem can be widespread. People may be sheep, but surely if Earthlink were losing any noticeable fraction of most people's e-mail, they would have suffered a mass defection.
SImilarly, back in the day I had to open an AOL account to contact AOL customers, but that was because AOL had a junkmail setting to block all non-AOL email "sent from the internet."
To this day, postfix says:
: connect to mailin-04.mx.aol.com[205.188.156.249]: server
refused to talk to me: 554- (RTR:SC)
So... a "zero-day" attack used to be one that appeared on the same day as the piece of software that was being attacked. Obviously, somehow the meaning of "zero-day" has changed. What does it mean now? (As far as I can tell, it's just meaningless padding, wehich means that a perfectly useful concept [that of an attack that appears on the same day as the software] now has to be explained periphrastically instead of using "zero-day". I hope I'm wrong, and that "zero-day" still does have a meaning, albeit one that's changed.) Anyone care to enlighten me?
Well, having lived with an AMD 64x2 for over a year now, I feel comfortable saying that a dual core proc is pretty useless to me. I've noticed absolutely no difference in my computing experience, either in the newest games or in day-to-day non-game activity. It's no different than my similarly clocked A64 with one core.
Stating the blindingly obvious: some people aren't going to notice much (if any) difference; others are going to see a huge difference. Parent falls into the former camp; I fall into the latter. I also have been using 62x2 for a year, and no way would I go back to single core. It would be worth having dual core if only for the fact that I can start a job and it will consume a core while all my interactive work runs on the second core, and hence I don't even notice that a huge job is running in the background. Everything else one gets with dual-core is an added bonus. I'm not totally certain that going to 4 cores on the desktop will be as useful, but I can believe that it might be, and will certainly be worth trying. For me, anyway (and I can't believe that I'm particularly untypical of slashdot users).
Given my experience, I'm even fairly convinced that the rest of my family (who are much more like ordinary users) would benefit from dual core too. Everything is simply so much more responsive.
I had heard that Deb-based distributions were easy to upgrade, and very nearly tried the 6.06 to 6.10 upgrade on my main machine. But fortunately sanity set in and I decided to try it first on a different AMD64-based system first.
The system I tried it on was one on which I had installed 6.06 a couple of weeks ago, and had barely used. It was commercial consumer-grade hardware (an HP box). I think that the only things I had added to the original 6.06 install was that I had updated to KDE 3.5.5 and amaroK 1.4.3.
So I followed the instructions on the Kubuntu wiki for upgrading from 6.06 to 6.10. The last step is "reboot". I did so and... where on Earth has my GUI gone? I get a CLI login prompt (which mysteriously says "6.06 LTS" not "6.10"). I log in and try "startx" thinking that maybe I need to do that the first time. Error messages about there being no X server.
So I wiped the disk and installed 6.10 from scratch. (Sure, if I had had the time, I could presumably have figured out what was wrong and maybe even fixed it. But sometimes discretion is indeed the better part of valour.) That install went fine. But I sure won't be attempting to upgrade my main machine (which is a dual-core 64-bit custom box). Pity, because there are already packages available for edgy that aren't available for dapper. But I think I'll be sticking with my tried-and-true upgrade process for important machines: no more than once a year, install the new OS to a brand new drive and gradually move everything over.
I have used this for more years than I care to remember (more than 10). It is the second thing to get installed on any Windows system that I have to use. Immediately after GoBack.
there is no such thing as a "collective intelligence"; group members hinder each other, not help, due to each individual following his own agenda.
This argument is seductive and almost, but not quite, true.
The optimum result comes from a system in which an intelligent benign decision-maker obtains and considers input from a small group of equally intelligent people. It's not even hard to prove this mathematically. The trick in real life is that this configuration tends not to be stable: the decision maker tends to turn into a dictator. There are several ways to discourage this from happening, but the obvious really efficient one (pay the underlings more than the decision maker) seems never to be used in practice. Instead we have things like voting systems (which tend to become corrupt) or limitations for the duration for which an individual can be responsible for the decisions (which sort-of worked for the Romans when they chose dictators in times of emergency, but has never really worked since).
How close does it get to solving the dependency hell problem? This is probably my biggest single problem with Mandriva.
I don't have an answer, but I agree that that is one of the two problems that finally got to the point where I switched from Mandriva to Kubuntu a couple of months ago. Compared to Mandriva, Kubuntu is a bit... weird:-) But that's probably just because I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva since 2000. I'll try out 2007, but it will have to have improved vastly in three areas for me to consider going back.
1. The dependency problem. When I tell packages to install, I expect them to... install, not give me some cryptic message that says that it can't be installed.
2. The utterly glacial (non-existent, really) rate at which packages are updated. The Mdv philosophy appears to be: upgrade packages with security updates, but for regular packages that are simply adding features or fixing bugs, don't do an update. This is a royal pain for those of us running 64 bit dual-core CPUs, because often the newer packages fix a lot of 64-bit or threading bugs
3. The mess that happens when you try to run a 64-bit OS and need some 32-bit programs. It isn't really fair to call this out as a separate problem (which is why I referred to two problems above), because I'm pretty sure it's really a specific instance of #1. Kubuntu in general doesn't seem to have problem #1; OTOH, Kubuntu seems, if anything, to be worse than Mandriva when it comes to running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system.
There are reasons why string theory has failed to come up with any NEW predictions. For one thing, it's being constantly tweaked so that it is consistent with EXISTING experimentation. After all, why would you build a theory that you hope will become a GUT if it's not consistent with other proven theories?
Yep; there are so many free parameters to superstring theory that it seems that it would be possible to create a version to suit almost any experimental observations. I know that the hope is that one day some version or other will make a useful, experimentally verifiable prediction (after all, these people are not remotely stupid; they do realise that a theory is required to make predictions), but one cannot help suspecting that, when that day comes and if the prediction turns out to be wrong, they'll just tweak one or more of the free parameters to create another one of the infinite number of possible theories so that the nre version does match the experimental result (and which will presumably make some sort of prediction for a future experiment). Wash; rinse; repeat.
I can understand why string theorists get excited about their work: there is a certain elegance to it all. But I cannot be sanguine that it will turn out to be a ToE. It may or may not be a ToN(othing); one suspects that at least some useful things will come out of it. But one cannot help thinking that it will be some much, much simpler revolution and new of looking at things that provides the real breakthrough.
That's the point. When a VOIP call is made from a cable ISP, the call stays on the cable ISP's backbone
Before I comment, I'd better post my credentials to say what I'm about to say: I am a co-author on many of the PacketCable specs, wrote the standard text on the subject, and also run a little company that sells PacketCable security software.
So, having said that, I would like to point out that your comment is accurate but may be a little misleading. It may indeed be true that today, and for most cable ISPs, the call stays on their network. But PacketCable was not specifically designed to be that narrow. Its architecture allows lots of things that cable companies have so far mostly not chosen to do. But, for example, there is no reason at all why the service has to be provide by a cable company. Sure, the cable company controls the pipe into the house (and the quality of service on that pipe), but there is nothing at all to prevent an ISP that decides that it doesn't want to get into the telephony business (and telephony could not remotely be described as easy) from contracting with a "real" telephony company so that that company provides service, with all the usual quality of service controls, over the ISP's network.
To give a completely and obviously hypothetical example. Instead of deploying telephony itself, Comcast could have chosen to have Qwest run a Comcast-branded VoIP service over Comcast's network, including the last-mile access network. That service could be given exactly the same quality-of-service guarantees that Comcast has chose to give to itself, and presumably both Qwest and Comcast would receive a cut of each phone call.
The corollary is that third-party providers (the Vonages of this world) do not have agreements and service-level contracts with Comcast. This means that their calls travel over the Comcast network using "best-effort" instead of some kind of guaranteed quality-of-service labelling. In particular, between the subscriber and the cable comapny, Vonage-like services travel over the ordinary standard primary DOCSIS flow from the cable modem, sharing it with all other traffic from that modem; PacketCable calls use special flows that have guaranteed latency-and-jitter limits specially designed for voice. Only the cable company can create and use those flows. (For the gory technical details, look at the DQoS [Dynamic Quality of Service] spec available at www.packetcable.com.)
OK, so there are about a bzillion things I don't understand in life. So add this one to the list.
What on Earth is the point of trying to ram an advert down the throat of someone who has already demonstrated that he doesn't want to see it? Surely, surely, surely, the person who is forced to view it is more likely to view your product negatively after this experience than he is to suddenly change his mind and decide that "Gosh! I was wrong after all. I really want to buy the product from this manufacturer and not from his competitor."
Hasn't a social scientist of some sort ever actually done an experiment to see what really happens in this sort of circumstance? I would love to see the results of a properly conceived and implemented experiment along these lines.
I used Mdk/Mdv for 5 years and just, within the last month or so, switched to Kubuntu.
1. Mdv installation is vastly better than Kubuntu. Printing, and to a lesser extent networking, are simply better in Mdv. I had to fight for ages to get networking printing to work right in Kubuntu, even though with exactly the same boxes it worked fine in Mdv. In the end, the way I got it working in Kubuntu was simply to steal all the configuration files that Mdv had created.
2. Once you have an up-and-running system, Kubuntu makes Mdv look second rate. Especially if you are running a 64-bit system. Mdv's policy of basically not updating packages except for security reasons means that one ends up with a system whose apps get rapidly out of date. And since 64-bit apps tend to be still at the stage of fixing pointer bugs, it means that one cannot get supported, more stable versions of many common apps. And don't get me started on URPMI. It used to work great. And maybe it still does on pure 32-bit systems. But in the end it was URPMI that drove me from Mdv to Kubuntu. Too many of Mdv's own packages simply refuse to install properly under Mdv. I imagine that it's not really the fault of URPMI, but more the fault that the packagers don't build dependency lists properly; but whatever the cause, the frustration of not being able to install stuff properly using URPMI on 64-bit systems became too great.
There are things about Kubuntu I strongly dislike; but on the whole I am glad that I made the switch. I might try out Mdv 2007 in a virtual machine, but unless it is a vast improvement over 2006, I won't be switching back to Mdv, at least for my main desktop system.
This kind of thing really REALLY ticks me off. AOL does something equally pernicious: if you have your own mail agent (postfix, sendmail, whatever), and you try to send e-mail to some poor unfortunate with an @aol.com (or @compuserve.com) address, well, forget it, because they won't accept it.
I've tried complaining to AOL, which of course was an utter waste of time. And it's not very helpful to tell AOL customers what the problem is, because they like AOL (for the most part) -- and actually, it's hard even to explain the problem in terms that they understand.
Sure, I could work around the problem by routing @aol.com mail specially. And for a while I did that. But then one day I was feeling particularly grumpy and decided that it wasn't my job to work around their idiocy.
This sort of thing is right up there with ISPs who block pings (yeah; mine does that. And when I complained I got the standard: "it's to protect our customers from viruses"). But I digress, and am getting myself cross again. Time to go get myself a cup of tea and calm down.
But the basic point is, I guess, if ISPs insist on being idiots and imposing their idiocies on customers, why oh why can't they provide opt-out options. (And also notify the customers when they change things. That's another thing that irritates me. I noticed a sudden decrease in the amount of spam hitting me. Guess what? My e-mail provider had silently installed a filter. At least they also installed an opt-out option. But still, why should they be permitted to change the service whenever they want without at least notifying me that they have done so?) Argh! I really need that cup of tea. And maybe a browse of http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/.
My memory must be going: I thought it was RH that was claiming that Xen was unstable and that Novell thought the opposite. So I start to read the summary... and after about ten seconds it dawns on me... the headline says exactly the opposite of the summary.
Re:Wow, they're actually _doing_ something
on
KDE 3.5.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Konqueror's CSS support annoys me maybe 1% of the time I am serving. Firefox's lack of desktop integration annoys me constantly.
Seriously. Once you get used to directly dropping files from an obex:/ Bluetooth folder to an sftp:/ folder, or from an audiocd:/ Compact Disc to a Samba share.. you'll never want to go back. Ever.
Yep. Also, the lack of KWallet support is highly irritating (to me, anyway). What good is a centralized secure password storage system if the application that most frequently needs to access it doesn't know how to? (Having said that, I admit to having seen a few sites that hint that it's possible to use kwallet with FF, but none of them actually provides any details.)
Actually, I see no way to avoid the unhappy conclusion that KDE users really need to use two browsers. FF's extension system is so great that it really is pretty unimaginable to use Konq as my main browser. On the other hand, as the parent points out, Konq's integration with the desktop and its ability to use KIO slaves is really something quite marvellous. It's one of those things (like tabbed browsing, I guess) that seems to leave people very unimpressed until they actually use it.
I had a conversation not long ago with someone who was clearly a very bright state Supreme Court justice. It was scary. On the one hand, at least when one gets high enough in the system, the judges are, for the most part anyway, pretty bright. The problem is that (from my single data point) they think they are bright enough that they understand technical detail -- when in fact they are more or less clueless. It's kind of like watching "Nova" or "Horizon" and thinking that by dint of having done that one really understands a scientific subject. This judge told me she realized that judges need technical training for some cases, but the lawyers are very good at making sure they receive it in the briefs and during argument, and she was convinced that the system works just fine.
And of course lower down in the system, the lack of technical competence is utterly appalling.
Personally, I think they should have technical cases judged by a 3-judge panel in which one of the judges is a technical expert, not a normal judge. But of course you can imagine what she thought of that idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I always look for the little "CD" logo on plastic discs in stores, and if that logo isn't there, there's no way I will buy the disc.
1. Right. It is also true, as you say, that it "can run for days on end"... but even running a simple bug-free widget set, it rarely runs for a week without spontaneously crashing.
2. The threading model in SK is fundamentally flawed. All widgets halt while one is updating. So if for some reason one takes a long time (network connection is down, it performs a heavy calculation, etc.) the entire SK portion of the desktop simply freezes for a length of time.
3. There is a fundamental design flaw in any system that is designed to contain objects, but which can be taken down by a buggy object.
I love the idea of SK. And I run it all the time. Right now I have 11 themes (widgets) on my desktop simply because over the course of the past few years I have found desktop widgets to so useful. But I sure hope that's it's vastly improved in KDE 4. Right now, I get embarrassed when I talk to OSX or Windows users when it comes to the subject of desktop widgets.
I thought that these were interesting items in their FAQ:
6. What license is this software going to be released under?
We are releasing this software under the GPL.
8. What core technologies are you utilizing?
* Database: Postgresql
* Logic/glue languages: C and Perl
* Webserver: Apache, mod_perl
* Server operating system: Linux
* Server hardware: x86-64
* Messaging core: Jabber
* Client side software: XUL
I was especially happily surprised to see jabber there. I have long thought that jabber is vastly underrated and under-used.
The entire FAQ is at:
http://www.open-ils.org/faq.html
1. Compare XP and KDE on Linux circa 2001.
2. Compare XP and KDE on Linux in 2006.
3. Compare expectations for Vista and KDE 4 on Linux in late 2007.
4. Extrapolate the relative improvements in Windows and KDE and Linux to 2010.
I don't care what resources Redmond has. They simply cannot compete with a bunch of determined individuals. No one can. It's just a matter of time.
KDE 4 running on Windows will probably speed things up, but even without it, Windows' days are truly numbered. The people at MS aren't stupid. They know this, which is why they've started fighting Linux more coherently this past year. They must be very, very worried about what Microsoft is going to look like 10 years from now. Any sensible person in their position would be.
Ditto and likewise. No problem here at all, and I would definitely notice it (and have noticed it in the past, within less than an hour of a problem occurring). So maybe Earthlink is losing a ton of e-mail on some accounts, but it seems to be working fine for others. I really can't believe that the problem can be widespread. People may be sheep, but surely if Earthlink were losing any noticeable fraction of most people's e-mail, they would have suffered a mass defection.
To this day, postfix says:
: connect to mailin-04.mx.aol.com[205.188.156.249]: server refused to talk to me: 554- (RTR:SC)
whenever I try to send mail to an AOL account.
So... a "zero-day" attack used to be one that appeared on the same day as the piece of software that was being attacked. Obviously, somehow the meaning of "zero-day" has changed. What does it mean now? (As far as I can tell, it's just meaningless padding, wehich means that a perfectly useful concept [that of an attack that appears on the same day as the software] now has to be explained periphrastically instead of using "zero-day". I hope I'm wrong, and that "zero-day" still does have a meaning, albeit one that's changed.) Anyone care to enlighten me?
You mean something like: http://gets.ncs.gov/
(This is PIN-based instead of hardware based, but one can reasonably argue that that's probably better.)
Stating the blindingly obvious: some people aren't going to notice much (if any) difference; others are going to see a huge difference. Parent falls into the former camp; I fall into the latter. I also have been using 62x2 for a year, and no way would I go back to single core. It would be worth having dual core if only for the fact that I can start a job and it will consume a core while all my interactive work runs on the second core, and hence I don't even notice that a huge job is running in the background. Everything else one gets with dual-core is an added bonus. I'm not totally certain that going to 4 cores on the desktop will be as useful, but I can believe that it might be, and will certainly be worth trying. For me, anyway (and I can't believe that I'm particularly untypical of slashdot users).
Given my experience, I'm even fairly convinced that the rest of my family (who are much more like ordinary users) would benefit from dual core too. Everything is simply so much more responsive.
Never mind; it must be Fiddler, from www.fiddlertool.com.
What tool did you use to get that info? I'm serious... That summary looks really nice and I'd like to use it on some sites.
The system I tried it on was one on which I had installed 6.06 a couple of weeks ago, and had barely used. It was commercial consumer-grade hardware (an HP box). I think that the only things I had added to the original 6.06 install was that I had updated to KDE 3.5.5 and amaroK 1.4.3.
So I followed the instructions on the Kubuntu wiki for upgrading from 6.06 to 6.10. The last step is "reboot". I did so and... where on Earth has my GUI gone? I get a CLI login prompt (which mysteriously says "6.06 LTS" not "6.10"). I log in and try "startx" thinking that maybe I need to do that the first time. Error messages about there being no X server.
So I wiped the disk and installed 6.10 from scratch. (Sure, if I had had the time, I could presumably have figured out what was wrong and maybe even fixed it. But sometimes discretion is indeed the better part of valour.) That install went fine. But I sure won't be attempting to upgrade my main machine (which is a dual-core 64-bit custom box). Pity, because there are already packages available for edgy that aren't available for dapper. But I think I'll be sticking with my tried-and-true upgrade process for important machines: no more than once a year, install the new OS to a brand new drive and gradually move everything over.
Maybe later today, one hopes.
"The DVD contains both Live Desktop and Alternate installers, as well as the other packages in our main archive", according to www.kubuntu.org.
In fact, the article quite clearly states that this is a patch, not a badge.
I have used this for more years than I care to remember (more than 10). It is the second thing to get installed on any Windows system that I have to use. Immediately after GoBack.
This argument is seductive and almost, but not quite, true.
The optimum result comes from a system in which an intelligent benign decision-maker obtains and considers input from a small group of equally intelligent people. It's not even hard to prove this mathematically. The trick in real life is that this configuration tends not to be stable: the decision maker tends to turn into a dictator. There are several ways to discourage this from happening, but the obvious really efficient one (pay the underlings more than the decision maker) seems never to be used in practice. Instead we have things like voting systems (which tend to become corrupt) or limitations for the duration for which an individual can be responsible for the decisions (which sort-of worked for the Romans when they chose dictators in times of emergency, but has never really worked since).
I don't have an answer, but I agree that that is one of the two problems that finally got to the point where I switched from Mandriva to Kubuntu a couple of months ago. Compared to Mandriva, Kubuntu is a bit... weird :-) But that's probably just because I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva since 2000. I'll try out 2007, but it will have to have improved vastly in three areas for me to consider going back.
1. The dependency problem. When I tell packages to install, I expect them to... install, not give me some cryptic message that says that it can't be installed.
2. The utterly glacial (non-existent, really) rate at which packages are updated. The Mdv philosophy appears to be: upgrade packages with security updates, but for regular packages that are simply adding features or fixing bugs, don't do an update. This is a royal pain for those of us running 64 bit dual-core CPUs, because often the newer packages fix a lot of 64-bit or threading bugs
3. The mess that happens when you try to run a 64-bit OS and need some 32-bit programs. It isn't really fair to call this out as a separate problem (which is why I referred to two problems above), because I'm pretty sure it's really a specific instance of #1. Kubuntu in general doesn't seem to have problem #1; OTOH, Kubuntu seems, if anything, to be worse than Mandriva when it comes to running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system.
Yep; there are so many free parameters to superstring theory that it seems that it would be possible to create a version to suit almost any experimental observations. I know that the hope is that one day some version or other will make a useful, experimentally verifiable prediction (after all, these people are not remotely stupid; they do realise that a theory is required to make predictions), but one cannot help suspecting that, when that day comes and if the prediction turns out to be wrong, they'll just tweak one or more of the free parameters to create another one of the infinite number of possible theories so that the nre version does match the experimental result (and which will presumably make some sort of prediction for a future experiment). Wash; rinse; repeat.
I can understand why string theorists get excited about their work: there is a certain elegance to it all. But I cannot be sanguine that it will turn out to be a ToE. It may or may not be a ToN(othing); one suspects that at least some useful things will come out of it. But one cannot help thinking that it will be some much, much simpler revolution and new of looking at things that provides the real breakthrough.
Before I comment, I'd better post my credentials to say what I'm about to say: I am a co-author on many of the PacketCable specs, wrote the standard text on the subject, and also run a little company that sells PacketCable security software.
So, having said that, I would like to point out that your comment is accurate but may be a little misleading. It may indeed be true that today, and for most cable ISPs, the call stays on their network. But PacketCable was not specifically designed to be that narrow. Its architecture allows lots of things that cable companies have so far mostly not chosen to do. But, for example, there is no reason at all why the service has to be provide by a cable company. Sure, the cable company controls the pipe into the house (and the quality of service on that pipe), but there is nothing at all to prevent an ISP that decides that it doesn't want to get into the telephony business (and telephony could not remotely be described as easy) from contracting with a "real" telephony company so that that company provides service, with all the usual quality of service controls, over the ISP's network.
To give a completely and obviously hypothetical example. Instead of deploying telephony itself, Comcast could have chosen to have Qwest run a Comcast-branded VoIP service over Comcast's network, including the last-mile access network. That service could be given exactly the same quality-of-service guarantees that Comcast has chose to give to itself, and presumably both Qwest and Comcast would receive a cut of each phone call.
The corollary is that third-party providers (the Vonages of this world) do not have agreements and service-level contracts with Comcast. This means that their calls travel over the Comcast network using "best-effort" instead of some kind of guaranteed quality-of-service labelling. In particular, between the subscriber and the cable comapny, Vonage-like services travel over the ordinary standard primary DOCSIS flow from the cable modem, sharing it with all other traffic from that modem; PacketCable calls use special flows that have guaranteed latency-and-jitter limits specially designed for voice. Only the cable company can create and use those flows. (For the gory technical details, look at the DQoS [Dynamic Quality of Service] spec available at www.packetcable.com.)
What on Earth is the point of trying to ram an advert down the throat of someone who has already demonstrated that he doesn't want to see it? Surely, surely, surely, the person who is forced to view it is more likely to view your product negatively after this experience than he is to suddenly change his mind and decide that "Gosh! I was wrong after all. I really want to buy the product from this manufacturer and not from his competitor."
Hasn't a social scientist of some sort ever actually done an experiment to see what really happens in this sort of circumstance? I would love to see the results of a properly conceived and implemented experiment along these lines.
I used Mdk/Mdv for 5 years and just, within the last month or so, switched to Kubuntu. 1. Mdv installation is vastly better than Kubuntu. Printing, and to a lesser extent networking, are simply better in Mdv. I had to fight for ages to get networking printing to work right in Kubuntu, even though with exactly the same boxes it worked fine in Mdv. In the end, the way I got it working in Kubuntu was simply to steal all the configuration files that Mdv had created. 2. Once you have an up-and-running system, Kubuntu makes Mdv look second rate. Especially if you are running a 64-bit system. Mdv's policy of basically not updating packages except for security reasons means that one ends up with a system whose apps get rapidly out of date. And since 64-bit apps tend to be still at the stage of fixing pointer bugs, it means that one cannot get supported, more stable versions of many common apps. And don't get me started on URPMI. It used to work great. And maybe it still does on pure 32-bit systems. But in the end it was URPMI that drove me from Mdv to Kubuntu. Too many of Mdv's own packages simply refuse to install properly under Mdv. I imagine that it's not really the fault of URPMI, but more the fault that the packagers don't build dependency lists properly; but whatever the cause, the frustration of not being able to install stuff properly using URPMI on 64-bit systems became too great. There are things about Kubuntu I strongly dislike; but on the whole I am glad that I made the switch. I might try out Mdv 2007 in a virtual machine, but unless it is a vast improvement over 2006, I won't be switching back to Mdv, at least for my main desktop system.
I've tried complaining to AOL, which of course was an utter waste of time. And it's not very helpful to tell AOL customers what the problem is, because they like AOL (for the most part) -- and actually, it's hard even to explain the problem in terms that they understand.
Sure, I could work around the problem by routing @aol.com mail specially. And for a while I did that. But then one day I was feeling particularly grumpy and decided that it wasn't my job to work around their idiocy.
This sort of thing is right up there with ISPs who block pings (yeah; mine does that. And when I complained I got the standard: "it's to protect our customers from viruses"). But I digress, and am getting myself cross again. Time to go get myself a cup of tea and calm down.
But the basic point is, I guess, if ISPs insist on being idiots and imposing their idiocies on customers, why oh why can't they provide opt-out options. (And also notify the customers when they change things. That's another thing that irritates me. I noticed a sudden decrease in the amount of spam hitting me. Guess what? My e-mail provider had silently installed a filter. At least they also installed an opt-out option. But still, why should they be permitted to change the service whenever they want without at least notifying me that they have done so?) Argh! I really need that cup of tea. And maybe a browse of http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/.
My memory must be going: I thought it was RH that was claiming that Xen was unstable and that Novell thought the opposite. So I start to read the summary... and after about ten seconds it dawns on me... the headline says exactly the opposite of the summary.
Seriously. Once you get used to directly dropping files from an obex:/ Bluetooth folder to an sftp:/ folder, or from an audiocd:/ Compact Disc to a Samba share.. you'll never want to go back. Ever.
Yep. Also, the lack of KWallet support is highly irritating (to me, anyway). What good is a centralized secure password storage system if the application that most frequently needs to access it doesn't know how to? (Having said that, I admit to having seen a few sites that hint that it's possible to use kwallet with FF, but none of them actually provides any details.)
Actually, I see no way to avoid the unhappy conclusion that KDE users really need to use two browsers. FF's extension system is so great that it really is pretty unimaginable to use Konq as my main browser. On the other hand, as the parent points out, Konq's integration with the desktop and its ability to use KIO slaves is really something quite marvellous. It's one of those things (like tabbed browsing, I guess) that seems to leave people very unimpressed until they actually use it.
I had a conversation not long ago with someone who was clearly a very bright state Supreme Court justice. It was scary. On the one hand, at least when one gets high enough in the system, the judges are, for the most part anyway, pretty bright. The problem is that (from my single data point) they think they are bright enough that they understand technical detail -- when in fact they are more or less clueless. It's kind of like watching "Nova" or "Horizon" and thinking that by dint of having done that one really understands a scientific subject. This judge told me she realized that judges need technical training for some cases, but the lawyers are very good at making sure they receive it in the briefs and during argument, and she was convinced that the system works just fine.
And of course lower down in the system, the lack of technical competence is utterly appalling.
Personally, I think they should have technical cases judged by a 3-judge panel in which one of the judges is a technical expert, not a normal judge. But of course you can imagine what she thought of that idea.