Having worked retail and various other service jobs over the years, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that 80% of the time, the customer is wrong. Maybe not completely out of their minds, but certainly wrong. Customers these days have far to high of a sense of entitlement and far to low of a sense of their own ineptitude. If you were a manufacturer, and you made a certain product for 3 years. Then you released a new version of the product that was identical in all respects to your current and previous versions except the size, and a small chunk of your customers were complaining that the product was easily damaged, would you assume it's the product or your customers?
But as many people correctly pointed out, they did't have to do it right then and there. After the return policy, they merely have to repair or replace it, and that can take (depending on which company you deal with) a few weeks.
Probably because they were bending the rules a bit (though they really didn't have to harp on it). Assuming the Apple stores are like most retail stores with repair centers, replacement stock and retail stock are two seperate things. In order for something to get replaced that isn't in the normal return period it has to be pulled from replacement stock. In order for that to happen, certain things have to be done in a certain order to make bean counters happy. In this case, you probably had to see the geniuses because the sales people couldn't ring out a service part and technicaly they needed documentation. More likely than not after you left, the manager types made up some documentation in the back to account for the item taken out of replacement stock.
If they can't stand being handled by unauthorized personnel, then what are we to expect after leaving them standing in a public place all day while hundreds of grubby plebes put their filthy hands all over them?
Which is exactly why unauthorized personelle are allowed to poke and prod at all secure systems right? I mean hell just last week I was invited to try poking at the internals of an ATM. And the week before that I was given access to the internals of a hospital computer system, and I'm just some random joe off the streets, and I managed to break both systems. Presumeably you will be giving me root access and remote login to all of your machines from now on correct? How can we possibly expect these systems to last against daily use by clueless users if they can't stand up to me with admin access..
Wait you mean there's a difference between restricted and unrestricted access to a machine? Say it isn't so.
in a democracy, there is only one thing that should absolutely be the property and purview of all the people all the time, and that's the integrity of our vote. Without it, we don't have jack shit.
And we have always had jack shit. The very nature that a ballot is supposed to be secret means by it's definition that at some point you need to assume a level of trust with someone. You will never be able to 100% verify a vote without a public system which links social security numbers with pictures of people and their names and adresses and their votes, and even then you run the risk of fraud.
So why is crime glamorized in the popular culture?
For the same reason anything is glamorized, it's unattainable and forbidden.
Why is there rampant blue collar white collar and just plain old crime still.
Note that these things are illegal and punished rather than allowed and accepted. The existance of humans by definition will never allow for a perfect culture, but a sucessful culture works heavily to subdue and eliminate undesireables.
Why are the little dominant culture boys running around imitating 'gangstas' in the suburbs?
See glamor above. Also note that the suit and tie world which you criticise is exactly the thing that will beat these wanna be losers into real members of society or let them whither and die depending on their choices.
So far we have had slavery, institutionalized racism with the paint still fresh over the Jim Crow signs, Italians beating Black kids in Bensonhurst, exploitation of a cheap labor pool (hello mexico!)
Note that all of these things are illegal. As I said, a succesful culture seeks to subdue and eliminate undesireable culture traits.
The melting pot is a largely a myth, as the ingredients have formed well defined Strata and have not blended or melted together at all. America is still a very young work in progress, we shall see what happens.
Hardly. The strata separation of the cultures is largely myth and more extensively the natural grouping of people that we see. Mobility into or out of the various sub cultures that make up america is considerably easy compared to for example attempting to integrate with japanese or french culture.
If anything causes the american culture to decline it will be relativism. The moment undesireables become semi desireable is the moment things begin to fall apart. Suceess as a culture is like anything else, it must be ruthless and unforgiving, allowing only the best and seeking to eliminate the worst.
Absolutely. Now roll the clock back 100 years and replace "dress like a homeless person" with "be a female" or "be a non-white person", and you'll see why simply accepting things the way they are, with old and unquestioned values, is commonly neither the right thing to do nor the path to progress.
Being female or non white is not a choice. If you choose to dress / act / speak a certain way, I will choose to judge you based on your choices.
So, flamebait or not, in a society that proclaims itself a "melting pot" and "equal opportunity employer" etc. ad nauseum, to be intolerant of a subculture (no matter how small) is nothing less than hypocrisy.
Hardly. The reason the melting pot culture is so succesful is precisely because it allows for multiple sub-cultures to exist but refuses to advance or allow culture traits which are viewed at inferior by the majority of people. The reason that modern "civilized" culture does not involve rape, sexual opression, constant infighting and death is preciesely becuase the people look down upon such cultural traits and work to lower, reduce and eliminate those traits (socialy or legaly it doesn't matter both are effective methods of modern culture)
Probably a decent chunk, but is that due to Apple (computer) being infringing on trademark or is it due to the fact that Appe (records) has faded into relative obscurity?
You're missing his point. It's not that there is a default size, it's that the default is too small so that you have no choice but to resize it for each new app and you can't change the default.
Too small is a matter of opinion. I find it to be just fine, though I'm working on an old 15 inch monitor. Given that OS X works on machines dating back to the original iMacs I would guess that the save dialouges look just fine on those and was chosen to look right on a small monitor because if it's too small you can make it bigger but if it's too big you can't really go smaller.
I'm not sure I agree with all or even most of his points of contention.
In issue 1 for example he complains that each open/save dialouge starts out the exact same way and then goes on to complain further in the article that the OS isn't always consistant. It's consistant for each dialouge to remain the same size by default until the user specifies a change. Furthermore since the size of the dialouge can be set per application, that size would need to be specified by the application making having a universal override obnoxious.
In his 2nd point he's descirbes a senario which is at best extremely uncommon and then describes a process which is obnoxious and complicated when it's easier for most people to either have an automator script to open specific things they want or even better for his senario and automator script which asks where he is and then opens the appropriate applications. A simple applescript for the applications one doesn't need all the time with a prompt at the begining to ask whether to launch the remaining apps and then placing that script in the login items folder seems more useful and less annoying than check boxes to enable and disable each item that you must do before loging out the previous time.
point 3 he's correct on
point 4 he's correct on the disapearing sidebar but on the issue of double clicking the boarder, it's a rather difficult task to accomplish accidently so I am sure anyone doing it would notice the dimple before and after.
point 5 he's moving away from his consistancy argument again. With the column view you set the size of the columns and the number of columns, and if you chose to physicaly change the display you can. What he's suggesting is a display system which dynamicaly changes size to fit the content of the display which while it could be benneficial to some people seems overly complicated and a major violation of the consistancy guideline. It's concieveable to see a situation there where all of a sudden you would go from having 4 collumns displayed to having 2 or 1 because you have one file in the display such as "com.apple.Components2.LocalCache.QuickTimeCompone nts" which now expands their one collumn to occupy most of the window.
point 6 he's correct on
point 7 he's got a point but at the same time, with the addition of the PDF abilities and the fact that faxing IS handled with PDFs it does make sense to put it under the PDF button. In the end I don't find it much more of an abstraction than his recomendation to make it an availible printer.
point 8 I can see a method to the madness in that if the next set of startup items require the server, it's important for you to know that the server is not availible BEFORE those apps launch and fail. There may be a better way, but I don't agree that it's a failing.
in point 9 the views update for the column view I think is a good thing. While it's not 100% consistant, in this case it would be irritating for a directory I'm working with to rename and then immediately move out of my working view until I indicate being done with the directory either by being idle or moving to a new object.
The size information I would assume is an updating routine thats scheduled rather than called.
in point 10 if he cant see a situation where a user might unknowingly or mistakenly change their file extention then he needs to think harder. The checkbox would be nice though but it's also nitpicking at this point. It's a potentialy destructive action, and a user should be reminded to think before they do it. Being able to permanently dismiss such reminders is what gives viruses and other malicious programs a better chance of succeeding.
I'm not sure I agree with all or even most of his points of contention.
In issue 1 for example he complains that each open/save dialouge starts out the exact same way and then goes on to complain further in the article that the OS isn't always consistant. It's consistant for each dialouge to remain the same size by default until the user specifies a change. Furthermore since the size of the dialouge can be set per application, that size would need to be specified by the application making having a universal override obnoxious.
In his 2nd point he's descirbes a senario which is at best extremely uncommon and then describes a process which is obnoxious and complicated when it's easier for most people to either have an automator script to open specific things they want or even better for his senario and automator script which asks where he is and then opens the appropriate applications. A simple applescript for the applications one doesn't need all the time with a prompt at the begining to ask whether to launch the remaining apps and then placing that script in the login items folder seems more useful and less annoying than check boxes to enable and disable each item that you must do before loging out the previous time.
Which widgets are you using? I have 3 widgets open on dashboard and 2 instaces of two of them givng me a total of 5 widgets to be displayed. When idle each one consumes (roundng up) about 7 MB of physical memory. That leaves me with a max use of 35 MB of memory for ALL of the widgets. Hardly a 20-30 per each widget.
The last post was trying to dismiss your straw man of a person who has no reason to switch, being the right standard for what the acceptable level of hassle is.
I think you fail to understand the argument I'm making. If Linux is to take any sizeable portion of the home desktop market, than their standard that they have to live up to are the standards of people with no reason to switch. They need to be given a reason to switch and at the same time maintain their expected level and type of service and support.
Furthermore I disagree that he was given excellent support. He had one helpful post on the first page and then it took until the 4th page before any real help was provided. It took that long just for someone to look up the error code instead of talking out their ass.
Now you're moving beyond the original scope of the conversation. Originaly this was all started by a home user who went to try linux, installed it, it fucked up his MBR, he had a bitch of a time getting any real help, complained and was told essentialy "STFU code it yourself"
In this case I was discussing why Linux is and will remain an also ran on home desktop systems, therefore our target consumer is a home desktop user. Since these people don't exist in a vaccum we must then take into acount their current situations. From there we can see that should linux devs or the linux community as a whole want linux to break into and succesfully capture a share of the home desktop market, then attitudes must change and the original posts complaints must be adressed in a way which does not require coding the solution for oneself.
In short I agree that as it stands, there is no reason for a home consumer to desire linux, but the linux comunity as a whole continues to push for it. Sadly home user experience is lacking and I illustrated part of the reason why. That is what my original post was about.
You are missing the point entirely in that home desktop users aren't buying Emporor Linux Laptops (until today I had never even heard of them). They aren't bying dell Enterprise + Oracle machines and they aren't buying Commercial Linuxes. They're getting their linux from a friend or a relative who's convinced them to try it. They're downloading it on someone's recomendation. These people are not paying out to give Linux a try. They may do so if and when they have discovered that they prefer Linux but they aren't going to before hand because they've already paid for a system that works.
Besides, when someone says Linux, people with a passing knowledge do not think of Xandros or Mandriva first, and if people in the know and with passing knowledge don't, how then does one expect the home consumer to?
Regardless of whether the support is provided by microsoft or Dell, as far as the end user is concerned is irellevant, the point is such support exists and is easy to acceess. With linux however, such support does not exist or is extremly difficult to access.
You are not the home desktop market, ergo microsoft does not need to cater to your needs. You are not part of point 1. You are part of point 2. The people the linux devs are trying to reach are not building machines from scratch and certainly not going to wipe their home machine and reinstall just to try linux.
He said that he had already tried reinstalling, multiple time, that would include the boot loader. Regardless of whether he COULD use a live CD to do it, he was right in that he should not HAVE to use a live CD to do it, ortherwise the install CD ahould also be a live CD. His computer was hosed and people were suggestiong that he needed to borrow someone elses machine tie it up to download a live CD (600MB still takes a while to download on highspeed) and then burn it to another disk. Not everyone would have access to that sort of resource.
Furthermore, not only did it take 4 pages to get any real help one of the first replies he gets automaticaly blames it on windows and that turns out to be inaccurate as we discover when someone actualy looks up what the error code means.
He was an ass to the people that weren't providing any real help to him. Everyone that provided a real trouble shooting step he took their advice and tried it. Everyone else was wasting their breath telling him to get a live CD or find his windows CDs.
In short, yes he could have been nicer but no he was not recieving very good help until the 4th page.
It's not a double standard because Microsoft and Linux devs are not trying to accomplish the same thing. Microsoft's concern is maintaining market dominance. They aren't trying to break into the home desktop market, they ARE the home desktop market.
Linux devs on the other hand ARE trying to break into the desktop market. Their concern is increasing acceptance, therefore Linux must be unobtrusive, meld smoothly with current setups and position itself to be better without being a major shift until the time comes to make a new purchase.
Two different goals, two different strategies, two different rules. It's not a double standard, it's reality. No one wants to install Windows on a Linux machine, but people do want to install Linux on a Windows machine.
IOW in order to supplant windows, linux needs to be equal to AND better than windows. That means that Linux must have things that Windows does not. One of those things is going to have to be awareness of other OSes.
1) They are the dominate player. They come preinstalled on all home systems except Apple systems. No one is installing XP on to a linux machine.
2) Anyone that would install XP on top of a linux machine likely knows what they're doing better than 90% of the population and therefore can handle taking care of that themselves. Furthermore the chances of these people actualy installing XP on one of their linux machines is low enough to be practicaly rounding error.
3) Linux developers are trying to reach home users, people who already have windows installed and already have windows. These people aren't going to give up their current set up just to try something new, they want something that doesn't disrupt their current setup. That means it's Linux's problem, not Microsofts.
Now let's look at what the most common event is? That someone will be installing windows on a machine with linux or that someone will be installing linux on a machine with windows? If linux devs want acceptance on the home desktop than Linux needs to be coded to play nice as the second place OS which means it needs to be other OS aware and respect the space of other OSes.
So when I suggest that Nvu is an alternative to Dreamweaver, people respond just like you did and rag on Nvu's feature set. And when I point out that there is a USD400 price tag difference between them, it's meaningless, because they know they can get Dreamweaver "for free."
And finally, when I point out that the Nvu developers are safeguarding your data and workflows because the product can never go away, they respond with quips like "Macromedia isn't going anywhere." (Ahem!) Either they can't or won't remember that the instant it becomes financially undesirable to support Dreamweaver it will disappear from the market.
The economic and support agument is shakey at best. If an open source program does not do what I want it to do but I commercial program does then it doesn't matter how much the commercial program is or how free the open source program is because the cost of getting what I want with the comercial program is fixed while the cost with the open source program is infinite.
To put it another way you have a choice between two matresses to sleep on, a Tempurpedic at $1000 or my own customed designed fecal matress. Sure my matress is filled with shit rather than memory foam, and it doesn't smell too good, but it can be used to rest upon just like a tempurpedic and it's free. Not only that but I will provide free shit refills for as long as I live where as if your tempurpedic goes bad, and they're no longer around you're SOL.
Cost becomes irellevant when the products don't do the same thing for your purposes.
While he wasn't the friendliest of people the one thing I did notice was that it took 3 pages before anyone really started offering some real help. Hell it took 3 pages just to find out what the error code was about. No wonder he's pissed off. Seriously while he could have been nicer, his computer was dead, and instead of any real help people are asking what version of windows (he's right, it's irellevant at this stage) and other information. The first step should have been to figure out what the error meant and where to go from there. He was perfectly reasonable to the people that were offering real help. The people saying go find a liveCD or a windows CD were unhelpful. He should not need extra software to recover an install failure, that should be recoverable from the install CD.
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Having worked retail and various other service jobs over the years, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that 80% of the time, the customer is wrong. Maybe not completely out of their minds, but certainly wrong. Customers these days have far to high of a sense of entitlement and far to low of a sense of their own ineptitude. If you were a manufacturer, and you made a certain product for 3 years. Then you released a new version of the product that was identical in all respects to your current and previous versions except the size, and a small chunk of your customers were complaining that the product was easily damaged, would you assume it's the product or your customers?
But as many people correctly pointed out, they did't have to do it right then and there. After the return policy, they merely have to repair or replace it, and that can take (depending on which company you deal with) a few weeks.
Probably because they were bending the rules a bit (though they really didn't have to harp on it). Assuming the Apple stores are like most retail stores with repair centers, replacement stock and retail stock are two seperate things. In order for something to get replaced that isn't in the normal return period it has to be pulled from replacement stock. In order for that to happen, certain things have to be done in a certain order to make bean counters happy. In this case, you probably had to see the geniuses because the sales people couldn't ring out a service part and technicaly they needed documentation. More likely than not after you left, the manager types made up some documentation in the back to account for the item taken out of replacement stock.
If they can't stand being handled by unauthorized personnel, then what are we to expect after leaving them standing in a public place all day while hundreds of grubby plebes put their filthy hands all over them?
Which is exactly why unauthorized personelle are allowed to poke and prod at all secure systems right? I mean hell just last week I was invited to try poking at the internals of an ATM. And the week before that I was given access to the internals of a hospital computer system, and I'm just some random joe off the streets, and I managed to break both systems. Presumeably you will be giving me root access and remote login to all of your machines from now on correct? How can we possibly expect these systems to last against daily use by clueless users if they can't stand up to me with admin access..
Wait you mean there's a difference between restricted and unrestricted access to a machine? Say it isn't so.
in a democracy, there is only one thing that should absolutely be the property and purview of all the people all the time, and that's the integrity of our vote. Without it, we don't have jack shit.
And we have always had jack shit. The very nature that a ballot is supposed to be secret means by it's definition that at some point you need to assume a level of trust with someone. You will never be able to 100% verify a vote without a public system which links social security numbers with pictures of people and their names and adresses and their votes, and even then you run the risk of fraud.
So why is crime glamorized in the popular culture?
For the same reason anything is glamorized, it's unattainable and forbidden.
Why is there rampant blue collar white collar and just plain old crime still.
Note that these things are illegal and punished rather than allowed and accepted. The existance of humans by definition will never allow for a perfect culture, but a sucessful culture works heavily to subdue and eliminate undesireables.
Why are the little dominant culture boys running around imitating 'gangstas' in the suburbs?
See glamor above. Also note that the suit and tie world which you criticise is exactly the thing that will beat these wanna be losers into real members of society or let them whither and die depending on their choices.
So far we have had slavery, institutionalized racism with the paint still fresh over the Jim Crow signs, Italians beating Black kids in Bensonhurst, exploitation of a cheap labor pool (hello mexico!)
Note that all of these things are illegal. As I said, a succesful culture seeks to subdue and eliminate undesireable culture traits.
The melting pot is a largely a myth, as the ingredients have formed well defined Strata and have not blended or melted together at all. America is still a very young work in progress, we shall see what happens.
Hardly. The strata separation of the cultures is largely myth and more extensively the natural grouping of people that we see. Mobility into or out of the various sub cultures that make up america is considerably easy compared to for example attempting to integrate with japanese or french culture.
If anything causes the american culture to decline it will be relativism. The moment undesireables become semi desireable is the moment things begin to fall apart. Suceess as a culture is like anything else, it must be ruthless and unforgiving, allowing only the best and seeking to eliminate the worst.
Absolutely. Now roll the clock back 100 years and replace "dress like a homeless person" with "be a female" or "be a non-white person", and you'll see why simply accepting things the way they are, with old and unquestioned values, is commonly neither the right thing to do nor the path to progress.
Being female or non white is not a choice. If you choose to dress / act / speak a certain way, I will choose to judge you based on your choices.
So, flamebait or not, in a society that proclaims itself a "melting pot" and "equal opportunity employer" etc. ad nauseum, to be intolerant of a subculture (no matter how small) is nothing less than hypocrisy.
Hardly. The reason the melting pot culture is so succesful is precisely because it allows for multiple sub-cultures to exist but refuses to advance or allow culture traits which are viewed at inferior by the majority of people. The reason that modern "civilized" culture does not involve rape, sexual opression, constant infighting and death is preciesely becuase the people look down upon such cultural traits and work to lower, reduce and eliminate those traits (socialy or legaly it doesn't matter both are effective methods of modern culture)
Probably a decent chunk, but is that due to Apple (computer) being infringing on trademark or is it due to the fact that Appe (records) has faded into relative obscurity?
You're missing his point. It's not that there is a default size, it's that the default is too small so that you have no choice but to resize it for each new app and you can't change the default.
Too small is a matter of opinion. I find it to be just fine, though I'm working on an old 15 inch monitor. Given that OS X works on machines dating back to the original iMacs I would guess that the save dialouges look just fine on those and was chosen to look right on a small monitor because if it's too small you can make it bigger but if it's too big you can't really go smaller.
since I screwed up, here's the rest:
e nts" which now expands their one collumn to occupy most of the window.
I'm not sure I agree with all or even most of his points of contention.
In issue 1 for example he complains that each open/save dialouge starts out the exact same way and then goes on to complain further in the article that the OS isn't always consistant. It's consistant for each dialouge to remain the same size by default until the user specifies a change. Furthermore since the size of the dialouge can be set per application, that size would need to be specified by the application making having a universal override obnoxious.
In his 2nd point he's descirbes a senario which is at best extremely uncommon and then describes a process which is obnoxious and complicated when it's easier for most people to either have an automator script to open specific things they want or even better for his senario and automator script which asks where he is and then opens the appropriate applications. A simple applescript for the applications one doesn't need all the time with a prompt at the begining to ask whether to launch the remaining apps and then placing that script in the login items folder seems more useful and less annoying than check boxes to enable and disable each item that you must do before loging out the previous time.
point 3 he's correct on
point 4 he's correct on the disapearing sidebar but on the issue of double clicking the boarder, it's a rather difficult task to accomplish accidently so I am sure anyone doing it would notice the dimple before and after.
point 5 he's moving away from his consistancy argument again. With the column view you set the size of the columns and the number of columns, and if you chose to physicaly change the display you can. What he's suggesting is a display system which dynamicaly changes size to fit the content of the display which while it could be benneficial to some people seems overly complicated and a major violation of the consistancy guideline. It's concieveable to see a situation there where all of a sudden you would go from having 4 collumns displayed to having 2 or 1 because you have one file in the display such as "com.apple.Components2.LocalCache.QuickTimeCompon
point 6 he's correct on
point 7 he's got a point but at the same time, with the addition of the PDF abilities and the fact that faxing IS handled with PDFs it does make sense to put it under the PDF button. In the end I don't find it much more of an abstraction than his recomendation to make it an availible printer.
point 8 I can see a method to the madness in that if the next set of startup items require the server, it's important for you to know that the server is not availible BEFORE those apps launch and fail. There may be a better way, but I don't agree that it's a failing.
in point 9 the views update for the column view I think is a good thing. While it's not 100% consistant, in this case it would be irritating for a directory I'm working with to rename and then immediately move out of my working view until I indicate being done with the directory either by being idle or moving to a new object.
The size information I would assume is an updating routine thats scheduled rather than called.
in point 10 if he cant see a situation where a user might unknowingly or mistakenly change their file extention then he needs to think harder. The checkbox would be nice though but it's also nitpicking at this point. It's a potentialy destructive action, and a user should be reminded to think before they do it. Being able to permanently dismiss such reminders is what gives viruses and other malicious programs a better chance of succeeding.
I'm not sure I agree with all or even most of his points of contention.
In issue 1 for example he complains that each open/save dialouge starts out the exact same way and then goes on to complain further in the article that the OS isn't always consistant. It's consistant for each dialouge to remain the same size by default until the user specifies a change. Furthermore since the size of the dialouge can be set per application, that size would need to be specified by the application making having a universal override obnoxious.
In his 2nd point he's descirbes a senario which is at best extremely uncommon and then describes a process which is obnoxious and complicated when it's easier for most people to either have an automator script to open specific things they want or even better for his senario and automator script which asks where he is and then opens the appropriate applications. A simple applescript for the applications one doesn't need all the time with a prompt at the begining to ask whether to launch the remaining apps and then placing that script in the login items folder seems more useful and less annoying than check boxes to enable and disable each item that you must do before loging out the previous time.
Which widgets are you using? I have 3 widgets open on dashboard and 2 instaces of two of them givng me a total of 5 widgets to be displayed. When idle each one consumes (roundng up) about 7 MB of physical memory. That leaves me with a max use of 35 MB of memory for ALL of the widgets. Hardly a 20-30 per each widget.
The last post was trying to dismiss your straw man of a person who has no reason to switch, being the right standard for what the acceptable level of hassle is.
I think you fail to understand the argument I'm making. If Linux is to take any sizeable portion of the home desktop market, than their standard that they have to live up to are the standards of people with no reason to switch. They need to be given a reason to switch and at the same time maintain their expected level and type of service and support.
Furthermore I disagree that he was given excellent support. He had one helpful post on the first page and then it took until the 4th page before any real help was provided. It took that long just for someone to look up the error code instead of talking out their ass.
Now you're moving beyond the original scope of the conversation. Originaly this was all started by a home user who went to try linux, installed it, it fucked up his MBR, he had a bitch of a time getting any real help, complained and was told essentialy "STFU code it yourself"
In this case I was discussing why Linux is and will remain an also ran on home desktop systems, therefore our target consumer is a home desktop user. Since these people don't exist in a vaccum we must then take into acount their current situations. From there we can see that should linux devs or the linux community as a whole want linux to break into and succesfully capture a share of the home desktop market, then attitudes must change and the original posts complaints must be adressed in a way which does not require coding the solution for oneself.
In short I agree that as it stands, there is no reason for a home consumer to desire linux, but the linux comunity as a whole continues to push for it. Sadly home user experience is lacking and I illustrated part of the reason why. That is what my original post was about.
How much is Dell to pay to "linux" so "we linuxers" have any need or inclination to listen to them?
The value of a preinstalled system is infinitely more valuble to the linux community than any money is.
You are missing the point entirely in that home desktop users aren't buying Emporor Linux Laptops (until today I had never even heard of them). They aren't bying dell Enterprise + Oracle machines and they aren't buying Commercial Linuxes. They're getting their linux from a friend or a relative who's convinced them to try it. They're downloading it on someone's recomendation. These people are not paying out to give Linux a try. They may do so if and when they have discovered that they prefer Linux but they aren't going to before hand because they've already paid for a system that works.
Besides, when someone says Linux, people with a passing knowledge do not think of Xandros or Mandriva first, and if people in the know and with passing knowledge don't, how then does one expect the home consumer to?
Regardless of whether the support is provided by microsoft or Dell, as far as the end user is concerned is irellevant, the point is such support exists and is easy to acceess. With linux however, such support does not exist or is extremly difficult to access.
People do pay for it. That's why they buy windows.
I need to build a dual boot machine,
You are not the home desktop market, ergo microsoft does not need to cater to your needs. You are not part of point 1. You are part of point 2. The people the linux devs are trying to reach are not building machines from scratch and certainly not going to wipe their home machine and reinstall just to try linux.
He said that he had already tried reinstalling, multiple time, that would include the boot loader. Regardless of whether he COULD use a live CD to do it, he was right in that he should not HAVE to use a live CD to do it, ortherwise the install CD ahould also be a live CD. His computer was hosed and people were suggestiong that he needed to borrow someone elses machine tie it up to download a live CD (600MB still takes a while to download on highspeed) and then burn it to another disk. Not everyone would have access to that sort of resource.
Furthermore, not only did it take 4 pages to get any real help one of the first replies he gets automaticaly blames it on windows and that turns out to be inaccurate as we discover when someone actualy looks up what the error code means.
He was an ass to the people that weren't providing any real help to him. Everyone that provided a real trouble shooting step he took their advice and tried it. Everyone else was wasting their breath telling him to get a live CD or find his windows CDs.
In short, yes he could have been nicer but no he was not recieving very good help until the 4th page.
It's not a double standard because Microsoft and Linux devs are not trying to accomplish the same thing. Microsoft's concern is maintaining market dominance. They aren't trying to break into the home desktop market, they ARE the home desktop market.
Linux devs on the other hand ARE trying to break into the desktop market. Their concern is increasing acceptance, therefore Linux must be unobtrusive, meld smoothly with current setups and position itself to be better without being a major shift until the time comes to make a new purchase.
Two different goals, two different strategies, two different rules. It's not a double standard, it's reality. No one wants to install Windows on a Linux machine, but people do want to install Linux on a Windows machine.
IOW in order to supplant windows, linux needs to be equal to AND better than windows. That means that Linux must have things that Windows does not. One of those things is going to have to be awareness of other OSes.
They don't have to for 3 reasons:
1) They are the dominate player. They come preinstalled on all home systems except Apple systems. No one is installing XP on to a linux machine.
2) Anyone that would install XP on top of a linux machine likely knows what they're doing better than 90% of the population and therefore can handle taking care of that themselves. Furthermore the chances of these people actualy installing XP on one of their linux machines is low enough to be practicaly rounding error.
3) Linux developers are trying to reach home users, people who already have windows installed and already have windows. These people aren't going to give up their current set up just to try something new, they want something that doesn't disrupt their current setup. That means it's Linux's problem, not Microsofts.
Now let's look at what the most common event is? That someone will be installing windows on a machine with linux or that someone will be installing linux on a machine with windows? If linux devs want acceptance on the home desktop than Linux needs to be coded to play nice as the second place OS which means it needs to be other OS aware and respect the space of other OSes.
So when I suggest that Nvu is an alternative to Dreamweaver, people respond just like you did and rag on Nvu's feature set. And when I point out that there is a USD400 price tag difference between them, it's meaningless, because they know they can get Dreamweaver "for free."
And finally, when I point out that the Nvu developers are safeguarding your data and workflows because the product can never go away, they respond with quips like "Macromedia isn't going anywhere." (Ahem!) Either they can't or won't remember that the instant it becomes financially undesirable to support Dreamweaver it will disappear from the market.
The economic and support agument is shakey at best. If an open source program does not do what I want it to do but I commercial program does then it doesn't matter how much the commercial program is or how free the open source program is because the cost of getting what I want with the comercial program is fixed while the cost with the open source program is infinite.
To put it another way you have a choice between two matresses to sleep on, a Tempurpedic at $1000 or my own customed designed fecal matress. Sure my matress is filled with shit rather than memory foam, and it doesn't smell too good, but it can be used to rest upon just like a tempurpedic and it's free. Not only that but I will provide free shit refills for as long as I live where as if your tempurpedic goes bad, and they're no longer around you're SOL.
Cost becomes irellevant when the products don't do the same thing for your purposes.
While he wasn't the friendliest of people the one thing I did notice was that it took 3 pages before anyone really started offering some real help. Hell it took 3 pages just to find out what the error code was about. No wonder he's pissed off. Seriously while he could have been nicer, his computer was dead, and instead of any real help people are asking what version of windows (he's right, it's irellevant at this stage) and other information. The first step should have been to figure out what the error meant and where to go from there. He was perfectly reasonable to the people that were offering real help. The people saying go find a liveCD or a windows CD were unhelpful. He should not need extra software to recover an install failure, that should be recoverable from the install CD.