First off, this article is talking about office environments, not home use.
as for the multimedia stuff, i do everything you do in windows on linux (except for kazaa, other then the time i got it running in wine for kicks) and its very different. When something crashes, it doesnt take down the whole system. my x server has crashed many times, but that doesnt require a reboot. the same cannot be said for windows
"The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries"
uh huh. And the americans show their education by allowing their freedoms and social liberties taken away from them by the very people who provoked (unintentional) attack by carrying out economic and strategic driven foreign policy rather then using their power to be a force for peace.
Noone hates us, most people love us, and we live relatively peaceful lives. I guess your right, we're just a bunch of uneducated boobs for not going after what really matters, money and conquest.
firefox has now been trademarked, there will be no more name changes. as a pre-release, it is also subject to massive changes quite frequently in the way it works. all that being said, firefox 0.9 is years ahead of internet explorer six in terms of standards implementation and features. ie used to be one of the best browsers around, but that was years ago.
You must be kidding me. First off, windows is extremely lazy about unloading dlls from memory, that means it is quite snappy and responsive at first, but as time goes on and memory fills up load time for apps go through the roof.
and i cant count the times when an app crashes and windows cant clean it up correctly.
Windows 3.1 and 9x werent operating systems, they were graphical shells. dos was the operating system. And the NT kernel is very close to UMS, not UNIX.
IMHO, corel had the best solution to it, but as usual with the software market, the superior product is in the minority and the more expensive one reigns supreme.
in the last version of wordperfect i used (cant recall the version number) the interface was almost completely mutable. everything from menus to toolbars could be customized, and it came with schemes for various word processor programs. migrating from word 97 and need to get work done fast? a few clicks and you have the same toolbars, menus, and key bindings as word.
the biggest problem with office apps is training. if microsoft word ran in linux, the secratary wouldnt notice a difference, as her entire pc is just an "office bucket". the barrier in this kind of situation is huge for a highly innovative app that is superior to the market standard, as opposed to a clone of the existing dominant product (this is also why every major distro configures both kde and gnome to look as much like windows as possible.)
look at storage, winfs, and spotlight, and ask yourself who came up with the idea first? that would be seth with storage. how about nats dashboard? ive seen a few mentions of "implicit queries" in longhorn that sound suspiciously close to what nat came up with. then theres the BSD TCP stack that was aparently copied into windows. and hey, if money = innovation, why has apple done more in the last five years then microsoft in ten?
he has some legitimate gripes, even if some are a bit much. go through the apps on your computer, and really look at how much of them you use. as an example, i only know one person who uses word to even 80% of what it can do. the other thirty or so people i know who use word daily really would be fine with the feature set of wordpad.
50% of americans have a computer cause an engineer called steve wozniak came up with a mass proucable computer for the masses.
90%+ of people use windows because its the cheapest solution for someone not technically inclined.
if a feature isnt useful to 51% of people out there, it should be something you have to hunt for to use, not something you have to use to do anything. a prime example of this is the windows installer. 99% of windows programs are a ten step process to install, if your know what your doing you hit "next" nine times and then "finish". if you dont know what your doing, you hit next till something scares you, then you phone up a friend to find out what to do next.
sane defaults and smart features dont mean that the technologically savvy miss out. the role of the plugin for example is a great solution for features for a few people who need them. every feature in a product that i dont need is not only overhead, but it is clutter that increases the time it takes me to find the ones that i do need. how is this helpful to the so called "power users" out there?
one final point, good design is not the same as dumbed down. do you consider photoshop dumbed down? or maybe flash? both of those were designed as mac programs.....
document.all is a real ugly hack that goes against the DOM in a tremendous way. there is an object hierarchy, and then a collection of those same objects without the hierarchy? makes no sense. the only reason to use document.all is laziness, sort of like goto.
As for gecko not wanting to be standards compliant, i have had no problems whatsoever so far, and i do ALOT of webbrowsing on a daily basis. the only issue i have had actually, is some pages in our webapp here at work just wouldnt work with mozilla browsers, and that was because of alot of ie specific code. now with firefox, it all works fine. now tell me, if mozilla was against IE compatibility, then why does it get more and more compatible with each release?
Mac would suffer the same fate, as would linux, but only if everyone used the same distro. considering the hundreds of distros out there, i doubt that monoculture would ever be the same problem it is today
what what version of apache runs on RHEL 3.0? Compared to Fedora Core 1? Compared to Redhat 9.0?
three products by the same company in the same family, all with different versions, and vulnerable to different exploits. and how many hundreds of linux distros are there?
of course they wont, but there is a big difference between a worm with one attack causing billions of dollars of damage, compared to alot of work to make a worm that only effects a small amount of the market.
as much as its a good thing to see someone who doesnt blithly follow the "if i install linux the box will magically become secure" myth, there are a few reasons that OSS isnt getting this kind of attention.
first off, theres the process. someone reports the problem to ms, ms denies it, someone else reports it, ms denys it, but starts looking at it. it gets validated and the maintenance guys start looking at it. eventually they find the bug and make the patch. the patch goes to qa. the qa people make sure nothing gets broken by the patch, and then it makes its way to ms update.
as opposed to (worst case) someone posting the problem to the mailing list of the app, (best case) someone posts the problem and a fix to the mailing list of the app.
the turnaround in OSS is much faster, patches are issued all the time, usually within hours of the vulnerability being found. compare that with the microsoft turnaround....
the second thing is that, as much as people here hate to admit it, linux related stuff doesnt matter as much. when the overwhelming majority of computers on the internet can be harnesed for DDoS attacks, the scruteny falls on the people who allow this to happen.
last point, do a comparison between the number of microsoft CERT warnings compared to those of other operating systems and tell me that the scruteny is unwarrented
being up to date with the latest release is very different the installing the latest security patches. you guys are comparing apples and oranges. unless, of course, you can go from win2k to winxp in 3 mouse clicks....
I agree 120%. Fedora is head and shoulders above the other userfriendly distros. There are a few libraries I wish they included, but if they manage to merge with freshrpms, it will become a non-issue.
There are a grand total of 2 bugs I knew about by the end of configuring fedora, and only one affected me. When I was setting up my dsl adapter, i used the wizard or druid or whatever its called, and that is broken. But a simple adsl-setup gets around that, the only reason i used the gui one in the first place was to see how it looked.
The second I was told about by a friend, the add/remove programs is broken. This had no impact on me, as with something like yum i wouldnt even thinking of using a gui that limited me to the install cds. i actually installed apt pretty quick, but yum is quite sufficient, and wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy better then nothing.
Anyways, apart from some *extremely* minor issues, fedora installs extremely well. The default setup is both practical and attractive, the gui config tools are quite well done for the most part. I even like their stock 2.4.22 kernels, other for not having ntfs support compiled in, they perform very well, aparently RH backported alot of 2.6 features into their version of 2.4.22. on a side note, the ntfs project has rpms for fedora kernels now, so the ntfs thing is a non issue.
I cant express how pleased i am with this distro. Ive used slack for the last two years or so, but i wanted something that was more of a workhorse then a science experament, so ive been playing with some of the user-friendly distros in the last few months, and fedora is my favorite by far.
I dont know what eugenia was smoking, but dont listen. if you use mandy/rh/suse, at the least give fedora a try. while there are bugs, even a newb can work past em.
you know, having messenger service enabled on the corporate version makes sense. On the pro, it would be understandable. but i wonder what genius decided that XP home version would have a network notification service enabled by default on the version of xp that is mostly unique by its lack of networking/admin tools? If XP home is on a network at all other then the internet, it will be a 2-5 home LAN that would have no conceivable reason to have a network notification service period. really, at the least its more bloat, at the worst its what win users are suffering from now.
the nigerian spams are my favorite! in the days of penis/breast enlarging, at least the nigerian spams had a modicum of effort put into them and an interesting story.....
Considering all the stuff when it comes to internet dominance that microsoft has planned in the "longhorn wave", killing flash should be the least of our worries. can anyone say hailstorm?
DISCLAIMER:
I am not a linux zealot
I do not believe that evil is embedded in every tenth line of microsoft code
I have purchased versions of windows, and develope for windows software as my profession
i simply find the direction that windows is heading with "service based computing" to be repellant, and have no desire to let microsoft tax me for using the internet or my own pc.
You still buy quality, the same quality that you get on a cd. The differences are
1) Its cheaper
2) You burn the cd yourself
3) You get what you pay for instantly from the comfort of wherever you have your computer
I dont think elimination of the origional media is the intent, or even direction this is heading. Elimination of the current distrobution system however....
The internet gives of a way to distribute media which can be digitized at a fraction of the cost it takes to distribute it traditionally. With the cd-burner costing next to nothing nowadays, internet distrobution seems to me like a fantastic idea.
for sure, but it seems like people who use those p2p networks dont know how to rip things properly. 10$ for an album of guarenteed pristine quality songs that is 100% legal is more attractive to me then a mishmash of bad quality, bad bitrates, varying volumes, and all out fakes that is kazaa.
yes it is an interesting concept. i am a webapp developer, and our product is pretty much married to IE 6 at this point. i use xp and slack at home, and 2k at work.
did i complain about windows instability? no. winXP is plenty stable, and longhorn looks like it will have plenty of innovative and interesting technology, however that technology is going to be used to not only lock users into the microsoft product stack in an unprecidented way, but will tax users on top of it. if the technology from the "longhorn wave" seemed to be for any other purpose then to increase their monopoly, then i would be all for it. i just dont believe that using a computer should be a subscription service, and im starting to get tired of the whole media campeign moving the focus away from that fact. i have no problem with windows, i have purchased almost every version so far. i perfer linux, but that is beside the point. i am currently writing this from xp, but longhorn will never touch my hd. microsoft lost me as a customer with this new shift in focus.
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First off, this article is talking about office environments, not home use.
as for the multimedia stuff, i do everything you do in windows on linux (except for kazaa, other then the time i got it running in wine for kicks) and its very different. When something crashes, it doesnt take down the whole system. my x server has crashed many times, but that doesnt require a reboot. the same cannot be said for windows
"The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries"
that is companies, not home users.
uh huh. And the americans show their education by allowing their freedoms and social liberties taken away from them by the very people who provoked (unintentional) attack by carrying out economic and strategic driven foreign policy rather then using their power to be a force for peace. Noone hates us, most people love us, and we live relatively peaceful lives. I guess your right, we're just a bunch of uneducated boobs for not going after what really matters, money and conquest.
the german nihilist had a marmot, not a farret
:-)
great quote though
firefox has now been trademarked, there will be no more name changes. as a pre-release, it is also subject to massive changes quite frequently in the way it works. all that being said, firefox 0.9 is years ahead of internet explorer six in terms of standards implementation and features. ie used to be one of the best browsers around, but that was years ago.
You must be kidding me. First off, windows is extremely lazy about unloading dlls from memory, that means it is quite snappy and responsive at first, but as time goes on and memory fills up load time for apps go through the roof.
and i cant count the times when an app crashes and windows cant clean it up correctly.
Windows 3.1 and 9x werent operating systems, they were graphical shells. dos was the operating system. And the NT kernel is very close to UMS, not UNIX.
IMHO, corel had the best solution to it, but as usual with the software market, the superior product is in the minority and the more expensive one reigns supreme.
in the last version of wordperfect i used (cant recall the version number) the interface was almost completely mutable. everything from menus to toolbars could be customized, and it came with schemes for various word processor programs. migrating from word 97 and need to get work done fast? a few clicks and you have the same toolbars, menus, and key bindings as word.
the biggest problem with office apps is training. if microsoft word ran in linux, the secratary wouldnt notice a difference, as her entire pc is just an "office bucket". the barrier in this kind of situation is huge for a highly innovative app that is superior to the market standard, as opposed to a clone of the existing dominant product (this is also why every major distro configures both kde and gnome to look as much like windows as possible.)
look at storage, winfs, and spotlight, and ask yourself who came up with the idea first? that would be seth with storage. how about nats dashboard? ive seen a few mentions of "implicit queries" in longhorn that sound suspiciously close to what nat came up with. then theres the BSD TCP stack that was aparently copied into windows. and hey, if money = innovation, why has apple done more in the last five years then microsoft in ten?
he has some legitimate gripes, even if some are a bit much. go through the apps on your computer, and really look at how much of them you use. as an example, i only know one person who uses word to even 80% of what it can do. the other thirty or so people i know who use word daily really would be fine with the feature set of wordpad.
50% of americans have a computer cause an engineer called steve wozniak came up with a mass proucable computer for the masses.
90%+ of people use windows because its the cheapest solution for someone not technically inclined.
if a feature isnt useful to 51% of people out there, it should be something you have to hunt for to use, not something you have to use to do anything. a prime example of this is the windows installer. 99% of windows programs are a ten step process to install, if your know what your doing you hit "next" nine times and then "finish". if you dont know what your doing, you hit next till something scares you, then you phone up a friend to find out what to do next.
sane defaults and smart features dont mean that the technologically savvy miss out. the role of the plugin for example is a great solution for features for a few people who need them. every feature in a product that i dont need is not only overhead, but it is clutter that increases the time it takes me to find the ones that i do need. how is this helpful to the so called "power users" out there?
one final point, good design is not the same as dumbed down. do you consider photoshop dumbed down? or maybe flash? both of those were designed as mac programs.....
document.all is a real ugly hack that goes against the DOM in a tremendous way. there is an object hierarchy, and then a collection of those same objects without the hierarchy? makes no sense. the only reason to use document.all is laziness, sort of like goto. As for gecko not wanting to be standards compliant, i have had no problems whatsoever so far, and i do ALOT of webbrowsing on a daily basis. the only issue i have had actually, is some pages in our webapp here at work just wouldnt work with mozilla browsers, and that was because of alot of ie specific code. now with firefox, it all works fine. now tell me, if mozilla was against IE compatibility, then why does it get more and more compatible with each release?
Mac would suffer the same fate, as would linux, but only if everyone used the same distro. considering the hundreds of distros out there, i doubt that monoculture would ever be the same problem it is today
what what version of apache runs on RHEL 3.0? Compared to Fedora Core 1? Compared to Redhat 9.0? three products by the same company in the same family, all with different versions, and vulnerable to different exploits. and how many hundreds of linux distros are there?
of course they wont, but there is a big difference between a worm with one attack causing billions of dollars of damage, compared to alot of work to make a worm that only effects a small amount of the market.
as much as its a good thing to see someone who doesnt blithly follow the "if i install linux the box will magically become secure" myth, there are a few reasons that OSS isnt getting this kind of attention. first off, theres the process. someone reports the problem to ms, ms denies it, someone else reports it, ms denys it, but starts looking at it. it gets validated and the maintenance guys start looking at it. eventually they find the bug and make the patch. the patch goes to qa. the qa people make sure nothing gets broken by the patch, and then it makes its way to ms update. as opposed to (worst case) someone posting the problem to the mailing list of the app, (best case) someone posts the problem and a fix to the mailing list of the app. the turnaround in OSS is much faster, patches are issued all the time, usually within hours of the vulnerability being found. compare that with the microsoft turnaround.... the second thing is that, as much as people here hate to admit it, linux related stuff doesnt matter as much. when the overwhelming majority of computers on the internet can be harnesed for DDoS attacks, the scruteny falls on the people who allow this to happen. last point, do a comparison between the number of microsoft CERT warnings compared to those of other operating systems and tell me that the scruteny is unwarrented
being up to date with the latest release is very different the installing the latest security patches. you guys are comparing apples and oranges. unless, of course, you can go from win2k to winxp in 3 mouse clicks....
I agree 120%. Fedora is head and shoulders above the other userfriendly distros. There are a few libraries I wish they included, but if they manage to merge with freshrpms, it will become a non-issue. There are a grand total of 2 bugs I knew about by the end of configuring fedora, and only one affected me. When I was setting up my dsl adapter, i used the wizard or druid or whatever its called, and that is broken. But a simple adsl-setup gets around that, the only reason i used the gui one in the first place was to see how it looked. The second I was told about by a friend, the add/remove programs is broken. This had no impact on me, as with something like yum i wouldnt even thinking of using a gui that limited me to the install cds. i actually installed apt pretty quick, but yum is quite sufficient, and wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy better then nothing. Anyways, apart from some *extremely* minor issues, fedora installs extremely well. The default setup is both practical and attractive, the gui config tools are quite well done for the most part. I even like their stock 2.4.22 kernels, other for not having ntfs support compiled in, they perform very well, aparently RH backported alot of 2.6 features into their version of 2.4.22. on a side note, the ntfs project has rpms for fedora kernels now, so the ntfs thing is a non issue. I cant express how pleased i am with this distro. Ive used slack for the last two years or so, but i wanted something that was more of a workhorse then a science experament, so ive been playing with some of the user-friendly distros in the last few months, and fedora is my favorite by far. I dont know what eugenia was smoking, but dont listen. if you use mandy/rh/suse, at the least give fedora a try. while there are bugs, even a newb can work past em.
you know, having messenger service enabled on the corporate version makes sense. On the pro, it would be understandable. but i wonder what genius decided that XP home version would have a network notification service enabled by default on the version of xp that is mostly unique by its lack of networking/admin tools? If XP home is on a network at all other then the internet, it will be a 2-5 home LAN that would have no conceivable reason to have a network notification service period. really, at the least its more bloat, at the worst its what win users are suffering from now.
the nigerian spams are my favorite! in the days of penis/breast enlarging, at least the nigerian spams had a modicum of effort put into them and an interesting story.....
Considering all the stuff when it comes to internet dominance that microsoft has planned in the "longhorn wave", killing flash should be the least of our worries. can anyone say hailstorm? DISCLAIMER: I am not a linux zealot I do not believe that evil is embedded in every tenth line of microsoft code I have purchased versions of windows, and develope for windows software as my profession i simply find the direction that windows is heading with "service based computing" to be repellant, and have no desire to let microsoft tax me for using the internet or my own pc.
You still buy quality, the same quality that you get on a cd. The differences are 1) Its cheaper 2) You burn the cd yourself 3) You get what you pay for instantly from the comfort of wherever you have your computer
I dont think elimination of the origional media is the intent, or even direction this is heading. Elimination of the current distrobution system however.... The internet gives of a way to distribute media which can be digitized at a fraction of the cost it takes to distribute it traditionally. With the cd-burner costing next to nothing nowadays, internet distrobution seems to me like a fantastic idea.
....at a bitrate of 12 kbps
for sure, but it seems like people who use those p2p networks dont know how to rip things properly. 10$ for an album of guarenteed pristine quality songs that is 100% legal is more attractive to me then a mishmash of bad quality, bad bitrates, varying volumes, and all out fakes that is kazaa.
yes it is an interesting concept. i am a webapp developer, and our product is pretty much married to IE 6 at this point. i use xp and slack at home, and 2k at work.
did i complain about windows instability? no. winXP is plenty stable, and longhorn looks like it will have plenty of innovative and interesting technology, however that technology is going to be used to not only lock users into the microsoft product stack in an unprecidented way, but will tax users on top of it. if the technology from the "longhorn wave" seemed to be for any other purpose then to increase their monopoly, then i would be all for it. i just dont believe that using a computer should be a subscription service, and im starting to get tired of the whole media campeign moving the focus away from that fact. i have no problem with windows, i have purchased almost every version so far. i perfer linux, but that is beside the point. i am currently writing this from xp, but longhorn will never touch my hd. microsoft lost me as a customer with this new shift in focus.