The entire document is about limiting (and defining, which imposes other limits) the federal government. Even when they leave powers to the states (10th) or people (9th), it's a limit on federal power. Defining job criteria is just about the only thing that comes to mind that is a stretch to fit to that idea. It was not even intended to apply to the states--and if memory serves, was specifically NOT applied to the states--for a long time (until after the 14th).
I don't recall signing any contract with FedEx that says they can search my goods, but even if I did the Constitution trumps that. I haven't got a problem with them opening it for technical reasons (repacking a mangled package, perhaps, which I'd accept gladly), but opening them for the purposes of determing if you've broken some law probably won't pass 4th Amendment muster.
The Constitution is, of course, a document limiting the power of the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment applied those same provisions to the states.
You do not, however, have a Constitutional right for me, as a private citizen, not to go through your desk drawers. Might other laws apply? Yes, but it's not a Constitutional issue.*
What does that mean? It means if FedEx--a private company--and the MPAA--also a private group**--decide to open your packages, your only recourses are to find another carrier or try your hand at a civil suit. I'm not sure one would fly, but it's your Consitutional right to try.
It gets hairy about what they do if they find something. I am not a lawyer, and I am not sure if the police (or FBI or DEA or what have you) could use evidence obtained in this manner if it were illegal. I still do not think it is, however.
This would be vastly different if it were the MPAA and the USPO, which is a government entity. Then all of your Constitutional protections would unequivically apply.
* Interestingly, some courts seem to be extending privacy concepts, such as reasonable expectation of privacy, to personal situations--business in particular. I would support such laws or amendments, but I don't think they're there right now and I think extending the Fourth Amendment to private entities is a bit of a stretch.
** Since the movie industry seems to have special legal protections (what other form of copyright infringement is a federal crime enforcable by the FBI?), I would be curious to see it go to court as to whether or not they are truly a private entity.
It's stupid statements like that which don't put this guy (or the lawyer) in a very good light. It sounds like he's grasping at straws, looking for some way to vindicate his client for doing something really stupid.
Which, it should be noted, is preciseley the job of a defense attorney and the purpose of the appeals system.
Everybody is entitled to an adequate defense, even ones who do something really stupid. If I were in this guy's place, I know I'd want my lawyer filing every appeal on every ground he could think of. If they're dumb they won't fly, but let's let the courts decide that.
Lay won't get off, for the same reason I knew George Ryan (former governor of Illinois, corruption scandal) wouldn't get off: They need to make some examples.
Ryan, though, seems well on his way to a new trial.
Where do you live that it costs $20-45 per person to go to a movie theater? Are you spending $12 on popcorn? Er--since you used the $45 mark in your calculations, it must be closer to $35 in popcorn and drinks. Maybe if you cut back a bit you'd save money AND lose weight!
The American banking system is dependant on these overdraw fees and will never separate with them. So as long as that's the case, removing classic style paper based money and checks is out of the question.
Why is it up to them? They already provide the services necessary to make paper checks and cash essentially obsolete; in the time I've had my check (debit) card, I have only written a handful of checks, and it was because the recipient didn't have a method of paying with a card or EFT.
They can bitch and moan as much as they want, but how quickly America becomes a relatively cashless society is dependent upon the merchants and the attitudes of the people, not what the banks want. When I *can* pay for everything without cash, I probably will. I am already pretty close. The banks certainly aren't the limiting factor for me.
might it not be prudent to actually put ppl in the patent office who know about technology and the obtuse patents some of these comapanies want to file for?
How many people with more than a passing knowledge of technology want to put it to work at the US Patent office?
It seems to me that skilled folks who would be really good at making decisions like these can find much better, higher paying, more rewarding and less boring jobs elsewhere in the market.
Tangently, the patent isn't quite as bad as the summary makes it sound. They didn't patent entering a product key. They patented the whole online activation thing introduced in XP. I still don't agree, but at least it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounded.
But what if this is simply a side effect of the fact that someone is actually there at all?
And yet one wonders what they are doing there if they're simply going to be assholes. If they are only there for collaboration amongst themselves, maybe they should advertise that. Maybe their IRC channel title should be "DEVELOPMENT CHAT ONLY - NO SUPPORT QUESTIONS." If I walked into a room with a title like that and asked a support question, I would expect to be flamed for it. At the very least, I couldn't be too upset with people for the flames.
Unfortunately, bad experiences stick with people far more than good experiences and one bad apple really can spoil the bunch. How many of us have used a provider, or visited a store, or used a particular support outlet or whathaveyou for ages and been satisfied with what we were getting, and then had one bad experience and decided we were never going back?
The RTFM crowd can get the same point across, much more constructively, if they were simply nicer about it. Do they really have to all but yell at a user because they think the answer is elsewhere? If it really is in the manual, or in the FAQ someplace, why not simply reply "You can find the answer to your question in the manual," and throw up a link? How is "hi jackass, RTFM and stop wasting our time trying to help you children learn" ever an appropriate response? If they don't want to help people, that's okay. They needn't respond, and chances are (since I'm sure a lot of this sort of thing happens on support forums or channels) they needn't be there in the first place.
For the record, I run linux, I like it, and I try to avoid Windows as much as humanly possible. At the same time, I acknowledge that not only do a lot of things not work as easily as they would in Windows, but some of them are hard to figure out or even describe. I have a problem with Flash under Firefox/linux where it seems as though if the Flash animation tries to use sound, not only does it fail to do so, but it then locks up the browser when I try to navigate away from that page.
How do I even describe that if I were looking for support? Is it a Flash problem? An ALSA problem? A Firefox problem? Is something in KDE not playing nicely with one of those? I have a friend with a similar software setup (Flash+Firefox+KDE+ALSA) and he doesn't have the problem. I've been looking around periodically for months, and have yet to find a workable solution.
Honestly, though, if you want to see the size of the problem... look at how this article has been tagged. There are five labels. Three of them are "flamebait," "troll" and "fud." One is "linux" (well good, an actual label!) and the other is "truth," undoubtedly a stab at the flamebait/troll/fud people. It is an actual issue. People do have these experiences. It does push them away. But we linux users can never stand any knock on anything to do with our OS choice or philosophies on software licensing or whatnot. Not even when they're true.
And even if it were shown that 99.99% of the use of lockpicks by unlicensed persons was for the purpose of burglary and auto theft -- well, tough, blame the user, not the tool. We have to preserve the unlicensed and unregulated use of that tool for the 0.01% of the uses that are beneficial.
The problem I have, personally, with criminalizing (in your example) lockpicks, even if it is used to commit a crime 99.99% of the time, is indeed that 0.01%. Not so much because they're deprived of some sort of right, but because I would consider it wrong to lock somebody up who legitimately did not commit a crime or have any intention of committing a crime with the lockpicks, solely because they had them in their pocket.
Some things there are no legitimate uses for. Somebody walking around with a backpack full of C4 isn't going for a picnic, and possession of that should be illegal. Likewise--again C4 would be a pretty good example--some things are so utterly dangerous that even when used for a legitimate purpose, the safety of the user, those around him/her, property nearby, etc etc dictate that such things should probably be made illegal.Other things there are legitimate uses for, regardless of how small of a percentage of use they might compromise, and should be treated differently.
Basically, it's a shortcut around legitimate police work and the assumption of innocence. Since they can't prove you have committed a crime just because you have a lockpick, but have a suspicion that you did or will, they criminalize having one in your pocket at all.
There's also an issue of disparate impact. Laws criminalizing legitimately useful things affect the law-abiding citizen the most. I can't have that set of lock picks, not because I did anything wrong, but because somebody might. If I'm a law-abiding person, that takes them away from me. From a thief? If this person is going to rob people, he's going to rob people lockpicks or not. BEST case scenario, from a police perspective--he too obeys the law and leaves the lockpicks at home. Instead, he runs his elbow through your window and unlocks the door. More likely, if they were going to use lockpicks to commit their crimes they're going to use them even if they're illegal. Do I really care about a couple week prison stint in minimum security (or more likely, just probation) when I'm going to go commit a home-invasion/burglary?
Another consideration: Where do you draw the line? 99.99% illegal usage is clearly enough in your mind to justify making possession illegal. What about 90%? 80%? 75%? 51%? 49%? What percentage risk of locking up innocent people who are no threat to anybody (or anybody's property) is good enough?
So yeah. As much as possible, I think we should be punishing the person for acts they have actually committed. There aren't a lot of cases where I value being able to lock somebody up for thinking of doing it, or having a tool that may or may not be used for it.
I like it. Not because I found it's typical function very useful, but in KDE (at least, and probably others) you can use it like the ctrl/alt modifier keys and assign keyboard shortcuts with it. Makes me feel better for some unexplainable psychological reason, and I'm also much less likely to try to pick a combination that's already used somewhere else this way--at least for the time being.
I don't mean this to be a troll, but if the typical consumer version of the OS doesn't have this new theme/graphics engine/whatever... what the hell is left to even make the average person consider upgrading?
It seems to me that all the features that might have actually been somewhat persuasive have been removed already in some attempt to meet a deadline they keep pushing back anyway. Aside from increased DRM (</tongueincheek>), what's left in Vista that would make anybody want it?
First of all, not all "corporate speak" is meaningless. Often, they are distinctions that may seem meaningless to people who aren't involved with them but are much more precise. For example, the article submitter mentioned "realignment" versus "layoffs." To a person getting fired, they mean the same thing: they're not going to have their job. To people who do specific jobs rather than manage the business itself, they mean the same thing. To a manager who is actually doing their job though, it may mean much more. The bigger the company, the more true that is.
Let's say I have some IT-related company, or at least a company with an IT department important to its operations. Let's say for some reason, I fire half of the programming team. Doing so raises other important questions. Does the programming team still need all of its managers? If not, what do we do? Do we just can the managers too? Do we shift those managers to other areas of the company? We could fold them under another manager from a different team as well. And those are just a small smattering sample of things those layoffs might affect. They are all important decisions about the structure of the company. While "realignments" almost always involve firings, they very often do not end there.
Is Web 2.0 a "buzzword?" It can be. It can also convey meaning. If somebody says something about Web 2.0 to me, I know what they're referring to. It's an utter waste of time to bitch at them just because they use it. Like you said, language is about communication. So long as the words being used are conveying the desired message to the desired target (and yes, who the target is matters a lot), it is effective and I have no problem with it being used.
In your example, is the guy blowing sunshine up your ass? Yup. Is he trying to sound smarter than he is? Almost certainly. And... who cares. It wastes far more of your time to complain and protest it and do any of your other suggestions than it does to simply smile and nod and walk away. Besides, your example sounds like marketing. It sounds like something an executive would say to a (prospective) client, not something a manager would necessarily say to a subordinate. Marketing is a whole other beast.
Bottom line: Know your audience and communicate your point unambiguously. If you're somebody interacting with management, learn the lingo. Using it might even be good for your career. If you're just buddying around with coworkers in the IT dungeon, no need. All in all though, I would have to say you're wound awfully tight to rail against simple verbiage so strongly.
And you wonder why the feds have no problem with the AT&T monopoly getting back together?
The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past. Cable companies, wireless companies and straight VoIP providers can all provide telephone service in direct competition with typical land-line phone companies. The phone companies are also competing with those companies on THEIR domains (for example, video over Internet lines--the reason they're interested in laying fiber all of the sudden).
These new forms of competition are also, undoubtedly, why you are hearing phone companies beginning to make a stink about charging people to carry traffic over their pipes.
Offer something constructive, or SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Was there anything worthwhile in your post? You rail against "skeptics" (despite the fact that there is nothing wrong with being one or for them to speak out), make a silly and utterly useless comment about why Microsoft didn't return calls for comment, and say anybody who doesn't agree with him (and you by extension) should be ashamed of themselves.
It seems to me that you did no better than those skeptics, only your post was a fanboy comment instead of a skeptic comment. If you're going to bitch about other people and companies saying things without offering any reasons or information otherwise worth the time it takes to read it, perhaps you shouldn't do the same thing. At least not in the same post. It's just unseemly.
People are so used to bondage by their vendors they can't deal with choice. people are so used to be told what to do and how to do it they are actively wishing for a "desktop god" to tell them what to do.
By "people" I assume you mean me, since you're using a direct quote. Except of course I don't run Windows. I am not bound by anybody. I deal with choice just fine. Aside from those inconveinient facts, though, yeah, you're right! Seriously, did you bother to read what I said or did you stop the instant you saw I had a criticism for desktop linux and proceed to try to flame?
I run Gentoo, but you know what? I wouldn't recommend any flavor of linux that I have tried to family. Any time I mention running linux and a friend makes some comment about "should I try it?" I tell them no. They're average people, not tech-savvy ones. They don't want to spend an hour wading through config files to get shit to work. They don't want to spend 10 hours scouring web forums when something doesn't work right. They don't want to know what the hell glibc is, much less why they need it. They don't want to play games, package managers or no, with all sorts of file dependencies. They don't want to get into a flame war on Slashdot about whether or not these are problems or linux's greatest strengths either. They want things to work right. They want to get things done. That's it. They don't give a shit if they can tinker with the code or not; they are not coders. They don't care about whether or not open source is a superior choice to closed source applications. And incidentally, average users who do try to make the switch don't appreciate the attitude of superiority spouted by so many in the OSS community.
Maybe Ubuntu or one of those distros has made things easier, but over the past... I don't know, five years or so that I've run various linux flavors--Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora once, now Gentoo--I've yet to come across one that works well enough for me to feel comfortable saying "yeah, go ahead and install this!" to an average user.
And please, nobody start a "linux is just a kernel!" flame. I am well aware of this. It is yet another distinction that the average end user doesn't care about.
If the goal is to target desktop linux toward those people, we're failing. The more we deny the fact, the longer it will take to fix it. Assuming people even want it to be fixed.
Me? I don't particularly care either way. I'll continue on using things the way I've been using them regardless of whether or not my friends or my neighbors are using Windows or some linux distro.
Cue the anecdotes about how somebody renamed the Firefox icon to Internet Explorer, sat their 80 year old mom down in front of Ubuntu and they never noticed the difference.
Microsoft says Windows users should "take care not to visit unfamiliar or untrusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code"...
It's so sad. The Internet (well, the WWW) is all ABOUT unfamiliar web sites. That's how we discover and learn. We're not going to know (abstract or specifically) who runs alot of the websites we visit, and any number of them could be hosting malicious crap, or fantastic insight, or both.
It shouldn't be like that. People shouldn't have to be afraid of browsing the web. Microsoft, fix your fucking browser already. "Don't go places you don't know" is a lame solution.
Desktop Linux? Nope. It's got two permanant and fatal flaws. No huge marketing department, and no goons breathing down OEM and channel partner throats.
I would add another flaw: Lack of consistent vision.
Before I get flamed as a Microsoft fanboy or something, I do run linux and I like it a lot.
But that said, the open source community is just that -- a community. There isn't any "linux god" (or "desktop linux god") who in any way controls direction. Many projects have essentially no regard for the end-user. I'll just throw out three questions to illustrate the point:
1. Richard Stallman: Saint or ass?
2. Should OSS developers cater to the wishes of their users, or code for themselves because anybody can get the code and add what they want?
3. KDE or Gnome?
Any of these three questions are more likely than not to start a flame war. Some people see the range of software, which ranges in quality from unusable to fantastic and often contains a dizzying array of choices in any one area, as an advantage. Others see it as a setback. Some people see "code it yourself" as a fantastic option, others see it as an elitest attitude that doesn't work for the majority of end-users.
I think the biggest question that the OSS community needs to answer -- if it is capable of such an answer -- is, are we trying to get linux onto Joe User's desktop or not? If linux is an OS for the geeky crowd, that's just fine. But if the goal is to get market penetration, to force Microsoft's dominance down, then things do need to change. They are getting better and better, but they're still not good enough. I'm not sure they're even close to good enough.
Without some guiding force, though, that cohesion is not likely to happen. As if to illustrate my point, I expect replies to follow about how I'm completely wrong about everything I said.:) If we can't even agree about what needs to be done, it's going to be even tougher to actually do it.
"For comparison purposes, that speed would allow a recipient to download an average slashdot user's entire porn collection is just six hours 19 minutes."
However, the way i see it. People choose it for a reason.
You're assuming that people choose. Sure, there are going to be people who DO know that they have other options, know about them, and make the choice to go with Windows. There will be people who do the same and make the choice to go with other operating systems as well.
Most, I'd wager, really don't know or are only vaugely aware at best. Most of my friends, for example, are aware that I don't run Windows. Perhaps half of them could remember what I DO run. An even smaller fraction truly understand what it means; many of them have a hard time understanding that I am not--or why I am not--running Internet Explorer or the official MSN clients, or why I don't run such-and-such app they run. Even though they know I don't use Windows, the fact that the applications will be largely different is still foreign to them. (Wine aside, of course. I don't even bother trying to explain THAT one to most of them!)
Point being, they know there IS an alternative because they know I run one, and they use Windows -- but they did not choose Windows in any educated-opinion sense of the word.
Windows is better, hands down because everyone knows it, it's UI is beautiful and easy to use to most people, there is a great deal of software support for it, and games are written for it.
The problem with your comment is that none of that means Windows is in any way "better," just that it is vastly more popular.
Really, the only fair way to determine "better" is to take two equal people (or large enough groups to minimize individual fluctuations) who have never in their lives touched a computer, sit one down in front of one OS and another down in front of the other, and see what happens. But even then, you run into problems defining "better" because there are so many factors to consider. Cost. Ease of learning. Speed at which a task can be completed once learned. Efficiency (time, resources). Flexibility. And probably many others. Who's to say which is more important than the others?
For me, I love the command line. I loved it in my DOS/Windows 3.1 days, I love it in linux. I particularly love scripting it. I'll give you a practical example.
In my mp3 directory, I have a couple of subdirectories: Country and pop (and naturally, tons of subdirectories under those). This is a scheme my brother came up with ("anything not country is pop!"), and we wanted to essentially sync our collections, so don't yell at me about how silly THAT is. Or for my taste in music!:P Anyway, I wanted to be sure that the ID3 genre tags were set to either "Country" or "pop" depending on which directory it was in.
Naturally, there are an absolute ton of ways to go about setting the genre tag of a file in linux. amarok can do it, which is what I use for music playing now (and was a large part of the reason the ID3 tags for genre suddenly became important to me); previous to that, I was using XMMS which of course could also do it. The problem is, at least so far as I know, there is no way to do it in BULK. I could bring up the dialog for every file, of course, but that becomes exceptionally tedious when you're dealing with a couple thousand files.
But luckily, I had a command line tool that could do the job. Since there IS no interface, it was exceptionally simple to whip up a few quick PHP script to recurse the directories and set the genre on all the files. The script is only a few lines of code, and likely would have been even shorter if I ever learned bash scripting.
To bring it back to my original point, it took me a long time, I suppose, to get to the level and then learn programming concepts that I ultimately used, such as recursion.* So clearly, the learning curve there was way steeper than "point, click, change, point, click, change, point, click change" to do it manually. But because of that extra learning time, and the knowledge gained from it, I was able to complete the task vastly quicker and more efficently than the simpler interface provided.
Now, I'm absolutely certain there exists a tool out there somewhere that allows you to set ID3 tags of files in bulk with a snazzy and easy-to-use GUI. In fact, either amarok or XMMS may have one I simply did not see. I am also not insinuating that this was a particularly complex task -- in fact I used it as an example because it was fairly simple and something an average user may actually want to accomplish. The point is simply to illustrate the previous point that it is extremely hard to judge "better" against divergent criteria.
* For the programming snobs out there, I am not saying that recursion is hard or all that complex of a task. I'm saying that the average person learning to program, who has never done any programming before (otherwise the CONCEPTS are the same and the language is all that has to be learned) tends to take quite a while to go from "never programmed in their life" to "wrote a recursive function." Certainly longer than it takes somebody to learn to point and click.
Since when has having remedial level math skills considered "insightful"?
You were so quick to insult him that you didn't consider the possibility that not all investments are equal. Why must everybody around here be so quick with the insults? Do they make you feel superior or what?
There are plenty of sites that report stats ad nauseum for things that other people care little about.
Some stats are good, some are stupid. I hardly thinking earnings reports from a company that I might consider investing in to be a stupid stat.
The Netcraft stats? They're one step away from "stupid" in the "not useful" department, because as you can see from comments made even here every time Netcraft has some new numbers, there are problems with the methodology (what sites are you collecting from? how diverse is the readship? etc) that makes them of questionable value.
Holding download counts up as a sign of quality is even worse. It's just stupid. I can download a program, find out that it sucks and never use it again. Happens to me all the time. And further, 150 million downloads--swell, fine. So how many users is that? I have downloaded the newest Firefox three times (one for my linux partition, one for Windows, and once for my laptop) and I am just a single-user, not an administrator for a company or school or any such. That also does not include downloads of any previous version. So the number may be artificially inflated.
At my school, Firefox is installed on every lab machine--which just in the ITK labs, is probably close to 200 machines. It is very likely that they downloaded it exactly once, ghost'd the drive of a machine when they had it set up how they wanted and installed the rest of the machines that way. So the number may be artificially deflated.
So in other words we have a number that may be too high, may be too low, and basically says nothing but how many times somebody clicked on a download link. That's pretty useless--but where it steps into fanyboyism is when people try to use that number to mean anything other than that, such as an indication of quality.
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The entire document is about limiting (and defining, which imposes other limits) the federal government. Even when they leave powers to the states (10th) or people (9th), it's a limit on federal power. Defining job criteria is just about the only thing that comes to mind that is a stretch to fit to that idea. It was not even intended to apply to the states--and if memory serves, was specifically NOT applied to the states--for a long time (until after the 14th).
The Constitution is, of course, a document limiting the power of the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment applied those same provisions to the states.
You do not, however, have a Constitutional right for me, as a private citizen, not to go through your desk drawers. Might other laws apply? Yes, but it's not a Constitutional issue.*
What does that mean? It means if FedEx--a private company--and the MPAA--also a private group**--decide to open your packages, your only recourses are to find another carrier or try your hand at a civil suit. I'm not sure one would fly, but it's your Consitutional right to try.
It gets hairy about what they do if they find something. I am not a lawyer, and I am not sure if the police (or FBI or DEA or what have you) could use evidence obtained in this manner if it were illegal. I still do not think it is, however.
This would be vastly different if it were the MPAA and the USPO, which is a government entity. Then all of your Constitutional protections would unequivically apply.
* Interestingly, some courts seem to be extending privacy concepts, such as reasonable expectation of privacy, to personal situations--business in particular. I would support such laws or amendments, but I don't think they're there right now and I think extending the Fourth Amendment to private entities is a bit of a stretch.
** Since the movie industry seems to have special legal protections (what other form of copyright infringement is a federal crime enforcable by the FBI?), I would be curious to see it go to court as to whether or not they are truly a private entity.
Which, it should be noted, is preciseley the job of a defense attorney and the purpose of the appeals system.
Everybody is entitled to an adequate defense, even ones who do something really stupid. If I were in this guy's place, I know I'd want my lawyer filing every appeal on every ground he could think of. If they're dumb they won't fly, but let's let the courts decide that.
Lay won't get off, for the same reason I knew George Ryan (former governor of Illinois, corruption scandal) wouldn't get off: They need to make some examples.
Ryan, though, seems well on his way to a new trial.
Where do you live that it costs $20-45 per person to go to a movie theater? Are you spending $12 on popcorn? Er--since you used the $45 mark in your calculations, it must be closer to $35 in popcorn and drinks. Maybe if you cut back a bit you'd save money AND lose weight!
Why is it up to them? They already provide the services necessary to make paper checks and cash essentially obsolete; in the time I've had my check (debit) card, I have only written a handful of checks, and it was because the recipient didn't have a method of paying with a card or EFT.
They can bitch and moan as much as they want, but how quickly America becomes a relatively cashless society is dependent upon the merchants and the attitudes of the people, not what the banks want. When I *can* pay for everything without cash, I probably will. I am already pretty close. The banks certainly aren't the limiting factor for me.
How many people with more than a passing knowledge of technology want to put it to work at the US Patent office?
It seems to me that skilled folks who would be really good at making decisions like these can find much better, higher paying, more rewarding and less boring jobs elsewhere in the market.
Tangently, the patent isn't quite as bad as the summary makes it sound. They didn't patent entering a product key. They patented the whole online activation thing introduced in XP. I still don't agree, but at least it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounded.
And yet one wonders what they are doing there if they're simply going to be assholes. If they are only there for collaboration amongst themselves, maybe they should advertise that. Maybe their IRC channel title should be "DEVELOPMENT CHAT ONLY - NO SUPPORT QUESTIONS." If I walked into a room with a title like that and asked a support question, I would expect to be flamed for it. At the very least, I couldn't be too upset with people for the flames.
Unfortunately, bad experiences stick with people far more than good experiences and one bad apple really can spoil the bunch. How many of us have used a provider, or visited a store, or used a particular support outlet or whathaveyou for ages and been satisfied with what we were getting, and then had one bad experience and decided we were never going back?
The RTFM crowd can get the same point across, much more constructively, if they were simply nicer about it. Do they really have to all but yell at a user because they think the answer is elsewhere? If it really is in the manual, or in the FAQ someplace, why not simply reply "You can find the answer to your question in the manual," and throw up a link? How is "hi jackass, RTFM and stop wasting our time trying to help you children learn" ever an appropriate response? If they don't want to help people, that's okay. They needn't respond, and chances are (since I'm sure a lot of this sort of thing happens on support forums or channels) they needn't be there in the first place.
For the record, I run linux, I like it, and I try to avoid Windows as much as humanly possible. At the same time, I acknowledge that not only do a lot of things not work as easily as they would in Windows, but some of them are hard to figure out or even describe. I have a problem with Flash under Firefox/linux where it seems as though if the Flash animation tries to use sound, not only does it fail to do so, but it then locks up the browser when I try to navigate away from that page.
How do I even describe that if I were looking for support? Is it a Flash problem? An ALSA problem? A Firefox problem? Is something in KDE not playing nicely with one of those? I have a friend with a similar software setup (Flash+Firefox+KDE+ALSA) and he doesn't have the problem. I've been looking around periodically for months, and have yet to find a workable solution.
Honestly, though, if you want to see the size of the problem... look at how this article has been tagged. There are five labels. Three of them are "flamebait," "troll" and "fud." One is "linux" (well good, an actual label!) and the other is "truth," undoubtedly a stab at the flamebait/troll/fud people. It is an actual issue. People do have these experiences. It does push them away. But we linux users can never stand any knock on anything to do with our OS choice or philosophies on software licensing or whatnot. Not even when they're true.
And even if it were shown that 99.99% of the use of lockpicks by unlicensed persons was for the purpose of burglary and auto theft -- well, tough, blame the user, not the tool. We have to preserve the unlicensed and unregulated use of that tool for the 0.01% of the uses that are beneficial.
The problem I have, personally, with criminalizing (in your example) lockpicks, even if it is used to commit a crime 99.99% of the time, is indeed that 0.01%. Not so much because they're deprived of some sort of right, but because I would consider it wrong to lock somebody up who legitimately did not commit a crime or have any intention of committing a crime with the lockpicks, solely because they had them in their pocket.
Some things there are no legitimate uses for. Somebody walking around with a backpack full of C4 isn't going for a picnic, and possession of that should be illegal. Likewise--again C4 would be a pretty good example--some things are so utterly dangerous that even when used for a legitimate purpose, the safety of the user, those around him/her, property nearby, etc etc dictate that such things should probably be made illegal.Other things there are legitimate uses for, regardless of how small of a percentage of use they might compromise, and should be treated differently.
Basically, it's a shortcut around legitimate police work and the assumption of innocence. Since they can't prove you have committed a crime just because you have a lockpick, but have a suspicion that you did or will, they criminalize having one in your pocket at all.
There's also an issue of disparate impact. Laws criminalizing legitimately useful things affect the law-abiding citizen the most. I can't have that set of lock picks, not because I did anything wrong, but because somebody might. If I'm a law-abiding person, that takes them away from me. From a thief? If this person is going to rob people, he's going to rob people lockpicks or not. BEST case scenario, from a police perspective--he too obeys the law and leaves the lockpicks at home. Instead, he runs his elbow through your window and unlocks the door. More likely, if they were going to use lockpicks to commit their crimes they're going to use them even if they're illegal. Do I really care about a couple week prison stint in minimum security (or more likely, just probation) when I'm going to go commit a home-invasion/burglary?
Another consideration: Where do you draw the line? 99.99% illegal usage is clearly enough in your mind to justify making possession illegal. What about 90%? 80%? 75%? 51%? 49%? What percentage risk of locking up innocent people who are no threat to anybody (or anybody's property) is good enough?
So yeah. As much as possible, I think we should be punishing the person for acts they have actually committed. There aren't a lot of cases where I value being able to lock somebody up for thinking of doing it, or having a tool that may or may not be used for it.
I like it. Not because I found it's typical function very useful, but in KDE (at least, and probably others) you can use it like the ctrl/alt modifier keys and assign keyboard shortcuts with it. Makes me feel better for some unexplainable psychological reason, and I'm also much less likely to try to pick a combination that's already used somewhere else this way--at least for the time being.
I don't mean this to be a troll, but if the typical consumer version of the OS doesn't have this new theme/graphics engine/whatever... what the hell is left to even make the average person consider upgrading?
It seems to me that all the features that might have actually been somewhat persuasive have been removed already in some attempt to meet a deadline they keep pushing back anyway. Aside from increased DRM (</tongueincheek>), what's left in Vista that would make anybody want it?
First of all, not all "corporate speak" is meaningless. Often, they are distinctions that may seem meaningless to people who aren't involved with them but are much more precise. For example, the article submitter mentioned "realignment" versus "layoffs." To a person getting fired, they mean the same thing: they're not going to have their job. To people who do specific jobs rather than manage the business itself, they mean the same thing. To a manager who is actually doing their job though, it may mean much more. The bigger the company, the more true that is.
Let's say I have some IT-related company, or at least a company with an IT department important to its operations. Let's say for some reason, I fire half of the programming team. Doing so raises other important questions. Does the programming team still need all of its managers? If not, what do we do? Do we just can the managers too? Do we shift those managers to other areas of the company? We could fold them under another manager from a different team as well. And those are just a small smattering sample of things those layoffs might affect. They are all important decisions about the structure of the company. While "realignments" almost always involve firings, they very often do not end there.
Is Web 2.0 a "buzzword?" It can be. It can also convey meaning. If somebody says something about Web 2.0 to me, I know what they're referring to. It's an utter waste of time to bitch at them just because they use it. Like you said, language is about communication. So long as the words being used are conveying the desired message to the desired target (and yes, who the target is matters a lot), it is effective and I have no problem with it being used.
In your example, is the guy blowing sunshine up your ass? Yup. Is he trying to sound smarter than he is? Almost certainly. And... who cares. It wastes far more of your time to complain and protest it and do any of your other suggestions than it does to simply smile and nod and walk away. Besides, your example sounds like marketing. It sounds like something an executive would say to a (prospective) client, not something a manager would necessarily say to a subordinate. Marketing is a whole other beast.
Bottom line: Know your audience and communicate your point unambiguously. If you're somebody interacting with management, learn the lingo. Using it might even be good for your career. If you're just buddying around with coworkers in the IT dungeon, no need. All in all though, I would have to say you're wound awfully tight to rail against simple verbiage so strongly.
The feds--and many economists--have no problem with AT&T essentially reassembling itself because competition exists today that did not exist in the past. Cable companies, wireless companies and straight VoIP providers can all provide telephone service in direct competition with typical land-line phone companies. The phone companies are also competing with those companies on THEIR domains (for example, video over Internet lines--the reason they're interested in laying fiber all of the sudden).
These new forms of competition are also, undoubtedly, why you are hearing phone companies beginning to make a stink about charging people to carry traffic over their pipes.
Was there anything worthwhile in your post? You rail against "skeptics" (despite the fact that there is nothing wrong with being one or for them to speak out), make a silly and utterly useless comment about why Microsoft didn't return calls for comment, and say anybody who doesn't agree with him (and you by extension) should be ashamed of themselves.
It seems to me that you did no better than those skeptics, only your post was a fanboy comment instead of a skeptic comment. If you're going to bitch about other people and companies saying things without offering any reasons or information otherwise worth the time it takes to read it, perhaps you shouldn't do the same thing. At least not in the same post. It's just unseemly.
Boy, if only the managers of the world agreed with you!
People are so used to bondage by their vendors they can't deal with choice. people are so used to be told what to do and how to do it they are actively wishing for a "desktop god" to tell them what to do.
By "people" I assume you mean me, since you're using a direct quote. Except of course I don't run Windows. I am not bound by anybody. I deal with choice just fine. Aside from those inconveinient facts, though, yeah, you're right! Seriously, did you bother to read what I said or did you stop the instant you saw I had a criticism for desktop linux and proceed to try to flame?
I run Gentoo, but you know what? I wouldn't recommend any flavor of linux that I have tried to family. Any time I mention running linux and a friend makes some comment about "should I try it?" I tell them no. They're average people, not tech-savvy ones. They don't want to spend an hour wading through config files to get shit to work. They don't want to spend 10 hours scouring web forums when something doesn't work right. They don't want to know what the hell glibc is, much less why they need it. They don't want to play games, package managers or no, with all sorts of file dependencies. They don't want to get into a flame war on Slashdot about whether or not these are problems or linux's greatest strengths either. They want things to work right. They want to get things done. That's it. They don't give a shit if they can tinker with the code or not; they are not coders. They don't care about whether or not open source is a superior choice to closed source applications. And incidentally, average users who do try to make the switch don't appreciate the attitude of superiority spouted by so many in the OSS community.
Maybe Ubuntu or one of those distros has made things easier, but over the past... I don't know, five years or so that I've run various linux flavors--Red Hat, Mandrake, Fedora once, now Gentoo--I've yet to come across one that works well enough for me to feel comfortable saying "yeah, go ahead and install this!" to an average user.
And please, nobody start a "linux is just a kernel!" flame. I am well aware of this. It is yet another distinction that the average end user doesn't care about.
If the goal is to target desktop linux toward those people, we're failing. The more we deny the fact, the longer it will take to fix it. Assuming people even want it to be fixed.
Me? I don't particularly care either way. I'll continue on using things the way I've been using them regardless of whether or not my friends or my neighbors are using Windows or some linux distro.
Cue the anecdotes about how somebody renamed the Firefox icon to Internet Explorer, sat their 80 year old mom down in front of Ubuntu and they never noticed the difference.
It's so sad. The Internet (well, the WWW) is all ABOUT unfamiliar web sites. That's how we discover and learn. We're not going to know (abstract or specifically) who runs alot of the websites we visit, and any number of them could be hosting malicious crap, or fantastic insight, or both.
It shouldn't be like that. People shouldn't have to be afraid of browsing the web. Microsoft, fix your fucking browser already. "Don't go places you don't know" is a lame solution.
I would add another flaw: Lack of consistent vision.
Before I get flamed as a Microsoft fanboy or something, I do run linux and I like it a lot.
But that said, the open source community is just that -- a community. There isn't any "linux god" (or "desktop linux god") who in any way controls direction. Many projects have essentially no regard for the end-user. I'll just throw out three questions to illustrate the point:
1. Richard Stallman: Saint or ass?
2. Should OSS developers cater to the wishes of their users, or code for themselves because anybody can get the code and add what they want?
3. KDE or Gnome?
Any of these three questions are more likely than not to start a flame war. Some people see the range of software, which ranges in quality from unusable to fantastic and often contains a dizzying array of choices in any one area, as an advantage. Others see it as a setback. Some people see "code it yourself" as a fantastic option, others see it as an elitest attitude that doesn't work for the majority of end-users.
I think the biggest question that the OSS community needs to answer -- if it is capable of such an answer -- is, are we trying to get linux onto Joe User's desktop or not? If linux is an OS for the geeky crowd, that's just fine. But if the goal is to get market penetration, to force Microsoft's dominance down, then things do need to change. They are getting better and better, but they're still not good enough. I'm not sure they're even close to good enough.
Without some guiding force, though, that cohesion is not likely to happen. As if to illustrate my point, I expect replies to follow about how I'm completely wrong about everything I said. :) If we can't even agree about what needs to be done, it's going to be even tougher to actually do it.
Damn it, clicked the wrong reply link. Please ignore me. :(
"For comparison purposes, that speed would allow a recipient to download an average slashdot user's entire porn collection is just six hours 19 minutes."
If you leave it running long enough, it just might!
...I kid, I kid.
However, the way i see it. People choose it for a reason.
You're assuming that people choose. Sure, there are going to be people who DO know that they have other options, know about them, and make the choice to go with Windows. There will be people who do the same and make the choice to go with other operating systems as well.
Most, I'd wager, really don't know or are only vaugely aware at best. Most of my friends, for example, are aware that I don't run Windows. Perhaps half of them could remember what I DO run. An even smaller fraction truly understand what it means; many of them have a hard time understanding that I am not--or why I am not--running Internet Explorer or the official MSN clients, or why I don't run such-and-such app they run. Even though they know I don't use Windows, the fact that the applications will be largely different is still foreign to them. (Wine aside, of course. I don't even bother trying to explain THAT one to most of them!)
Point being, they know there IS an alternative because they know I run one, and they use Windows -- but they did not choose Windows in any educated-opinion sense of the word.
The problem with your comment is that none of that means Windows is in any way "better," just that it is vastly more popular.
Really, the only fair way to determine "better" is to take two equal people (or large enough groups to minimize individual fluctuations) who have never in their lives touched a computer, sit one down in front of one OS and another down in front of the other, and see what happens. But even then, you run into problems defining "better" because there are so many factors to consider. Cost. Ease of learning. Speed at which a task can be completed once learned. Efficiency (time, resources). Flexibility. And probably many others. Who's to say which is more important than the others?
For me, I love the command line. I loved it in my DOS/Windows 3.1 days, I love it in linux. I particularly love scripting it. I'll give you a practical example.
In my mp3 directory, I have a couple of subdirectories: Country and pop (and naturally, tons of subdirectories under those). This is a scheme my brother came up with ("anything not country is pop!"), and we wanted to essentially sync our collections, so don't yell at me about how silly THAT is. Or for my taste in music! :P Anyway, I wanted to be sure that the ID3 genre tags were set to either "Country" or "pop" depending on which directory it was in.
Naturally, there are an absolute ton of ways to go about setting the genre tag of a file in linux. amarok can do it, which is what I use for music playing now (and was a large part of the reason the ID3 tags for genre suddenly became important to me); previous to that, I was using XMMS which of course could also do it. The problem is, at least so far as I know, there is no way to do it in BULK. I could bring up the dialog for every file, of course, but that becomes exceptionally tedious when you're dealing with a couple thousand files.
But luckily, I had a command line tool that could do the job. Since there IS no interface, it was exceptionally simple to whip up a few quick PHP script to recurse the directories and set the genre on all the files. The script is only a few lines of code, and likely would have been even shorter if I ever learned bash scripting.
To bring it back to my original point, it took me a long time, I suppose, to get to the level and then learn programming concepts that I ultimately used, such as recursion.* So clearly, the learning curve there was way steeper than "point, click, change, point, click, change, point, click change" to do it manually. But because of that extra learning time, and the knowledge gained from it, I was able to complete the task vastly quicker and more efficently than the simpler interface provided.
Now, I'm absolutely certain there exists a tool out there somewhere that allows you to set ID3 tags of files in bulk with a snazzy and easy-to-use GUI. In fact, either amarok or XMMS may have one I simply did not see. I am also not insinuating that this was a particularly complex task -- in fact I used it as an example because it was fairly simple and something an average user may actually want to accomplish. The point is simply to illustrate the previous point that it is extremely hard to judge "better" against divergent criteria.
* For the programming snobs out there, I am not saying that recursion is hard or all that complex of a task. I'm saying that the average person learning to program, who has never done any programming before (otherwise the CONCEPTS are the same and the language is all that has to be learned) tends to take quite a while to go from "never programmed in their life" to "wrote a recursive function." Certainly longer than it takes somebody to learn to point and click.
You were so quick to insult him that you didn't consider the possibility that not all investments are equal. Why must everybody around here be so quick with the insults? Do they make you feel superior or what?
There are plenty of sites that report stats ad nauseum for things that other people care little about.
Some stats are good, some are stupid. I hardly thinking earnings reports from a company that I might consider investing in to be a stupid stat.
The Netcraft stats? They're one step away from "stupid" in the "not useful" department, because as you can see from comments made even here every time Netcraft has some new numbers, there are problems with the methodology (what sites are you collecting from? how diverse is the readship? etc) that makes them of questionable value.
Holding download counts up as a sign of quality is even worse. It's just stupid. I can download a program, find out that it sucks and never use it again. Happens to me all the time. And further, 150 million downloads--swell, fine. So how many users is that? I have downloaded the newest Firefox three times (one for my linux partition, one for Windows, and once for my laptop) and I am just a single-user, not an administrator for a company or school or any such. That also does not include downloads of any previous version. So the number may be artificially inflated.
At my school, Firefox is installed on every lab machine--which just in the ITK labs, is probably close to 200 machines. It is very likely that they downloaded it exactly once, ghost'd the drive of a machine when they had it set up how they wanted and installed the rest of the machines that way. So the number may be artificially deflated.
So in other words we have a number that may be too high, may be too low, and basically says nothing but how many times somebody clicked on a download link. That's pretty useless--but where it steps into fanyboyism is when people try to use that number to mean anything other than that, such as an indication of quality.