I think he's just talking about distros aimed at easy desktop use. I.E. having a unified control panel style grouping of configuration utilities to configure hardware and system setups. I love the distros you mentioned, but none of them make mucking about with the hardware as easy as it is with the more desktop oriented distros like mandrake, suse, or lindows.
Of course, all of SCO's 1M pages were diagrams of kittens and houses in crayon so they can hardly complain.
After they're brought to court it will also be revealed that they drew a stick figure sco representitive holding a gun to the kitten and a match to the house.
I don't have any experience with macrovision, but I wonder if you could plug the vcr running the tape into a computer's tv-card and from there record, edit, and convert to vcd. Anyone know if this would be feasable, or if the macrovision wouldn't play nice with a tvcard?
Well, when it comes to IE he's got a point. Development quality took a massive nosedive when it reached it's currentl level of the market. Look at their png support for example.
I wish I could remember the link to this interview. But a while back I read an article dealing with the upcoming new version of IE for longhorn, and the person doing the interview asked if they were going to fix the problem with png transparency. The microsoft representive replied with "No comment". How hard can it possibly be to fix this issue that they're spending years on the new release and once again are likley to not finish png support. You'd think the bad press alone would be cause to fix it.
Re:Bad for users of alternative browsers?
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps they'll start writing their new ads in sparkle, knowing that microsoft will be unwilling to block off a new format they're trying to push. It'd be a win-win scenario for non windows users as lack of support for a new format turns into a feature.
I think a lot of it comes down to lack of hardware to test on. The only thing a lot of us small timers have to test on is the same one development is done on. While in-house software usually has the money behind it to test and debug on a wide variety of hardware configurations.
I don't know if it'd really help much. The US advertising industry is remarkably complex and convoluted, partially to avoid being responsible for much of what they say. If you look closely, a huge number of them simply imply rather than come out and say something about the product, or twist events around to represent their product in ways that won't be applicable for the average user. Diet pills are a good example. A lot of them use normally fit or skinny people who've been recently bed ridden for for time, such as after breaking a bone. Since their normal body shape is normally slim, the diet company can put them on their product, and then when they return to what is normal for their body - the diet pill gets the credit when it was really the persons normal metabolism. And in that they wind up being able to state that a person took the diet pill and lost 80 lbs, both of which are completely factual, even though there might be no actual causation betwean the lost weight and the diet pill.
I think you've got the order confused. Now saying Windoze r00lz and Linux suX0rz is the cool thing among those who let the article titles dictate their opinion of the month.
While I like the idea of a robot cat, I've allways had the same reaction to it as you describe. It looks like some kind of dead zombie demon cat, not at all comforting. The aibo looks cuter somehow. Plus I'm unimpressed by a robot animal that can't walk. While not really a robot, the Power Assist Suit was my favorite. That's such a weird comic book idea that I never would have thought the real thing would have appeared in my lifetime.
Can you please give "Is linux ready for the desktop" articles their own catagory so that I can block them? I keep reading these thinking that the comments will somehow be different than last time. They never are. Including this one.
That's a pet peeve of mine as well. If a company means windows, they should just say windows. When I bought my computer it was a 'pc', but removing windows from it and replacing it with linux somehow magically transformed it into 'not-pc' even though it's the exact same hardware?
I wouldn't buy a Linux game now, but I am a potential customer.
I disagree. You won't buy a Linux game. You're as much a potential customer for them as I, owning no mac hardware, am for an OS X game. I 'might' buy an OS X game one day, but I think any company would be pretty foolish to market anything to my demographic right now.
Same here. Aren't most of the people in there for drug offences, not violent crime? Violent anal rape every day for ten years is a pretty harsh punishment for getting caught with a bag of pot.
At first glance I did have the 'ewww!' reaction to quite a few of these. But think about it, a lot of these seem better than dealing with the frustrating bureaucracy most of us have to go through. I'd much rather count fish, or even clean a rotting carcass than have to deal with most of the stuff highlighted in office space. Of course if you have to deal with that 'and' the worst job scenarios...well, that would suck.
Because it was ugly
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 4, Informative
I started using it right about the time that geramik came along. I finally had some unity in application appearence. After using Kylix for a while I came to the realisation that anything I wrote with it would not only look out of place among everything else on my system, but in my opinion at least - look pretty ugly. I had a program I was working on in Kylix up when a friend came over, and the first thing she said after walking by the computer was "Hey! That looks like a Windows 3.1 program!". Perhaps they've changed this behavior since then, but since finding WxWindows I havn't had any motivation to check back.
I thought it was rather odd they weren't going with iTunes as well. Napster does have some name recognition, but more often I think the recognition is as something that was pretty good 'for its time'. iTunes seems to have a lot more appeal as a new and hip technology.
I've been using Linux since '95, and I (unlike most of the/. crowd) have come to grips with the fact that it is not a viable desktop solution.
I've only been using it for three, and learned that different people are looking for different features for that holy grail of 'desktop viability'. I don't care if someone's using OS X, Windows, BeOS or whatever, don't tell me what's viable for MY desktop.
DRM will probably become the only pressing issue that would make me go through the configuration hell of Linux on the desktop.
You're making a big mistake applying difficulty in configuration with Linux to all machines, instead of being difficult on 'your' computer. The desktop centric distros do a fine job detecting hardware for a large number of people. I've never had to configure any of my hardware in Mandrake, aside from installing NVIDIA's drivers. The old hardware was all detected and configured on installation, and new hardware just had me answer 'yes' when prompted to install drivers for them after a reboot.
I bought a ps2 for little reason other than to play this game - and I consider it money well spent. I was a big fan of the original series, but the online installments left me nostalgic for the characters and story of the first four (or 14, whatever) games. Some of the changes I've found a bit odd, but all in all I'm loving it. Though it helps that one of my friends speaks Japanese and is interested enough in PS to be willing to translate as we play.
On another note, what is responsible for the recent surge of anti-free software propaganda?
I think simply the fact that open source is finally making itself very visible in the mainstream. Open source is different, and as a whole people get freaked out when things they don't understand invade their world. As much as many, or at least I, would like to believe that educated people in suits and ties are less likely to give in to such a knee-jerk reaction, I've yet to see much evidence that this is true. I'd bet if one looked back far enough that you'd find similar sarcastic rants about people 'foolish' enough to have toilets in their homes instead of outside, or to risk causing eyestrain by inviting a television into ones home.
I agree with you. I really don't see what all the fuss is about user-friendliness and linux either. On one of the desktop based distros it all comes down to pointing and clicking. Perhaps difficult for someone who's never used a computer, but anyone familier with windows shouldn't have any difficulty getting the basics of linux use down. It dosn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that clicking on the envelope in KDE will bring up email. Or that a webbrowser is in the 'internet' folder of the menu. And even installing programs is pretty trivial. In my opinion easier on some distros than it would be in Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he's just talking about distros aimed at easy desktop use. I.E. having a unified control panel style grouping of configuration utilities to configure hardware and system setups. I love the distros you mentioned, but none of them make mucking about with the hardware as easy as it is with the more desktop oriented distros like mandrake, suse, or lindows.
Of course, all of SCO's 1M pages were diagrams of kittens and houses in crayon so they can hardly complain.
After they're brought to court it will also be revealed that they drew a stick figure sco representitive holding a gun to the kitten and a match to the house.
If people involved with the legalities of this case were getting as frustrated with SCO as I've been. Nice to see that this seems to be the case.
I don't have any experience with macrovision, but I wonder if you could plug the vcr running the tape into a computer's tv-card and from there record, edit, and convert to vcd. Anyone know if this would be feasable, or if the macrovision wouldn't play nice with a tvcard?
Well, when it comes to IE he's got a point. Development quality took a massive nosedive when it reached it's currentl level of the market. Look at their png support for example.
I wish I could remember the link to this interview. But a while back I read an article dealing with the upcoming new version of IE for longhorn, and the person doing the interview asked if they were going to fix the problem with png transparency. The microsoft representive replied with "No comment". How hard can it possibly be to fix this issue that they're spending years on the new release and once again are likley to not finish png support. You'd think the bad press alone would be cause to fix it.
Perhaps they'll start writing their new ads in sparkle, knowing that microsoft will be unwilling to block off a new format they're trying to push. It'd be a win-win scenario for non windows users as lack of support for a new format turns into a feature.
I think a lot of it comes down to lack of hardware to test on. The only thing a lot of us small timers have to test on is the same one development is done on. While in-house software usually has the money behind it to test and debug on a wide variety of hardware configurations.
I don't know if it'd really help much. The US advertising industry is remarkably complex and convoluted, partially to avoid being responsible for much of what they say. If you look closely, a huge number of them simply imply rather than come out and say something about the product, or twist events around to represent their product in ways that won't be applicable for the average user. Diet pills are a good example. A lot of them use normally fit or skinny people who've been recently bed ridden for for time, such as after breaking a bone. Since their normal body shape is normally slim, the diet company can put them on their product, and then when they return to what is normal for their body - the diet pill gets the credit when it was really the persons normal metabolism. And in that they wind up being able to state that a person took the diet pill and lost 80 lbs, both of which are completely factual, even though there might be no actual causation betwean the lost weight and the diet pill.
I think you've got the order confused. Now saying Windoze r00lz and Linux suX0rz is the cool thing among those who let the article titles dictate their opinion of the month.
While I like the idea of a robot cat, I've allways had the same reaction to it as you describe. It looks like some kind of dead zombie demon cat, not at all comforting. The aibo looks cuter somehow. Plus I'm unimpressed by a robot animal that can't walk. While not really a robot, the Power Assist Suit was my favorite. That's such a weird comic book idea that I never would have thought the real thing would have appeared in my lifetime.
That was my reaction as well. This dosn't have anything to do with emotion, it's an erection pill. Euphemisms should die a painful death.
Can you please give "Is linux ready for the desktop" articles their own catagory so that I can block them? I keep reading these thinking that the comments will somehow be different than last time. They never are. Including this one.
That's a pet peeve of mine as well. If a company means windows, they should just say windows. When I bought my computer it was a 'pc', but removing windows from it and replacing it with linux somehow magically transformed it into 'not-pc' even though it's the exact same hardware?
I thought his character looked a bit like Vyvyan minus the metal.
I wouldn't buy a Linux game now, but I am a potential customer.
I disagree. You won't buy a Linux game. You're as much a potential customer for them as I, owning no mac hardware, am for an OS X game. I 'might' buy an OS X game one day, but I think any company would be pretty foolish to market anything to my demographic right now.
Same here. Aren't most of the people in there for drug offences, not violent crime? Violent anal rape every day for ten years is a pretty harsh punishment for getting caught with a bag of pot.
At first glance I did have the 'ewww!' reaction to quite a few of these. But think about it, a lot of these seem better than dealing with the frustrating bureaucracy most of us have to go through. I'd much rather count fish, or even clean a rotting carcass than have to deal with most of the stuff highlighted in office space. Of course if you have to deal with that 'and' the worst job scenarios...well, that would suck.
I started using it right about the time that geramik came along. I finally had some unity in application appearence. After using Kylix for a while I came to the realisation that anything I wrote with it would not only look out of place among everything else on my system, but in my opinion at least - look pretty ugly. I had a program I was working on in Kylix up when a friend came over, and the first thing she said after walking by the computer was "Hey! That looks like a Windows 3.1 program!". Perhaps they've changed this behavior since then, but since finding WxWindows I havn't had any motivation to check back.
I thought it was rather odd they weren't going with iTunes as well. Napster does have some name recognition, but more often I think the recognition is as something that was pretty good 'for its time'. iTunes seems to have a lot more appeal as a new and hip technology.
I've been using Linux since '95, and I (unlike most of the /. crowd) have come to grips with the fact that it is not a viable desktop solution.
I've only been using it for three, and learned that different people are looking for different features for that holy grail of 'desktop viability'. I don't care if someone's using OS X, Windows, BeOS or whatever, don't tell me what's viable for MY desktop.
DRM will probably become the only pressing issue that would make me go through the configuration hell of Linux on the desktop.
You're making a big mistake applying difficulty in configuration with Linux to all machines, instead of being difficult on 'your' computer. The desktop centric distros do a fine job detecting hardware for a large number of people. I've never had to configure any of my hardware in Mandrake, aside from installing NVIDIA's drivers. The old hardware was all detected and configured on installation, and new hardware just had me answer 'yes' when prompted to install drivers for them after a reboot.
I bought a ps2 for little reason other than to play this game - and I consider it money well spent. I was a big fan of the original series, but the online installments left me nostalgic for the characters and story of the first four (or 14, whatever) games. Some of the changes I've found a bit odd, but all in all I'm loving it. Though it helps that one of my friends speaks Japanese and is interested enough in PS to be willing to translate as we play.
On another note, what is responsible for the recent surge of anti-free software propaganda?
I think simply the fact that open source is finally making itself very visible in the mainstream. Open source is different, and as a whole people get freaked out when things they don't understand invade their world. As much as many, or at least I, would like to believe that educated people in suits and ties are less likely to give in to such a knee-jerk reaction, I've yet to see much evidence that this is true. I'd bet if one looked back far enough that you'd find similar sarcastic rants about people 'foolish' enough to have toilets in their homes instead of outside, or to risk causing eyestrain by inviting a television into ones home.
I agree with you. I really don't see what all the fuss is about user-friendliness and linux either. On one of the desktop based distros it all comes down to pointing and clicking. Perhaps difficult for someone who's never used a computer, but anyone familier with windows shouldn't have any difficulty getting the basics of linux use down. It dosn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that clicking on the envelope in KDE will bring up email. Or that a webbrowser is in the 'internet' folder of the menu. And even installing programs is pretty trivial. In my opinion easier on some distros than it would be in Windows.