"Certainly more often than Vista does." This is what gives Slashdot a bad name: completely false (or exaggerated) negative statements in order to promote your own ideas.
The GP makes an incorrect claim of inaccuracy because he misunderstood the summary (it is talking about application compatibility not user numbers) and gets modded (currently) "3 insightful"
They are not charities, they are supporting open source because they expect to directly or indirectly (selling licensed versions, selling support, selling more hardware, etc.) profit from it.
They cannot expect to do that if users are not happy with it. If they want to profit from us, they need to listed to complaints.
What you seem to miss is that the exact same thing also happens with Windows, as my experience as the 'free Windows tech support for everybody that gets to know me' shows. The myth that Windows is more user-friendly than Linux has been nothing more than a myth for the last two or three years.
An advantage of being a Linux user is that I can politely turn down requests for free tech support by saying that I use Linux and do not know anything about Windows...
Linux support requests are more manageable because they die down over time.
The GP also misses the point that many of us have successfully switched friends or family who are not part of our households to Linux as well, and it is often less of a problem than helping the same people with Windows problems.
And when that happens to Wikipedia, when it has become too topheavy and hidebound to be useful, someone will start a new project that will attempt to learn from the lessons of the old, and go from there.
We could avoid that by having people write on lots of different websites (which also deals with problems of bias and neutrality) and have some sort of web service that will list and rank the most relevant pages for the particular information you want......
Yes and central planning has such as good track record we should all adopt it!
The British government's standardisation of curricula and the greater control it has taken of schools in recent years has been such a success we want to extend it to IT!
Personally I think it would be much more useful to spend the money of a decent library.
KDE 3.5 still works great and has plenty of eye candy for when you're bored.
I agree - I am still using 3.5 too. The problem is that some of the major distros have made KDE4 the default and users are getting upgraded by default (especially naive users who are the least able to deal with KDE4's flaws).
Sometimes I get annoyed with something in Linux, and then I stop and think, wait a minute, this stuff is all free and people have volunteered their time to write a lot of it, so why should I be complaining. I'm just glad that it exists!
Free as in beer is irrelevant. The cost of software is trivial compared to its importance. A lot of people are also paid to work on open source, they are not volunteering their time, and their employers presumably have sound business reasons for contributing.
I use Linux because for every annoyance in Linux, there is one at least as bad in the alternatives - i.e. I use it because it works better for me than anything else. Free as in speech is good in principle, but having stuff in open formats is of much more practical importance.
At this point, I use almost all open source software--browser, word processor, database, spreadsheet. I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
What I find still essential is widely used proprietary freeware: Flash, Realplayer and Skype.
I find Windows annoying these days when I am forced to use it--everything's so fixed and locked down. It lacks so much stuff out of the box--you mean I can't just read pdf documents? or have virtual desktops? I need to download Firefox? I find the Mac only a bit better, but on the other hand the Mac allows you to use a nice Unix shell window and that makes everything all better:)
I have not seriously tried Mac. As far as Windows does, yes, it sucks out of the box.
Ireland's taxes are lower than most of the rest of the EU, so it makes sense for any company doing pan-EU business to be based there.
In other words it is a tax haven within the EU.
It also has had a number of years where it was a cheap place to get labor, and had workers that were educated and spoke English, though there's recently been a lot of business moving to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, where the labor's cheaper.
Eastern European competition would not hurt them anything like as much - the whole of Western Europe has to cope with that.
For more about Ireland and how companies (especially MS) use it to dodge tax, read:
The evidence for Zeus is every bit as valid as the evidence for "God."
Really? I can find lots of evidence for God, including personal experiences of myself and others. Where is the evidence for Zeus?
But when religion becomes involved as a motivating factor, suddenly the problem becomes a LOT bigger, bloodier and more dangerous. So down with all of it I say... or... let them all kill themselves and leave us out of it.
Then why are so many of the nastiest examples either unconnected with religion (fascism, ethnic nationalism, etc.) or overtly atheist (stalinism, Khmer Rouge, the nastier Maoist groups etc.)?
Religion is far more of a motivating factor for good than for evil. Even rational (i.e. not theophobes like Dawkins) atheists will admit as much.
Actually they must have. Lots of people would have had laptops with pirated mp3s on them, and with that many passengers someone probably had child porn as well (at least one pedo with a laptop or carrying some DVDs or something out of that many people sounds quite likely to me).
Slashdot is clearly not as geeky as I thought when the first visible post on a story is by someone who does not understand what is meant by free in this context, and it then gets moderated "interesting".
What is really weird is that the comment is made by someone who has made nearly 600 comments on Slashdot and who uses the phrase "open source".
Ubuntu happened! Fantastic. Linux for human beings. For the first time, we can give Ubuntu CDs to our grandmas and get some degree of success. It's a Linux distro that's tuned for normal users. It looks great. It can play DVDs and do 3D graphics. (But that's not cool, according to RMS, because there are binary blobs).
Mandriva etc. have been doing this for years before Ubuntu. I do not think that Ubuntu is the most friendly distro for naive users even now.
Or to put in in a more strictly financial way: the change increase in the NPV of the income generated by a copyright by extending copyright beyond about 20 or 30 years from the date a work is finished, is very small. The increase in changes such as increasing copyright from life + 50 to life + 70 is negligible.
With the issues with Flash cookies and the annoyance of Flash ads, Flash is pretty user hostile. If it was not for Youtube and similar I would uninstall it.
If everyone did this, then any site that is big enough will switch to direct ad sales and serve the ads off the same domain as the content - this happens to an extent already.
Does your hosts file include ad networks that have good policies about not using annoying ads? Google, for example, does not do inter-sitals or popups, and their video ads only play if you click on a play button.
Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
What we really need are "annoying ad blockers". That would gives sites an incentive to use less obtrusive adds, which would be less likely to be blocked.
The effects of ad blockers that block everything is to encourage advertorials and other sneaky ways to get past them, most of which are worse than the original ads.
Actually he has a point. Modern India (the same is true of Sri Lanka) has much more strict sexual mores than they once did. The change is undoubtedly due to British and Islamic influences: although nationalists will not thank you for pointing it out.
Most terrorists outside the Middle East are doing it for purely secular (usually wanting a seperate state or something simlilar) causes. Examples:
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: the masters of suicide bombing. Want a separate state with a secular consitution. IRA, INLA, UDF, UVF etc. Loosely affiliated with religious groups because the ethnic groups they represented followed different religions, but no religious content to their nationalist ideology. Basque separatists: want a separate state. FARC: Marxist Leninist Abu Nidal Organization: Secular Palestinian Shining Path: Maoist Various spin offs of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Greek communists) Various separatist groups in India: some may have a religious motive, most are nationalists.
Defenders of many of the above may say that they are not really terrorists (e.g. because their main activity is fighting against armed forces). however all have made some use of undoubted terrorist tactics (i.e. bombs targeted against civilians without the sanction of a state party)
If you think economics is easy try studying some econometrics (try reading Time Series Analysis, Hamilton, Princeton University Press).
Financial economics theory uses lots of other maths including differential equations, statistics and probability etc.
The Black-Scholes formula for option valuation was originally solved by transforming it into the same form as the heat equation. Closed form solutions in finance are usually non-trivial.
The problem with business degrees is that they are so generalist that you study nothing in depth (I do have an MBA as well as an MSc in Financial Economics). That makes them less challenging, but nonetheless useful. How bright the other students are probably depends on where you study.
I assume that you would want to get rid of pictures like this and these as well? They are being actively encouraged to undo the damage done by people like you - so I suggest you avoid looking at religious art for a start.
In fact, given that most women these days breastfeed where ever their baby needs it, I suggest you stay in your basement and never come out.
In many areas you can get a "homeowner" permit to do almost any electrical work you want yourself. You still have to get an inspection to make sure you did it right
Because its the government's job to protect you from yourself?
Slashdot Mirror
"Certainly more often than Vista does." This is what gives Slashdot a bad name: completely false (or exaggerated) negative statements in order to promote your own ideas.
The GP makes an incorrect claim of inaccuracy because he misunderstood the summary (it is talking about application compatibility not user numbers) and gets modded (currently) "3 insightful"
That is what gives Slashdot a bad name
They are not charities, they are supporting open source because they expect to directly or indirectly (selling licensed versions, selling support, selling more hardware, etc.) profit from it.
They cannot expect to do that if users are not happy with it. If they want to profit from us, they need to listed to complaints.
What you seem to miss is that the exact same thing also happens with Windows, as my experience as the 'free Windows tech support for everybody that gets to know me' shows. The myth that Windows is more user-friendly than Linux has been nothing more than a myth for the last two or three years.
An advantage of being a Linux user is that I can politely turn down requests for free tech support by saying that I use Linux and do not know anything about Windows...
Linux support requests are more manageable because they die down over time.
The GP also misses the point that many of us have successfully switched friends or family who are not part of our households to Linux as well, and it is often less of a problem than helping the same people with Windows problems.
How is that obvious?
I think he is being sarcastic. The comment about 4.5 is hilarious.
What is true is that it should have been obvious to distros that KDE4 should not yet be a default.
And when that happens to Wikipedia, when it has become too topheavy and hidebound to be useful, someone will start a new project that will attempt to learn from the lessons of the old, and go from there.
We could avoid that by having people write on lots of different websites (which also deals with problems of bias and neutrality) and have some sort of web service that will list and rank the most relevant pages for the particular information you want......
Yes and central planning has such as good track record we should all adopt it!
The British government's standardisation of curricula and the greater control it has taken of schools in recent years has been such a success we want to extend it to IT!
Personally I think it would be much more useful to spend the money of a decent library.
KDE 3.5 still works great and has plenty of eye candy for when you're bored.
I agree - I am still using 3.5 too. The problem is that some of the major distros have made KDE4 the default and users are getting upgraded by default (especially naive users who are the least able to deal with KDE4's flaws).
Sometimes I get annoyed with something in Linux, and then I stop and think, wait a minute, this stuff is all free and people have volunteered their time to write a lot of it, so why should I be complaining. I'm just glad that it exists!
Free as in beer is irrelevant. The cost of software is trivial compared to its importance. A lot of people are also paid to work on open source, they are not volunteering their time, and their employers presumably have sound business reasons for contributing.
I use Linux because for every annoyance in Linux, there is one at least as bad in the alternatives - i.e. I use it because it works better for me than anything else. Free as in speech is good in principle, but having stuff in open formats is of much more practical importance.
At this point, I use almost all open source software--browser, word processor, database, spreadsheet. I'm using H&R Taxcut this year, probably the only software I still purchase on a regular basis.
What I find still essential is widely used proprietary freeware: Flash, Realplayer and Skype.
I find Windows annoying these days when I am forced to use it--everything's so fixed and locked down. It lacks so much stuff out of the box--you mean I can't just read pdf documents? or have virtual desktops? I need to download Firefox? I find the Mac only a bit better, but on the other hand the Mac allows you to use a nice Unix shell window and that makes everything all better :)
I have not seriously tried Mac. As far as Windows does, yes, it sucks out of the box.
Ireland's taxes are lower than most of the rest of the EU, so it makes sense for any company doing pan-EU business to be based there.
In other words it is a tax haven within the EU.
It also has had a number of years where it was a cheap place to get labor, and had workers that were educated and spoke English, though there's recently been a lot of business moving to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, where the labor's cheaper.
Eastern European competition would not hurt them anything like as much - the whole of Western Europe has to cope with that.
For more about Ireland and how companies (especially MS) use it to dodge tax, read:
The evidence for Zeus is every bit as valid as the evidence for "God."
Really? I can find lots of evidence for God, including personal experiences of myself and others. Where is the evidence for Zeus?
But when religion becomes involved as a motivating factor, suddenly the problem becomes a LOT bigger, bloodier and more dangerous. So down with all of it I say... or... let them all kill themselves and leave us out of it.
Then why are so many of the nastiest examples either unconnected with religion (fascism, ethnic nationalism, etc.) or overtly atheist (stalinism, Khmer Rouge, the nastier Maoist groups etc.)?
Religion is far more of a motivating factor for good than for evil. Even rational (i.e. not theophobes like Dawkins) atheists will admit as much.
Every job, like airport security, that can be done by a private company, will be done better by a private company than the government will.
Yes because we have a working competitive market? So if I am not happy with the airport security company, I can use another one when I travel?
Actually they must have. Lots of people would have had laptops with pirated mp3s on them, and with that many passengers someone probably had child porn as well (at least one pedo with a laptop or carrying some DVDs or something out of that many people sounds quite likely to me).
I think as have all been trolled. Other recent comments by the same poster include:
Blaming the current financial crisis on over regulation and Keynsianism of all things.
Slashdot is clearly not as geeky as I thought when the first visible post on a story is by someone who does not understand what is meant by free in this context, and it then gets moderated "interesting".
What is really weird is that the comment is made by someone who has made nearly 600 comments on Slashdot and who uses the phrase "open source".
Ubuntu happened! Fantastic. Linux for human beings. For the first time, we can give Ubuntu CDs to our grandmas and get some degree of success. It's a Linux distro that's tuned for normal users. It looks great. It can play DVDs and do 3D graphics. (But that's not cool, according to RMS, because there are binary blobs).
Mandriva etc. have been doing this for years before Ubuntu. I do not think that Ubuntu is the most friendly distro for naive users even now.
Or to put in in a more strictly financial way: the change increase in the NPV of the income generated by a copyright by extending copyright beyond about 20 or 30 years from the date a work is finished, is very small. The increase in changes such as increasing copyright from life + 50 to life + 70 is negligible.
With the issues with Flash cookies and the annoyance of Flash ads, Flash is pretty user hostile. If it was not for Youtube and similar I would uninstall it.
If everyone did this, then any site that is big enough will switch to direct ad sales and serve the ads off the same domain as the content - this happens to an extent already.
Does your hosts file include ad networks that have good policies about not using annoying ads? Google, for example, does not do inter-sitals or popups, and their video ads only play if you click on a play button.
at the end of the day ad blocking is going to win that arms race
My comment further up partly covers this. How are ad blockers going to filter out advertorial?
If that is all that works, then that will be what people do to make money.
Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
What we really need are "annoying ad blockers". That would gives sites an incentive to use less obtrusive adds, which would be less likely to be blocked.
The effects of ad blockers that block everything is to encourage advertorials and other sneaky ways to get past them, most of which are worse than the original ads.
Lok Sabha (one of the two parliamentary chambers), where I am sure not a single person would even have a vague idea of what the bill is,
India is just like everywhere else!
Actually he has a point. Modern India (the same is true of Sri Lanka) has much more strict sexual mores than they once did. The change is undoubtedly due to British and Islamic influences: although nationalists will not thank you for pointing it out.
Most terrorists outside the Middle East are doing it for purely secular (usually wanting a seperate state or something simlilar) causes. Examples:
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: the masters of suicide bombing. Want a separate state with a secular consitution.
IRA, INLA, UDF, UVF etc. Loosely affiliated with religious groups because the ethnic groups they represented followed different religions, but no religious content to their nationalist ideology.
Basque separatists: want a separate state.
FARC: Marxist Leninist
Abu Nidal Organization: Secular Palestinian
Shining Path: Maoist
Various spin offs of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Greek communists)
Various separatist groups in India: some may have a religious motive, most are nationalists.
Defenders of many of the above may say that they are not really terrorists (e.g. because their main activity is fighting against armed forces). however all have made some use of undoubted terrorist tactics (i.e. bombs targeted against civilians without the sanction of a state party)
If you think economics is easy try studying some econometrics (try reading Time Series Analysis, Hamilton, Princeton University Press).
Financial economics theory uses lots of other maths including differential equations, statistics and probability etc.
The Black-Scholes formula for option valuation was originally solved by transforming it into the same form as the heat equation. Closed form solutions in finance are usually non-trivial.
The problem with business degrees is that they are so generalist that you study nothing in depth (I do have an MBA as well as an MSc in Financial Economics). That makes them less challenging, but nonetheless useful. How bright the other students are probably depends on where you study.
They could also physically isolate networks on which lives depend.
I assume that you would want to get rid of pictures like this and these as well? They are being actively encouraged to undo the damage done by people like you - so I suggest you avoid looking at religious art for a start.
In fact, given that most women these days breastfeed where ever their baby needs it, I suggest you stay in your basement and never come out.
In many areas you can get a "homeowner" permit to do almost any electrical work you want yourself. You still have to get an inspection to make sure you did it right
Because its the government's job to protect you from yourself?