The article argues for trading off control for usability.
Gnome does this (compared to other desktops), so why isn;t everyone moving to Gnome? My experience is that a lot of ordinary users tend to end up saying "I can not find how to do X". I now reccommend KDE for non-geek users other than those whose usage really is just web browsing and word processing.
Almost everyone has something that they need control for, and this tends to override their basic usage of other things elsewhere.
Incidentally, I do not want to just knock Gnome: it is beautifully elegant and I keep trying it, but I think it takes simplicity too far.
Plug it in with a USB cable, or put the card in a card reader and plug the card reader in with a USB cable.
My four year old daughter can do it.
My cheap and nasty music player works like this:
Remove cover, plug it into the USB port.
My four year old daughter can do that too.
From other people's comments an iPod works just was well as my unbranded piece of cheap junk.
Having read the parent, does anyone who has moderated recently regret rating this comment of mine troll? his is one more of the dozens of pieces of evidence I see every time I read Slashdot.
The comments and the moderation on this article made something very clear to me.
The bias on Slashdot has shifted quite significantly away from Linux and towards MS over the last two or three years.
Why? Astroturfing, wider audience, what?
My own suspicion is that PR people who spend all day on the web, spend a lot more time (per head) reading and commenting on Slashdot, they therefore all end up with high karma and probably get mod points often (I am not sure how/. decides to award mod points), have a heavy influence on meta-moderation, and certainly use all their mod points (I rraely do, I am too busy).
I sued to be an analyst at a fund managemetnt company. I used to look at pharmas (although I was not a sector specialist).
A few things I noticeded.
1) Lots of patents cover minor improvements of existing drugs. 2) Lots new drugs are similar to existing drugs. 3) Patents are such a wonderfully effective mechanism that regulators (the FDA etc) have to give pharmas additional incentives (such as orphan drug deisgnation) to develop certain drugs. 4) Patents do more to boost marketing expenditure than R & D expenditure.
There is also no real evidence of what effect patents have. We know from academic studies that they have little positive impact on semiconductors or software, as for eveything else, we have no idea.
If they are a simgle product how come they are sold through separate contracts?
The sale of the PC is a normal retail sale.
The sale of the OS is subject to the EULA.
The sale of the PC is an outright sale.
The OS is sold not licensed.
You own the PC the moment the transaction in the shop is completed.
You only have a valid license after you agree to the EULA.
It is perfectly possible for you to own the PC without a license to the OS (between buying and agreeing to the EULA, or after rejecting the EULA), therefore they cannot be a single product.
Furthermore the core problem is the lack of consumer choice - if (to run with your example) you want to buy a PC without monitor or FVD writer you can (forget PC and mouse, they are cheap enough to throw away if you do not want them) so why is to so difficult to buy a PC without an OS, of with a different OS?
I have looked at very little of the code of the apps I use, but I still trust open source more for two reasons:
1) It is likely that other people will have looked at the code. It is like the difference between audited and unaudited accounts. I can not see all the info that auditors are given, but I know that an independent third party has been given full access, and done some checking - so I trust audited accounts more than unaudited.
2) Because the code is disclosed, anyone doing anything malicious faces a much greater chance of being caught. That is a deterent.
More transparent is always better: This applies to governments, corporations , software authors and anyone who had enough power or influence for it to matter.
Its not that bad. I do not have MS Office for comparision, but it works nicely on a reasonably modern machine, and does not compare doo badly with other apps. Actual numbers:
PID PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4895 15 0 139m 68m 22m S 1.7 7.0 2:59.20 firefox-bin 4883 15 0 78020 52m 21m S 0.0 5.3 0:28.51 konqueror 4927 15 0 106m 41m 21m S 0.0 4.3 0:22.28 mozilla-thunder 26874 15 0 80308 15m 11m R 0.0 1.5 0:06.82 realplay.bin 26994 15 0 4180 1676 1068 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 soffice 27005 15 0 190m 77m 47m S 0.0 8.0 0:29.43 soffice.bin 27026 15 0 32440 15m 12m S 0.0 1.6 0:01.88 konsole
Open Office has a 300 page document open, the browsers have a few tabs open in each, firefox also has the reallayer plugin loaded. Konsole is running top. Open Office is clearly not lightweight, but it is not terrible either.
I do not "hate" MS, but I will rather not use their software.
1) Proprietary software is not transparent. It is therefore intrinsically less trustworthy than open source. 2) Using MS tends to lead to dependance on MS. 3) MS's business practices suggest they in particular are not trustowrthy, and more likely to exploit dependence on them to my detriment. 4) I resent the fact that their software is bundled by everyone - I want to be able to walk into a shop and have a choice of PCs with different OSes installed. 5) I have found most of their software to suck (with the exception of Excel which is very good) and the OS hard to administer (lack of a single auto update mechanism for all, or almost all, my software in particular). 6) Their security track record, and their other shortcoming, sugggests that their attitude to theis custoers is "the sucks will buy anythings".
No, not many of us are good enough to actually cast of possessions etc. Given that we are not saints, yes our lives look much the same as everyone elses.
Many of the things I am thinking of could also be true for an atheist - but if I behave in a certain way because of my religion, then it has had an effect in my case, even if an atheist could get there by a different route.
Even though we may not have a dramatically different life style there may be lots of comparatively small decisions that add up to a lot. For example, we may not buy a flashy car because we believe that a possession that is meant to impress others is morally corrupting, we may give up some luxury and give the money saved to some charity.
Of course, as I said before, I do now a lot of people who have made more visible and dramatic choices.
An analogy: Christianity (and, I think, the other theistic religions) is about a relationship NOT a code of behaviour. Suppose your acquintance Y, has a close friend X, who you ahve never met. Y thinks that X is not someone you would get on with so never talks to you about X. How well placed would you be to assess the importance of X in Y's life?
Living in the country where there is some scattered persecution (church burings and thngs like that) of Christians also opens up a whole other line of possiblities of effects on my life from living in Britain (as I did most of my life)- even though I and my familly are not in any danger (we have been affected by things like school carol services being canceled following threats). It has opened by eyes to the risks and hardship many people face.
Finally thanks for your comments which made me think about how to explain things to people. Hopefully I will make a beter job of it next time.
I could not disagree more. Most of the sort of information people search for is not user generated: when did you last do a Google search for which a slasdot comment was the appropriate answer?
The only exception that I can think of (form my searches) are forums that have answers to software problems. Google seems to have no problem finding these for me.
You obviously have a problem with old people. They are not necesarilly stupid - possibly your lack of understanding of other people is the problem.
The oldest person I have swtiched to Linux is my father, who is in his 70s. He certainly does not want to swtich back to Windows. Overall he seems to require less help from me than when he used Windows.
Actually the British government's official view was that Saddam Hussein's regime typically gave people a "fair trial under an independent and properly constituted judiciary".
I still have to meet people whose religious beliefs play an important role in their lives.
I know lots of people whose religion (in the case of theists, more accurately God) has a huge impact on their lives.
Have you asked people or assumed that because there is no impact you are aware of that there is none? It is something that is difficult to talk about people who are not religous. For one thing they are likely to think one crazy (a zealot!), for another they are unlikely to be interested or understand - and it is often difficult to explain.
The "rituals and small things" may be the tip of the iceberg. What are the motives for them? What impact does the underlying belief and relationship with God have on them?
OK, very few of go and do very visible things like working for the poor, joining a monastary etc. (although I know a few of those too). However, someone like you is unlikely to meet the people who do do those things.
Where are you and how do you define "civilized world"? I have lived in two very different countries, but it is in the one that is less apparently religious and more developed (Britain) that I have seen the greatest impact on people at an individual level (impact on societey and culture are another matter).
The site that is closing is demonstrates why they should care:
1) It would be preferable to download a forked version rather than download patches separtely.
2) There have been no new versions of PINE for over an year - surely it would be nice to have a fork of the old Pine until Alpine is ready? Perhaps even after Alpine is released if some people do not like it?
That only applies to wealth made purely through investment.
In either case (welth through investment or entrepremeurship) it is an advantage to start with more wealth: part of the advantage Bill Gates had over Bricklin and others is that he inherited a few million, so he had something to fall back on if the risky startup failed.
The Islamist extremists, on the other hand, are ultimately waging an imperialist war against Western civilization and culture
Wrong. Their main cause is that they want American troops out of the Middle East - not greatly different from the IRA's cause. This is certainly true of the British terrorists, and is probably true of the Middle Eastern ones as well.
They also would probably like to over-throw various Middle Eastern governments and replace them with fundamentalis dictatorships - but some a number of these governments (like Saudi Arabia) are already fundamentalist dictatorships, who cares?
Possibly less socialist, but less free market as well.
Huge parts of all the major economies are now oligopolistic. Every merger and takeover you here about makes this more so.
Capitalism != free market. Competition = Free market.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of open ports is not all good. Getting entwork printing working with UBuntu is a pain, for example.
I would have thought the biggest problem at the moment are web browser vulnerabilities - which is why I use Noscript.
The article argues for trading off control for usability.
Gnome does this (compared to other desktops), so why isn;t everyone moving to Gnome? My experience is that a lot of ordinary users tend to end up saying "I can not find how to do X". I now reccommend KDE for non-geek users other than those whose usage really is just web browsing and word processing.
Almost everyone has something that they need control for, and this tends to override their basic usage of other things elsewhere.
Incidentally, I do not want to just knock Gnome: it is beautifully elegant and I keep trying it, but I think it takes simplicity too far.
Plug it in with a USB cable, or put the card in a card reader and plug the card reader in with a USB cable.
My four year old daughter can do it.
My cheap and nasty music player works like this:
Remove cover, plug it into the USB port.
My four year old daughter can do that too.
From other people's comments an iPod works just was well as my unbranded piece of cheap junk.
Having read the parent, does anyone who has moderated recently regret rating this comment of mine troll? his is one more of the dozens of pieces of evidence I see every time I read Slashdot.
The comments and the moderation on this article made something very clear to me.
/. decides to award mod points), have a heavy influence on meta-moderation, and certainly use all their mod points (I rraely do, I am too busy).
The bias on Slashdot has shifted quite significantly away from Linux and towards MS over the last two or three years.
Why? Astroturfing, wider audience, what?
My own suspicion is that PR people who spend all day on the web, spend a lot more time (per head) reading and commenting on Slashdot, they therefore all end up with high karma and probably get mod points often (I am not sure how
It did not take a noticable time to either download or render: Firefox, linux and dialup.
Most people do not want to look at MSN.
They do not know how to change the home page, or regard it as too much work.
name a product, any product, as potentially lethal as a prescription drug
All the prescriptions drugs that are completely new.
You are clearly an eccentric.
What has good plot and good acting got to do with making a good film?
The measure of a good film is how much money is spent on making it: especilly how much is spent on marketing.
I sued to be an analyst at a fund managemetnt company. I used to look at pharmas (although I was not a sector specialist).
A few things I noticeded.
1) Lots of patents cover minor improvements of existing drugs.
2) Lots new drugs are similar to existing drugs.
3) Patents are such a wonderfully effective mechanism that regulators (the FDA etc) have to give pharmas additional incentives (such as orphan drug deisgnation) to develop certain drugs.
4) Patents do more to boost marketing expenditure than R & D expenditure.
There is also no real evidence of what effect patents have. We know from academic studies that they have little positive impact on semiconductors or software, as for eveything else, we have no idea.
It depends on why how they make their money.
Google rely on ad revenues, so they need people to visit their site.
What about Amazon web services - as long as people buy, they make money. It does not matter how the access Amazon.
The BBC API for getting schedule information is not something they want to make money out of either.
If they are a simgle product how come they are sold through separate contracts?
The sale of the PC is a normal retail sale.
The sale of the OS is subject to the EULA.
The sale of the PC is an outright sale.
The OS is sold not licensed.
You own the PC the moment the transaction in the shop is completed.
You only have a valid license after you agree to the EULA.
It is perfectly possible for you to own the PC without a license to the OS (between buying and agreeing to the EULA, or after rejecting the EULA), therefore they cannot be a single product.
Furthermore the core problem is the lack of consumer choice - if (to run with your example) you want to buy a PC without monitor or FVD writer you can (forget PC and mouse, they are cheap enough to throw away if you do not want them) so why is to so difficult to buy a PC without an OS, of with a different OS?
I have looked at very little of the code of the apps I use, but I still trust open source more for two reasons:
1) It is likely that other people will have looked at the code. It is like the difference between audited and unaudited accounts. I can not see all the info that auditors are given, but I know that an independent third party has been given full access, and done some checking - so I trust audited accounts more than unaudited.
2) Because the code is disclosed, anyone doing anything malicious faces a much greater chance of being caught. That is a deterent.
More transparent is always better: This applies to governments, corporations , software authors and anyone who had enough power or influence for it to matter.
Its not that bad. I do not have MS Office for comparision, but it works nicely on a reasonably modern machine, and does not compare doo badly with other apps. Actual numbers:
PID PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4895 15 0 139m 68m 22m S 1.7 7.0 2:59.20 firefox-bin
4883 15 0 78020 52m 21m S 0.0 5.3 0:28.51 konqueror
4927 15 0 106m 41m 21m S 0.0 4.3 0:22.28 mozilla-thunder
26874 15 0 80308 15m 11m R 0.0 1.5 0:06.82 realplay.bin
26994 15 0 4180 1676 1068 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 soffice
27005 15 0 190m 77m 47m S 0.0 8.0 0:29.43 soffice.bin
27026 15 0 32440 15m 12m S 0.0 1.6 0:01.88 konsole
Open Office has a 300 page document open, the browsers have a few tabs open in each, firefox also has the reallayer plugin loaded. Konsole is running top. Open Office is clearly not lightweight, but it is not terrible either.
I do not "hate" MS, but I will rather not use their software.
1) Proprietary software is not transparent. It is therefore intrinsically less trustworthy than open source.
2) Using MS tends to lead to dependance on MS.
3) MS's business practices suggest they in particular are not trustowrthy, and more likely to exploit dependence on them to my detriment.
4) I resent the fact that their software is bundled by everyone - I want to be able to walk into a shop and have a choice of PCs with different OSes installed.
5) I have found most of their software to suck (with the exception of Excel which is very good) and the OS hard to administer (lack of a single auto update mechanism for all, or almost all, my software in particular).
6) Their security track record, and their other shortcoming, sugggests that their attitude to theis custoers is "the sucks will buy anythings".
No, not many of us are good enough to actually cast of possessions etc. Given that we are not saints, yes our lives look much the same as everyone elses.
Many of the things I am thinking of could also be true for an atheist - but if I behave in a certain way because of my religion, then it has had an effect in my case, even if an atheist could get there by a different route.
Even though we may not have a dramatically different life style there may be lots of comparatively small decisions that add up to a lot. For example, we may not buy a flashy car because we believe that a possession that is meant to impress others is morally corrupting, we may give up some luxury and give the money saved to some charity.
Of course, as I said before, I do now a lot of people who have made more visible and dramatic choices.
An analogy: Christianity (and, I think, the other theistic religions) is about a relationship NOT a code of behaviour. Suppose your acquintance Y, has a close friend X, who you ahve never met. Y thinks that X is not someone you would get on with so never talks to you about X. How well placed would you be to assess the importance of X in Y's life?
Living in the country where there is some scattered persecution (church burings and thngs like that) of Christians also opens up a whole other line of possiblities of effects on my life from living in Britain (as I did most of my life)- even though I and my familly are not in any danger (we have been affected by things like school carol services being canceled following threats). It has opened by eyes to the risks and hardship many people face.
Finally thanks for your comments which made me think about how to explain things to people. Hopefully I will make a beter job of it next time.
I could not disagree more. Most of the sort of information people search for is not user generated: when did you last do a Google search for which a slasdot comment was the appropriate answer?
The only exception that I can think of (form my searches) are forums that have answers to software problems. Google seems to have no problem finding these for me.
You obviously have a problem with old people. They are not necesarilly stupid - possibly your lack of understanding of other people is the problem.
The oldest person I have swtiched to Linux is my father, who is in his 70s. He certainly does not want to swtich back to Windows. Overall he seems to require less help from me than when he used Windows.
Quote at the bottom of this page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,431 143,00.html
I know lots of people whose religion (in the case of theists, more accurately God) has a huge impact on their lives.
Have you asked people or assumed that because there is no impact you are aware of that there is none? It is something that is difficult to talk about people who are not religous. For one thing they are likely to think one crazy (a zealot!), for another they are unlikely to be interested or understand - and it is often difficult to explain.
The "rituals and small things" may be the tip of the iceberg. What are the motives for them? What impact does the underlying belief and relationship with God have on them?
OK, very few of go and do very visible things like working for the poor, joining a monastary etc. (although I know a few of those too). However, someone like you is unlikely to meet the people who do do those things.
Where are you and how do you define "civilized world"? I have lived in two very different countries, but it is in the one that is less apparently religious and more developed (Britain) that I have seen the greatest impact on people at an individual level (impact on societey and culture are another matter).
The site that is closing is demonstrates why they should care:
1) It would be preferable to download a forked version rather than download patches separtely.
2) There have been no new versions of PINE for over an year - surely it would be nice to have a fork of the old Pine until Alpine is ready? Perhaps even after Alpine is released if some people do not like it?
When did taking a dump last profoundly change a relationship?
How big is the market for pictures of people eating lunch?
Do you get spam offering mouth enlargements?
How often to people seek psychiatric help over luncheon problems?
Do you think "agile and developed" is a synonym for "adolescent"
That only applies to wealth made purely through investment.
In either case (welth through investment or entrepremeurship) it is an advantage to start with more wealth: part of the advantage Bill Gates had over Bricklin and others is that he inherited a few million, so he had something to fall back on if the risky startup failed.
Wrong. Their main cause is that they want American troops out of the Middle East - not greatly different from the IRA's cause. This is certainly true of the British terrorists, and is probably true of the Middle Eastern ones as well.
They also would probably like to over-throw various Middle Eastern governments and replace them with fundamentalis dictatorships - but some a number of these governments (like Saudi Arabia) are already fundamentalist dictatorships, who cares?
Possibly less socialist, but less free market as well. Huge parts of all the major economies are now oligopolistic. Every merger and takeover you here about makes this more so. Capitalism != free market. Competition = Free market.
Tell them that, if they are innocent, they have nothing to hide.