Thats the problem with Windows, its too difficult to get it to run the software I am used to......
Only joking (I have to say that for the benefit of the less bright moderators),but, more seriously, are there any apps that tie you to Windows? If not why not switch?
I tried Wine and I could not get IE (the only Windows program I need for testing websites) to work. I tried various install scripts, they silently failed.
Crossover Office installed everything flawlessly, in a very simple GUI to boot.
I plan to pay for it when the trial period runs out.
I just hope the it will be possible to install IE7 on it - if MS is going to treat IE 7 as a Windows update you need WGPA for that might screw it (and lose Codeweavers some sales).
Yes but as they own half of Symbian, half of the $140m still belongs to them.
In fact Symbian is not really and independent business so much as an outsourced R & D facility for mobile phone companies - which is why Psion, the only shareholder who was interested in making money out of it, sold their stake.
You need to check your own fact and avoid propagating myths. We can start with the idea that you need to compile and window manager (or anything else) to use Linux. In fact Linux at least Mandriva) is easier to install than Windows (unless things have improved a lot in XP).
Brands are notorious can lose value very quickly so suggesting you can rely on the brand to keep a company going for 10 years is not credible.
Windows has always lagged Mac OS in features (it now seems to be lagging Linux as well). This never stopped it from dominating the market.
Apple has made no real headway in the corporate market.
Macs and iPods, too lines of business. Software is a separate line of business but its sales depend on hardware sales to drive it.
Stock brokers using Macs? That's a joke. In several years in the industry I once came across one very old Mac in a brokers office. There is a lot of software the financial sector uses (e.g. the Blooomberg plugin for Excel Spreadsheets, clients for broker forecast distribution services) that is Windows only.
People may be sick of Windows but they are frightened of anything different. I have tried to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs but they will not use anything that is not the same was what they are used to. I have had better success with Linux becuase they can try it on their existing hardware.
I spend the vast majority of my time being productive on my computer instead of maintaining it
What do you think users of other OSes do? It would hardly be in our interests to tolerate anything else. I would drop Linux and go back to Windows or buy Macs if I thought I would get my work done better in Windows or MacOS.
with some basic knowledge and tweaking (Tweak UI, some new drivers and some Regedits) a windows box
Sounds like more work than Mandrake/Mandriva needs
Windows gets its bad name from users who don't know to put up a firewall and current AV software; who willingly install
Linux gets its bad name from people who either tried and early version of Red Hat and found it difficult, and from people using inappropriate distributions (e.g. newbies using Slackware or Gentoo).
with proper precautions taken I have never experienced them
Time spent taking precautions is lost productivity. I have to maintain a small network (five PCs) and do my real work as well. I want to be able install quickly and tweak as little as possible. Mandriva does this admirably. I have only every had installation/configuration problems on my own machine which has more server and other less common/non-desktop software installed on it than the others.
I know there are utilities for making Windows networks easier to maintain and secure but I am not aware of any suited to small business.
You are assuming that people use Linux out of idealism. Plenty of people use Linux because it is what works best for us.
They may not care much about the politics of it but it may be possible, by discussing analogies such as cars to make them more sympathetic towards those who do.
A lot of people can be made to care about the financial and business implications. Most importantly, and open source vendor can not lock you in to their product and can not force the upgrade cycle.
Ask a finance person who they think you should cost lock-in when making a purchasing decision. The answer will be that it is impractical, so buying software that might lock you in means committing to an unquantified future cost.
This puts the comments of those Windows fanboys who accuse OSS of copying Windows in an interesting light.
put documents in any number of virtual folders
Like a link?
folders that will automatically update
Based on desktop search obviously. A bit like the virtual folders in some email programs (Opera, Thunderbird) but applied filesystem wide (so there is something genuinely new here - but not much.
security improvements
Need I say anything?
adding a PC to a home network
Like Zeroconf/Renzevous?
icons that are tiny representations of a document itself
Konqueror and Nautilus both do this
I assume everything that is not already on my (linux) desktop is copied from the Mac.
To be fair to him lots of words have different meanings within and outside particular groups of people.
However I do think hacker is a lost cause, because the two meanings are too similar. However while those of you who want the word used correctly, could you help improve precision which we can use the English language by also being careful to use the following words strictly according to their original definitions:
gay: happy, jolly rude: rustic, crude gentleman: person with enough property not to need to work lady: the wife of a knight or lord charity: love of people per se (and of God)
You will notice that in each case the current meaning of the word is redundant (there are synonyms) and less precise than the original, therefore the change of meaning has shrunk the range of the language. Much like the case with hacker. So, please be consistent, use all these words (and many more) accurately. The only problem is that most people will not understand you: but then again why not allow the ignorant to misunderstand you.
(note to moderators: this is meant to ironic. If you have not heard the word before please look it up).
If the Chinese had to pay full US prices they would reduce their imports. The vast majority of them will buy this stuff cheap but they will not pay anything like full retail.
Why do you think Windows has the highest share in countries where piracy is common?
Furthermore the leverage the US has over China is limited.
Finally, if the US pushes other countries too far for these income streams, they are likely to end up regarding them as a tax and simply weaken "IP" laws.
Finally remember that the US can not pressure other countries to have significantly stronger IP than the US has itself, and therefore the income this generates has to be set against the costs imposed on US consumers by stronger IP in the US AND the general global inflation this causes.
I installed it, tried it for a few days, decided I did not use it and disabled it a good while ago. Now Slashdot gets round to telling me its available. How would I keep up with whats happenning without/.'s timely news aggregation.
such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing
Those are not intrinsic. Intrinsic motivators are those that are intrinsic to the job - i.e. what the article is saying is that people work hard because their job is fulfilling or interesting.
Of course making jobs interesting is difficult, which is why bad managers tend to be overly reliant on extrinsic perks and threats.
However extrinsic factors (the most important of which is money) are essential, research shows (I think going back to Herzberg, though its a while since I studied this stuff) that people paid more than the necessary level do not become more motivated, but those paid less become demotivated.
What SAS do is spot on, they encourage developers to do things that make them feel good about their jobs: write, go to conferences, train.
I'm not sure how you're able to make the claim that Windows power users only know how to do things, but don't know how it actually works.
I make the claim because I have known people for whom it is true. "Power users" known recipes for getting things done, and secondly their knowledge tends to be very narrow.
I think that you do not understand how people who know absolutely nothing about computers approach them. I would have agreed with your statement at one time, but I have slowly realised how many people get a lot of stuff done by learning sequences of actions, rather than actually understanding what is going on. Yes they do inevitably learn a little (especially if they start writing macros), but it is much less than you might think. If you have absolutely no idea of how computers work, you have no framework to learn from. A computer becomes a black box device that produces certain outputs for certain inputs and that's it.
Most people do not actually do much configuration beyond installing software (which these days is easy), and setting backgrounds and screen savers (and even there many users call the former the latter).
As of the narrowness of power users knowledge, let me give you a few examples. Many years ago I came across someone keeping a database in Wordperfect. They knew WordPerfect so they wrote a set of macros to do what they needed. That is a power user in action. More recently I have seen Excel used to circulate information - so that in order to see a single page that you wanted, you had to download an Excel file that ran to several megabyte with macros etc., the file had to be manually copied to the file server at each branch office. Putting the information on a web server would have been obviously better. This was the product of a "power user" who knew how to write VB scripts in Excel but little else.
As for software installation, I have not used OS X , but I would say that the better Linux distros (such as Mandrake) are at least as easy as Windows - easier if you stick to software from your distro. The hardest are of course very difficult to install (both OS and additional software), but they are designed for a different user base.
I agree, Wordpress is easy to install, easy to administer, and easy to use. You can do a lot of customisation simply by editing templates (as I did on this site). If you need more extensive customisation plugins are not difficult to write.
Not only will "power users" be the last to use Windows because they want all their hardware supported, but they are also usually specially "windows power users" they have invested a lot in learning how Windows and whatever apps they use do things, but they do not actually understand how they work so their "knowledge" is not transferable.
This is actually the group who the article call "regular users", real regular users are quite happy with Linux desktops - copy their files over, export their bookmarks and import into Firefox and that's it. This has worked fine for my father, my wife and some guys who worked for me (one is now planning to install Linux at home).
I also do not understand what he is talking about when it comes to installing applications. There are only three pieces of software I have installed which required anything more complicated than downloading the RPM, clicking in it to start the installer, and then typing the root password and clicking OK a few times. These were: Erlang, Firefox and Thunderbird.
In fact, bar Erlang (which needed to be compiled), Firefox has been by for the most problematic thing to install.
And it provides better value for money than the commercial broadcasters or the record companies.
The root of their problem is that the BBC can provide what they want to make money out of, and the BBC can do it cheaply because it does not have the overheads they do (marketing, distribution, billing...).
In this particular case the taxpayer funded service is more efficient than the private sector - which demonstrates just how fat the music industry is.
All those posts on the lines of "we have this already" are missing several points.
Firstly, this is about choice. You can have the official Google toolbar or the alternatives. Google have even said they will continue to link to Googlebar so users know they have the choice
Secondly, it is more likely to be used by non-geek users, simply becuase it comes from Google.
Thirdly, it is very good publicity for Firefox - it will be mentioned in Google press releases, and on pages about the Google Toolbar.
Fourthly, it will pressure others who have IE only extensions to produce Firefox versions - as Yahoo and Clusty already have.
Yes but if there has been an accurate summary it would have been something like "man tries to enforce trade mark on the word stealth and fails" which would not have been exciting enough for Slashdot to carry.
You are missing my point, it is pointless ranking sites by what software I use. Neither of the sites from which I removed the meta tag is a blog as such.
Why sense does it make to penalise me for using Worpress rather than publishing exactly the same content using, say, Mambo.
There are also a number of people (including me) who use blog software as simple CMSes even for sites that are not strictly speaking blogs - are you going to exclude us too?
Finally, how are you going to determine what software a site runs on? If you use generator meta tags, they can be excluded or faked.
Incidentally thanks for reminding me to remove them from my new theme (I had done it earlier, but forgot this time).
Slashdot Mirror
Thats the problem with Windows, its too difficult to get it to run the software I am used to...... Only joking (I have to say that for the benefit of the less bright moderators),but, more seriously, are there any apps that tie you to Windows? If not why not switch?
Crossover office is much easier to install.
I tried Wine and I could not get IE (the only Windows program I need for testing websites) to work. I tried various install scripts, they silently failed.
Crossover Office installed everything flawlessly, in a very simple GUI to boot.
I plan to pay for it when the trial period runs out.
I just hope the it will be possible to install IE7 on it - if MS is going to treat IE 7 as a Windows update you need WGPA for that might screw it (and lose Codeweavers some sales).
To say nothing of the mental damage done by reading Slashdot everyday
Yes but as they own half of Symbian, half of the $140m still belongs to them. In fact Symbian is not really and independent business so much as an outsourced R & D facility for mobile phone companies - which is why Psion, the only shareholder who was interested in making money out of it, sold their stake.
You need to check your own fact and avoid propagating myths. We can start with the idea that you need to compile and window manager (or anything else) to use Linux. In fact Linux at least Mandriva) is easier to install than Windows (unless things have improved a lot in XP).
Brands are notorious can lose value very quickly so suggesting you can rely on the brand to keep a company going for 10 years is not credible.
Windows has always lagged Mac OS in features (it now seems to be lagging Linux as well). This never stopped it from dominating the market.
Apple has made no real headway in the corporate market.
Macs and iPods, too lines of business. Software is a separate line of business but its sales depend on hardware sales to drive it.
Stock brokers using Macs? That's a joke. In several years in the industry I once came across one very old Mac in a brokers office. There is a lot of software the financial sector uses (e.g. the Blooomberg plugin for Excel Spreadsheets, clients for broker forecast distribution services) that is Windows only.
People may be sick of Windows but they are frightened of anything different. I have tried to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs but they will not use anything that is not the same was what they are used to. I have had better success with Linux becuase they can try it on their existing hardware.
In what way is it worse than Red Hat, Debian or Gentoo? For that matter what could be worse than Vista?
What do you think users of other OSes do? It would hardly be in our interests to tolerate anything else. I would drop Linux and go back to Windows or buy Macs if I thought I would get my work done better in Windows or MacOS.
with some basic knowledge and tweaking (Tweak UI, some new drivers and some Regedits) a windows box
Sounds like more work than Mandrake/Mandriva needs
Windows gets its bad name from users who don't know to put up a firewall and current AV software; who willingly install
Linux gets its bad name from people who either tried and early version of Red Hat and found it difficult, and from people using inappropriate distributions (e.g. newbies using Slackware or Gentoo).
with proper precautions taken I have never experienced them
Time spent taking precautions is lost productivity. I have to maintain a small network (five PCs) and do my real work as well. I want to be able install quickly and tweak as little as possible. Mandriva does this admirably. I have only every had installation/configuration problems on my own machine which has more server and other less common/non-desktop software installed on it than the others.
I know there are utilities for making Windows networks easier to maintain and secure but I am not aware of any suited to small business.
You are assuming that people use Linux out of idealism. Plenty of people use Linux because it is what works best for us.
They may not care much about the politics of it but it may be possible, by discussing analogies such as cars to make them more sympathetic towards those who do.
A lot of people can be made to care about the financial and business implications. Most importantly, and open source vendor can not lock you in to their product and can not force the upgrade cycle.
Ask a finance person who they think you should cost lock-in when making a purchasing decision. The answer will be that it is impractical, so buying software that might lock you in means committing to an unquantified future cost.
put documents in any number of virtual folders
Like a link?
folders that will automatically update
Based on desktop search obviously. A bit like the virtual folders in some email programs (Opera, Thunderbird) but applied filesystem wide (so there is something genuinely new here - but not much.
security improvements
Need I say anything?
adding a PC to a home network
Like Zeroconf/Renzevous?
icons that are tiny representations of a document itself
Konqueror and Nautilus both do this
I assume everything that is not already on my (linux) desktop is copied from the Mac.
To be fair to him lots of words have different meanings within and outside particular groups of people.
However I do think hacker is a lost cause, because the two meanings are too similar. However while those of you who want the word used correctly, could you help improve precision which we can use the English language by also being careful to use the following words strictly according to their original definitions:
gay: happy, jolly
rude: rustic, crude
gentleman: person with enough property not to need to work
lady: the wife of a knight or lord
charity: love of people per se (and of God)
You will notice that in each case the current meaning of the word is redundant (there are synonyms) and less precise than the original, therefore the change of meaning has shrunk the range of the language. Much like the case with hacker. So, please be consistent, use all these words (and many more) accurately. The only problem is that most people will not understand you: but then again why not allow the ignorant to misunderstand you.
(note to moderators: this is meant to ironic. If you have not heard the word before please look it up).
If the Chinese had to pay full US prices they would reduce their imports. The vast majority of them will buy this stuff cheap but they will not pay anything like full retail.
Why do you think Windows has the highest share in countries where piracy is common?
Furthermore the leverage the US has over China is limited.
Finally, if the US pushes other countries too far for these income streams, they are likely to end up regarding them as a tax and simply weaken "IP" laws.
Finally remember that the US can not pressure other countries to have significantly stronger IP than the US has itself, and therefore the income this generates has to be set against the costs imposed on US consumers by stronger IP in the US AND the general global inflation this causes.
I installed it, tried it for a few days, decided I did not use it and disabled it a good while ago. Now Slashdot gets round to telling me its available. How would I keep up with whats happenning without /.'s timely news aggregation.
Those are not intrinsic. Intrinsic motivators are those that are intrinsic to the job - i.e. what the article is saying is that people work hard because their job is fulfilling or interesting.
Of course making jobs interesting is difficult, which is why bad managers tend to be overly reliant on extrinsic perks and threats.
However extrinsic factors (the most important of which is money) are essential, research shows (I think going back to Herzberg, though its a while since I studied this stuff) that people paid more than the necessary level do not become more motivated, but those paid less become demotivated.
What SAS do is spot on, they encourage developers to do things that make them feel good about their jobs: write, go to conferences, train.
He or his publisher will use you, that is sufficeint reason to stop people doing it, therefore DRM is not necessary.
I make the claim because I have known people for whom it is true. "Power users" known recipes for getting things done, and secondly their knowledge tends to be very narrow.
I think that you do not understand how people who know absolutely nothing about computers approach them. I would have agreed with your statement at one time, but I have slowly realised how many people get a lot of stuff done by learning sequences of actions, rather than actually understanding what is going on. Yes they do inevitably learn a little (especially if they start writing macros), but it is much less than you might think. If you have absolutely no idea of how computers work, you have no framework to learn from. A computer becomes a black box device that produces certain outputs for certain inputs and that's it.
Most people do not actually do much configuration beyond installing software (which these days is easy), and setting backgrounds and screen savers (and even there many users call the former the latter).
As of the narrowness of power users knowledge, let me give you a few examples. Many years ago I came across someone keeping a database in Wordperfect. They knew WordPerfect so they wrote a set of macros to do what they needed. That is a power user in action. More recently I have seen Excel used to circulate information - so that in order to see a single page that you wanted, you had to download an Excel file that ran to several megabyte with macros etc., the file had to be manually copied to the file server at each branch office. Putting the information on a web server would have been obviously better. This was the product of a "power user" who knew how to write VB scripts in Excel but little else.
As for software installation, I have not used OS X , but I would say that the better Linux distros (such as Mandrake) are at least as easy as Windows - easier if you stick to software from your distro. The hardest are of course very difficult to install (both OS and additional software), but they are designed for a different user base.
The community is very helpful and there is already a huge range of themes and plugins available. There are even several threads in the support forums on family blogs
Not only will "power users" be the last to use Windows because they want all their hardware supported, but they are also usually specially "windows power users" they have invested a lot in learning how Windows and whatever apps they use do things, but they do not actually understand how they work so their "knowledge" is not transferable.
This is actually the group who the article call "regular users", real regular users are quite happy with Linux desktops - copy their files over, export their bookmarks and import into Firefox and that's it. This has worked fine for my father, my wife and some guys who worked for me (one is now planning to install Linux at home).
I also do not understand what he is talking about when it comes to installing applications. There are only three pieces of software I have installed which required anything more complicated than downloading the RPM, clicking in it to start the installer, and then typing the root password and clicking OK a few times. These were: Erlang, Firefox and Thunderbird.
In fact, bar Erlang (which needed to be compiled), Firefox has been by for the most problematic thing to install.
And it provides better value for money than the commercial broadcasters or the record companies. The root of their problem is that the BBC can provide what they want to make money out of, and the BBC can do it cheaply because it does not have the overheads they do (marketing, distribution, billing ...).
In this particular case the taxpayer funded service is more efficient than the private sector - which demonstrates just how fat the music industry is.
All those posts on the lines of "we have this already" are missing several points.
Firstly, this is about choice. You can have the official Google toolbar or the alternatives. Google have even said they will continue to link to Googlebar so users know they have the choice
Secondly, it is more likely to be used by non-geek users, simply becuase it comes from Google.
Thirdly, it is very good publicity for Firefox - it will be mentioned in Google press releases, and on pages about the Google Toolbar.
Fourthly, it will pressure others who have IE only extensions to produce Firefox versions - as Yahoo and Clusty already have.
Fast booting after a crash is stable? What are you comparing against? Windows ME?
I have not had a crash that required re-booting for at least six months - and I use Mandrake which does not have the best reputation for stability.
Yes but if there has been an accurate summary it would have been something like "man tries to enforce trade mark on the word stealth and fails" which would not have been exciting enough for Slashdot to carry.
I am not sure this is true anymore.
With some dsitros now having very easy installs all sorts of people are using Linux.
People by distros like Mandriva becuase they do not want to tweak everyting, so are unlikely to put much efffort into securitn a machine.
You are missing my point, it is pointless ranking sites by what software I use. Neither of the sites from which I removed the meta tag is a blog as such. Why sense does it make to penalise me for using Worpress rather than publishing exactly the same content using, say, Mambo.
I do not think the law does (or can) differentiate between responsible and iresponsible journalists.
In any case if you think that, you could not possibly have read the British tabloid newspapers any time in, say, the last century or so.
What about all the useful content on blogs?
There are also a number of people (including me) who use blog software as simple CMSes even for sites that are not strictly speaking blogs - are you going to exclude us too?
Finally, how are you going to determine what software a site runs on? If you use generator meta tags, they can be excluded or faked.
Incidentally thanks for reminding me to remove them from my new theme (I had done it earlier, but forgot this time).