There are good reasons to need Windows. Voice dictation software for other OSs is crappy or nonexistent. The same is probably true of a lot of accessibility or alternative input software. And voice dictation is something I need. It's arrogant to presume that needing MS is a choice.
There's a company that does Internet and phone service for people living in the university accommodation here (University of Edinburgh). My voice mail hasn't worked since the beginning of the year, but it only doesn't work when people call from outside the U.K. (which happens a lot since I'm an international student). Naturally, their tech support is a little confused by this since they aren't calling from outside the U.K., so it works for them. After we'd been through the routine of them testing it several times, calling me, getting my voicemail, and insisting that there was no problem, they finally it informed me that they thought that everybody calling me must be using pulse dialing, since they were obviously having trouble negotiating the system of having to dial and and then dial an extension #.
I explained to them that they weren't having trouble dialing extension #, but that the problem occurred after a they had already got into my #, and furthermore pulse dialing was hardly ever used in the United States anymore, and that people are calling me from several different landline phones, using several different phone companies, plus cellphones using a variety of carriers. After that they resorted to insisting that it was some kind of problem in the phone system, and couldn't possibly be on their end because everything worked from their perspective. After that I gave up and started telling people to send me an e-mail if they didn't get my voicemail. Later, I discovered that it would pickup while I was on the phone, but not when I wasn't. Definitely the strangest tech support problem I've ever had, and a completely inadequate explanation -- not too interesting, though.
It seems from reading the relevant law section that anyone the school approves of is allowed to use the name, just not the ones they don't approve of.
I don't think that's a good law, but that does seem to be the way it stands. So special interests aligned with their political views wouldn't get in trouble because they're not using the name without the approval of the university.
Re:Brushed Metal Appearance
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
Indeed. Safari is brushed metal as well, and when I was using OS X at work, I avoided it almost entirely for that reason (I used Camino instead). If the Finder had been brushed-metal, I would have been very unhappy.
Freedom of speech includes the right to say things that other people find stupid and disgusting. This is not a flaw -- the purpose of free speech is to protect the expression minority opinions, regardless of what the opinion is. This equal protection is necessary, because if you can suppress any minority opinion, you can suppress every one.
Calling someone un-American for a certain behavior is disconcertingly common, and I don't think it is in any sense a good thing. But the fact that people can do it and get acceptance for it is related to differing values, not a problem with free speech. Nasty but socially acceptable opinions indicate a problem with society, not a problem with the Constitution.
How do you know they're bad guys, do you know them personally or something?
Seriously. Get a life, and stop posting the e-mail addresses of people who very likely have nothing to do with this decision, and may even strongly disagree with it.
It's not unlike posting the email addresses of a bunch of Americans and telling people to spam them because their president started a war in Iraq. That's an inflammatory comparison, but it does seem roughly comparable.
Another secret of their success is that the labels target consumers - namely, adults - who are still willing to pay for their music, rather than download it for free.
Nice stereotyping there, Christian Science Monitor. There are plenty of college students and teenagers who will pay for music -- especially if it's good music.
I also wonder how many people actually use the ALT, CTRL, SHIFT and similar keys on THE RIGHT SIDE of the keyboards...
Anyone who's worried about RSI. Using two hands to do CTRL+[letter key] is better for your hands and requires less movement. Unfortunately, some keyboards (including mine) have a weird "menu" key (plus an ALT, CTRL, and Windows key) on the right, so it makes it awkward for my pinky to reach the CTRL key over there. So I haven't developed the habit either.
How much we're willing to spend in return for what level of service is still open to question. The idea of software subscriptions is still new. Is $99 per year too much to pay? $119? $69? $59? What about "tiered" subscription prices...
So after two or three years, you've paid nearly as much for a copy of Linux as you would for a copy of Windows? That seems kind of silly. Of course, you're getting access to a software library (if well-implemented, a very good one), but most people don't buy that many pieces of extra software anyway.
I think the writer's crazy to think that people are going to pay $99 or more a year to get access to a software library. Picture this:
"Yeah, Mom. A copy of Windows is $200, plus any software you need to buy. A copy of a friendly Linux distribution is $100, plus you can pay for a software subscription for $100 a year if you want to be able to update your system and download software easily."
"I think I'll just go with Windows. I'm familiar with it, and it sounds cheaper in the long run, because I probably won't need much extra software."
Yeah, that's what I see.
I agree that it's not a big problem, but it does make numbers harder to remember. Seven digits is easily within the compass of people's short-term memories, but add two other pieces of information that you have keep in mind, and nine pieces is a bit of a stretch -- almost out of the 7 +/- 2 range that most people's short-term memory works in.
And realistically, you still have to devote some processing time to dialing all three area code digits, which gives them a chance to displace the phone number in your memory.
At the movie theater the other night, I saw a Windows error box -- one of the fairly primitive ones, white with a thin gray border. It said something like "TrueType Font error. The application has tried to use a TrueType font that is corrupt. Please exit all applications and restart Windows."
GIMP is a very difficult program to set up and use on Windows. Also, like Mozilla, it suffers from a lot of inconsistencies with the standard Win32-type interface.
I do agree that it's a great program and one of the things that hooked me on Linux was the fact that I could, legitimately and for free, have a great graphics editor to work with. (I used to use MS Paint to do graphics. *gag*)
I didn't really have any contact with Photoshop until after I'd used GIMP, which I think was part of the reason I didn't mind the weird interface, Linux being the other part, since most of its interfaces are a little weird.
They have a specific WinGIMP project to work on it, so maybe they'll be able to include it in the future. But right now I think they're right not to include it, because most people trying to use GIMP on Windows would just get frustrated and go pirate a copy of Photoshop.:P
I think it's a much better idea to think critically about the government and be realistic about the likelihood of any given set of people making good laws and not abusing their power than to just "trust the government."
If you don't like the right mouse button, tear off the right-button menu and use it like a normal menuset. It doesn't solve your other problems, but it's one more step along the way.
It's a lot harder for people with common last names, though, since the main source of uniqueness is their first name - not many people actually use their middle names. And really, there are already enough weird baby names out there.
It seems to me that the situation would have been much better if Inter.net had disclosed the terms of the suspension to her, explaining that they had suspended her account but were not terminating it or bouncing her email. And that disclosure is pretty reasonable - if my ISP suspended my account, I would probably expect them to tell me what was happening with it.
Because of their lack of disclosure, and other strange behavior, like accepting an offer of a reduced payment at first and then rejecting it later, it seems like they're substantially responsible for the problem and the delay of its resolution.
Disclosure might have reduced the problem for her, because she would have been able to contact people who she thought might contact her by email and let them know the issue.
However, she had no way of knowing what specific email was being held, so she wouldn't necessaily have been able to guess that the specific email that's at issue would arrive. Having some kind of notices sent to people who sent email to the account, which is technically quite feasible (programs like the "vacation" program do it), might have helped with that, and that seems like a pretty reasonable thing for an ISP to set up.
Search engines are a good start. I tried "linux help" and "linux users" and "linux users help" on Google and got both some documentation sites (some of which looked pretty good, and a few of which were even aimed at newbies) and some hits for LUGs. Those seemed like queries that someone who was just confused might think to enter, and they turned up half-decent sites, so that's a good sign.
There's also search engine topic directories - I don't often try those, but maybe some people would. Google has a category for Linux User Groups.
There's no foolproof way to put someone in touch with a LUG, which is unfortunate, but I'm not really sure how you would go about fixing it. Maybe vendor documentation could suggest them, but since they don't exist everywhere, that doesn't seem too likely.
Hopefully a lot of people people who get stuck will know someone who could help them. (That's how I was able to persevere long enough to get comfortable with Linux.) It doesn't have to be someone who knows Linux specifically -- it could just be someone who's good with computers and the web and might know how to look for information or have ideas about where an error message is coming from.
There may not be any formal infrastructure for people who are having problems in their personal Linux setups for a while. (Maybe someone will start a business doing personal Linux consulting, but I can't really see something like that being profitable yet.:-) ) So until then people are probably going to have to use their ingenuity to get help if they need it.
Tech support isn't promised (especially not for free) from most vendors. Having some kind of interface for your average user to report the issues that they're experiencing is not a productive use of the vendor's time unless they're heavily staffed by masochistic volunteers or receiving money from the user in order to provide that service.
The reason most people posting in this thread say "submit a patch or test case" and suggest that you check the maintainer is that the person who asked the question asked about bug reports, not technical support, and those are good answers to the questions about bug reports. Bug reports need only be filed by the people who are willing to do some research - otherwise the database gets clogged with vague, fluffy, "this might be bug, but on the other hand we don't know" issues and the legitimate, well-researched bugs get lost.
Joe User needs to find a knowledgeable friend or his friendly local LUG, not submit vague reports about issues to his vendor.
I think we just disagree, then. I think that the important and popular 1% should become available for others. The idea isn't to let just the copyright holders contribute to the culture, it's to let everyone contribute by building off it.
I think it's important to think about this not just as an economic issue of who deserves the financial value, but as a cultural idea - the concept of a commons, a rich public domain that is a huge source for information, ideas, and innovation. Such a thing is beneficial to the public at large (for information and enjoyment), and to small creators (as a source to use for new creativity). The economic value to the creator is balanced as a factor in the complex equation of creation. It's not the end-purpose of the monopoly. It's important to consider the balance of the culture and the interests of newer creators.
(I'm still confused about what you're getting at with the extension. Creating a new work, like a new Peanuts strip, makes a new work whose copyright starts at its creation. It doesn't extend the copyright on any of the older strips. The trouble arises because the characters are recognizably a creation that end up being independent of each specific work created -- this is the trouble that Disney is in with Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is actually a trademark of Disney, which is one way that they solve the problem - even if Steamboat Willie loses its copyright, I'm pretty sure people still have to get permission to use Mickey Mouse. (IANAL either, and I'm uncertain about this.) So I think it's a weird case, but I'm fairly certain it's not the case that creating new works with common elements does anything like extend copyright on older works, as you seem to be suggesting it could/should.)
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There are good reasons to need Windows. Voice dictation software for other OSs is crappy or nonexistent. The same is probably true of a lot of accessibility or alternative input software. And voice dictation is something I need. It's arrogant to presume that needing MS is a choice.
There's a company that does Internet and phone service for people living in the university accommodation here (University of Edinburgh). My voice mail hasn't worked since the beginning of the year, but it only doesn't work when people call from outside the U.K. (which happens a lot since I'm an international student). Naturally, their tech support is a little confused by this since they aren't calling from outside the U.K., so it works for them. After we'd been through the routine of them testing it several times, calling me, getting my voicemail, and insisting that there was no problem, they finally it informed me that they thought that everybody calling me must be using pulse dialing, since they were obviously having trouble negotiating the system of having to dial and and then dial an extension #.
I explained to them that they weren't having trouble dialing extension #, but that the problem occurred after a they had already got into my #, and furthermore pulse dialing was hardly ever used in the United States anymore, and that people are calling me from several different landline phones, using several different phone companies, plus cellphones using a variety of carriers. After that they resorted to insisting that it was some kind of problem in the phone system, and couldn't possibly be on their end because everything worked from their perspective. After that I gave up and started telling people to send me an e-mail if they didn't get my voicemail. Later, I discovered that it would pickup while I was on the phone, but not when I wasn't. Definitely the strangest tech support problem I've ever had, and a completely inadequate explanation -- not too interesting, though.
Google's not good enough for you? :)
I'm sure there's plenty of room for disagreement, but many people/dictionaries make a definite distinction between musical and operetta.
I agree with you, though -- Les Mis is much more of an opera than a musical, in my mind.
It seems from reading the relevant law section that anyone the school approves of is allowed to use the name, just not the ones they don't approve of.
I don't think that's a good law, but that does seem to be the way it stands. So special interests aligned with their political views wouldn't get in trouble because they're not using the name without the approval of the university.
Indeed. Safari is brushed metal as well, and when I was using OS X at work, I avoided it almost entirely for that reason (I used Camino instead). If the Finder had been brushed-metal, I would have been very unhappy.
At least with laws it is out in the open and gets discussed in a transparent manner.
Wait, are you saying that laws get out in the open and are discussed in a transparent manner? Ha ha...
Freedom of speech includes the right to say things that other people find stupid and disgusting. This is not a flaw -- the purpose of free speech is to protect the expression minority opinions, regardless of what the opinion is. This equal protection is necessary, because if you can suppress any minority opinion, you can suppress every one.
Calling someone un-American for a certain behavior is disconcertingly common, and I don't think it is in any sense a good thing. But the fact that people can do it and get acceptance for it is related to differing values, not a problem with free speech. Nasty but socially acceptable opinions indicate a problem with society, not a problem with the Constitution.
How do you know they're bad guys, do you know them personally or something?
Seriously. Get a life, and stop posting the e-mail addresses of people who very likely have nothing to do with this decision, and may even strongly disagree with it.
It's not unlike posting the email addresses of a bunch of Americans and telling people to spam them because their president started a war in Iraq. That's an inflammatory comparison, but it does seem roughly comparable.
Another secret of their success is that the labels target consumers - namely, adults - who are still willing to pay for their music, rather than download it for free.
Nice stereotyping there, Christian Science Monitor. There are plenty of college students and teenagers who will pay for music -- especially if it's good music.
I also wonder how many people actually use the ALT, CTRL, SHIFT and similar keys on THE RIGHT SIDE of the keyboards...
Anyone who's worried about RSI. Using two hands to do CTRL+[letter key] is better for your hands and requires less movement. Unfortunately, some keyboards (including mine) have a weird "menu" key (plus an ALT, CTRL, and Windows key) on the right, so it makes it awkward for my pinky to reach the CTRL key over there. So I haven't developed the habit either.
We believe that customers should be able to plan migrations to newer distributions well in advance of their discontinuation date.
And that's why you're discontinuing several distributions "immediately." I see.
How much we're willing to spend in return for what level of service is still open to question. The idea of software subscriptions is still new. Is $99 per year too much to pay? $119? $69? $59? What about "tiered" subscription prices...
So after two or three years, you've paid nearly as much for a copy of Linux as you would for a copy of Windows? That seems kind of silly. Of course, you're getting access to a software library (if well-implemented, a very good one), but most people don't buy that many pieces of extra software anyway.
I think the writer's crazy to think that people are going to pay $99 or more a year to get access to a software library. Picture this:
"Yeah, Mom. A copy of Windows is $200, plus any software you need to buy. A copy of a friendly Linux distribution is $100, plus you can pay for a software subscription for $100 a year if you want to be able to update your system and download software easily."
"I think I'll just go with Windows. I'm familiar with it, and it sounds cheaper in the long run, because I probably won't need much extra software." Yeah, that's what I see.
I agree that it's not a big problem, but it does make numbers harder to remember. Seven digits is easily within the compass of people's short-term memories, but add two other pieces of information that you have keep in mind, and nine pieces is a bit of a stretch -- almost out of the 7 +/- 2 range that most people's short-term memory works in.
And realistically, you still have to devote some processing time to dialing all three area code digits, which gives them a chance to displace the phone number in your memory.
At the movie theater the other night, I saw a Windows error box -- one of the fairly primitive ones, white with a thin gray border. It said something like "TrueType Font error. The application has tried to use a TrueType font that is corrupt. Please exit all applications and restart Windows."
I laughed for quite a while about that one.
GIMP is a very difficult program to set up and use on Windows. Also, like Mozilla, it suffers from a lot of inconsistencies with the standard Win32-type interface.
:P
I do agree that it's a great program and one of the things that hooked me on Linux was the fact that I could, legitimately and for free, have a great graphics editor to work with. (I used to use MS Paint to do graphics. *gag*)
I didn't really have any contact with Photoshop until after I'd used GIMP, which I think was part of the reason I didn't mind the weird interface, Linux being the other part, since most of its interfaces are a little weird.
They have a specific WinGIMP project to work on it, so maybe they'll be able to include it in the future. But right now I think they're right not to include it, because most people trying to use GIMP on Windows would just get frustrated and go pirate a copy of Photoshop.
I think it's a much better idea to think critically about the government and be realistic about the likelihood of any given set of people making good laws and not abusing their power than to just "trust the government."
On the same page as a blink tag...ugh.
If you don't like the right mouse button, tear off the right-button menu and use it like a normal menuset. It doesn't solve your other problems, but it's one more step along the way.
It's a lot harder for people with common last names, though, since the main source of uniqueness is their first name - not many people actually use their middle names. And really, there are already enough weird baby names out there.
It seems to me that the situation would have been much better if Inter.net had disclosed the terms of the suspension to her, explaining that they had suspended her account but were not terminating it or bouncing her email. And that disclosure is pretty reasonable - if my ISP suspended my account, I would probably expect them to tell me what was happening with it.
Because of their lack of disclosure, and other strange behavior, like accepting an offer of a reduced payment at first and then rejecting it later, it seems like they're substantially responsible for the problem and the delay of its resolution.
Disclosure might have reduced the problem for her, because she would have been able to contact people who she thought might contact her by email and let them know the issue.
However, she had no way of knowing what specific email was being held, so she wouldn't necessaily have been able to guess that the specific email that's at issue would arrive. Having some kind of notices sent to people who sent email to the account, which is technically quite feasible (programs like the "vacation" program do it), might have helped with that, and that seems like a pretty reasonable thing for an ISP to set up.
Search engines are a good start. I tried "linux help" and "linux users" and "linux users help" on Google and got both some documentation sites (some of which looked pretty good, and a few of which were even aimed at newbies) and some hits for LUGs. Those seemed like queries that someone who was just confused might think to enter, and they turned up half-decent sites, so that's a good sign.
:-) ) So until then people are probably going to have to use their ingenuity to get help if they need it.
There's also search engine topic directories - I don't often try those, but maybe some people would. Google has a category for Linux User Groups.
There's no foolproof way to put someone in touch with a LUG, which is unfortunate, but I'm not really sure how you would go about fixing it. Maybe vendor documentation could suggest them, but since they don't exist everywhere, that doesn't seem too likely.
Hopefully a lot of people people who get stuck will know someone who could help them. (That's how I was able to persevere long enough to get comfortable with Linux.) It doesn't have to be someone who knows Linux specifically -- it could just be someone who's good with computers and the web and might know how to look for information or have ideas about where an error message is coming from.
There may not be any formal infrastructure for people who are having problems in their personal Linux setups for a while. (Maybe someone will start a business doing personal Linux consulting, but I can't really see something like that being profitable yet.
Tech support isn't promised (especially not for free) from most vendors. Having some kind of interface for your average user to report the issues that they're experiencing is not a productive use of the vendor's time unless they're heavily staffed by masochistic volunteers or receiving money from the user in order to provide that service.
The reason most people posting in this thread say "submit a patch or test case" and suggest that you check the maintainer is that the person who asked the question asked about bug reports, not technical support, and those are good answers to the questions about bug reports. Bug reports need only be filed by the people who are willing to do some research - otherwise the database gets clogged with vague, fluffy, "this might be bug, but on the other hand we don't know" issues and the legitimate, well-researched bugs get lost.
Joe User needs to find a knowledgeable friend or his friendly local LUG, not submit vague reports about issues to his vendor.
Well, LawMeme got at least one thing right. Slasdot posters do have some very "inciteful" comments - inciting license wars!
I think we just disagree, then. I think that the important and popular 1% should become available for others. The idea isn't to let just the copyright holders contribute to the culture, it's to let everyone contribute by building off it.
I think it's important to think about this not just as an economic issue of who deserves the financial value, but as a cultural idea - the concept of a commons, a rich public domain that is a huge source for information, ideas, and innovation. Such a thing is beneficial to the public at large (for information and enjoyment), and to small creators (as a source to use for new creativity). The economic value to the creator is balanced as a factor in the complex equation of creation. It's not the end-purpose of the monopoly. It's important to consider the balance of the culture and the interests of newer creators.
(I'm still confused about what you're getting at with the extension. Creating a new work, like a new Peanuts strip, makes a new work whose copyright starts at its creation. It doesn't extend the copyright on any of the older strips. The trouble arises because the characters are recognizably a creation that end up being independent of each specific work created -- this is the trouble that Disney is in with Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse is actually a trademark of Disney, which is one way that they solve the problem - even if Steamboat Willie loses its copyright, I'm pretty sure people still have to get permission to use Mickey Mouse. (IANAL either, and I'm uncertain about this.) So I think it's a weird case, but I'm fairly certain it's not the case that creating new works with common elements does anything like extend copyright on older works, as you seem to be suggesting it could/should.)