They should actually reports what standard they can use
They sort of do this, with the HTTP Accept: header. In the long run, this probably wouldn't fix anything. While the intent is to have servers produce the same content with slightly different markup, it would undoubtedly lead to some browsers getting different content. Then the browsers that get bad content would start to misidentify themselves. That's the same reason modern browsers have extensions (or default settings) to identify as IE. Same reason IE UA headers start with "Mozilla/."
It's always nice to hear from the "Everything Google has ever made is automatically the greatest thing since its sliced bread euivalent" camp.... (Don't get me wrong, Google's search engines and maps are great, and while I've never used Gmail, I'm sure it works great FOR USING EMAIL) I don't see the point of using an email system for storing notes. If you only need access from one computer, just use text or html files. If you need a web-based system, why not use something like Yahoo Notepad, which is designed for this. Wikis don't seem like the best solution either; they're great for distrubuted editing and cross-referencing, but generally lack (automatic) indexing and organizational capabilities that are useful for keeping track of notes.
Install systems on windows are just one of the examples of how windows GUIs lack anything near the standardization efforts that are used in developing linux desktop environments. Linux is allowed to have multiple packaging systems because there are different distributions, but there's no reason that Microsoft's single platform can't have a single method for installing/uninstalling software. As for dependencies, I suggest you look into Gentoo. Portage does fully automated dependency checking, configuration of optional components, and tries to help you merge updates to configuration files so your customizations don't get wiped.
2) The reliance of many people on "source only"....
Installing from source is great if you want to keep up-to-date with bleeding edge development, but if you don't have time, you can ALWAYS find stable binaries for all but the most obscure projects or system configurations
3) Alt-Tab....
I don't use that many fullscreen graphics apps, so I'll focus more on your points that affect everyone
4) Drivers. There isn't much that can be done about this...
Is this thread about linux itself, or hardware vendors' attitudes? Please stay on topic. By the way, ATI and Broadcom, I will most likely forever hate you.
5) GTK themes vs. KDE themes....
The closest thing to a valid point I've heard from you this far. Sure, windows has a single, consistent, universal, simplistic, ugly, toolkit, but I think the linux state of having 2 very different toolkits that are both far superior to anything microsoft has made in almost every way is a much better solution. GTK+ and Qt are completely different systems made by different people for slightly different puroposes. They use incompatible themes. Go figure. Find a GTK theme you like and a Qt theme you like and use them. Or put together your own theme. Or try the Qt engine for GTK.
6) man pages....
Finding and interpreting a man page is usually much easier than finding the equivalent in windows. You simply type "man" followed by the command you're confused about, and the text is formatted and displayed in your favorite pager. And each man page is displayed and organized in mostly the same format, so navigation is generally extremely easy.
7) Configuration....
Another mostly valid point. Although I fail to see a structured for or against either the linux or windows configuration styles, so I won't comment.
8) Cockyness of it's fans....
Since I'm only focusing on technical issues, not cultural ones, my only comment is that you should have used "its" instead of "it's."
9) Documentation...
I agree, Unix/Linux programs usually require the user to know a lot about the program in order to do anything besides simple tasks. Then again, so do many windows apps. Documentation is one of the major problems standing in the way of widesread linux use. The besat solution (although very costly) would be to collect all of the questions and answers from the various forums, mailing lists, IRC channels, wikis, and what have you into a centralized, globally-mirrored, easily accessible, continuously updated searchable repository.
One of the biggest (dis)advantages of linux is that there is always more than one (hundred, thousand) way(s) to do something. It's a disadvantage because it's hard to tell which way is best, and documentation is spread very thin. It's an advantage because it forces a more modular architecture that allows new features to be added more easily. Windows is too monolithic for Microsoft to re-vamp a mid-level component like the GUI library without breaking compatibility with users with older operating systems who don't have the money or hardware to do a full upgrade.
The headline should have read "Nullsoft open sourcing audio & video technology" Of course we're supposed to like AOL, because they own things like Netscape and Nullsoft.
Firefox could be updated to filter out flash content on specific websites. A quick click, and a site that offends me can be blacklisted...
Have you tried the Adblock extension? There's also Flashblock, which puts every flash object behind a "Click to play" layer, but it doesn't work very well alongside Adblock.
Windows or OSX... don't present settings that will prevent the PC from booting where you might accidently click on them (or type them...)
I'm going to attempt to reply to your idiotic claims with some amount of rational thought. If anything, Windows makes actions that "prevent the PC from booting" far too easy. It's extremely difficult to "accidentally" log in as root and run "mke2fs/dev/hda1". A lot harder than a stupid windows user with admin privileges right-clicking the C drive and selecting "format" because that's what they thought some poorly-written support document for an older OS was telling them to do.
The linux camps need to stop stabilizing the kernel and spend enough time with user interaction
What you don't seem to understand about the "Linux camp" (which is indeed much more amorphous and decentralized than you imply) is that certain people are working on the kernel, others are designing and implementing standards for desktop environments, and others are packaging the kernels and desktop environments into distributions that users can use easily.
until my grandmother can use the calculator without fear of a total meltdown.
You've never used a desktop calculator program on linux, have you? I can open the Gnome Applications menu and select the Calculator icon from the Accessories submenu, just like windows. OK, it gets a little confusing when you switch to Scientific mode, but seriously, does your grandmother even have a clue what a natural log is? or a factorial? Modern linux desktop environments are very powerful and easy to use; the only thing missing is a distro that handles all of the setup and hardware integration out of the box, and a lot of that is dependant on cooperation from vendors. So I don't really see anything that the linux camp is doing wrong.
I still fail to comprehend exactly why they put the IE render option in the new Netscape. I thought we were finally done letting Microsoft dictate how we write web pages. They don't control the standards. If anything, the W3C does, and Microsoft obviously doesn't care about them; otherwise they would have fixed many of the rendering bugs years ago. Developers used to write pages for IE compatibility because that was what people used, but now it's obvious that it's losing market share. fast. I don't see why Netscape is encouraging a backward move like this (Not that any significant number of people used netscape 7+).
I, for one, actually put a considerable amount of thought into writing web pages, unlike what many people seem to do. I read the standards and use a standards-compliant browser to test them. I hand-code all of my (X)HTML from scratch, using as many new markup/style features as possible and still keeping a reasonable amount of backward compatibility. I end up with layouts that are cross platform compatible, bandwidth efficient, easy to maintain, and don't look ugly. I don't know why Netscape seems to be telling website devs that it's OK to go back to the old days of using WYSIWYG editors to generate IE-targeted pages with code that would make HTML parsers cry and wish for their own deaths if they had feelings.
Now, in an attempt to keep this post on-topic: this build is based on Firefox, not Mozilla (suite)? I guess that means they dropped the email, newsreader, and composer components. Quick poll: does anyone besides me still use mozilla mail, or has everyone moved to Thunderbird or web-based email?
And if the employer says "Please submit your resume in Word format,"
I would much rather die any horrible, painful death that you can think of than even think about working with someone lacking that much basic common sense.
There are two main reasons why Ogg/Vorbis is used by the small number of people who use it. One is that the format is open source, so people can write all kinds of software for it without worrying about patents or licensing fees. Another reason (which is less of an issue since portable players are now available with storage that would put even a high end PC from five years ago to shame) is that the codec is much newer than mp3 and gives higher quality in a comparable file size.
One of the reasons that Ogg hasn't been widely adopted yet is that companies like Apple prefer to make their players support proprietary formats that are more friendly to DRM than open source codecs. That's the only real technical obstacle preventing people who don't know about it from hearing about it. Distributing content solely in mp3 format that is destined mainly for playback on a computer is mostly just ignorance, since EVERY well known player comes with a vorbis decoder by now. MP3 was the first breakthrough audio format, and the closest and digital audio format has come to a household name, so it will continue to dominate for quite some time.
CVS integration... is way better than what JBuilder offers
I guess I should pick up a copy of JBuilder, just to see how horrible its CVS compponent is, if it's worse than Eclipse. I've been working a school project for about 2 months, using Eclipse and CVS on a team with four other people. Of the few things i like about Eclipse, CVS is not one of them. Compared to other tools, including Emacs, Netbeans, Tkcvs, and *gasp* the cvs command line program, Eclipse is by far the least efficient for simple version control tasks (The rest of the UI is equally confusing. The GTK+ interface is noticeably faster than netbeans's swing UI, but it usually takes me twice as long to find a command).
To check in a file, I have to pop up the package explorer, find the file, right-click, select Team->Commit... as opposed to Emacs (C-c v v) or netbeans (VC submenu on the editor tab or VC toolbar)
CVS updates require way too many mouse clicks. It always asks me if I want to update from a different tag (this is rarel, if ever, done; the update command should just update the current tag without an intermediate dialog). I find the seven keystrokes required to run "cvs up" in a terminal much faster. Once the update command finishes, the output is simply discarded, making it harder to see what files were patched, modified, conflict, etc. Occasionally it will say that a resource is out of sync, and command me to perform a refresh. God knows why it can't refresh automatically, or why the refresh is even necessary in the first place.
The one good thing i've noticed about Eclipse is the "Share project" command, which simplifies the import/checkout sequence. And two more complaints: it doesn't supprot local CVS repositories (I hav to do loopback ssh) or other version control system (RCS, subversion, etc.)
Interesting point, and in some instances allowing binary compatibility can even lead to problems.
Consider device drivers. I think the licenses for projects like the linux kernel and x.org should include a provision that explicitly forbids distributing closed-source modules for them. (The GPL has some features like this, but they usually apply the other way around) That way, hardware vendors would be forced to release full source code for their drivers, instead of the current situation where companies like ATI and nVidia get away with pretending to support linux by making a half-assed attempt to release prorietary, buggy drivers that only get updated occasionally and seldom keep up with development changes in the programs they link to. Maybe closed-source drivers don't need to be banned altogether, but they should be discouraged.
A direct X connection or ssh forwarding is much better that VNC. First of all, the vnc viewer already needs an X server running, so there can be issues operating the remote window manager. Also, the X protocol is much more efficient and responsive than RFB for things like moving windows, as opposed to a vnc server just dumping raw graphics data over the network. X is nice, it's too bad we have to waste space on slashdot explaining it to windows users.
How portable are the Windows or Mac OS X widget sets? The fact that they're both named for an operating system is a clue. Splitting into numerous layers is one of the ways that many open source projects are so portable. Gnome sits on GTK which uses Glib and GDK, on top of either X11/POSIX or Win32. On windows, there is almost always an extra layer such as VCL, MFC, or WxWidgets above the windows API, because it's so hideous to use directly. The layers don't necessarily have anything to do with speed. I think that the small slowdowns and large code size is a reasonably tradeoff for making applications more portable and easier to write. Sure, writing Mozilla in C++, Javascript, and several proprietary compatibility libraries makes it bigger and slower than a pure C application, but also much easier to port and maintain.
I use the Gnome desktop, file manager, and some small utilities, but third party apps for most work. Gnome has Epiphany; I use Mozilla. Gnome has Gcalctool, I use Qalculate. Gnome has gedit, I use XEmacs or Leafpad.
for that matter, who uses the default window manager with Gnome? I once saw someone on #gentoo say "I wouldn't widh Metacity on my worst enemies." So the window border theme doesn't affect everybody. It's mostly new users who will see the default theme. I think it would be cool if Gnome made it easier for new users to select a different theme immediately, like the theme selection in the KDE setup wizard. Also, a completely new user will be subject to any changes their distributor might make to the theme settings.
This is getting almost comical. Almost every story about Firefox in the last few weeks has had a few threads related to this issue, and by now they should be getting more off-topic mods, instead of mods saying "Ooh, this guy got 15 replies in half an hour. He must be smart." I've noticed this issue also affects Mozilla 1.7.5 (Yes, I use Mozilla, the "suite" or whatever it's called. I've been using it since the 1.0 release about two years ago, back when what you call Firefox was called Phoenix.) The problem, as far as I can tell (I haven't looked into it that much) lies partly in/. and partly in Gecko. Slashdot uses "ancient and nasty HTML" (FAQ) , and Gecko does a better job with more modern, CSS-based layouts (tricky stuff used on the mozilla and w3c sites, using floats instead of tables, etc.) than older techniques popular when slashdot was first developed. It may also have something to do with the "quirks" mode that breaks some standards compliance to emulate older browsers. A List Apart has already proved that the layout can be upgraded to pure CSS, and I think the slashdot admins should implement this soon. They're probably hesitant to do such a total revamp as it would lead to a few hours of downtime, and the idiots who post on here would never let them hear the end of it.
Sounds like what they did with GTK+ on windows. Apparently anyone who wants to install a GTK+ (other than GIMP) cannot be trusted to download and install GTK+ first, so they have to bundle it into the installer. So, once you install Gaim, GIMP, Ethereal, GTK Radiant, etc. you end up with 3 or 4 copies of the GTK+ libs scattered around (The most absurd one I've seen is Ethereal, which stuffs into the installer two versions of the app, one linked with GTK 1.x, the other with GTK 2.x, and both GTK runtime versions, for a plump 17MB installer). Whenever this approach is used, space is always wasted because of duplicates, and it makes it more difficult to update a shared library without reinstalling each application using it. Installing applications into their own separate locations does make administration easier. One of the only advantages to the current system is that you can have a PATH variable with a finite number of directories (/bin/sbin/usr/bin/usr/sbin/usr/local/bin/usr/local/sbin) and every application is quickly accessible from a shell command line. Now that many programs are launched form a desktop menu instead of the command line, this is not always needed. But bundling libraries with applications usually impedes maintenance and administration. It's also unnecessary because most package management systems (portage, apt, rpm, etc.) handle dependencies automatically (portage also has the depclean command to remove unneeded library packages).
I assume they'll pipe one stream of each of the 4 channels into a router on the plane and then multicast it to everyone, so the bandwidth won't depend on how many people are watching. If they want to offer more channels at a relatively high quality then they will need more bandwidth.
The difference between geeks and non-geeks is that the non-geeks will just use stuff that's more popular (iPod, MP3) but geeks actually car about which product is better. Most of the people pleading for Vorbis* support are probably doing so because it sounds better than MP3, especially at low bitrates, which is useful on portable devices.
Slashdot Mirror
They sort of do this, with the HTTP Accept: header. In the long run, this probably wouldn't fix anything. While the intent is to have servers produce the same content with slightly different markup, it would undoubtedly lead to some browsers getting different content. Then the browsers that get bad content would start to misidentify themselves. That's the same reason modern browsers have extensions (or default settings) to identify as IE. Same reason IE UA headers start with "Mozilla/."
It's always nice to hear from the "Everything Google has ever made is automatically the greatest thing since its sliced bread euivalent" camp.... (Don't get me wrong, Google's search engines and maps are great, and while I've never used Gmail, I'm sure it works great FOR USING EMAIL) I don't see the point of using an email system for storing notes. If you only need access from one computer, just use text or html files. If you need a web-based system, why not use something like Yahoo Notepad, which is designed for this. Wikis don't seem like the best solution either; they're great for distrubuted editing and cross-referencing, but generally lack (automatic) indexing and organizational capabilities that are useful for keeping track of notes.
You're all wrong! This entire thread is off-topic! Maybe wikitorial was simply overrun with spelling/grammar correction correction corrections...
1) No unification in package management. ...
Install systems on windows are just one of the examples of how windows GUIs lack anything near the standardization efforts that are used in developing linux desktop environments. Linux is allowed to have multiple packaging systems because there are different distributions, but there's no reason that Microsoft's single platform can't have a single method for installing/uninstalling software. As for dependencies, I suggest you look into Gentoo. Portage does fully automated dependency checking, configuration of optional components, and tries to help you merge updates to configuration files so your customizations don't get wiped.
2) The reliance of many people on "source only". ...
Installing from source is great if you want to keep up-to-date with bleeding edge development, but if you don't have time, you can ALWAYS find stable binaries for all but the most obscure projects or system configurations
3) Alt-Tab. ...
I don't use that many fullscreen graphics apps, so I'll focus more on your points that affect everyone
4) Drivers. There isn't much that can be done about this ...
Is this thread about linux itself, or hardware vendors' attitudes? Please stay on topic. By the way, ATI and Broadcom, I will most likely forever hate you.
5) GTK themes vs. KDE themes. ...
The closest thing to a valid point I've heard from you this far. Sure, windows has a single, consistent, universal, simplistic, ugly, toolkit, but I think the linux state of having 2 very different toolkits that are both far superior to anything microsoft has made in almost every way is a much better solution. GTK+ and Qt are completely different systems made by different people for slightly different puroposes. They use incompatible themes. Go figure. Find a GTK theme you like and a Qt theme you like and use them. Or put together your own theme. Or try the Qt engine for GTK.
6) man pages. ...
Finding and interpreting a man page is usually much easier than finding the equivalent in windows. You simply type "man" followed by the command you're confused about, and the text is formatted and displayed in your favorite pager. And each man page is displayed and organized in mostly the same format, so navigation is generally extremely easy.7) Configuration. ...
Another mostly valid point. Although I fail to see a structured for or against either the linux or windows configuration styles, so I won't comment.
8) Cockyness of it's fans. ...
Since I'm only focusing on technical issues, not cultural ones, my only comment is that you should have used "its" instead of "it's."
9) Documentation ...
I agree, Unix/Linux programs usually require the user to know a lot about the program in order to do anything besides simple tasks. Then again, so do many windows apps. Documentation is one of the major problems standing in the way of widesread linux use. The besat solution (although very costly) would be to collect all of the questions and answers from the various forums, mailing lists, IRC channels, wikis, and what have you into a centralized, globally-mirrored, easily accessible, continuously updated searchable repository.
One of the biggest (dis)advantages of linux is that there is always more than one (hundred, thousand) way(s) to do something. It's a disadvantage because it's hard to tell which way is best, and documentation is spread very thin. It's an advantage because it forces a more modular architecture that allows new features to be added more easily. Windows is too monolithic for Microsoft to re-vamp a mid-level component like the GUI library without breaking compatibility with users with older operating systems who don't have the money or hardware to do a full upgrade.
The headline should have read "Nullsoft open sourcing audio & video technology" Of course we're supposed to like AOL, because they own things like Netscape and Nullsoft.
Firefox could be updated to filter out flash content on specific websites. A quick click, and a site that offends me can be blacklisted...
Have you tried the Adblock extension? There's also Flashblock, which puts every flash object behind a "Click to play" layer, but it doesn't work very well alongside Adblock.
Windows or OSX ... don't present settings that will prevent the PC from booting where you might accidently click on them (or type them...)
I'm going to attempt to reply to your idiotic claims with some amount of rational thought. If anything, Windows makes actions that "prevent the PC from booting" far too easy. It's extremely difficult to "accidentally" log in as root and run "mke2fs /dev/hda1". A lot harder than a stupid windows user with admin privileges right-clicking the C drive and selecting "format" because that's what they thought some poorly-written support document for an older OS was telling them to do.
The linux camps need to stop stabilizing the kernel and spend enough time with user interaction
What you don't seem to understand about the "Linux camp" (which is indeed much more amorphous and decentralized than you imply) is that certain people are working on the kernel, others are designing and implementing standards for desktop environments, and others are packaging the kernels and desktop environments into distributions that users can use easily.
until my grandmother can use the calculator without fear of a total meltdown.
You've never used a desktop calculator program on linux, have you? I can open the Gnome Applications menu and select the Calculator icon from the Accessories submenu, just like windows. OK, it gets a little confusing when you switch to Scientific mode, but seriously, does your grandmother even have a clue what a natural log is? or a factorial? Modern linux desktop environments are very powerful and easy to use; the only thing missing is a distro that handles all of the setup and hardware integration out of the box, and a lot of that is dependant on cooperation from vendors. So I don't really see anything that the linux camp is doing wrong.
Why do I even bother fighting stupidity?
I still fail to comprehend exactly why they put the IE render option in the new Netscape. I thought we were finally done letting Microsoft dictate how we write web pages. They don't control the standards. If anything, the W3C does, and Microsoft obviously doesn't care about them; otherwise they would have fixed many of the rendering bugs years ago. Developers used to write pages for IE compatibility because that was what people used, but now it's obvious that it's losing market share. fast. I don't see why Netscape is encouraging a backward move like this (Not that any significant number of people used netscape 7+).
I, for one, actually put a considerable amount of thought into writing web pages, unlike what many people seem to do. I read the standards and use a standards-compliant browser to test them. I hand-code all of my (X)HTML from scratch, using as many new markup/style features as possible and still keeping a reasonable amount of backward compatibility. I end up with layouts that are cross platform compatible, bandwidth efficient, easy to maintain, and don't look ugly. I don't know why Netscape seems to be telling website devs that it's OK to go back to the old days of using WYSIWYG editors to generate IE-targeted pages with code that would make HTML parsers cry and wish for their own deaths if they had feelings.
Now, in an attempt to keep this post on-topic: this build is based on Firefox, not Mozilla (suite)? I guess that means they dropped the email, newsreader, and composer components. Quick poll: does anyone besides me still use mozilla mail, or has everyone moved to Thunderbird or web-based email?
And if the employer says "Please submit your resume in Word format,"
I would much rather die any horrible, painful death that you can think of than even think about working with someone lacking that much basic common sense.
Screenshots of what? error messages?
There are two main reasons why Ogg/Vorbis is used by the small number of people who use it. One is that the format is open source, so people can write all kinds of software for it without worrying about patents or licensing fees. Another reason (which is less of an issue since portable players are now available with storage that would put even a high end PC from five years ago to shame) is that the codec is much newer than mp3 and gives higher quality in a comparable file size.
One of the reasons that Ogg hasn't been widely adopted yet is that companies like Apple prefer to make their players support proprietary formats that are more friendly to DRM than open source codecs. That's the only real technical obstacle preventing people who don't know about it from hearing about it. Distributing content solely in mp3 format that is destined mainly for playback on a computer is mostly just ignorance, since EVERY well known player comes with a vorbis decoder by now. MP3 was the first breakthrough audio format, and the closest and digital audio format has come to a household name, so it will continue to dominate for quite some time.
Neither does slashdot require that you submit articles as Misrocoft Word documents.
CVS integration ... is way better than what JBuilder offers
I guess I should pick up a copy of JBuilder, just to see how horrible its CVS compponent is, if it's worse than Eclipse. I've been working a school project for about 2 months, using Eclipse and CVS on a team with four other people. Of the few things i like about Eclipse, CVS is not one of them. Compared to other tools, including Emacs, Netbeans, Tkcvs, and *gasp* the cvs command line program, Eclipse is by far the least efficient for simple version control tasks (The rest of the UI is equally confusing. The GTK+ interface is noticeably faster than netbeans's swing UI, but it usually takes me twice as long to find a command).
To check in a file, I have to pop up the package explorer, find the file, right-click, select Team->Commit... as opposed to Emacs (C-c v v) or netbeans (VC submenu on the editor tab or VC toolbar)
CVS updates require way too many mouse clicks. It always asks me if I want to update from a different tag (this is rarel, if ever, done; the update command should just update the current tag without an intermediate dialog). I find the seven keystrokes required to run "cvs up" in a terminal much faster. Once the update command finishes, the output is simply discarded, making it harder to see what files were patched, modified, conflict, etc. Occasionally it will say that a resource is out of sync, and command me to perform a refresh. God knows why it can't refresh automatically, or why the refresh is even necessary in the first place.
The one good thing i've noticed about Eclipse is the "Share project" command, which simplifies the import/checkout sequence. And two more complaints: it doesn't supprot local CVS repositories (I hav to do loopback ssh) or other version control system (RCS, subversion, etc.)
Interesting point, and in some instances allowing binary compatibility can even lead to problems.
Consider device drivers. I think the licenses for projects like the linux kernel and x.org should include a provision that explicitly forbids distributing closed-source modules for them. (The GPL has some features like this, but they usually apply the other way around) That way, hardware vendors would be forced to release full source code for their drivers, instead of the current situation where companies like ATI and nVidia get away with pretending to support linux by making a half-assed attempt to release prorietary, buggy drivers that only get updated occasionally and seldom keep up with development changes in the programs they link to. Maybe closed-source drivers don't need to be banned altogether, but they should be discouraged.
Maybe, but wouldn't they be falling over all the time?
I hope my dumb off-topic post gets a funny mod too
A direct X connection or ssh forwarding is much better that VNC. First of all, the vnc viewer already needs an X server running, so there can be issues operating the remote window manager. Also, the X protocol is much more efficient and responsive than RFB for things like moving windows, as opposed to a vnc server just dumping raw graphics data over the network. X is nice, it's too bad we have to waste space on slashdot explaining it to windows users.
I use the Gnome desktop, file manager, and some small utilities, but third party apps for most work. Gnome has Epiphany; I use Mozilla. Gnome has Gcalctool, I use Qalculate. Gnome has gedit, I use XEmacs or Leafpad.
for that matter, who uses the default window manager with Gnome? I once saw someone on #gentoo say "I wouldn't widh Metacity on my worst enemies." So the window border theme doesn't affect everybody. It's mostly new users who will see the default theme. I think it would be cool if Gnome made it easier for new users to select a different theme immediately, like the theme selection in the KDE setup wizard. Also, a completely new user will be subject to any changes their distributor might make to the theme settings.
This is getting almost comical. Almost every story about Firefox in the last few weeks has had a few threads related to this issue, and by now they should be getting more off-topic mods, instead of mods saying "Ooh, this guy got 15 replies in half an hour. He must be smart." I've noticed this issue also affects Mozilla 1.7.5 (Yes, I use Mozilla, the "suite" or whatever it's called. I've been using it since the 1.0 release about two years ago, back when what you call Firefox was called Phoenix.) The problem, as far as I can tell (I haven't looked into it that much) lies partly in /. and partly in Gecko. Slashdot uses "ancient and nasty HTML" (FAQ) , and Gecko does a better job with more modern, CSS-based layouts (tricky stuff used on the mozilla and w3c sites, using floats instead of tables, etc.) than older techniques popular when slashdot was first developed. It may also have something to do with the "quirks" mode that breaks some standards compliance to emulate older browsers. A List Apart has already proved that the layout can be upgraded to pure CSS, and I think the slashdot admins should implement this soon. They're probably hesitant to do such a total revamp as it would lead to a few hours of downtime, and the idiots who post on here would never let them hear the end of it.
Sounds like what they did with GTK+ on windows. Apparently anyone who wants to install a GTK+ (other than GIMP) cannot be trusted to download and install GTK+ first, so they have to bundle it into the installer. So, once you install Gaim, GIMP, Ethereal, GTK Radiant, etc. you end up with 3 or 4 copies of the GTK+ libs scattered around (The most absurd one I've seen is Ethereal, which stuffs into the installer two versions of the app, one linked with GTK 1.x, the other with GTK 2.x, and both GTK runtime versions, for a plump 17MB installer). Whenever this approach is used, space is always wasted because of duplicates, and it makes it more difficult to update a shared library without reinstalling each application using it. Installing applications into their own separate locations does make administration easier. One of the only advantages to the current system is that you can have a PATH variable with a finite number of directories (/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin) and every application is quickly accessible from a shell command line. Now that many programs are launched form a desktop menu instead of the command line, this is not always needed. But bundling libraries with applications usually impedes maintenance and administration. It's also unnecessary because most package management systems (portage, apt, rpm, etc.) handle dependencies automatically (portage also has the depclean command to remove unneeded library packages).
They've probably already done it, and it was probably the only thing Microsoft ever patched in a timely manner.
I assume they'll pipe one stream of each of the 4 channels into a router on the plane and then multicast it to everyone, so the bandwidth won't depend on how many people are watching. If they want to offer more channels at a relatively high quality then they will need more bandwidth.
The difference between geeks and non-geeks is that the non-geeks will just use stuff that's more popular (iPod, MP3) but geeks actually car about which product is better. Most of the people pleading for Vorbis* support are probably doing so because it sounds better than MP3, especially at low bitrates, which is useful on portable devices.
Coral cache
By the end of your post, you seemed to be saying that any 9-year-old can operate a Harley.
And is it really a bad thing if users have to learn a little bit about how their OS works before they start reconfiguring it and installing software?.