I realised things had gone crazy with advertising when I noticed that even the 4" diameter space on the top of a petrol pump nozzle (whilst I was filling my car one day) had an advert for a chocolate bar on it.
It's also somewhat disturbing to realise that advertising is absorbed into the shelf-price of a product and that, if the product wasn't advertised, it could be sold slightly cheaper and would end up selling more anyway. I don't play World Of Warcraft, for example and have no interest in MMORPGs at all but it seems to me that this is a good example of a product that hasn't been marketed that heavily but done very well purely as a result of "word of mouth" advertising.
Seriously, if corporations want to give something away for free to people who are happy to submit themselves to yet more corporate marketing and brainwashing, let them do it - at least they're doing so by choice.
It's the people who *pay* good money like Sky/cable subscribers only to still be subjected to constant advertising that I don't understand (and before anyone flames me, I'm lucky enough to be in the UK where I pay a small annual sum for ad-free television and radio from the BBC).
Even worse are the designer clothes crowd that pay a premium sum purely to turn themselves into advertising billboards for Gap and the countless other clothes stores (the names of which escape me due to my immunity to their brainwashing).
Me, I'll stick with a proper free OS and keep configuring Firefox to block every advertisement possible.
I hate to break it to you, but OO.o isn't 100% compatible with MS Office because doesn't have 100% of the features of MS Office.
And who needs all of the features of MS Office? Most people use about 10% of the features of Office and the majority of home users use it because they can get it free from work or from copied CDs. Yes, they have it installed but it's vast overkill for most of them that just use it for the occasional letter or home finance spreadsheet.
If those people were faced with paying £100 (or whatever the cost is) license for it, they would look at free alternatives like OpenOffice far more readily and they would still find it met all of their needs and more. I fully accept that there are developer-types who need VB to do a lot of complex work in Office but those are a SMALL MINORITY of the userbase for whom OpenOffice would not be suitable.
And as for file format, I care as do many other people. When a document containing information I need to read can be easily published in an open format, why should I be forced to pay a tax to a commercial software company in order to access that document?
And why should I accept that as a "standard" when the only reason it is a standard is because the vast majority of people run an unlicensed copy of the "accepted" Office package in the first place? I've no problem with people paying Microsoft for XP, Office or whatever product they care to buy but let's compare like-for-like: OpenOffice is FREE and OPEN, MS Office COSTS MONEY and is CLOSED.
Whether or not Openoffice supports a file type that Office can is not the problem. The problem is as you say clever marketing. The.doc format is the defacto standard for all word processing documents. I've even talked with hiring managers in all Linux shops and they ask for a Word formatted resume.
And if Microsoft will not publish the ".doc" specification openly, then how can you expect OpenOffice to be 100% compatible?
No consumer is going to want to have to try and match up their hardware to their OS.
Then they should make an appropriate choice of OS. Either stick with Windows or do some investigation and choose an appropriate Linux distro that they pay for support for. Why do you, and lots of other people like you, impose a commercial software view on Open Source? With commercial software, you can demand your money back if it doesn't do what it says on the box. With Open Source, you also accept a degree of self-determination and responsibility such that if something doesn't work right, you investigate why and you ask someone to try and make it right, even if it's the person(s) that wrote the software.
We, as a community, have been doing exactly that for over 5 years now and we still don't have but a couple of native games and that crappy Cedega. But because the game producers don't think that Linux is even in the same league, much less the same ballpark as the other OS, we will never have the choices available to get our game on.
Then don't use Linux. Or use it and just use Windows for gaming. Whatever works. Just don't expect everything dropped in your lap - you have to do some work yourself.
As long as we as a community vilify software and hardware developers for writting closed source solutions Linux will remain a limp bird.
No sensible Linux user vilifies hardware companies - all you do is don't buy their hardware. Again, self-determination and responsibility - do your research and only buy hardware that you know is supported.
But thank you I will go back to my Windows and moan, moan about how much I'd rather have an alternative that is capable of doing the most basic tasks that consumers ask of it.
Another generic statement. Fine, you've worked with Linux since '99 and you're probably excellent at supporting it within the needs of your organisation, I'm not denying that. But you probably do need to devote more of your time to building up your knowledge to be able to go further with it - a lot of the problems you've mentioned might well be time-consuming or difficult to resolve in Linux but they are mostly resolvable.
It could actually be argued that long before anyone thought of *selling* software, people were handing it out freely - if you go back to the late 70s/early 80s to AT&T, Bell Labs, UCB and UNIX, this was indeed the case amongst the academic UNIX users of the time.
I'm not denying anyone the right to sell their hard work but it could be argued that since software basically started as free, then it's the "software sales" model that actually flawed.
Yet I still love the "Windows Classic" theme, even more so than most X themes.
Amen to that! The default XP theme is the biggest load of patronising bloatware ever designed as a GUI, I find it totally unusable. I'm also quite surprised at the number of my friends and colleagues who are ditching the XP GUI now and switching to the Classic view just like I have. About the only "XP feature" I keep active are the Cleartype Fonts for my LCD displays.
The problem with X themes are that if you "do it yourself" you're never going to get a single look and feel to your X desktop because of the great QT/GTK debate - I now use XFCE4 because it's relatively fast and light and just addin external desktop icon display programs and dockapps. But as a user of both GAIM and K3B, there's no chance of a consistent interface.
And I have finally come to the conclusion that Linux on the desktop is not only dead, but never really got started.
Correction. It's dead on *YOUR* desktop, not on the desktops of millions of other users.
Sure Office is very bloated, but it is also the defacto standard and Openoffice has never been and probably never will be 100% compatible.
OpenOffice is not "100% compatible" because it just so happens that Microsoft's closed document standards are, unfortunately, the "accepted" standard for documentation - this is due to clever Microsoft marketing, not a fault of OpenOffice. ODF and RTF are open formats that are supported by OpenOffice.
All the interfaces available for Linux to stream video are so clunky that they are nearly unusable.
Huh? Pray tell what was it you were trying to stream from or to? It's never been a problem for me...
And then you have the poor hardware support. I have two laptops and two desktops. My two laptops are completely out of the question as most of the hardware is too new to be fully supported. Everything from native LCD resolutions to no native support for the wireless card.
So you just choose your hardware wisely, that's all. I've purchased two laptops within the past 6 months, a Gateway one and an HP one. I think the only thing that doesn't work on one of them is the button above the keyboard to turn off/on the wireless network interface. Oh, and I use Gentoo and I have use of native LCD resolutions.
And on my desktops, one still runs Gentoo as a server, which Linux is ideally suited for, the other, in order to play games (which once again is pathetic on Linux) I have to run that other OS.
So how about doing something constructive and contacting games companies to make native Linux games ports if that's what you want? Rather than just sitting there moaning and not doing anything. If there are enough people like you, maybe some of those companies will do something.
So to all the fanatics and fanboys, Linux will never be a force on the consumer's desktop.
Who cares? I use it and love it along with lots of other people. My niece loves Windows XP, Word and Powerpoint - and when I have to fix her PC for her, I don't install Linux on her PC, I put XP and MS Office back on it and let her get on with it.
It's not bad on the business desktop because of its management capabilities and actually because of some of the flaws listed above
You're making very generic statements here which suggests that you probably don't know as much about Linux as you'd like us to believe. What do you mean by "management capabilities, for example? Do you mean SNMP? Webmin? Package management? What?
And in the back room Linux is the light in a once dark world with its power and plethora of server software.
Why is this anything to do with Linux? The "server software" you talk about, whether it's Apache, Squid, sendmail, MySQL, SAMBA, etc, etc, all run on Solaris and just about any other UNIX you could think of - a few even run on Windows. And if your a Microsoft shop who insists on running Exchange, Active Directory, MS SQL and IIS, for example, then Linux is probably bugger all use to you. You seem to be very good at making empty sweeping statements without clarifying what it is you are talking about.
Until the hardware manufacturers start writing native drivers (and aren't vilified for keeping their company secrets hidden) and until the major software manufacturers begin to believe that Linux is a viable consumer platform, Linux on the desktop is dead.
Most Linux people are relatively happy with the state of nVidia and ATI drivers, for example, which are closed source. Sure, sometimes they release rubbish versions and a lot of hackers (not "crackers") would love to get their hands on the source code to these but that's just the way it is. I'm just happy there is *some* support.
By the sounds of it, Gentoo was probably the wrong choice of distro for you anyway - you probably need a more newbie orientated distro like SuSE or Ubuntu.
And if you're not prepared to do some of the hard work yourself then don't even bother - go back to Windows and moaning a lot.
And with me only two score and four years on this earth, there I was thinking that software only had to be "useful" and "usable".
Look, I have no problem with people using Windows (I do myself a little), I have no problem with people disliking command-line tools in Windows or Linux but can *both types* of people please STOP imposing their view of the world on the rest of us! Now!
The fact is that NOBODY (repeat N-O-B-O-D-Y) can appreciate the power of a Linux or UNIX operating system until you dive into the command line, learn shell, Python, Perl or another scripting language and start putting together INCREDIBLY POWERFUL AND VERSATILE TOOLS yourself.
For the uninitiated, from the shell prompt in Linux or UNIX you can log into remote systems, view web pages, burn CDs, rip CDs, play MP3s, convert images, perform countless system diagnostics, edit files, etc. etc. On top of this, you can do some of the most amazingly powerful text manipulation using complex regular expressions that end up looking like a spider has crawled across your screen with inky feet. Admittedly, to a GUI-based user, none of this looks particularly "exciting" but when all of these tasks can be combined in countless ways within scripts, NOTHING (repeat N-O-T-H-I-N-G) within a GUI environment comes CLOSE for automation and sheer power.
No, I'm not a command line zealot. I believe it's up to the user to decide what software/OS they are comfortable with, I personally have favourite tools in Windows, Gnome, KDE, BASH and even MS-DOS and I just use whatever I need to use to get a job done as quickly as possible. But the fact is that the UNIX command line is the most common place for me to work in.
But to all the uninitiated out there, please do not voice opinions on a subject you do not fully understand. Linux and Open Source is NOT waging some kind of anti-Windows war with the goal of total Microsoft destruction - it's an ALTERNATIVE way of doing things where everything is done in an open fashion and the sole aim is to write useful, usable but NOT NECESSARILY PRETTY software, nothing more.
And if you're waiting for Linux to drop into your lap as a ready-packaged alternative to Windows that you can immediately start using like Windows from day one, then I'm afraid you're in for a long wait. To become a Linux user means taking more time to learn about how your computer works and, to be an effective Linux user, ramping up your learning curve so that you know how to take best advantage of the wealth of excellent free software that has become available to you.
If you're not willing to devote that time then, so be it. Stick with what you are comfortable with and enjoy it with my blessing - just don't be so quick to judge the rest of us.
To be perfectly honest, I believe the whole games industry is going to completely change within the next few years.
Firstly, I don't see games stores surviving in shopping malls anyway. Certainly here in the UK, stores like Game, HMV and Virgin have permanent Sales on these days, owing to the fact that their profits are dropping due to cheaper on-line retailers. (They can all be damned to hell as far as I'm concerned, they're all rip-off merchants who've had it far too good with price fixing for far too long anyway.)
Secondly, games themseleves have changed. Again, because of price-fixing games companies charging too much for games in the first place, customers expect much longer playability from the games they do buy - with PC games, this has worked *against* the PC games publishers because of the Internet and games modding. (Hell, I bought "Total Annihilation" in 1998 and I'm *still* downloading new units, maps and mods for it!)
Thirdly, Internet and communications. The fact that people subscribe to games forums and read on-line games reviews makes them much more informed these days. I'm sure most WoW players, for example, heard about it from friends and on-line discussions rather than from Blizzard's advertising or marketing of it. Likewise, this works against some games also - for example, I walked into my local Game store the other day to see Quake 4 in their bargain section even though it was released just a few months ago.
And you're entirely correct with regards to video cards and laptops. For me personally, I've dropped out of the endless upgrade cycle now because no PC game in the past year has been enough for me to justify upgrading my graphics card and I've got a whole heap of older games that I'm going back to play now anyway - especially since I travel and use a laptop a lot.
Not that I ever plan to use it but it will be interesting to see what happens with Vista. If Microsoft do start stamping down heavy on piracy and charging more money for Vista, then a very large number of their existing user base will either stick with XP or migrate to Linux. In the end, that *might* swing things in the favour of games developers creating native Linux games but I guess that waits to be seen.
Cedega's all you'll get for new games on Linux
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I really do not see there being any increase in games companies making native Linux games.
For starters, even if you suggested that 10% of computer users in the world are using Linux currently (possibly side-by-side with Windows), then that community of users is made up of many different distros and many different types of people - it's dangerous to assume that all of that 10% actually want or care about commercial games on Linux.
Although I'm a relatively avid gamer and a user of Linux far more than Windows, I personally am not that interested in any commercial software on Linux. I'm a Gentoo Linux user, I enjoy tweaking and optimising my systems and I'm more than happy to compile source code to run as best as it can on those machines whether it's a game or application. I'm just not prepared to take someone else's closed-source pre-compiled executable and trust it on my Linux machines, especially when I update the machines a lot and will end up breaking those same executables quite quickly due to dependency issues. Besides which, I don't want to "pollute" my nice Open Source-based operating system with closed source software and I think a lot of the core Linux user community thinks entirely the same way.
Yes, I'd like to see more games on Linux but I'd rather see games companies releasing source code to older games (like ID and the early Quakes) at which point I'm happy to go buy the Windows version of the CD in order to get hold of the games data files and levels.
I've no problem with commercial software or Windows and probably buy a game a month to run on my Windows XP machine. But I've no "passion" for Windows XP - as long as it does what it's supposed to do, I really don't care to know how or why it does it.
However, my Linux machines are *mine*, I decide what and how software gets installed on them, no argument - again, a lot of Linux users feel entirely the same way.
Therefore, it's safe to conclude that the community of people who want commercial games on Linux is a very small minority, to the point where it just isn't ecomonically viable for games companies to port the games across. Sure, I'd *like* to see it happen for those people because Linux is about "having it your way" but I personally wouldn't buy any closed source Linux software.
You make a good point but you could apply that Microsoft argument to anything - the fact I'm at work happier and programming faster because I have a Led Zeppelin CD playing in the background might also be the case!:-) Besides, why would Microsoft care if someone was more productive using their products? Sure, they'd *say* that to sell more products but, like any other company, it's *just* about shifting as much product as possible for as much money as possible.
As to your second point, that's a good one also. I'm inclined to say "Yes" to that one though because that company is employing someone somewhere and taking money out of the UK - although I do agree that what they're doing is different to, say, Megacorp Ltd employing 5,000 people in an office in the UK one day and then sacking everyone and moving those jobs overseas the next.
I'm not American but I don't see the connection here.
The Detroit car industry was devastated because of cheaper Japanese imports, was it not? Presumably all cars were manufactured in Japan and Asia and then shipped over to be sold in the US?
Therefore, by my argument, if the Japanese auto manufacturers were selling cars in the US but not making them there, then the US government would have taxed them more (kind of like a heavier import duty). This would have kept the US car industry more competitive and therefore helped stop the problem you're describing?
Let's take everyone's favourite American company, Microsoft. They have offices in the UK and they employ UK citizens. They also sell their products in the UK and probably sponsor a few schools and sports events.
The UK employment and sponsorship is money they put into the UK, the money they get through UK product sales is money they take out of the UK. Take the first from the second and have the UK government tax the remainder. And if UK jobs or sponsorship reduces, that figure gets bigger so you tax it more...
In other words, you *force* that company to make it more expensive for them to recruit overseas and perhaps stop them making snap decisions when it comes to mass job cuts. Plus you make the company realise that when you take something out of a country, you need to put something back in.
Then perhaps my definition of capitalism is wrong - I can accept that.
I'm happy to live in a society where I do a job, get paid for it and have a nice wedge of money at the end of the month to go spend on the nicer things in life. I'm happy to go looking and what's being offered to me, comparing one item of goods against another and buying the one I think offers me best value for money. I have a reasonable car, a good house and private healthcare where public healthcare is already available and if I had any children, I'd probably send them to a private school. I don't see anything in there that makes me a socialist...
On the other hand, I don't own any stocks or shares because I'm really not that bothered about making money purely for the sake of it. I can admire people like Richard Branson, for example, who have set out from the start to make money, devoted all of their lives to making money and end up being rich - but I'm not interested in doing so myself because I consider money a tool to get things done only. I have enough of it to live comfortably and happily, if someone offers me more then I'll take it but I'm not out to accumulate more of it. Since I'm not out to accumulate wealth, therefore, I guess I'm probably not a capitalist either...
So, yes, maybe my definition is wrong but this still does not change the fact that corporations have a social responsibility - just in the same way that most capitalists wouldn't support a petro-chemical company polluting seas and rivers or a pharmaceutical company killing thousands of patients through not trialing new drugs properly, why would they support corporations making sudden changes in lifestyles of thousands of people purely for profit.
Or are you simply admitting that capitalism and social responsibility, not socialism, are entirely at odds with each other?
I should firstly say that I'm a UK resident, not an American, but outsourcing from British companies is just as bad.
Also, I'm not trying to deny jobs to people in emerging economies who can work for lower salaries because houses and the cost of living are also much lower in those countries - that's how capitalism works.
However, whether it's in the US, the UK or India, the activities of corporations change the societies around them. Salaries are higher in the Western World because demands for housing near to places of work has increased the cost of them meaning that people have needed to earn more. Sure, there's personal greed in there also but then that's no different to Indian workers demanding higher and higher salaries also - people are the same the world over.
Unfortunately, at the drop of a hat, any corporation currently has free reign to make decisions at board room level that affect the lives of thousands of workers - and if those workers mostly live near to their offices, then an entire community can be devastated; this leads to more drain on government money (for benefits) and perhaps even forces local, smaller businesses to crash also.
My point of argument is that corporations should be stopped from making "snap decisions" by higher taxation of their profits - after all, despite reducing jobs in certain countries, those corporations still expect to make as much, if not more money from those same countries.
This is exactly why Microsoft really does have a very big problem to deal with now and in the coming years.
Just like every other company today, it's having to tighten its belt and maximise income from every possible source - especially when most of MS's shares are held by employees who will no doubt "dump and run" as soon as the stock price drops significantly.
Office is a core MS product and MS knows full well that probably the majority of Office users are using it illegally. However, if it inflicts tighter licensing/piracy restrictions, it knows full well that those same users are just not going to spend several hundred pounds/dollars/Euros/etc. on a legal copy of Office and will instead start using cheaper or free alternatives. And once that starts happening "en masse", MS will lose those users for good as the latter realise that they never needed a whole heap of additional features that they never used. So they will continue to lose a large amount of income through piracy.
As to their proprietary file formats, whilst I'd like to see those opened up completely, MS is never going to let that happen without a fight and it would make no commercial sense for them to do that.
However, in my view, what makes this really interesting are government departments who are obviously a fair-sized portion of the Office user base. Putting aside the restrictive budgets these departments have anyway (for such things as expensive software licenses), they also have an obligation to provide open and free information to the general populace - the idea, therefore, that access to information relies on owning a Microsoft product is not going to hold, especially when most governments are now very aware of the power MS has at the moment.
A bit of a side-track argument but it makes for interesting watching over the next few years. I guess that Office 2007 is just an upgrade to keep the revenue coming in from corporate licenses (are there *REALLY* any more features that can be added to Office apart from the evils of DRM?) but I really do think that MS's only courses of action are to either release a cut-down version of Office for the home user (MS Works doesn't count here) or to focus on web-based applications and go head-to-head with Google - another interesting thing to watch...
It strikes me that the whole outsourcing issue could have been stopped in its tracks if Western governments had taken the opportunity to "reign in" the corporations much more than they have done.
Corporations *should* have a social responsibility and conscience. Look at any big, sparkling technology park anywhere in the world and you see housing and transportation links springing up around it - purely because most people want to live close to where they work.
Consequently, when these same corporations suddenly decide to move thousands of jobs overseas, offices close down and entire communities can be devastated through unemployment.
The logical solution, therefore, should have been additional taxation on the corporations by government - very simply, each nation works out how much profit a company makes in their country (i.e. how much money it takes out) and compares it to how much money it spends on employing people in their country (i.e. how much money it puts back in). Then just subtract the second from the first and, if it's positive, tax the hell out of it.
And before anyone flames me about being "anti-capitalist", I'd remind them that when people lose their jobs and, say, private health care benefits, they turn to the government for unemployment handouts and public healthcare - both of which are financed from our taxes.
...requests that Microsoft just "STFU", stop poking their big, fat Microsoft nose in areas that doesn't concern them and concentrate more on fixing the bugs in their software - otherwise we're all allowed to put our big, hob-nailed, non-Microsoft boots on and give them a damned good kicking.
I remember a time when we all used to write things down on paper with pens or pencils and were taught all about capitalisation, punctuation and English grammar in school.
Nowadays, most people can type faster than they can write and have access to all manner of spelling and grammar checkers but just look at the messages on that site (and many others) and it's quite shocking to witness the poor quality of what they've written, excluding the minority where English perhaps isn't their first language.
Maybe some of this change for the worse is down to poorer quality teaching nowadays but I feel it's probably more attributable to simple downright laziness on the part of the writers who just cannot be bothered to take a little more time to communicate effectively.
According to statistics that I recently read, in the UK each and every citizen can expect to be captured on camera up to 300 times a day - probably an over-estimated figure but do I really care? No.
I'm an honest, law-abiding citizen, I've never been in trouble with the police and have no criminal record, exactly the same as 99% of other people captured on those same cameras. I therefore very much doubt that law enforcement is interested in me - until I break the law.
Then just imagine the huge amount of video data those cameras create and then realise just how much human resource would be required to analyse that amount of data - impossible. Sure, it can all be archived for a week or two but then comes the question of storing all that data...
However, I do accept that personal information and keeping one's identity as secret as possible is of the utmost importance because all this information is so valuable to insiduous corporations that want to crowbar more money from each and every one of us. This is where the real issue is because 99% of the sheeple in this world are not prepared to take responsibility for their own lives and their own information and are too weak-minded to make informed decisions, falling instead for endless media and advertising hype. In a capitalist society of intelligent, well-informed citizens, such phrases as "brand loyalty" would not exist.
If anything, Western governments are losing influence over the general populace because of the power of the corporations - in the UK, it's frightening to see the amount and effects of outsourcing work to private corporations that are only there to make a profit. A classic example is hospital cleanliness - twenty years ago, when cleaners were employed by the National Health Service itself, there was no doubt a lot of inefficiency and waste but, today, now that the specialised job of hospital cleaning has been farmed out to private corporations, bugs like MRSA are rife in hospital to the point where possibly hundreds of patients a year are dying because of it.
Yes, today we live in a "nanny state" but that is for two very specific reasons - firstly, the general populace is far too fat, dumb and happy to take responsibility for themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it and, secondly, the corporations are eager to accept that money, do very little for it and put it into the hands of a few very rich individuals.
Think about it... no government truly wants an overweight, smoking, unemployed populace because that means having to raise taxes for additional health service resource and benefits, taxes makes them unpopular which means politicians lose their fat salaries and benefits when they lose elections. But people choose to smoke and eat too much crap, the tobacco and junk food companies are raking in the money as a result and because people choose not to take responsibility for themselves, the government steps in with stupid and restrictive legislation to try and cut down on the huge amount of expenditure it has to make in these areas.
This whole idea that law-abiding citizens are being constantly watched by the government is ludicrous - in reality, government just wants everyone to pay their taxes, have lots of sex (so as to create more tax payers in the future) and just be happy and contented (so that no-one goes out committing any crime). Unfortunately, it's the corporate vultures who sit there watching, just waiting for any opportunity to make more money from us - and them not making that money is down to each one of us not giving it to them so easily...
I think you will find that there are a vast number of people that use Word, indeed MS Office, completely illegally because they happen to be able to get a copy of a CD from their place of work or from a friend/relative - I personally am surrounded by computer-literate people, many with 3 or 4 PCs in the house, but *not one* of them (to my knowledge) has ever paid for MS Office or Windows XP, unless the latter was pre-installed on a new machine.
Yes, I know some people at work who do use a lot of advanced features, particularly in Excel, that are therefore justified in using MS Office specifically. However, for the level most of us have to go to, OpenOffice works perfectly well.
It always amuses me that people are very quick to criticise OpenOffice in comparison to MS Office - but then when you remind those same people that MS Office is a *commercial* office suite whereas OpenOffice is a free one and then ask them if they paid for their copy of MS Office, they tend to go very quiet.
OpenOffice has a way to go to catch up with MS Office but for 90% of normal users, even it will do far more than those users are ever likely to need - and do it in file formats based on open standards.
I'm no MS fan, use Linux far more than Windows but I really don't see what the problem is here.
There are good Windows sysadmins and users but by far the majority of Windows' user base are Joe Average-types who wouldn't know a security update if it hit them on the head with a hammer - consequently, if those users won't take responsibility for the security of their PCs themselves, then good luck to MS pushing those updates on them. I've not used IE7 but if it's more secure & more standards compliant then I say it's a good thing.
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It's also somewhat disturbing to realise that advertising is absorbed into the shelf-price of a product and that, if the product wasn't advertised, it could be sold slightly cheaper and would end up selling more anyway. I don't play World Of Warcraft, for example and have no interest in MMORPGs at all but it seems to me that this is a good example of a product that hasn't been marketed that heavily but done very well purely as a result of "word of mouth" advertising.
It's the people who *pay* good money like Sky/cable subscribers only to still be subjected to constant advertising that I don't understand (and before anyone flames me, I'm lucky enough to be in the UK where I pay a small annual sum for ad-free television and radio from the BBC).
Even worse are the designer clothes crowd that pay a premium sum purely to turn themselves into advertising billboards for Gap and the countless other clothes stores (the names of which escape me due to my immunity to their brainwashing).
Me, I'll stick with a proper free OS and keep configuring Firefox to block every advertisement possible.
And who needs all of the features of MS Office? Most people use about 10% of the features of Office and the majority of home users use it because they can get it free from work or from copied CDs. Yes, they have it installed but it's vast overkill for most of them that just use it for the occasional letter or home finance spreadsheet.
If those people were faced with paying £100 (or whatever the cost is) license for it, they would look at free alternatives like OpenOffice far more readily and they would still find it met all of their needs and more. I fully accept that there are developer-types who need VB to do a lot of complex work in Office but those are a SMALL MINORITY of the userbase for whom OpenOffice would not be suitable.
And as for file format, I care as do many other people. When a document containing information I need to read can be easily published in an open format, why should I be forced to pay a tax to a commercial software company in order to access that document?
And why should I accept that as a "standard" when the only reason it is a standard is because the vast majority of people run an unlicensed copy of the "accepted" Office package in the first place? I've no problem with people paying Microsoft for XP, Office or whatever product they care to buy but let's compare like-for-like: OpenOffice is FREE and OPEN, MS Office COSTS MONEY and is CLOSED.
And if Microsoft will not publish the ".doc" specification openly, then how can you expect OpenOffice to be 100% compatible?
No consumer is going to want to have to try and match up their hardware to their OS.
Then they should make an appropriate choice of OS. Either stick with Windows or do some investigation and choose an appropriate Linux distro that they pay for support for. Why do you, and lots of other people like you, impose a commercial software view on Open Source? With commercial software, you can demand your money back if it doesn't do what it says on the box. With Open Source, you also accept a degree of self-determination and responsibility such that if something doesn't work right, you investigate why and you ask someone to try and make it right, even if it's the person(s) that wrote the software.
We, as a community, have been doing exactly that for over 5 years now and we still don't have but a couple of native games and that crappy Cedega. But because the game producers don't think that Linux is even in the same league, much less the same ballpark as the other OS, we will never have the choices available to get our game on.
Then don't use Linux. Or use it and just use Windows for gaming. Whatever works. Just don't expect everything dropped in your lap - you have to do some work yourself.
As long as we as a community vilify software and hardware developers for writting closed source solutions Linux will remain a limp bird.
No sensible Linux user vilifies hardware companies - all you do is don't buy their hardware. Again, self-determination and responsibility - do your research and only buy hardware that you know is supported.
But thank you I will go back to my Windows and moan, moan about how much I'd rather have an alternative that is capable of doing the most basic tasks that consumers ask of it.
Another generic statement. Fine, you've worked with Linux since '99 and you're probably excellent at supporting it within the needs of your organisation, I'm not denying that. But you probably do need to devote more of your time to building up your knowledge to be able to go further with it - a lot of the problems you've mentioned might well be time-consuming or difficult to resolve in Linux but they are mostly resolvable.
...and had I known Curt Kobain was writing such intense, intelligent lyrics as that, I'd have probably shot him.
I'm not denying anyone the right to sell their hard work but it could be argued that since software basically started as free, then it's the "software sales" model that actually flawed.
Amen to that! The default XP theme is the biggest load of patronising bloatware ever designed as a GUI, I find it totally unusable. I'm also quite surprised at the number of my friends and colleagues who are ditching the XP GUI now and switching to the Classic view just like I have. About the only "XP feature" I keep active are the Cleartype Fonts for my LCD displays.
The problem with X themes are that if you "do it yourself" you're never going to get a single look and feel to your X desktop because of the great QT/GTK debate - I now use XFCE4 because it's relatively fast and light and just addin external desktop icon display programs and dockapps. But as a user of both GAIM and K3B, there's no chance of a consistent interface.
Correction. It's dead on *YOUR* desktop, not on the desktops of millions of other users.
Sure Office is very bloated, but it is also the defacto standard and Openoffice has never been and probably never will be 100% compatible.
OpenOffice is not "100% compatible" because it just so happens that Microsoft's closed document standards are, unfortunately, the "accepted" standard for documentation - this is due to clever Microsoft marketing, not a fault of OpenOffice. ODF and RTF are open formats that are supported by OpenOffice.
All the interfaces available for Linux to stream video are so clunky that they are nearly unusable.
Huh? Pray tell what was it you were trying to stream from or to? It's never been a problem for me...
And then you have the poor hardware support. I have two laptops and two desktops. My two laptops are completely out of the question as most of the hardware is too new to be fully supported. Everything from native LCD resolutions to no native support for the wireless card.
So you just choose your hardware wisely, that's all. I've purchased two laptops within the past 6 months, a Gateway one and an HP one. I think the only thing that doesn't work on one of them is the button above the keyboard to turn off/on the wireless network interface. Oh, and I use Gentoo and I have use of native LCD resolutions.
And on my desktops, one still runs Gentoo as a server, which Linux is ideally suited for, the other, in order to play games (which once again is pathetic on Linux) I have to run that other OS.
So how about doing something constructive and contacting games companies to make native Linux games ports if that's what you want? Rather than just sitting there moaning and not doing anything. If there are enough people like you, maybe some of those companies will do something.
So to all the fanatics and fanboys, Linux will never be a force on the consumer's desktop.
Who cares? I use it and love it along with lots of other people. My niece loves Windows XP, Word and Powerpoint - and when I have to fix her PC for her, I don't install Linux on her PC, I put XP and MS Office back on it and let her get on with it.
It's not bad on the business desktop because of its management capabilities and actually because of some of the flaws listed above
You're making very generic statements here which suggests that you probably don't know as much about Linux as you'd like us to believe. What do you mean by "management capabilities, for example? Do you mean SNMP? Webmin? Package management? What?
And in the back room Linux is the light in a once dark world with its power and plethora of server software.
Why is this anything to do with Linux? The "server software" you talk about, whether it's Apache, Squid, sendmail, MySQL, SAMBA, etc, etc, all run on Solaris and just about any other UNIX you could think of - a few even run on Windows. And if your a Microsoft shop who insists on running Exchange, Active Directory, MS SQL and IIS, for example, then Linux is probably bugger all use to you. You seem to be very good at making empty sweeping statements without clarifying what it is you are talking about.
Until the hardware manufacturers start writing native drivers (and aren't vilified for keeping their company secrets hidden) and until the major software manufacturers begin to believe that Linux is a viable consumer platform, Linux on the desktop is dead.
Most Linux people are relatively happy with the state of nVidia and ATI drivers, for example, which are closed source. Sure, sometimes they release rubbish versions and a lot of hackers (not "crackers") would love to get their hands on the source code to these but that's just the way it is. I'm just happy there is *some* support.
By the sounds of it, Gentoo was probably the wrong choice of distro for you anyway - you probably need a more newbie orientated distro like SuSE or Ubuntu.
And if you're not prepared to do some of the hard work yourself then don't even bother - go back to Windows and moaning a lot.
Look, I have no problem with people using Windows (I do myself a little), I have no problem with people disliking command-line tools in Windows or Linux but can *both types* of people please STOP imposing their view of the world on the rest of us! Now!
The fact is that NOBODY (repeat N-O-B-O-D-Y) can appreciate the power of a Linux or UNIX operating system until you dive into the command line, learn shell, Python, Perl or another scripting language and start putting together INCREDIBLY POWERFUL AND VERSATILE TOOLS yourself.
For the uninitiated, from the shell prompt in Linux or UNIX you can log into remote systems, view web pages, burn CDs, rip CDs, play MP3s, convert images, perform countless system diagnostics, edit files, etc. etc. On top of this, you can do some of the most amazingly powerful text manipulation using complex regular expressions that end up looking like a spider has crawled across your screen with inky feet. Admittedly, to a GUI-based user, none of this looks particularly "exciting" but when all of these tasks can be combined in countless ways within scripts, NOTHING (repeat N-O-T-H-I-N-G) within a GUI environment comes CLOSE for automation and sheer power.
No, I'm not a command line zealot. I believe it's up to the user to decide what software/OS they are comfortable with, I personally have favourite tools in Windows, Gnome, KDE, BASH and even MS-DOS and I just use whatever I need to use to get a job done as quickly as possible. But the fact is that the UNIX command line is the most common place for me to work in.
But to all the uninitiated out there, please do not voice opinions on a subject you do not fully understand. Linux and Open Source is NOT waging some kind of anti-Windows war with the goal of total Microsoft destruction - it's an ALTERNATIVE way of doing things where everything is done in an open fashion and the sole aim is to write useful, usable but NOT NECESSARILY PRETTY software, nothing more.
And if you're waiting for Linux to drop into your lap as a ready-packaged alternative to Windows that you can immediately start using like Windows from day one, then I'm afraid you're in for a long wait. To become a Linux user means taking more time to learn about how your computer works and, to be an effective Linux user, ramping up your learning curve so that you know how to take best advantage of the wealth of excellent free software that has become available to you.
If you're not willing to devote that time then, so be it. Stick with what you are comfortable with and enjoy it with my blessing - just don't be so quick to judge the rest of us.
Firstly, I don't see games stores surviving in shopping malls anyway. Certainly here in the UK, stores like Game, HMV and Virgin have permanent Sales on these days, owing to the fact that their profits are dropping due to cheaper on-line retailers. (They can all be damned to hell as far as I'm concerned, they're all rip-off merchants who've had it far too good with price fixing for far too long anyway.)
Secondly, games themseleves have changed. Again, because of price-fixing games companies charging too much for games in the first place, customers expect much longer playability from the games they do buy - with PC games, this has worked *against* the PC games publishers because of the Internet and games modding. (Hell, I bought "Total Annihilation" in 1998 and I'm *still* downloading new units, maps and mods for it!)
Thirdly, Internet and communications. The fact that people subscribe to games forums and read on-line games reviews makes them much more informed these days. I'm sure most WoW players, for example, heard about it from friends and on-line discussions rather than from Blizzard's advertising or marketing of it. Likewise, this works against some games also - for example, I walked into my local Game store the other day to see Quake 4 in their bargain section even though it was released just a few months ago.
And you're entirely correct with regards to video cards and laptops. For me personally, I've dropped out of the endless upgrade cycle now because no PC game in the past year has been enough for me to justify upgrading my graphics card and I've got a whole heap of older games that I'm going back to play now anyway - especially since I travel and use a laptop a lot.
Not that I ever plan to use it but it will be interesting to see what happens with Vista. If Microsoft do start stamping down heavy on piracy and charging more money for Vista, then a very large number of their existing user base will either stick with XP or migrate to Linux. In the end, that *might* swing things in the favour of games developers creating native Linux games but I guess that waits to be seen.
For starters, even if you suggested that 10% of computer users in the world are using Linux currently (possibly side-by-side with Windows), then that community of users is made up of many different distros and many different types of people - it's dangerous to assume that all of that 10% actually want or care about commercial games on Linux.
Although I'm a relatively avid gamer and a user of Linux far more than Windows, I personally am not that interested in any commercial software on Linux. I'm a Gentoo Linux user, I enjoy tweaking and optimising my systems and I'm more than happy to compile source code to run as best as it can on those machines whether it's a game or application. I'm just not prepared to take someone else's closed-source pre-compiled executable and trust it on my Linux machines, especially when I update the machines a lot and will end up breaking those same executables quite quickly due to dependency issues. Besides which, I don't want to "pollute" my nice Open Source-based operating system with closed source software and I think a lot of the core Linux user community thinks entirely the same way.
Yes, I'd like to see more games on Linux but I'd rather see games companies releasing source code to older games (like ID and the early Quakes) at which point I'm happy to go buy the Windows version of the CD in order to get hold of the games data files and levels.
I've no problem with commercial software or Windows and probably buy a game a month to run on my Windows XP machine. But I've no "passion" for Windows XP - as long as it does what it's supposed to do, I really don't care to know how or why it does it.
However, my Linux machines are *mine*, I decide what and how software gets installed on them, no argument - again, a lot of Linux users feel entirely the same way.
Therefore, it's safe to conclude that the community of people who want commercial games on Linux is a very small minority, to the point where it just isn't ecomonically viable for games companies to port the games across. Sure, I'd *like* to see it happen for those people because Linux is about "having it your way" but I personally wouldn't buy any closed source Linux software.
As to your second point, that's a good one also. I'm inclined to say "Yes" to that one though because that company is employing someone somewhere and taking money out of the UK - although I do agree that what they're doing is different to, say, Megacorp Ltd employing 5,000 people in an office in the UK one day and then sacking everyone and moving those jobs overseas the next.
The Detroit car industry was devastated because of cheaper Japanese imports, was it not? Presumably all cars were manufactured in Japan and Asia and then shipped over to be sold in the US?
Therefore, by my argument, if the Japanese auto manufacturers were selling cars in the US but not making them there, then the US government would have taxed them more (kind of like a heavier import duty). This would have kept the US car industry more competitive and therefore helped stop the problem you're describing?
Let's take everyone's favourite American company, Microsoft. They have offices in the UK and they employ UK citizens. They also sell their products in the UK and probably sponsor a few schools and sports events.
The UK employment and sponsorship is money they put into the UK, the money they get through UK product sales is money they take out of the UK. Take the first from the second and have the UK government tax the remainder. And if UK jobs or sponsorship reduces, that figure gets bigger so you tax it more...
In other words, you *force* that company to make it more expensive for them to recruit overseas and perhaps stop them making snap decisions when it comes to mass job cuts. Plus you make the company realise that when you take something out of a country, you need to put something back in.
I'm happy to live in a society where I do a job, get paid for it and have a nice wedge of money at the end of the month to go spend on the nicer things in life. I'm happy to go looking and what's being offered to me, comparing one item of goods against another and buying the one I think offers me best value for money. I have a reasonable car, a good house and private healthcare where public healthcare is already available and if I had any children, I'd probably send them to a private school. I don't see anything in there that makes me a socialist...
On the other hand, I don't own any stocks or shares because I'm really not that bothered about making money purely for the sake of it. I can admire people like Richard Branson, for example, who have set out from the start to make money, devoted all of their lives to making money and end up being rich - but I'm not interested in doing so myself because I consider money a tool to get things done only. I have enough of it to live comfortably and happily, if someone offers me more then I'll take it but I'm not out to accumulate more of it. Since I'm not out to accumulate wealth, therefore, I guess I'm probably not a capitalist either...
So, yes, maybe my definition is wrong but this still does not change the fact that corporations have a social responsibility - just in the same way that most capitalists wouldn't support a petro-chemical company polluting seas and rivers or a pharmaceutical company killing thousands of patients through not trialing new drugs properly, why would they support corporations making sudden changes in lifestyles of thousands of people purely for profit.
Or are you simply admitting that capitalism and social responsibility, not socialism, are entirely at odds with each other?
I should firstly say that I'm a UK resident, not an American, but outsourcing from British companies is just as bad.
Also, I'm not trying to deny jobs to people in emerging economies who can work for lower salaries because houses and the cost of living are also much lower in those countries - that's how capitalism works.
However, whether it's in the US, the UK or India, the activities of corporations change the societies around them. Salaries are higher in the Western World because demands for housing near to places of work has increased the cost of them meaning that people have needed to earn more. Sure, there's personal greed in there also but then that's no different to Indian workers demanding higher and higher salaries also - people are the same the world over.
Unfortunately, at the drop of a hat, any corporation currently has free reign to make decisions at board room level that affect the lives of thousands of workers - and if those workers mostly live near to their offices, then an entire community can be devastated; this leads to more drain on government money (for benefits) and perhaps even forces local, smaller businesses to crash also.
My point of argument is that corporations should be stopped from making "snap decisions" by higher taxation of their profits - after all, despite reducing jobs in certain countries, those corporations still expect to make as much, if not more money from those same countries.
Just like every other company today, it's having to tighten its belt and maximise income from every possible source - especially when most of MS's shares are held by employees who will no doubt "dump and run" as soon as the stock price drops significantly.
Office is a core MS product and MS knows full well that probably the majority of Office users are using it illegally. However, if it inflicts tighter licensing/piracy restrictions, it knows full well that those same users are just not going to spend several hundred pounds/dollars/Euros/etc. on a legal copy of Office and will instead start using cheaper or free alternatives. And once that starts happening "en masse", MS will lose those users for good as the latter realise that they never needed a whole heap of additional features that they never used. So they will continue to lose a large amount of income through piracy.
As to their proprietary file formats, whilst I'd like to see those opened up completely, MS is never going to let that happen without a fight and it would make no commercial sense for them to do that.
However, in my view, what makes this really interesting are government departments who are obviously a fair-sized portion of the Office user base. Putting aside the restrictive budgets these departments have anyway (for such things as expensive software licenses), they also have an obligation to provide open and free information to the general populace - the idea, therefore, that access to information relies on owning a Microsoft product is not going to hold, especially when most governments are now very aware of the power MS has at the moment.
A bit of a side-track argument but it makes for interesting watching over the next few years. I guess that Office 2007 is just an upgrade to keep the revenue coming in from corporate licenses (are there *REALLY* any more features that can be added to Office apart from the evils of DRM?) but I really do think that MS's only courses of action are to either release a cut-down version of Office for the home user (MS Works doesn't count here) or to focus on web-based applications and go head-to-head with Google - another interesting thing to watch...
Corporations *should* have a social responsibility and conscience. Look at any big, sparkling technology park anywhere in the world and you see housing and transportation links springing up around it - purely because most people want to live close to where they work.
Consequently, when these same corporations suddenly decide to move thousands of jobs overseas, offices close down and entire communities can be devastated through unemployment.
The logical solution, therefore, should have been additional taxation on the corporations by government - very simply, each nation works out how much profit a company makes in their country (i.e. how much money it takes out) and compares it to how much money it spends on employing people in their country (i.e. how much money it puts back in). Then just subtract the second from the first and, if it's positive, tax the hell out of it.
And before anyone flames me about being "anti-capitalist", I'd remind them that when people lose their jobs and, say, private health care benefits, they turn to the government for unemployment handouts and public healthcare - both of which are financed from our taxes.
...requests that Microsoft just "STFU", stop poking their big, fat Microsoft nose in areas that doesn't concern them and concentrate more on fixing the bugs in their software - otherwise we're all allowed to put our big, hob-nailed, non-Microsoft boots on and give them a damned good kicking.
...as I've never known an Ethernet network to suffer longer "ping" round-trips and increased packet loss as a result of too much beer...
Nowadays, most people can type faster than they can write and have access to all manner of spelling and grammar checkers but just look at the messages on that site (and many others) and it's quite shocking to witness the poor quality of what they've written, excluding the minority where English perhaps isn't their first language.
Maybe some of this change for the worse is down to poorer quality teaching nowadays but I feel it's probably more attributable to simple downright laziness on the part of the writers who just cannot be bothered to take a little more time to communicate effectively.
I'm an honest, law-abiding citizen, I've never been in trouble with the police and have no criminal record, exactly the same as 99% of other people captured on those same cameras. I therefore very much doubt that law enforcement is interested in me - until I break the law.
Then just imagine the huge amount of video data those cameras create and then realise just how much human resource would be required to analyse that amount of data - impossible. Sure, it can all be archived for a week or two but then comes the question of storing all that data...
However, I do accept that personal information and keeping one's identity as secret as possible is of the utmost importance because all this information is so valuable to insiduous corporations that want to crowbar more money from each and every one of us. This is where the real issue is because 99% of the sheeple in this world are not prepared to take responsibility for their own lives and their own information and are too weak-minded to make informed decisions, falling instead for endless media and advertising hype. In a capitalist society of intelligent, well-informed citizens, such phrases as "brand loyalty" would not exist.
If anything, Western governments are losing influence over the general populace because of the power of the corporations - in the UK, it's frightening to see the amount and effects of outsourcing work to private corporations that are only there to make a profit. A classic example is hospital cleanliness - twenty years ago, when cleaners were employed by the National Health Service itself, there was no doubt a lot of inefficiency and waste but, today, now that the specialised job of hospital cleaning has been farmed out to private corporations, bugs like MRSA are rife in hospital to the point where possibly hundreds of patients a year are dying because of it.
Yes, today we live in a "nanny state" but that is for two very specific reasons - firstly, the general populace is far too fat, dumb and happy to take responsibility for themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it and, secondly, the corporations are eager to accept that money, do very little for it and put it into the hands of a few very rich individuals.
Think about it... no government truly wants an overweight, smoking, unemployed populace because that means having to raise taxes for additional health service resource and benefits, taxes makes them unpopular which means politicians lose their fat salaries and benefits when they lose elections. But people choose to smoke and eat too much crap, the tobacco and junk food companies are raking in the money as a result and because people choose not to take responsibility for themselves, the government steps in with stupid and restrictive legislation to try and cut down on the huge amount of expenditure it has to make in these areas.
This whole idea that law-abiding citizens are being constantly watched by the government is ludicrous - in reality, government just wants everyone to pay their taxes, have lots of sex (so as to create more tax payers in the future) and just be happy and contented (so that no-one goes out committing any crime). Unfortunately, it's the corporate vultures who sit there watching, just waiting for any opportunity to make more money from us - and them not making that money is down to each one of us not giving it to them so easily...
Yes, I know some people at work who do use a lot of advanced features, particularly in Excel, that are therefore justified in using MS Office specifically. However, for the level most of us have to go to, OpenOffice works perfectly well.
It always amuses me that people are very quick to criticise OpenOffice in comparison to MS Office - but then when you remind those same people that MS Office is a *commercial* office suite whereas OpenOffice is a free one and then ask them if they paid for their copy of MS Office, they tend to go very quiet.
OpenOffice has a way to go to catch up with MS Office but for 90% of normal users, even it will do far more than those users are ever likely to need - and do it in file formats based on open standards.
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -avu internet-explorer
as there is no way Internet Explorer would be in the *STABLE* toolchain!
There are good Windows sysadmins and users but by far the majority of Windows' user base are Joe Average-types who wouldn't know a security update if it hit them on the head with a hammer - consequently, if those users won't take responsibility for the security of their PCs themselves, then good luck to MS pushing those updates on them. I've not used IE7 but if it's more secure & more standards compliant then I say it's a good thing.