Oooh, another one! But this time wrong on two accounts, not just one.
1. I've been using (and working) with Linux for about 15 years, UNIX for about 25 years. I became a Red Hat Certified Engineer back in 2001 and at home use Gentoo Linux 80% of the time and XP for 20% of the time.
2. I have no problem paying for a closed-source application if the price is right and the application is good enough. That's because a computer is a device for productivity & entertainment. I am, and always have been, as OS fiddler, I like open platforms and being able to install what I like when I like. However, I'm no hippie with a need to make any political statements.
Here's an idea for you - find out a little more about what you are talking about before you write anything. It'll mean less chance of looking like a plonker.
The Skype program on ALL OSes is *CLOSED SOURCE*! That means that nobody, apart from Skype people, get to see the source code.
In which case, why didn't Apple then just stick to using standard BSD with one of the already developed UIs like Gnome or KDE, rather than creating *YET ANOTHER* UI?
I've also used Linux at home (and at work) for at least 12 years. I think I will continue to do so because I see no value in "polished interfaces" that would add absolutely zero to my productivity.
I use the Windows Classic interface on XP (with no intention of going to Windows 7) and Gnome on Linux. The only reason I can think of going to OS X would be to have something I can try to impress friends & colleagues with - but since my computers are productivity and entertainment tools for me only, eye candy is simply a waste of money.
I am a competent Linux user and I like fiddling and optimising any OS I run on a computer.
However, rather than sitting there moaning about mainstream Linux distributions, I switched to Gentoo several years ago and have not looked back since.
So good luck to the people who make and use the "easy to use" distros like Ubuntu & SuSE - they're not for me but if others like them then let them get on with it & enjoy.
Unfortunately, you're the type of Linux snob that gives the rest of us Linux people bad names.
...*I* have to put some effort into ensuring *YOU* get as many "away from the office" jollies as you can.
How about you go check out an office chair company on your next expenses-paid trip out? Then when I tell you to go "sit & swivel", I can at least gain some pleasure in knowing you will have a fairly good chance of carrying out my orders.
Incidentally, I'm thinking of taking a sickie from the office on Wednesday next week? Can you call my boss and make up an excuse for me?
...I respect the fact that you've become very wealthy very quickly but the consequence of that is that you probably never have to work again & can now employ people to do any of the stuff in your life that you don't want to do any more. That means you can create a lot of free time to do other interesting things with your time, and good luck to you on that.
Me, I have a reasonably good job and live comfortably, for that I am very grateful. But I do have to work a mimimum of 40 hours a week to pay things like mortgages and bills. I also have to help clean the house, do the lawn, cook food, go shopping & do washing & ironing. If I had children then I would have to find a lot more time & money to make sure they were okay also.
Yes, I buy my meat pre-packaged because I'm a coward and I don't want to see any animal suffer, even if it is a humane and quick killing. But even if I had the physical courage to kill an animal in order to eat it, because I don't have as much money as you, I'd also need to butcher it, hang it in my own cold store & dispose of the parts that I'm not going to eat. Not to mention the time and cost to rear the animal before I killed it, or to get it transported to me for killing. This process would take considerably more time & money to do, but I am limited in both of those that I have to spare.
In other words, *YOU* can do this because *YOU* have huge wealth & a strong stomach, *BOTH* of which are pre-requisites for living that type of lifestyle.
Consequently, even if I possessed the courage to kill an animal, my limited resources make it impractical. Therefore the message you are trying to convey is wasted on the 99% of the population who likewise do not have the resource to do things your way.
In fact, we actually have a paradox forming here - you have made your money with Facebook *PRECISELY BECAUSE* millions of people waste time on it rather than putting it to better use - like killing their own animals.
In summary, you have the wealth & ability to kill animals precisely for the reason that the rest of us do not.
I will kill my own animals for my plate as long as everyone who owns a computer learns how it works and how to fix it themselves, rather than call on me to fix it.
I mean, we're talking personal responsibility here, right?
Before getting to the PC in the very early 90s, I came from a Commodore Amiga background where you'd always been encouraged to fiddle with the OS due to the sheer amount of shareware and freeware that you could get for it. At the same time I started to cut my teeth in UNIX which has ended up with me being a mostly Linux guy these days, again as an OS fiddler.
I've also been through the MS-DOS and Windows iterations from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP (can't see a reason to go beyound XP at the moment) and fiddled with them a lot also. MS-DOS could be a complete pain to set up with PC gaming, especially if you were trying to get MS-DOS to boot up with selectable driver combinations and memory configurations to allow as many games as possible to work. But I quite enjoyed fiddling about with it and I've no doubt that writing DOS batch files helped me in my skills today in shell, Perl & Python scripting. So from that perspective, I have a great fondness for it and keep meaning to run DOS 6.22 up in a VM just to have a play around again.
However, I've also been in the telecoms industry for 30 years, and remember a particular occasion when I had the unfortunate experience of having to fix problems on an MS-DOS based voicemail & interactive response system that was installed on a customer site here in the UK. It was working in a major customer's call centre and kept repeatedly crashing, to the point where me and another engineer spent alternating weeks on site over about three months just hitting the reset button on the system every hour or so when it bombed out. The poor server had to load all manner of drivers for networking and station/trunk interface cards even before the big application was then loaded up on it - no wonder it was so unstable.
Fortunately, the product never really saw the light of day and was ripped out and replaced with another server (running SCO UNIX, now there's a name from the past!) and that worked much better.
Even though, at the time, I missed the great hardware multitasking and Workbench on the Amiga, I did like messing about with MS-DOS on home systems - but for anything more serious, it was crap and I don't mourn its passing.
1. The top soccer players earn an absolute fortune so can buy themselves any legal representation they want whenever they want to.
2. Soccer fans are too caught up in their gang mentalities to realise that they are being ripped off by everyone around them - they pay huge premiums for annual season tickets but it's the Sky Sports channel that dictates when the games start (which can be a different time each week) so it fits in with their live programming schedules.
3. Those same fans also pay a premium for Sky Sports in order to watch the games.
4. Soccer players do not believe the laws that apply to the rest of UK citizens apply to them. Many are ill-behaved thugs both on and off the football field, and the poor example they set to youngsters has now filtered down to amateur leagues and schools where complaints about abuse against soccer referees is now common over here.
5. Because of the bad reputation set by a minority of troublemaking fans, you cannot, even with a highly priced season ticket, drink any alcohol while watching a live game.
There's a well known saying over here:
"Soccer is a gentleman's game played by thugs, whilst rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen."
And that's why I personally follow rugby and despise soccer - it's a better game, I can have a beer while I'm watching it, I can even have a friendly beer or two with opposing fans in the pub afterwards (rather than in soccer where lines of policemen separate fans entering and leaving the stadium) and it's more entertainment for much less money.
Plus it's incredibly rare for a rugby player to make the headlines for bad behaviour or shagging some other woman.
This is the argument I've been using against the BBC when they've been removing my posts.
I assume you are talking about their "Have Your Say" forum on their web site on which I too have experienced "strange" moderation on posts in the past - though admittedly not on this specific "Prima donna Shags Tart" issue.
I get the impression that they have quite RIght Wing moderators because I have seen blatantly racial and off-topic posts left on their boards whilst on-topic posts get deleted.
Suffice it to say, I don't go on there any more because I was sick of reading endless bleatings by the Nazi party on it.
I accept that a US billion is 100 million whilst a (my) UK billion is 1000 million.
This Apple page does say $144 million in January 1998, but that would equate to -$6 million if you take out the $150 million Microsoft gave them as a bailout. i.e. a loss without Microsoft's help.
It's irrelevant as to the reasons *WHY* they got the bailout money - they got it at a time they needed it. And who knows what would have happened to them had they not got it...
Just remember to send a 400 page design specification to Steve Jobs first, let him bury it in soft peat for 3 months and then see if he approves your app for distribution on iTunes.
And remember - no titties or ROM emulation. That's a definite "no no" from The High Priest Of Fanboi".
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Oooh, another one! But this time wrong on two accounts, not just one.
1. I've been using (and working) with Linux for about 15 years, UNIX for about 25 years. I became a Red Hat Certified Engineer back in 2001 and at home use Gentoo Linux 80% of the time and XP for 20% of the time.
2. I have no problem paying for a closed-source application if the price is right and the application is good enough. That's because a computer is a device for productivity & entertainment. I am, and always have been, as OS fiddler, I like open platforms and being able to install what I like when I like. However, I'm no hippie with a need to make any political statements.
Therefore, the word is "Fail". Please try again.
Here's an idea for you - find out a little more about what you are talking about before you write anything. It'll mean less chance of looking like a plonker.
The Skype program on ALL OSes is *CLOSED SOURCE*! That means that nobody, apart from Skype people, get to see the source code.
Apple innovates. ...whilst silently thanking Microsoft for the $150M bailout in 1997 of course.
In which case, why didn't Apple then just stick to using standard BSD with one of the already developed UIs like Gnome or KDE, rather than creating *YET ANOTHER* UI?
I've also used Linux at home (and at work) for at least 12 years. I think I will continue to do so because I see no value in "polished interfaces" that would add absolutely zero to my productivity.
I use the Windows Classic interface on XP (with no intention of going to Windows 7) and Gnome on Linux. The only reason I can think of going to OS X would be to have something I can try to impress friends & colleagues with - but since my computers are productivity and entertainment tools for me only, eye candy is simply a waste of money.
But clearly NOT forward-thinking enough such that their iPads, for example, don't need to be upgraded every year.
I am a competent Linux user and I like fiddling and optimising any OS I run on a computer.
However, rather than sitting there moaning about mainstream Linux distributions, I switched to Gentoo several years ago and have not looked back since.
So good luck to the people who make and use the "easy to use" distros like Ubuntu & SuSE - they're not for me but if others like them then let them get on with it & enjoy.
Unfortunately, you're the type of Linux snob that gives the rest of us Linux people bad names.
In other words, Apple beat Palm so Apple fanbois can beat into their palms. Cool!
No, Gates is a two-trick pony.
1. He ran Microsoft.
2. In 1997 he gave Apple $150M to save them from extinction.
...*I* have to put some effort into ensuring *YOU* get as many "away from the office" jollies as you can.
How about you go check out an office chair company on your next expenses-paid trip out? Then when I tell you to go "sit & swivel", I can at least gain some pleasure in knowing you will have a fairly good chance of carrying out my orders.
Incidentally, I'm thinking of taking a sickie from the office on Wednesday next week? Can you call my boss and make up an excuse for me?
...I respect the fact that you've become very wealthy very quickly but the consequence of that is that you probably never have to work again & can now employ people to do any of the stuff in your life that you don't want to do any more. That means you can create a lot of free time to do other interesting things with your time, and good luck to you on that.
Me, I have a reasonably good job and live comfortably, for that I am very grateful. But I do have to work a mimimum of 40 hours a week to pay things like mortgages and bills. I also have to help clean the house, do the lawn, cook food, go shopping & do washing & ironing. If I had children then I would have to find a lot more time & money to make sure they were okay also.
Yes, I buy my meat pre-packaged because I'm a coward and I don't want to see any animal suffer, even if it is a humane and quick killing. But even if I had the physical courage to kill an animal in order to eat it, because I don't have as much money as you, I'd also need to butcher it, hang it in my own cold store & dispose of the parts that I'm not going to eat. Not to mention the time and cost to rear the animal before I killed it, or to get it transported to me for killing. This process would take considerably more time & money to do, but I am limited in both of those that I have to spare.
In other words, *YOU* can do this because *YOU* have huge wealth & a strong stomach, *BOTH* of which are pre-requisites for living that type of lifestyle.
Consequently, even if I possessed the courage to kill an animal, my limited resources make it impractical. Therefore the message you are trying to convey is wasted on the 99% of the population who likewise do not have the resource to do things your way.
In fact, we actually have a paradox forming here - you have made your money with Facebook *PRECISELY BECAUSE* millions of people waste time on it rather than putting it to better use - like killing their own animals.
In summary, you have the wealth & ability to kill animals precisely for the reason that the rest of us do not.
You kill possum but can use a computer keyboard? What are you? Some kind of stereotype-erasing freak???
I will kill my own animals for my plate as long as everyone who owns a computer learns how it works and how to fix it themselves, rather than call on me to fix it.
I mean, we're talking personal responsibility here, right?
But isn't living on a farm and rearing animals that you do not kill just for you to eat just as hypocritical?
Presumably you raised livestock and sold it for money knowing full well it would be slaughtered for others to eat.
Furthermore, as a vegetarian that is not necessarily against eating meat but more the manor that animals are treated pre and post slaughter;
Furthermore, as a vegetarian, you've made a personal decision about the type of food you want to put in your mouth & I respect that.
So now butt out & don't lecture an omnivore like me about what I should & shouldn't do.
I think it would look better on a guppy.
There's a whole bunch of really rich people who are about to rip into each other and I don't want to miss ANYTHING!
Before getting to the PC in the very early 90s, I came from a Commodore Amiga background where you'd always been encouraged to fiddle with the OS due to the sheer amount of shareware and freeware that you could get for it. At the same time I started to cut my teeth in UNIX which has ended up with me being a mostly Linux guy these days, again as an OS fiddler.
I've also been through the MS-DOS and Windows iterations from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP (can't see a reason to go beyound XP at the moment) and fiddled with them a lot also. MS-DOS could be a complete pain to set up with PC gaming, especially if you were trying to get MS-DOS to boot up with selectable driver combinations and memory configurations to allow as many games as possible to work. But I quite enjoyed fiddling about with it and I've no doubt that writing DOS batch files helped me in my skills today in shell, Perl & Python scripting. So from that perspective, I have a great fondness for it and keep meaning to run DOS 6.22 up in a VM just to have a play around again.
However, I've also been in the telecoms industry for 30 years, and remember a particular occasion when I had the unfortunate experience of having to fix problems on an MS-DOS based voicemail & interactive response system that was installed on a customer site here in the UK. It was working in a major customer's call centre and kept repeatedly crashing, to the point where me and another engineer spent alternating weeks on site over about three months just hitting the reset button on the system every hour or so when it bombed out. The poor server had to load all manner of drivers for networking and station/trunk interface cards even before the big application was then loaded up on it - no wonder it was so unstable.
Fortunately, the product never really saw the light of day and was ripped out and replaced with another server (running SCO UNIX, now there's a name from the past!) and that worked much better.
Even though, at the time, I missed the great hardware multitasking and Workbench on the Amiga, I did like messing about with MS-DOS on home systems - but for anything more serious, it was crap and I don't mourn its passing.
Yes, but we don't do perms.
Also fine over here across the pond in Blighty, me ole mucka!
1. The top soccer players earn an absolute fortune so can buy themselves any legal representation they want whenever they want to.
2. Soccer fans are too caught up in their gang mentalities to realise that they are being ripped off by everyone around them - they pay huge premiums for annual season tickets but it's the Sky Sports channel that dictates when the games start (which can be a different time each week) so it fits in with their live programming schedules.
3. Those same fans also pay a premium for Sky Sports in order to watch the games.
4. Soccer players do not believe the laws that apply to the rest of UK citizens apply to them. Many are ill-behaved thugs both on and off the football field, and the poor example they set to youngsters has now filtered down to amateur leagues and schools where complaints about abuse against soccer referees is now common over here.
5. Because of the bad reputation set by a minority of troublemaking fans, you cannot, even with a highly priced season ticket, drink any alcohol while watching a live game.
There's a well known saying over here:
"Soccer is a gentleman's game played by thugs, whilst rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen."
And that's why I personally follow rugby and despise soccer - it's a better game, I can have a beer while I'm watching it, I can even have a friendly beer or two with opposing fans in the pub afterwards (rather than in soccer where lines of policemen separate fans entering and leaving the stadium) and it's more entertainment for much less money.
Plus it's incredibly rare for a rugby player to make the headlines for bad behaviour or shagging some other woman.
This is the argument I've been using against the BBC when they've been removing my posts.
I assume you are talking about their "Have Your Say" forum on their web site on which I too have experienced "strange" moderation on posts in the past - though admittedly not on this specific "Prima donna Shags Tart" issue.
I get the impression that they have quite RIght Wing moderators because I have seen blatantly racial and off-topic posts left on their boards whilst on-topic posts get deleted.
Suffice it to say, I don't go on there any more because I was sick of reading endless bleatings by the Nazi party on it.
I accept that a US billion is 100 million whilst a (my) UK billion is 1000 million.
This Apple page does say $144 million in January 1998, but that would equate to -$6 million if you take out the $150 million Microsoft gave them as a bailout. i.e. a loss without Microsoft's help.
It's irrelevant as to the reasons *WHY* they got the bailout money - they got it at a time they needed it. And who knows what would have happened to them had they not got it...
Just remember to send a 400 page design specification to Steve Jobs first, let him bury it in soft peat for 3 months and then see if he approves your app for distribution on iTunes.
And remember - no titties or ROM emulation. That's a definite "no no" from The High Priest Of Fanboi".