...this article is *not* the way to convince people to give it a try.
What the author fails to realise completely is that the vast majority of home Windows users that use MS Office do so because they can use it freely - either because they know someone with MSDN CDs or have access to pirated versions. After all, let's face it, very few Joe Sixpack users are going to go buy a software application that costs almost as much as their PC does, in many cases.
Whether we like it or not, MS Office is the de facto standard for Windows desktop use & the only time that is likely to change is if Linux displaces Windows from the desktop or if MS Office becomes much more protected from copying.
What the author should have done was a report on compatibility between MS Office and OpenOffice documents and maybe a comparison of how similar actions can be achieved in both packages.
OpenOffice is a more than adequate package for most users but if Joe Sixpack can still get MS Office for free, can run it relatively speedily & doesn't have to go through a large learning curve to migrate to OpenOffice, it will not displace MS Office whatsoever.
I have no problem with people wanting to download individual songs electronically for iPods if that's what they want but it's not for me.
I have a 256MB unbranded MP3 player that I use at the gym to blast out some decent rock music to workout to and cover up the pop crap they play over the speakers, it holds about 90 minutes of music and does me fine.
Apart from the occasional self-burnt compilation for the car, everything about my music enjoyment is whole albums, not individual tracks. I'm a rock/metal/blues fan myself which I think has a lot to do with it, I'm more likely to play all of Led Zeppelin 4 than just Stairway To Heaven for example.
Added to that, I just can't bring myself to *pay* to download what is essentially just a file on my computer. I don't pirate music or software but I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've paid for and downloaded registered software online - I use Open Source mostly now anyway and I find it difficult to hand over money without getting something back that's not "tangible".
So good luck to those who do like downloadable music but for me, nothing beats the thrill of finding something interesting in the racks of a music store, particularly if it's cheap!
...except in the minds of marketing people who felt the need to turn *directories* into something cool so that other marketing-type people could still have absolutely no inkling about how their computers work.
I can make directories & sub-directories, I can create links to them however I like, I can "find" files in those directories and I can "grep" what's in them...
It could be argued that if the general populace is kept in fear of a terrorist attack, purely because the government keeps a heightened state of security, then the terrorists actually have no need to go commit more acts of violence anyway.
This means the governments don't actually have to implement proper security measures themselves, they can just create an "appearance" of doing so, like at airports.
I'm in the UK, not the US, but "heightened state of security" is an excuse used by El Presidente Blair to get all manner of unpopular measures through these days - for example, a fire station was closed in central London this week, thus putting response times to fires (and therefore lives) in some parts of London in jeopardy. However, we were told the reasons for this are that the Fire Brigade is focusing on anti-terrorism measures due to the "heightened state of security".
LOL...the funny thing is I do. I use Debian for a database server and FreeBSD for my web server farm...
So who built those for you then?
I don't bash the companies who make it possible to do what I need on a daily basis...especially if I can't do it better myself.
How about if those companies make it possible for you to do things BETTER or MORE CHEAPLY? Or without tying you into proprietary standards forever and a day so you are FORCED to continue using their products?
MS's competitors are using you guys to get you against MS so that they can stay in business.
And those competitors to the Microsoft monopoly being... ???
Instead of creating a better product to match MS they have learned to use the media to stir up the world and get all the lemmings to back them up.
Lemming = a pack mammal that just follows along with the rest of its peers demonstrating no independence or freedom of choice.
A bit like Joe Sixpack going to his computer store and buying his PC with Windows pre-installed purely because everyone else has it and uses it?
Look, make your choice, stick with it and just be happy, okay? Linux has to be spread by word of mouth because there's no money to spend on TV ads and full page spreads in magazines.
If you don't want to hear the message then don't listen, it's that simple.
These are people who believe that it is morally wrong to make a computer easy to use
Define "ease of use". Surely "ease of use" comes from experience - I find vi easy to use, I've used it for years and can edit any document quicker using that than anyone else I know can in a GUI editor, whether on Windows or Linux.
If you state that a Windows user will find Linux difficult to use initially, I would probably agree with you.
Once people get used to point-and-click interfaces, and software development that works like a powerpoint drawing, getting them to go back to a CLI and text code development is like talking people into giving up their car for a bicycle.
Absolute dross! A power computer user just uses the best software for the job he/she needs to carry out. Currently I use PowerPoint to create presentations when I need them (until I can find the time to play with OpenOffice a bit more) but I can make computers do things with LINUX shell scripts that you just cannot do on a Windows machine.
I have zero chance of getting my kids to see the world that way.
How about you just present your kids with the options and let them decide?
Either make Linux easier to use
Sorry, it doesn't work like that in the Open Source world. No-one's forcing you to use Linux, it's up to you to make the choice to try it out and to be prepared for an initial steep learning curve. Then, if you like it or care about it, you speak to other people about it - possibly even email Open Source development teams and tell them what you'd like to see changed in their software.
or resign yourselves to having Linux be the dysfunctional OS for the kind of social misfits who brew methane with their own poop to fuel their converted VW bugs.
Oh dear. Didn't you say you had kids? It's just that I'd taken you for an adult up to this point, then out comes the classroom name calling.
Our work laptops were recently upgraded from 800 MHz Pentium III machines running Windows 2000 to Pentium M (1.6 GHz) machines running Windows XP.
My initial thoughts on XP were that it sucked completely due to the amount of eye candy bloat on it. Then I worked out how to get the "Classic" look back, ran TweakUI and a few other tools over it and got it a lot more responsive to the point where it felt like Windows 2000 again.
However, I wanted to make a comparison between XP and 2000 on the same machine so borrowed an MSDN XP disk from work and put it on one of my home machines in place of Windows 2000. Again, I tweaked the bloat out of XP to give it the classic look, apart from that I kept the setup the same as I had on Windows 2000. The result was that XP felt noticeably slower on the machine (a 2Ghz AMD Athlon with 512MB RAM) than Windows 2000 did.
Sure, Linux is my OS of choice but since I "have" to run a Microsoft OS, I'm comfortable with Windows 2000 - for all it's security flaws, it runs okay on the desktop and is pretty stable. I certainly won't be using XP at home full stop.
Incidentally, I compared "like for like" in that I replaced Windows 2000 Professional with Windows XP Professional.
1. Windows 3.x - crap.
2. Windows 95 - okay (for the time anyway).
3. Windows NT 4 - crap.
4. Windows 98 -okay.
5. Windows ME - crap.
6. Windows 2000 - okay.
7. Windows XP - crap.
8. Windows 2003 - okay. (Based on other opinions, never used it personally.)
...every "even numbered" Windows operating system is okay if taken chronologically.
1. Windows 3.x - crap.
2. Windows 95 - okay (for the time anyway).
3. Windows NT 4 - crap.
4. Windows 2000 - okay.
5. Windows XP - crap.
6. Windows 2003 - okay. (Based on other opinions, never used it personally.)
And, no, before anyone asks, Star Trek 10 (Nemesis) was crap so I'll give that oe to that idiot Rick Berman.
There are plenty of people who would pay a premium for a computer that didn't look like an old-fashioned PC.
Yes, those are the same people who have to have mobile phone covers that match what their wearing, that pay huge sums of money for personalised number plates and that have to hide being feeble minded under statements of "brand loyalty".
Those of us with intelligence & individuality recognise a computer for what it is - a tool and an entertainment device.
If it does both with speed, stability and usability, who the hell *cares* what bloody colour it is!
Yes, Lexmark are a bunch on scum-sucking bottom-feeders just like almost every other money-grabbing corporation out there.
But the fact is that any idiot that goes to his local PC store and buys a printer without doing some research first deserves all he/she gets, quite frankly.
In these days of the Internet, there is no excuse for getting ripped off as the number of sites out there reviewing hardware, software, movies, CDs, etc, etc, means that it's quite easy to get good information prior to making any purchase. So if you've bought a printer without researching the prices of cartridges and the quality/prices of third-party cartridges, that's your fault.
The fact is that photo-printing to any reasonable quality is *hugely expensive* on a home use printer & PC combination and it's still much cheaper to drop a CD into a shop or a memory card into a machine and get the photos printed that way. Even much cheaper third party cartridges suffer from quality issues - it really is a case of "you get what you pay for".
No, I'm not justifying Lexmark's price-rigging, I bought one of their printers once and never will again unless their prices for cartridges come down.
But ignorance is no excuse - if the majority of people are too stupid to see beyond the glossy adverts that they are constantly bombarded with, then more fool them.
Agree with you 100% but the reason why these people want morality in games is because of their own lack of parenting skills with their kids - if they didn't use PS2s as babysitters, this wouldn't be an issue.
Kids are like sponges, they will "soak up" absolutely everything around them whether it's computer games, McDonalds adverts, etc. However, good parenting means that kids can get a counterbalance to everything else they're being forced to take in - e.g. having parents who provide a good healthy diet with just the odd occasional "fast food treat".
Games are no different. If parents restrict the amount of time kids play these games and fill that time with talking to them, reading stories, etc. then the kids get "balanced mental diets" that mean they grow up stable individuals quite capable from an early age of distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Unfortunately, it's those idiot parents who throw their kids in front of a games console and leave them there that are the problem - the kids have not enough experiences of reality, become unbalanced, the parents blame the games and the liberals start ranting on about morals.
Add to that an unadventurous, money sucking games industry and is it any surprise that today's games are, on the whole, such turgid dross?
Your knowledge of that fact makes no impact on the points I am making here so it is entirely irrelevant I reveal that information to you in the first place.
So why do I care whether a scientist is Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc? And if the scientist chooses to reveal that irrelevant fact to me, am I not right in having suspicions of an alterior motive in his/her points of view?
My other half was captured by a speed camera allegedly doing 38mph in a 30mph zone. She's never been sure if she was actually speeding but, when she was sent the photograph taken by the camera, the time the photo was supposedly taken was half-an-hour too early. (Fortunately, she was coming home from a doctor's appointment at the time so knew almost the exact time she passed the camera.)
When we raised the question of the calibration of the camera, we were fobbed off with a letter from the police about all cameras being synched to an "atomic clock" and there being no possibility of an inaccuracy.
I then asked for technical information regarding the synching method used but was refused.
I then wrote a final letter stating that we would fight this in a courtroom and would expect proof that the camera was accurate to be demonstrated in front of the judge. I also demanded that prior to the court case, I would require technical information on camera timings so as to prepare a defence case.
The upshot of this was that the case was ultimately dropped.
Erm, if I released a magazine called "Huge Breasts" but the content of the magazine was filled entirely with articles and pictures on model aircaft making, the title of my magazine would be deemed misleading.
So if the CSM is not Christian orientated, why have the word in the title?
Slashdot Mirror
What the author fails to realise completely is that the vast majority of home Windows users that use MS Office do so because they can use it freely - either because they know someone with MSDN CDs or have access to pirated versions. After all, let's face it, very few Joe Sixpack users are going to go buy a software application that costs almost as much as their PC does, in many cases.
Whether we like it or not, MS Office is the de facto standard for Windows desktop use & the only time that is likely to change is if Linux displaces Windows from the desktop or if MS Office becomes much more protected from copying.
What the author should have done was a report on compatibility between MS Office and OpenOffice documents and maybe a comparison of how similar actions can be achieved in both packages.
OpenOffice is a more than adequate package for most users but if Joe Sixpack can still get MS Office for free, can run it relatively speedily & doesn't have to go through a large learning curve to migrate to OpenOffice, it will not displace MS Office whatsoever.
You don't suppose it's RMS himself, do you??
We're gonna *TAKE DOWN* those vi fanboys!
No, but they're a whole bunch of t*ts, tw*ts & a**holes anyway so I guess it's easy to make the mistake.
I have no problem with people wanting to download individual songs electronically for iPods if that's what they want but it's not for me.
I have a 256MB unbranded MP3 player that I use at the gym to blast out some decent rock music to workout to and cover up the pop crap they play over the speakers, it holds about 90 minutes of music and does me fine.
Apart from the occasional self-burnt compilation for the car, everything about my music enjoyment is whole albums, not individual tracks. I'm a rock/metal/blues fan myself which I think has a lot to do with it, I'm more likely to play all of Led Zeppelin 4 than just Stairway To Heaven for example.
Added to that, I just can't bring myself to *pay* to download what is essentially just a file on my computer. I don't pirate music or software but I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've paid for and downloaded registered software online - I use Open Source mostly now anyway and I find it difficult to hand over money without getting something back that's not "tangible".
So good luck to those who do like downloadable music but for me, nothing beats the thrill of finding something interesting in the racks of a music store, particularly if it's cheap!
And as I kiss your rosy lips My server checks my email And as I lay down by your side My syslog's piped to tail.
They're not generally females in the 20-40 age range are they?
They don't by chance, ask you to come round to their houses at certain times, do they?
When you get there, there's not a whole bunch of happy kids sat around a table and a big iced cake?
You're not, by chance, asked to put on a big red nose, a pair of big shoes and make animals from balloons, are you?
Just wondered - sounds like you'd be good at it.
I can make directories & sub-directories, I can create links to them however I like, I can "find" files in those directories and I can "grep" what's in them...
This means the governments don't actually have to implement proper security measures themselves, they can just create an "appearance" of doing so, like at airports.
I'm in the UK, not the US, but "heightened state of security" is an excuse used by El Presidente Blair to get all manner of unpopular measures through these days - for example, a fire station was closed in central London this week, thus putting response times to fires (and therefore lives) in some parts of London in jeopardy. However, we were told the reasons for this are that the Fire Brigade is focusing on anti-terrorism measures due to the "heightened state of security".
...just nuke the site from orbit.
So who built those for you then?
I don't bash the companies who make it possible to do what I need on a daily basis...especially if I can't do it better myself.
How about if those companies make it possible for you to do things BETTER or MORE CHEAPLY? Or without tying you into proprietary standards forever and a day so you are FORCED to continue using their products?
MS's competitors are using you guys to get you against MS so that they can stay in business.
And those competitors to the Microsoft monopoly being... ???
Instead of creating a better product to match MS they have learned to use the media to stir up the world and get all the lemmings to back them up.
Lemming = a pack mammal that just follows along with the rest of its peers demonstrating no independence or freedom of choice.
A bit like Joe Sixpack going to his computer store and buying his PC with Windows pre-installed purely because everyone else has it and uses it?
Look, make your choice, stick with it and just be happy, okay? Linux has to be spread by word of mouth because there's no money to spend on TV ads and full page spreads in magazines.
If you don't want to hear the message then don't listen, it's that simple.
Define "ease of use". Surely "ease of use" comes from experience - I find vi easy to use, I've used it for years and can edit any document quicker using that than anyone else I know can in a GUI editor, whether on Windows or Linux.
If you state that a Windows user will find Linux difficult to use initially, I would probably agree with you.
Once people get used to point-and-click interfaces, and software development that works like a powerpoint drawing, getting them to go back to a CLI and text code development is like talking people into giving up their car for a bicycle.
Absolute dross! A power computer user just uses the best software for the job he/she needs to carry out. Currently I use PowerPoint to create presentations when I need them (until I can find the time to play with OpenOffice a bit more) but I can make computers do things with LINUX shell scripts that you just cannot do on a Windows machine.
I have zero chance of getting my kids to see the world that way.
How about you just present your kids with the options and let them decide?
Either make Linux easier to use
Sorry, it doesn't work like that in the Open Source world. No-one's forcing you to use Linux, it's up to you to make the choice to try it out and to be prepared for an initial steep learning curve. Then, if you like it or care about it, you speak to other people about it - possibly even email Open Source development teams and tell them what you'd like to see changed in their software.
or resign yourselves to having Linux be the dysfunctional OS for the kind of social misfits who brew methane with their own poop to fuel their converted VW bugs.
Oh dear. Didn't you say you had kids? It's just that I'd taken you for an adult up to this point, then out comes the classroom name calling.
Oh well, suit yourself...
My initial thoughts on XP were that it sucked completely due to the amount of eye candy bloat on it. Then I worked out how to get the "Classic" look back, ran TweakUI and a few other tools over it and got it a lot more responsive to the point where it felt like Windows 2000 again.
However, I wanted to make a comparison between XP and 2000 on the same machine so borrowed an MSDN XP disk from work and put it on one of my home machines in place of Windows 2000. Again, I tweaked the bloat out of XP to give it the classic look, apart from that I kept the setup the same as I had on Windows 2000. The result was that XP felt noticeably slower on the machine (a 2Ghz AMD Athlon with 512MB RAM) than Windows 2000 did.
Sure, Linux is my OS of choice but since I "have" to run a Microsoft OS, I'm comfortable with Windows 2000 - for all it's security flaws, it runs okay on the desktop and is pretty stable. I certainly won't be using XP at home full stop.
Incidentally, I compared "like for like" in that I replaced Windows 2000 Professional with Windows XP Professional.
1. Windows 3.x - crap.
2. Windows 95 - okay (for the time anyway).
3. Windows NT 4 - crap.
4. Windows 98 -okay.
5. Windows ME - crap.
6. Windows 2000 - okay.
7. Windows XP - crap.
8. Windows 2003 - okay. (Based on other opinions, never used it personally.)
1. Windows 3.x - crap.
2. Windows 95 - okay (for the time anyway).
3. Windows NT 4 - crap.
4. Windows 2000 - okay.
5. Windows XP - crap.
6. Windows 2003 - okay. (Based on other opinions, never used it personally.)
And, no, before anyone asks, Star Trek 10 (Nemesis) was crap so I'll give that oe to that idiot Rick Berman.
Yes, those are the same people who have to have mobile phone covers that match what their wearing, that pay huge sums of money for personalised number plates and that have to hide being feeble minded under statements of "brand loyalty".
Those of us with intelligence & individuality recognise a computer for what it is - a tool and an entertainment device.
If it does both with speed, stability and usability, who the hell *cares* what bloody colour it is!
But the fact is that any idiot that goes to his local PC store and buys a printer without doing some research first deserves all he/she gets, quite frankly.
In these days of the Internet, there is no excuse for getting ripped off as the number of sites out there reviewing hardware, software, movies, CDs, etc, etc, means that it's quite easy to get good information prior to making any purchase. So if you've bought a printer without researching the prices of cartridges and the quality/prices of third-party cartridges, that's your fault.
The fact is that photo-printing to any reasonable quality is *hugely expensive* on a home use printer & PC combination and it's still much cheaper to drop a CD into a shop or a memory card into a machine and get the photos printed that way. Even much cheaper third party cartridges suffer from quality issues - it really is a case of "you get what you pay for".
No, I'm not justifying Lexmark's price-rigging, I bought one of their printers once and never will again unless their prices for cartridges come down.
But ignorance is no excuse - if the majority of people are too stupid to see beyond the glossy adverts that they are constantly bombarded with, then more fool them.
Kids are like sponges, they will "soak up" absolutely everything around them whether it's computer games, McDonalds adverts, etc. However, good parenting means that kids can get a counterbalance to everything else they're being forced to take in - e.g. having parents who provide a good healthy diet with just the odd occasional "fast food treat".
Games are no different. If parents restrict the amount of time kids play these games and fill that time with talking to them, reading stories, etc. then the kids get "balanced mental diets" that mean they grow up stable individuals quite capable from an early age of distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Unfortunately, it's those idiot parents who throw their kids in front of a games console and leave them there that are the problem - the kids have not enough experiences of reality, become unbalanced, the parents blame the games and the liberals start ranting on about morals.
Add to that an unadventurous, money sucking games industry and is it any surprise that today's games are, on the whole, such turgid dross?
I was born a Roman Catholic.
Your knowledge of that fact makes no impact on the points I am making here so it is entirely irrelevant I reveal that information to you in the first place.
So why do I care whether a scientist is Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc? And if the scientist chooses to reveal that irrelevant fact to me, am I not right in having suspicions of an alterior motive in his/her points of view?
When we raised the question of the calibration of the camera, we were fobbed off with a letter from the police about all cameras being synched to an "atomic clock" and there being no possibility of an inaccuracy.
I then asked for technical information regarding the synching method used but was refused.
I then wrote a final letter stating that we would fight this in a courtroom and would expect proof that the camera was accurate to be demonstrated in front of the judge. I also demanded that prior to the court case, I would require technical information on camera timings so as to prepare a defence case.
The upshot of this was that the case was ultimately dropped.
So if the CSM is not Christian orientated, why have the word in the title?
People who need Ten Commandments when the rest of us can cover them all with "Be nice to everyone else".
So how about we commission Electronic Arts to write a report on falling church attendances or get John Carmack to do a blog on teenage preganancies?