Hands up all you home users using MS Office... yep, millions of you.
Now hands up all you home users using MS Office that have legally purchased a copy rather than copying it from work or downloading a torrent... anyone?
when microsoft makes open source moves it's a trap
Microsoft doesn't do Open Source, it does Shared Source. To laymen, that means you can look at some of it but if you change any of it, it spends three months festering in Ballmer's underpants before approval gets signed in triplicate and you get a letter basically requesting you to empty the entire contents of your bank account into the Microsoft Money Pit before the fat sweaty bald man gets his "Yes" rubber stamp out.
In my home office I have four desktop PCs - two run XP and two run Linux.
Up to two weeks ago, the XP machines had Athlon 64 CPUs in them whilst the Linux machines had Athlon XP CPUs in them.
Two weeks ago, I bought two new (cheap) Intel Dual Core motherboards to put in the XP machines to get a little more power for gaming. So I put the Intel motherboards in the XP machines and moved the Athlon 64s to the Linux machines.
After migration, the Linux machines booted absolutely fine - a ten minute kernel recompile on both machines, job done.
On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing.
I've decided that I'm going to change the Linux PCs to run 64-bit Linux. I use Gentoo Linux so I accept I'm probably going to need to do a reinstall using a 64-bit bootdisk and I suspect there will be some headaches getting everything to compile properly as 64-bit Gentoo is a bit less mature than 32-bit Gentoo. But I'll copy off all the config files in home directories and/etc, rebuild and copy all the stuff back and most of it should pretty much work as before. Plus I can build one machine, get it running okay, then just copy everything over to the other and do another simple kernel recompile because the two AMD 64 motherboards are different.
With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.
Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.
So presumably you have all but forgot about the initial learning curve that you underwent to become productive on Windows in the first place then? Or are they bio-engineering embryos these days with an ability to write Word macros the moment they emerge from the womb?
I'm not trying to be pedantic here but let me reverse your argument. I cut my programming teeth writng assembly on Z80 CPUs, then some BASIC and AREXX programming on the Commodore Amiga and gravitated to shell-programming, PERL and a little C on UNIX and then Linux. I'm happy using the shell and churn out (in my opinion) some pretty neat stuff.
I've never programmed in Visual Basic or Dotnet. So what kind of learning curve would I need to go through to learn about how to program using Windows as an environment?
Your argument works both ways and leads to the same conclusion - if you don't want to put in extra effort, then don't change in the first place.
I've actually met people who are suspicious of Macs. They're too easy. They're too reliable. They're not like other (i.e. Windows) computers. There has to be a catch, somewhere. Us Mac fans just say this is how computers are supposed to work, and it's Windows that has it wrong.
How about those of us who just don't plain want a Mac?
I don't want to pay a premium price for a hardware/software platform that is as locked down as an Apple is and where a sizeable proportion of the money I pay goes into making it "just look nice". I can tweak XP pretty heavily and ditch all the Microsoft-included apps with the FOSS ones I prefer using and it really doesn't bother me that every piece of software doesn't look the same - as long as it's logical and works, I can learn how to use it.
With Linux, I can pretty much "wipe the drawing board" and design my OS environment pretty much how I want it so it's tailored to the way I work, not the other way round.
If you like OS X then great - knock yourself out.
But I've never owned an Apple computer and really cannot ever see a reason to buy one.
I wish you Apple people would learn about that word called "perspective".
Okay, let's have a reasoned logical argument about where OS X is going - you from the point of (I suspect) an OS X user and me, someone who uses mostly Linux, a bit of XP (and quite likes it) and has never yet found the need to ever own an Apple product.
Yes, Apple is gaining market share and over here in the UK, even I have seen a new Apple store open in my local shopping centre. But here in the UK, and I suspect in the rest of Europe, for desktops Apple is still pretty much in third place - behind Windows and Linux. Yes, that may change in the future but the fact is I see a lot more people using Ubuntu than I do OS X, the main reason being that here Apple machines are not the equivalent in pounds or euros that they are in dollars in the US - invariably a lot more expensive here.
In the USA, the demographic is different and I'll accept that over there Apple's share probably puts them in second place, maybe as high as 12% with Linux in third place.
So, having established that as a premise, then where are the new Apple users coming from?
In the first instance, they're coming from the Windows user base. Whether or not Vista is actually a great OS or a piece of crap, the fact is that it has had a really bad press in the eyes of most people. On top of that, it's a lot more expensive than XP was (if you're a home user who wants all the features in the Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called) and it's just not that easy any more to copy a disk at work of all the Microsoft software you want. Therefore, you have to buy Microsoft software now which means that the price difference between buying a PC with Windows and an Apple with OS X is closing.
Secondly, there's the "cool" factor of Apple. Personally, I completely fail to understand why a "tool" that is a computer has to be "cool" but I won't deny that some people are that way inclined.
And finally, who uses Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop? Well, for starters, if you're going to pigeon-hole everyone, then write the three down as "OS X------Windows------Linux".
In other words, OS X is a diametrically opposite alternative to Linux. Some people don't want to use Windows and have no interest in understanding about how a computer and software work, they want to get jobs done and entertain themselves, they don't mind paying a premium price and so they gravitate to an Apple.
Other people want more power and control over their computers, they don't mind steep learning curves and tinkering with their machines, so they gravitate to Linux. They may also not want to (or be able to) pay for software and brand new hardware so they too will take the Linux path. Yes, some may try out Ubuntu, find it to be too hard to work with and maybe go back to Windows or even buy an Apple.
So what I'm trying to say is that you should not make any direct comparisons between OS X and Linux because they are complete opposites. OS X users generally see Linux as "primitive" and like the eye-candy and GUI an Apple gives them, whereas Linux users see OS X as a locked down operating system that can only run on very specific machines and cannot be "tailored" to run as a desktop, server or however they want on whatever they want.
As I said at the start, I've never found any reason to buy an Apple computer. Any OS I touch (whether Windows, BSD or Linux) I tweak and streamline to ditch all they eye-candy and just get "maximum bucks for CPU cycles" so any machine where that ability is locked away from me just doesn't interest me.
So please stop hailing OS X as "The Great White Hope" of operating systems because it isn't, just like Linux isn't. The two of them are "alternatives" to not having to be entirely reliant (or ever reliant) on Windows. And bearing in mind that I personally do everything from playing games & media, writing documents and spreadsheets, a little photo-editing, some shell and Perl programming, supporting Linux servers at work and for some private clients, OS X just doesn't get a look in and probably never will do.
Yes, some people like OS X and good luck to them - but at least an equal number of people don't give it a second thought.
In a nutshell, it's a case of "dog eat dog" when it comes to security and getting things into perspective a little.
Most "crackers" are nothing more than teenage script-kiddies who have little knowledge of how to break into a computer system. They download a script from somewhere on the Internet, let it run and when it "hooks a fish", they get a hard-on and have a look at what they'e caught.
If they catch you with your encrypted files, they'll give up and go find someone else with files that aren't encrypted because it's easier in the short term - therefore the encryption you've used has worked as a deterrent.
The serious crackers who do know what they're doing are probably not going to be that interested in you personally unless you work for a company they're trying to target or maybe have some important financial information they can use.
So the trick is to always think of security as "layered" - anything you can do to put a barrier in the way of someone you don't want getting to your information is good security; whether it's encryption or just making sure your device never leaves your sight.
Bad security is only using one single security barrier, thinking you are "secure" rather than constantly looking at ways to be "more secure" and (TAKE NOTE MANY OF YOU HIGHLY PAID SECURITY CONSULTANTS AND IT MANAGERS READING THIS!) making stuff SO secure that the people who DO need to get to that information have a real problem doing so.
Quite probably but then, unlike Google, I've never heard of them.
I really do not understand you people who are negative about stuff Google do.
No, I'm not a fanboi of Google (or anyone else0 but the fact is if I paid good money for a piece of commercial software that didn't "do what it said on the tin", then I'd have a right to be pretty pissed off about it.
But if Google (or anyone else)does something for free, as they tend to do with lots of other stuff, what's the worst that can happen? You spend five minutes of your time trying it out but don't like it - so what's the problem?
Your response just serves to tell me that you don't understand what CAN be done in a shell environment.
No, I'm not a GUI-hating bearded sandal wearer, there is obviously an advantage on some occasions to using a desktop environment and a mouse - but the fact is that it's perfectly possible to spend five or ten minutes knocking together a simple script that can provide a level of automation that is impossible with GUI tools.
You can sit there and mock someone who might use, say, a text browser in a shell but when you then use the power of tools like sed, awk, grep, even a bit of Perl, when applied to a text dump of a web page to pick out the bits you need, you start to appreciate what you can do in a shell.
I use Windows XP, Linux and other UNIXes and recognise that all of them have something to contribute to what I need to achieve at work, home or for friends and family on computers. To me, they're all parts of a toolbox and the more tools I have, the more jobs I can do with them.
If GUIs do what you need to then fine, knock yourself out. But if you don't recognise what can be done at a shell prompt, then you've probably never used one that much and probably aren't in a position to comment.
Why would you not just use prioritisation for VoIP packets? I've a (non-Cisco) remote VoIP hardphone on the desk in my home office over a BT ADSL link.
I do use BitTorrent & NNTP but notice no degradation of service when those are on when I make VoIP calls - and I've only got a 3MB/s ADSL connection to boot.
I suspect you're having to do all the fancy stuff with Snort because your VoIP hardware isn't that good - Cisco again no doubt?
B) IE (and even Firefox) are not fully standards compliant, whereas WebKit is mostly compliant
Please stop manipulating words. Firefox 2 is mostly standards compliant, Firefox 3 Beta passes the Acid2 Test. This makes it at least on a par with WebKit (never used it) or better.
But Mac OS X is supposedly designed so even the most inexperienced person can use it.
So why wouldn't an inexperienced Apple user possibly run these files in the same way inexperienced Windows users are responsible for the spread of most viruses by opening dangerous email attachments?
The fact that "dangerous" files are there in the first place is a major problem - after all, don't all the Apple users on here constantly remind us that OS X is designed to be used by anyone, even newbies? So what's the guarantee those same newbies don't run files indiscriminately?
Another reason why people don't use Linux is lack of third party driver support.
I liked your argument until you made this statement.
Corporate IT people keep the makes and models of user desktops and laptops to a minimum. This means that they can roll out Windows PCs quickly and just using one of a handful of build images if they need to rollout a new machine or rebuild an existing one.
Yes, drivers under Linux can still be a problem - but with diligent hardware selection, that problem goes away.
So it still comes down to the fact that if you keep to a fixed but supported subset of hardware, Linux is as easy (or with a modular kernel easier) to get hardware working as it is under Windows.
You just need to spend a little more time researching what hardware works well first...
I disagree with the "dollar-store cheap-crap" statement that's aimed at PCs.
After all, a Mac is an x86-based platform that happens to be a conglomeration of selected hardware that happens to run well under OS X - that's no different to a knowledgable PC user choosing the right hardware combination that runs well under Windows or Linux.
Macs and "cheap-crap" pre-built PCs are all aimed at the people who, rightly or wrongly, don't want to spend the time building systems from components. Yes, I'm sure the quality of Mac hardware is much better than a £250 PC - but then £250 of the cost of a Mac is due to it being packaged into a pretty looking box.
To be honest, the "last straw" for me was not discovering that there's an incompatibility with the latest ATI drivers and the latest 2.6.25 Linux kernel.
Sure, maybe give ATI some more time to fix the problem - but then again, my old nVidia 6200 board has had better frame rates under Linux than my newer ATI X1950 Pro board (when the ATI drivers don't crash my X-Server) for over a year now - so I'm not holding my breath for ATI to fix anything soon.
Yes, the free ATI drivers work okay for 2D and desktop but I've never done much else with them because I'd always read that they couldn't do a lot with 3D - maybe I'm wrong...
But at the same time, the nVidia card in Linux just works - installing the nVidia drivers is never a problem, the kernel version never seems to be that much of an issue and one or two occasional changes in xorg.conf is no biggie.
Nope, it's "bye bye ATI" for me - they're being swapped out for nVidia 7600GT boards now and the ATIs can go on eBay.
I think that dual booting does give people time to adjust to Linux, secure in the knowledge that if they need to do something quickly while they figure out Linux, they can boot Windows and just do what they need to.
But otherwise I agree with you - just being bloody-minded about it and forcing yourself to ***MAKE IT WORK*** under Linux is a great learning curve if nothing else.
From my perspective, I'm going off the whole PC games scene anyway. I'm in my 40s, been an avid gamer for 20+ years and, as such, I've a heap of classic favourite games that I keep going back to like Doom, Quake and Civilization anyway - so with the exception of Half-Life 2 and Galactic Civilizations 2 expansions, I just don't buy any other PC games any more.
Most of the old stuff runs happily in Linux so I'm happy also - though I fully accept that modern games are a reason some gamers will probably never try Linux.
You do know you can "sudo -i" and it's just like "su"?
No, I did not - but then I've not used Ubuntu that much.
Please don't misunderstand me - Ubuntu is an excellent distro for people who want easy installation and familiarity, it's done a fantastic job getting people into Linux and long may it continue to do so. And the way it does things with protecting root-level privileges from people who could unknowingly do some damage to their systems due to lack of experience is well thought out.
But me, I just prefer going into a root shell when I need to and I'd rather suffer the occasional pain of compiling everything properly from source rather than using binaries.
It's just preference, neither way is right or wrong.
You're joking right? It took me a few months to finally figure out how to get a RAID card in my debian box to work (Had to recompile the kernel with support for that card).
This is kind of like saying "I've driven a car with an automatic gearbox all my life so had real problems when I had to drive one with a manual gearbox".
One again, like lots of other Slashdot people, you've made the incorrect assumption that one morning you are going to wake up and there is an "all singing all dancing" Linux distribution CD in a nice envelope in your letterbox that is going to be just like Windows and runs all your hardware 100%. Forget it.
Linux is about "community". No, not the hippy "peace & love" crap, it's about people putting stuff into it to get stuff out of it. And you need to care about it so when something goes wrong, or doesn't work the way you want it to, then you tell the right person what you've discovered and then see if they can make it better. But absolutely nothing will happen if you sit there with you arms folded and do nothing.
Sorry, but anyone who takes months to figure out a RAID problem shouldn't be using Linux. Just about any Linux problem you have can be found on Google and most of the time you can get a solution. Plus there are "step-by-step" instructions on how to compile a kernel on numerous web pages. Plus many thousands of Linux people in newsgroups and chat boards who will help you out if you take the time to explain what your problem is. If you're prepared to pur some effort in to find those resources, you will get the rewards as a result.
Fine, you like your MacBook Pro and good luck to you. But please don't talk about hardware and drivers on Linux and compare it to a Mac - the fact is that Apple machines use a very tiny subset of all the x86 hardware that's out there which makes it a relatively easy task for Apple to develop and test drivers on that hardware before putting into OS X.
However, the expectation of most Windows and Linux users is that they should be able to get just about any hardware they want running on either OS and, in reality, that's sometimes not possible to do with such a huge range of hardware.
And if that's not the case, let me finish by asking one question:
If you were prepared to spend money on a piece of hardware (MacBook Pro) that is designed specifically to run OS X well, why did you not use equal diligence in choosing hardware that (with some research) would work well under Ubuntu?
Yes, it would make it easier - but would the game companies actually do it?
After all, most of them have been creating games in DirectX for 95% of the world's PCs for years - would they really go to the trouble of changing to OpenGL just to get a few more PCs and piss Microsoft off?
I don't like it any more than you do - but I'm being the pragmatist here!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Now hands up all you home users using MS Office that have legally purchased a copy rather than copying it from work or downloading a torrent... anyone?
I rest my case.
You've just passed your GCSEs. That makes you around 16 years old.
So step away from the computer, go out and get drunk and laid.
And when you can perch your keyboard on your belly, come back to Slashdot then.
But please don't tell anyone else, okay?
Ditch the "P" and reverse the name so Microsoft "Windows XP" becomes Microsoft "X Windows"...
I think I just felt a great disturbance in The Force...
Microsoft doesn't do Open Source, it does Shared Source. To laymen, that means you can look at some of it but if you change any of it, it spends three months festering in Ballmer's underpants before approval gets signed in triplicate and you get a letter basically requesting you to empty the entire contents of your bank account into the Microsoft Money Pit before the fat sweaty bald man gets his "Yes" rubber stamp out.
Up to two weeks ago, the XP machines had Athlon 64 CPUs in them whilst the Linux machines had Athlon XP CPUs in them.
Two weeks ago, I bought two new (cheap) Intel Dual Core motherboards to put in the XP machines to get a little more power for gaming. So I put the Intel motherboards in the XP machines and moved the Athlon 64s to the Linux machines.
After migration, the Linux machines booted absolutely fine - a ten minute kernel recompile on both machines, job done.
On the XP machines, they wouldn't boot the original XP installations, they blue-screened. I had to reinstall Windows on both and, even though both of my XP licenses are entirely legitimate, I had to ring Microsoft to get different license keys. It took me the best part of a day to reinstall Windows and longer to reinstall all the other games and apps that now wouldn't work because of registry bits missing.
I've decided that I'm going to change the Linux PCs to run 64-bit Linux. I use Gentoo Linux so I accept I'm probably going to need to do a reinstall using a 64-bit bootdisk and I suspect there will be some headaches getting everything to compile properly as 64-bit Gentoo is a bit less mature than 32-bit Gentoo. But I'll copy off all the config files in home directories and /etc, rebuild and copy all the stuff back and most of it should pretty much work as before. Plus I can build one machine, get it running okay, then just copy everything over to the other and do another simple kernel recompile because the two AMD 64 motherboards are different.
With Windows, I have to buy two new 64-bit XP licenses or, if I completely lose my sanity, by two Vista licenses. Yes, maybe the included migration tool will do a lot of the hard work for me but ultimately it's another two rebuilds, no chance of just rebuilding one and copying across.
Oh, and BTW, using all of 4 gigs of ram is simply about how much memory a 32-bit environment can address - 64-bit Linux can address and use 4 gigs of RAM equally as well as (64-bit) Vista.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here but let me reverse your argument. I cut my programming teeth writng assembly on Z80 CPUs, then some BASIC and AREXX programming on the Commodore Amiga and gravitated to shell-programming, PERL and a little C on UNIX and then Linux. I'm happy using the shell and churn out (in my opinion) some pretty neat stuff.
I've never programmed in Visual Basic or Dotnet. So what kind of learning curve would I need to go through to learn about how to program using Windows as an environment?
Your argument works both ways and leads to the same conclusion - if you don't want to put in extra effort, then don't change in the first place.
How about those of us who just don't plain want a Mac?
I don't want to pay a premium price for a hardware/software platform that is as locked down as an Apple is and where a sizeable proportion of the money I pay goes into making it "just look nice". I can tweak XP pretty heavily and ditch all the Microsoft-included apps with the FOSS ones I prefer using and it really doesn't bother me that every piece of software doesn't look the same - as long as it's logical and works, I can learn how to use it.
With Linux, I can pretty much "wipe the drawing board" and design my OS environment pretty much how I want it so it's tailored to the way I work, not the other way round.
If you like OS X then great - knock yourself out.
But I've never owned an Apple computer and really cannot ever see a reason to buy one.
Okay, let's have a reasoned logical argument about where OS X is going - you from the point of (I suspect) an OS X user and me, someone who uses mostly Linux, a bit of XP (and quite likes it) and has never yet found the need to ever own an Apple product.
Yes, Apple is gaining market share and over here in the UK, even I have seen a new Apple store open in my local shopping centre. But here in the UK, and I suspect in the rest of Europe, for desktops Apple is still pretty much in third place - behind Windows and Linux. Yes, that may change in the future but the fact is I see a lot more people using Ubuntu than I do OS X, the main reason being that here Apple machines are not the equivalent in pounds or euros that they are in dollars in the US - invariably a lot more expensive here.
In the USA, the demographic is different and I'll accept that over there Apple's share probably puts them in second place, maybe as high as 12% with Linux in third place.
So, having established that as a premise, then where are the new Apple users coming from?
In the first instance, they're coming from the Windows user base. Whether or not Vista is actually a great OS or a piece of crap, the fact is that it has had a really bad press in the eyes of most people. On top of that, it's a lot more expensive than XP was (if you're a home user who wants all the features in the Ultimate Edition or whatever it's called) and it's just not that easy any more to copy a disk at work of all the Microsoft software you want. Therefore, you have to buy Microsoft software now which means that the price difference between buying a PC with Windows and an Apple with OS X is closing.
Secondly, there's the "cool" factor of Apple. Personally, I completely fail to understand why a "tool" that is a computer has to be "cool" but I won't deny that some people are that way inclined.
And finally, who uses Windows, OS X and Linux on the desktop? Well, for starters, if you're going to pigeon-hole everyone, then write the three down as "OS X------Windows------Linux".
In other words, OS X is a diametrically opposite alternative to Linux. Some people don't want to use Windows and have no interest in understanding about how a computer and software work, they want to get jobs done and entertain themselves, they don't mind paying a premium price and so they gravitate to an Apple.
Other people want more power and control over their computers, they don't mind steep learning curves and tinkering with their machines, so they gravitate to Linux. They may also not want to (or be able to) pay for software and brand new hardware so they too will take the Linux path. Yes, some may try out Ubuntu, find it to be too hard to work with and maybe go back to Windows or even buy an Apple.
So what I'm trying to say is that you should not make any direct comparisons between OS X and Linux because they are complete opposites. OS X users generally see Linux as "primitive" and like the eye-candy and GUI an Apple gives them, whereas Linux users see OS X as a locked down operating system that can only run on very specific machines and cannot be "tailored" to run as a desktop, server or however they want on whatever they want.
As I said at the start, I've never found any reason to buy an Apple computer. Any OS I touch (whether Windows, BSD or Linux) I tweak and streamline to ditch all they eye-candy and just get "maximum bucks for CPU cycles" so any machine where that ability is locked away from me just doesn't interest me.
So please stop hailing OS X as "The Great White Hope" of operating systems because it isn't, just like Linux isn't. The two of them are "alternatives" to not having to be entirely reliant (or ever reliant) on Windows. And bearing in mind that I personally do everything from playing games & media, writing documents and spreadsheets, a little photo-editing, some shell and Perl programming, supporting Linux servers at work and for some private clients, OS X just doesn't get a look in and probably never will do.
Yes, some people like OS X and good luck to them - but at least an equal number of people don't give it a second thought.
After all, she did this morning when she found "Ghostly Ring Found Circling Bath Tub".
Most "crackers" are nothing more than teenage script-kiddies who have little knowledge of how to break into a computer system. They download a script from somewhere on the Internet, let it run and when it "hooks a fish", they get a hard-on and have a look at what they'e caught.
If they catch you with your encrypted files, they'll give up and go find someone else with files that aren't encrypted because it's easier in the short term - therefore the encryption you've used has worked as a deterrent.
The serious crackers who do know what they're doing are probably not going to be that interested in you personally unless you work for a company they're trying to target or maybe have some important financial information they can use.
So the trick is to always think of security as "layered" - anything you can do to put a barrier in the way of someone you don't want getting to your information is good security; whether it's encryption or just making sure your device never leaves your sight.
Bad security is only using one single security barrier, thinking you are "secure" rather than constantly looking at ways to be "more secure" and (TAKE NOTE MANY OF YOU HIGHLY PAID SECURITY CONSULTANTS AND IT MANAGERS READING THIS!) making stuff SO secure that the people who DO need to get to that information have a real problem doing so.
I really do not understand you people who are negative about stuff Google do.
No, I'm not a fanboi of Google (or anyone else0 but the fact is if I paid good money for a piece of commercial software that didn't "do what it said on the tin", then I'd have a right to be pretty pissed off about it.
But if Google (or anyone else)does something for free, as they tend to do with lots of other stuff, what's the worst that can happen? You spend five minutes of your time trying it out but don't like it - so what's the problem?
No, I'm not a GUI-hating bearded sandal wearer, there is obviously an advantage on some occasions to using a desktop environment and a mouse - but the fact is that it's perfectly possible to spend five or ten minutes knocking together a simple script that can provide a level of automation that is impossible with GUI tools.
You can sit there and mock someone who might use, say, a text browser in a shell but when you then use the power of tools like sed, awk, grep, even a bit of Perl, when applied to a text dump of a web page to pick out the bits you need, you start to appreciate what you can do in a shell.
I use Windows XP, Linux and other UNIXes and recognise that all of them have something to contribute to what I need to achieve at work, home or for friends and family on computers. To me, they're all parts of a toolbox and the more tools I have, the more jobs I can do with them.
If GUIs do what you need to then fine, knock yourself out. But if you don't recognise what can be done at a shell prompt, then you've probably never used one that much and probably aren't in a position to comment.
I do use BitTorrent & NNTP but notice no degradation of service when those are on when I make VoIP calls - and I've only got a 3MB/s ADSL connection to boot.
I suspect you're having to do all the fancy stuff with Snort because your VoIP hardware isn't that good - Cisco again no doubt?
Please stop manipulating words. Firefox 2 is mostly standards compliant, Firefox 3 Beta passes the Acid2 Test. This makes it at least on a par with WebKit (never used it) or better.
So why wouldn't an inexperienced Apple user possibly run these files in the same way inexperienced Windows users are responsible for the spread of most viruses by opening dangerous email attachments?
The fact that "dangerous" files are there in the first place is a major problem - after all, don't all the Apple users on here constantly remind us that OS X is designed to be used by anyone, even newbies? So what's the guarantee those same newbies don't run files indiscriminately?
It's already been done - just look in the popular music charts.
I liked your argument until you made this statement.
Corporate IT people keep the makes and models of user desktops and laptops to a minimum. This means that they can roll out Windows PCs quickly and just using one of a handful of build images if they need to rollout a new machine or rebuild an existing one.
Yes, drivers under Linux can still be a problem - but with diligent hardware selection, that problem goes away.
So it still comes down to the fact that if you keep to a fixed but supported subset of hardware, Linux is as easy (or with a modular kernel easier) to get hardware working as it is under Windows.
You just need to spend a little more time researching what hardware works well first...
After all, a Mac is an x86-based platform that happens to be a conglomeration of selected hardware that happens to run well under OS X - that's no different to a knowledgable PC user choosing the right hardware combination that runs well under Windows or Linux.
Macs and "cheap-crap" pre-built PCs are all aimed at the people who, rightly or wrongly, don't want to spend the time building systems from components. Yes, I'm sure the quality of Mac hardware is much better than a £250 PC - but then £250 of the cost of a Mac is due to it being packaged into a pretty looking box.
Sure, maybe give ATI some more time to fix the problem - but then again, my old nVidia 6200 board has had better frame rates under Linux than my newer ATI X1950 Pro board (when the ATI drivers don't crash my X-Server) for over a year now - so I'm not holding my breath for ATI to fix anything soon.
Yes, the free ATI drivers work okay for 2D and desktop but I've never done much else with them because I'd always read that they couldn't do a lot with 3D - maybe I'm wrong...
But at the same time, the nVidia card in Linux just works - installing the nVidia drivers is never a problem, the kernel version never seems to be that much of an issue and one or two occasional changes in xorg.conf is no biggie.
Nope, it's "bye bye ATI" for me - they're being swapped out for nVidia 7600GT boards now and the ATIs can go on eBay.
But otherwise I agree with you - just being bloody-minded about it and forcing yourself to ***MAKE IT WORK*** under Linux is a great learning curve if nothing else.
From my perspective, I'm going off the whole PC games scene anyway. I'm in my 40s, been an avid gamer for 20+ years and, as such, I've a heap of classic favourite games that I keep going back to like Doom, Quake and Civilization anyway - so with the exception of Half-Life 2 and Galactic Civilizations 2 expansions, I just don't buy any other PC games any more.
Most of the old stuff runs happily in Linux so I'm happy also - though I fully accept that modern games are a reason some gamers will probably never try Linux.
No, I did not - but then I've not used Ubuntu that much.
Please don't misunderstand me - Ubuntu is an excellent distro for people who want easy installation and familiarity, it's done a fantastic job getting people into Linux and long may it continue to do so. And the way it does things with protecting root-level privileges from people who could unknowingly do some damage to their systems due to lack of experience is well thought out.
But me, I just prefer going into a root shell when I need to and I'd rather suffer the occasional pain of compiling everything properly from source rather than using binaries.
It's just preference, neither way is right or wrong.
This is kind of like saying "I've driven a car with an automatic gearbox all my life so had real problems when I had to drive one with a manual gearbox".
One again, like lots of other Slashdot people, you've made the incorrect assumption that one morning you are going to wake up and there is an "all singing all dancing" Linux distribution CD in a nice envelope in your letterbox that is going to be just like Windows and runs all your hardware 100%. Forget it.
Linux is about "community". No, not the hippy "peace & love" crap, it's about people putting stuff into it to get stuff out of it. And you need to care about it so when something goes wrong, or doesn't work the way you want it to, then you tell the right person what you've discovered and then see if they can make it better. But absolutely nothing will happen if you sit there with you arms folded and do nothing.
Sorry, but anyone who takes months to figure out a RAID problem shouldn't be using Linux. Just about any Linux problem you have can be found on Google and most of the time you can get a solution. Plus there are "step-by-step" instructions on how to compile a kernel on numerous web pages. Plus many thousands of Linux people in newsgroups and chat boards who will help you out if you take the time to explain what your problem is. If you're prepared to pur some effort in to find those resources, you will get the rewards as a result.
Fine, you like your MacBook Pro and good luck to you. But please don't talk about hardware and drivers on Linux and compare it to a Mac - the fact is that Apple machines use a very tiny subset of all the x86 hardware that's out there which makes it a relatively easy task for Apple to develop and test drivers on that hardware before putting into OS X.
However, the expectation of most Windows and Linux users is that they should be able to get just about any hardware they want running on either OS and, in reality, that's sometimes not possible to do with such a huge range of hardware.
And if that's not the case, let me finish by asking one question:
If you were prepared to spend money on a piece of hardware (MacBook Pro) that is designed specifically to run OS X well, why did you not use equal diligence in choosing hardware that (with some research) would work well under Ubuntu?
After all, most of them have been creating games in DirectX for 95% of the world's PCs for years - would they really go to the trouble of changing to OpenGL just to get a few more PCs and piss Microsoft off?
I don't like it any more than you do - but I'm being the pragmatist here! :-)