Why is everyone so caught up on the hot swappable feature. I mean, I get it, it's convenient to hot swap, but that's gotta be a terrible price / performance penalty. First off, convenient hot swap requires real estate, i.e., you have to be able to access the drive from the front of the rack which means you won't fit 45 drives in a 4U space (not 3.5 inch drives anyway). Assuming they have massive redundancy (which someone using a system like this would), it's not that big of a pain to power off the entire node, slide it out, swap a drive, slide it in. That just took you what, 4 minutes? Hot swapping requires a lot of faith in your OS (raid and filesystem subsystems) and controller cards to handle that situation gracefully and reliably (which is why you pay a lot for a box from Sun/HP that "guarantees" you have that ability).
That's what I was thinking. In many retail businesses (clothing I know for sure), there is almost always a 100% markup over wholesale. Perform the same analysis on a Monster RCA cable and tell me what their margin is...
You left out the #1 reason to shop online which is what the article relates to most: there are no sales people when you shop online. Amazon has never given me an obtrusive pop-up about an extended warranty or lied to me about being in stock.
The only real downsides are 1) if you want to return it during the return period you have to ship it (pain as far as I'm concerned), and many online stores now don't have a price guarantee for the first 30 days like most brick and mortar stores (Amazon cancelled their program almost a year ago but will still honor it once per user if you email them).
While you are correct, this thread was specifically talking about the command line apt-cache search and the like. The GUI's are an improvement, especially recently, though I believe Synaptic is still just as ignorant, but I don't have an up to date Ubuntu system to try it on.
Out of curiosity, do you know if most Windows applications also remove your personal preferences from the hidden directories in your home folder? It seems to me that they wouldn't though I guess I remember a few specifically asking me if they should do so... just curious.
The problem of storing user preferences has always been a pain but I do prefer their non-hidden state on the Mac to the hidden "Local Settings" folder on Windows (or even worse, in the registry).
I concede, my information was based on my impression from a few years ago. I just checked my latest Fedora install and noticed that their default menus have dropped the names of the actual applications entirely, instead just saying "Spreadsheets", "Video Player" and the like.
I was just remember my earlier Ubuntu installs which (and maybe my memory is wrong) presented me with menus containing things like "File Roller", "Pidgin", etc. whereas a fresh install of Windows comes with fairly simple but clearly titled applications like "Paint", "Internet Explorer", "Notepad". You get the idea. But it looks like that area has been addressed by at least the most popular distributions so kudos!
Your point is certainly valid and I admit that I didn't put enough thought into it before I wrote. Though you do admit that the names we see in Windows are much more familiar to us as many of them have been around almost as long as Windows has. Though I have to think that there is plenty of room for improvement both to icons and names to help linux adopters along. SOME distributions do add the extra description to the menu items. I seem to recall Mandrake used to do that with their KDE menus back in the day (using the optional program description field so that they could be turned off once you were familiar with them).
I guess I'm just stuck in a wishful thinking pattern of saying, if you're willing to concede that Amarok is to be officially bundled with KDE, then can't we just rename it to KDE Media Player so I'm not left wondering what a blue fox icon will do when I click it and people don't laugh at me when I pronounce it wrong;-)
As a side note, I personally don't suffer from these problems cause I've been around for a while, since RedHat 6 or thereabouts. I believe that GAIM made more sense than Pidgin since it at least retained a common Windows name inside of its own.
The problem is that by and large the "search" functions of package managers are completely useless. Suppose I'm searching for an instant messenger client. Coming from a Windows machine I'd use my "tech saviness" to search for "im" or maybe "im client". The result (performed using yum search on a fedora machine) returns 4523 programs. I'll give you an example entry:
"ftplib.i386 : Library of FTP routines"
That's odd, I searched on "im client" and it returned an ftp library, along with 4500 other useless entries and are seemingly unrelated to my search. It turns out it does that cause it breaks my two words up into two separate searches so it was actually "client" that returned the ftp result, even though "client" doesn't appear in the package name or short description.
Now I know that I really want to install pidgin but what on earth would I ever search for that would return that? It turns out that even searching on the quoted string "instant messenger" won't return pidgin because the description uses the term "messenging". Sigh.
What bothers me about this situation is exactly what the author says in the article, recommending that people don't install updates for packages they don't recognize. So a major security hole gets patched in X11/whatever and the end-user reads this article and says, "shit, I don't know what the hell X11 is so I better not let it install that on my computer".
I completely agree with you that the drag-to-applications install method was completely foreign to me when I got my first Mac. That being said, after using it for two years I'm sold that it's got to be the best application install paradigm out there. When it comes time to remove the application, I know exactly what needs to be deleted. I don't need to worry about one file getting corrupt and the uninstall application failing to ever remove the entire program, etc.
Except that even the windows steps start with something familiar, My Computer. Maybe even My Documents. Or if you want to get extremely advanced, open Windows Explorer. The big problem for me when it comes to Linux always has been that people choose the most absurd names when writing their applications. If I'm looking through an application repository how am I (assuming for the moment that I was a novice) supposed to know that Pidgin is an IM client? Why should I believe that GIMP is an image program? I mean, it's not like it advertises itself ala "Photoshop". OpenOffice is about the best example that the free community has to offer when it comes to application naming. I'm surprised Firefox got as far as it did and probably wouldn't have if it wasn't coming from Mozilla's shop. But I don't care who you are, when you're browsing through the default menus on a Linux distro you better be completely uninspired to open Konqueror to browse your file system.
Haha, yeah, that key. Well in all fairness I didn't jump on board til the post Intel days, so maybe those keys came with the x86 territory (you know, since they advertised you could run Windows on the computer as well, might as well have all the keys).
Actually... I'm using my 'Mac' keyboard right now and the lower left key is clearly labeled "control" and the key to its right is co-labeled "alt" and "option". So it is acceptable, and indeed appropriate, to refer to those keys as "Alt" and "Ctrl" when using a Mac as well.
Wow, you're so off base it's not even funny. Nevermind that your command on linux has no bearing on how the system announces itself to the network, doesn't affect WINS servers, etc. While it seems trivial at the outset, Windows uses the computers name for a lot more things than an internal DNS reference so the user can ping him/herself. That being said, it would seem to me that Windows could do a simple service restart as opposed to a full reboot.
Considering that almost every time I run YUM there's a new kernel update I'm not sure that this is entirely accurate. While I do think there are things that Windows is ridiculous for wanting me to reboot for, Linux is getting worse faster than it's getting better. When I was running Ubuntu it seemed like every update wanted to restart.
I agree with most, if not all, of the proposed changes to the notification system. I agree, for example, that notifications are just "extra information" if you happen to be present and shouldn't require interaction. However, that's not to say that I don't think it would be convenient to have a gesture/keystroke shortcut that causes a predetermined interaction with a notification type. For instance, it would be convenient for me if there was a short snippet about each incoming email, displayed in a notification, as opposed to "1 new message". That way I could know if the email was worth checking or not. If it was, it'd be nice, at the time of notification, to hit a key combo or something that took me straight to mail to see the new content. While I think that's a great idea, I have no idea on how to implement it in such a way that doesn't negatively affect other users.
I think one of the longest standing problems with Linux is the tray / notification area. Too many competing methods, sloppy looking icons, and inconsistencies that create a negative experience for the user.
I want to be in an accident in my 3/4 ton 4WD pickup.>
The train will win... and I doubt 4WD will make a difference. I, for one, welcome the opportunity to never get in an accident.
Your claim, implied through sarcasm since you didn't actually make a statement, was that the store must charge what they do on used games in order to survive because they have fixed and marginal costs associated with each used game transaction including, but not necessarily limited to: transaction processing, storage, rent, advertising, salaries, etc.
Since retail stores would still have to find a way to exist even without the market for used games (which hasn't always been there), then the store must have a very low marginal cost to "store and market" their used selection. That being the case then their only justification for a 300% mark-up is greed. I do understand that the market will ultimately decide what they can and cannot charge for used games, I'm just using this as my pedestal for complaining. And then you had to go and start stating that their justification for charging 10% less for used games as opposed to new was due to operating costs.
Wow, an entire comment dedicated solely to sarcasm.
I would assume that you've already done a thorough analysis of their business model and how it might survive if they're no longer allowed to even sell used games, I guess your post should have read more like this:
"Used game retailers have a business model that is largely based on the resale of previously played games. A move by the gaming industry to ban used game sales would ultimately lead to the death of the very retailers that purvey their games today contributing to a positive feedback loop of reduced sales and game exposure."
First off let me say that absolutely despise them for trying to stop the used game market. On the other hand, I understand how that does eat into profit. I won't pretend like we all wouldn't mind some extra cash, deserved or not. So what's the answer? They've made a few suggestions that I'll address.
1) In game advertising - doesn't really bother me at all. I could really care less if I'm driving down the street in GTA and I pass a billboard for CocaCola, whoopdi-do. If done in that way then it's non-invasive. Now if you paused the game every 12 minutes to show me a 30 second ad like television you better believe your game is getting burned / hacked / whatever. 2) Downloadable content - again, this can be done tastefully or as an insult to your customer. Almost all games currently sell additional content on the Xbox 360 Marketplace and I've gotta say that I love that. New maps for Halo every 6 months? Sweet. A new 30 minute mission for Mass Effect to tide me over til the next part of the trilogy comes out? Sweet. On the other hand, if you remove crucial elements of the game and make me pay additional for those, then your game is not going to be bought by me.
A suggestion that I'd throw out there is making Gamestop, etc pay royalties for used game sales. I do think it is a RIPOFF that Gamestop gives me $12 for a used game, turns around and sells it for $40, and all they had to do was put a sticker on it. I mean, their used game sell for $5 less than their new games, how absurd. Obviously I'm still gonna pay it cause it's less than the new game and there's no risk for me cause I can return it if it doesn't work, but still, what a ripoff. Make Gamestop pay a couple of bucks from their profit to the game studio.
Well the problem is this, you want to consolidate things but there are way too many apps installed for them to be one-click accessible (quickbar). So you move the most frequently used items somewhere where you can do that (dock/quickbar). Now where do you put all of the other, less frequently used app launchers? Windows uses the "Start" menu, OSX uses Stacks/Folders on the dock. Personally I like the Windows version for that better. I don't criticize windows for the Desktop launchers, OS X isn't any different, you've always been able to launch apps from Explorer/Finder which is what you're doing when you double click an icon on the desktop. It's the software writers that should be shot for installing icons in all three locations. There's no reason for the icon to be put straight on the desktop anymore, maybe in Windows 3.1 but NOT ANYMORE.
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Why is everyone so caught up on the hot swappable feature. I mean, I get it, it's convenient to hot swap, but that's gotta be a terrible price / performance penalty. First off, convenient hot swap requires real estate, i.e., you have to be able to access the drive from the front of the rack which means you won't fit 45 drives in a 4U space (not 3.5 inch drives anyway). Assuming they have massive redundancy (which someone using a system like this would), it's not that big of a pain to power off the entire node, slide it out, swap a drive, slide it in. That just took you what, 4 minutes? Hot swapping requires a lot of faith in your OS (raid and filesystem subsystems) and controller cards to handle that situation gracefully and reliably (which is why you pay a lot for a box from Sun/HP that "guarantees" you have that ability).
That's what I was thinking. In many retail businesses (clothing I know for sure), there is almost always a 100% markup over wholesale. Perform the same analysis on a Monster RCA cable and tell me what their margin is ...
You left out the #1 reason to shop online which is what the article relates to most: there are no sales people when you shop online. Amazon has never given me an obtrusive pop-up about an extended warranty or lied to me about being in stock.
The only real downsides are 1) if you want to return it during the return period you have to ship it (pain as far as I'm concerned), and many online stores now don't have a price guarantee for the first 30 days like most brick and mortar stores (Amazon cancelled their program almost a year ago but will still honor it once per user if you email them).
Agreed, though there have been several instances where OpenOffice would not start until I removed the entire preferences directory and started over.
While you are correct, this thread was specifically talking about the command line apt-cache search and the like. The GUI's are an improvement, especially recently, though I believe Synaptic is still just as ignorant, but I don't have an up to date Ubuntu system to try it on.
Out of curiosity, do you know if most Windows applications also remove your personal preferences from the hidden directories in your home folder? It seems to me that they wouldn't though I guess I remember a few specifically asking me if they should do so ... just curious.
The problem of storing user preferences has always been a pain but I do prefer their non-hidden state on the Mac to the hidden "Local Settings" folder on Windows (or even worse, in the registry).
I concede, my information was based on my impression from a few years ago. I just checked my latest Fedora install and noticed that their default menus have dropped the names of the actual applications entirely, instead just saying "Spreadsheets", "Video Player" and the like.
I was just remember my earlier Ubuntu installs which (and maybe my memory is wrong) presented me with menus containing things like "File Roller", "Pidgin", etc. whereas a fresh install of Windows comes with fairly simple but clearly titled applications like "Paint", "Internet Explorer", "Notepad". You get the idea. But it looks like that area has been addressed by at least the most popular distributions so kudos!
Your point is certainly valid and I admit that I didn't put enough thought into it before I wrote. Though you do admit that the names we see in Windows are much more familiar to us as many of them have been around almost as long as Windows has. Though I have to think that there is plenty of room for improvement both to icons and names to help linux adopters along. SOME distributions do add the extra description to the menu items. I seem to recall Mandrake used to do that with their KDE menus back in the day (using the optional program description field so that they could be turned off once you were familiar with them).
I guess I'm just stuck in a wishful thinking pattern of saying, if you're willing to concede that Amarok is to be officially bundled with KDE, then can't we just rename it to KDE Media Player so I'm not left wondering what a blue fox icon will do when I click it and people don't laugh at me when I pronounce it wrong ;-)
As a side note, I personally don't suffer from these problems cause I've been around for a while, since RedHat 6 or thereabouts. I believe that GAIM made more sense than Pidgin since it at least retained a common Windows name inside of its own.
The problem is that by and large the "search" functions of package managers are completely useless. Suppose I'm searching for an instant messenger client. Coming from a Windows machine I'd use my "tech saviness" to search for "im" or maybe "im client". The result (performed using yum search on a fedora machine) returns 4523 programs. I'll give you an example entry:
"ftplib.i386 : Library of FTP routines"
That's odd, I searched on "im client" and it returned an ftp library, along with 4500 other useless entries and are seemingly unrelated to my search. It turns out it does that cause it breaks my two words up into two separate searches so it was actually "client" that returned the ftp result, even though "client" doesn't appear in the package name or short description.
Now I know that I really want to install pidgin but what on earth would I ever search for that would return that? It turns out that even searching on the quoted string "instant messenger" won't return pidgin because the description uses the term "messenging". Sigh.
What bothers me about this situation is exactly what the author says in the article, recommending that people don't install updates for packages they don't recognize. So a major security hole gets patched in X11/whatever and the end-user reads this article and says, "shit, I don't know what the hell X11 is so I better not let it install that on my computer".
I completely agree with you that the drag-to-applications install method was completely foreign to me when I got my first Mac. That being said, after using it for two years I'm sold that it's got to be the best application install paradigm out there. When it comes time to remove the application, I know exactly what needs to be deleted. I don't need to worry about one file getting corrupt and the uninstall application failing to ever remove the entire program, etc.
Except that even the windows steps start with something familiar, My Computer. Maybe even My Documents. Or if you want to get extremely advanced, open Windows Explorer. The big problem for me when it comes to Linux always has been that people choose the most absurd names when writing their applications. If I'm looking through an application repository how am I (assuming for the moment that I was a novice) supposed to know that Pidgin is an IM client? Why should I believe that GIMP is an image program? I mean, it's not like it advertises itself ala "Photoshop". OpenOffice is about the best example that the free community has to offer when it comes to application naming. I'm surprised Firefox got as far as it did and probably wouldn't have if it wasn't coming from Mozilla's shop. But I don't care who you are, when you're browsing through the default menus on a Linux distro you better be completely uninspired to open Konqueror to browse your file system.
Haha, yeah, that key. Well in all fairness I didn't jump on board til the post Intel days, so maybe those keys came with the x86 territory (you know, since they advertised you could run Windows on the computer as well, might as well have all the keys).
Actually ... I'm using my 'Mac' keyboard right now and the lower left key is clearly labeled "control" and the key to its right is co-labeled "alt" and "option". So it is acceptable, and indeed appropriate, to refer to those keys as "Alt" and "Ctrl" when using a Mac as well.
Or C) bought cheap memory.
Wow, you're so off base it's not even funny. Nevermind that your command on linux has no bearing on how the system announces itself to the network, doesn't affect WINS servers, etc. While it seems trivial at the outset, Windows uses the computers name for a lot more things than an internal DNS reference so the user can ping him/herself. That being said, it would seem to me that Windows could do a simple service restart as opposed to a full reboot.
Considering that almost every time I run YUM there's a new kernel update I'm not sure that this is entirely accurate. While I do think there are things that Windows is ridiculous for wanting me to reboot for, Linux is getting worse faster than it's getting better. When I was running Ubuntu it seemed like every update wanted to restart.
It's probably a reasonable assumption that at least 98.5% of the population is unfit to post articles on Wikipedia so that 98.3 number is meaningless.
I agree with most, if not all, of the proposed changes to the notification system. I agree, for example, that notifications are just "extra information" if you happen to be present and shouldn't require interaction. However, that's not to say that I don't think it would be convenient to have a gesture/keystroke shortcut that causes a predetermined interaction with a notification type. For instance, it would be convenient for me if there was a short snippet about each incoming email, displayed in a notification, as opposed to "1 new message". That way I could know if the email was worth checking or not. If it was, it'd be nice, at the time of notification, to hit a key combo or something that took me straight to mail to see the new content. While I think that's a great idea, I have no idea on how to implement it in such a way that doesn't negatively affect other users.
I think one of the longest standing problems with Linux is the tray / notification area. Too many competing methods, sloppy looking icons, and inconsistencies that create a negative experience for the user.
I want to be in an accident in my 3/4 ton 4WD pickup.> The train will win ... and I doubt 4WD will make a difference. I, for one, welcome the opportunity to never get in an accident.
Your claim, implied through sarcasm since you didn't actually make a statement, was that the store must charge what they do on used games in order to survive because they have fixed and marginal costs associated with each used game transaction including, but not necessarily limited to: transaction processing, storage, rent, advertising, salaries, etc.
Since retail stores would still have to find a way to exist even without the market for used games (which hasn't always been there), then the store must have a very low marginal cost to "store and market" their used selection. That being the case then their only justification for a 300% mark-up is greed. I do understand that the market will ultimately decide what they can and cannot charge for used games, I'm just using this as my pedestal for complaining. And then you had to go and start stating that their justification for charging 10% less for used games as opposed to new was due to operating costs.
Ummm ... because Apple is paying for the hosting?
I don't know, for a while there I wished I had a nice set to play with when I got bored ...
Wow, an entire comment dedicated solely to sarcasm.
I would assume that you've already done a thorough analysis of their business model and how it might survive if they're no longer allowed to even sell used games, I guess your post should have read more like this:
"Used game retailers have a business model that is largely based on the resale of previously played games. A move by the gaming industry to ban used game sales would ultimately lead to the death of the very retailers that purvey their games today contributing to a positive feedback loop of reduced sales and game exposure."
First off let me say that absolutely despise them for trying to stop the used game market. On the other hand, I understand how that does eat into profit. I won't pretend like we all wouldn't mind some extra cash, deserved or not. So what's the answer? They've made a few suggestions that I'll address.
1) In game advertising - doesn't really bother me at all. I could really care less if I'm driving down the street in GTA and I pass a billboard for CocaCola, whoopdi-do. If done in that way then it's non-invasive. Now if you paused the game every 12 minutes to show me a 30 second ad like television you better believe your game is getting burned / hacked / whatever.
2) Downloadable content - again, this can be done tastefully or as an insult to your customer. Almost all games currently sell additional content on the Xbox 360 Marketplace and I've gotta say that I love that. New maps for Halo every 6 months? Sweet. A new 30 minute mission for Mass Effect to tide me over til the next part of the trilogy comes out? Sweet. On the other hand, if you remove crucial elements of the game and make me pay additional for those, then your game is not going to be bought by me.
A suggestion that I'd throw out there is making Gamestop, etc pay royalties for used game sales. I do think it is a RIPOFF that Gamestop gives me $12 for a used game, turns around and sells it for $40, and all they had to do was put a sticker on it. I mean, their used game sell for $5 less than their new games, how absurd. Obviously I'm still gonna pay it cause it's less than the new game and there's no risk for me cause I can return it if it doesn't work, but still, what a ripoff. Make Gamestop pay a couple of bucks from their profit to the game studio.
Well the problem is this, you want to consolidate things but there are way too many apps installed for them to be one-click accessible (quickbar). So you move the most frequently used items somewhere where you can do that (dock/quickbar). Now where do you put all of the other, less frequently used app launchers? Windows uses the "Start" menu, OSX uses Stacks/Folders on the dock. Personally I like the Windows version for that better. I don't criticize windows for the Desktop launchers, OS X isn't any different, you've always been able to launch apps from Explorer/Finder which is what you're doing when you double click an icon on the desktop. It's the software writers that should be shot for installing icons in all three locations. There's no reason for the icon to be put straight on the desktop anymore, maybe in Windows 3.1 but NOT ANYMORE.