In small villages, people not only knew you, you knew them. You were all in it together, and the tribe made sure that everybody functioned as a unit. Being cast out likely meant death, so everybody cooperated because they were all subject to the same constraints on survival.
Do you know George W. Bush or Barack Obama or the people they are beholden to? Are they operating on the same principles and under the same constraints that you are?
Thought not.
The only way the world can get rid of privacy concerns is to get rid of the ability of the state to coerce people for its own reasons - which means get rid of the state.
None of this is relevant anyway - within fifty years, Transhumans will eradicate the state and probably a significant percentage of the human population.
It is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT how many distros there are. Ninety five percent of the people use the top five or six - and anybody who isn't a Linux geek hasn't even heard of the others.
This is a bullshit complaint that crops up every time somebody talks about what's wrong with Linux, and it's absolutely irrelevant.
Linux distros need the following:
1) Better QA - stop releasing software that's not ready to be used. "Release early and often" does NOT mean "release CRAP"! Canonical a few versions ago released an installer that wouldn't allow you to leave the mount point management screen! WTF? That means the installer WAS NOT TESTED AT ALL! That sort of thing should be embarrassing for any software outfit.
2) Get better driver support from peripheral manufacturers. And that includes 64-bit support. In reality, this won't be solved until corporations start demanding better driver support from their main hardware distributors like Dell and HP, and then the hardware companies start demanding it from the peripheral manufacturers.
3) Straighten out the package mess. By that I mean all the main distros need to start tuning their package management systems for reliability (no more downed servers every time the repository needs to refresh), better dependency management, and speed (openSUSE has massively sped up its repository refreshes from 10.3 to 11.0 and even includes a "skip refresh" button, thank GOD!) Some consolidation of repositories between distros might be necessary, too, to allow more packages to run on more systems and reduce the need to compile from source, which, although easy, means the system is outside package management.
4) Fix ALL existing bugs BEFORE releasing new features that compound the bugs. This should be obvious but the entire IT industry continues to ignore this basic principle. You CANNOT fix bugs while introducing NEW ones - and if you haven't fixed the old bugs, you WILL introduce new ones. Duh!
5) Stop writing software "BY geeks FOR geeks" - i.e., stop issuing incomprehensible error messages, crashing with no clue why, with user interfaces even Steven Hawking couldn't figure out. In other words, learn to program CORRECTLY before "learning to program" in some language. Learn user interface guidelines. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. You are NOT better than everybody at Apple at this.
6) In other words, most of the above boil down to: check your ego at the keyboard. Stop assuming you're the world's greatest software designer, GUI designer, programmer, debugger, and system analyst. You're not. There are RULES for doing this stuff developed over the last forty years! Know them and don't break them unless you absolutely have to.
Prisons make a ton of money on pay phones for inmates. If the inmates evade that with cell phones, the prison loses money.
Of course, it's hardly likely that enough inmates can smuggle enough cell phones in to really hurt the prison's revenue, but in prison the rule is "if it isn't mandatory, it's prohibited". So they overreact to everything.
The excuse that inmates are using them for criminal purposes is just that - an excuse.
Every time I switch a page here I have to wait 2-5 seconds for fucking "google-analytics" fucking server to respond. This wasn't happening a while back - what changed?
It's driving me fucking crazy. It makes Slashdot one of the slowest Web site I deal with daily (not counting the Sarah Connor Society Web site which has such a huge front page it takes a minute to fully load and some of it never stops loading).
Not to mention that when coming in to the front page, the fucking Slashdot "image" server takes forever to show...what? How many fucking IMAGES are on the front page that I have to wait for that POS?
Using the Internet these days is like living in the 1970's with fucking green screen monitors and mainframes that take a minute to respond. The only difference is we have color and multimedia. The waiting is incredibly tedious. Every single Web site does not have a) enough server power, and b) enough bandwidth to handle their loads. ALL of them. It's pathetic.
They consistently test near the bottom third of all the malware test suites I've ever read about.
Windows Defender in particular irritates the crap out of me because it reports tons of "suspected software" in the Windows event logs without being able to do anything about it - either shutting off the spurious messages or specifying that the software is safe. It's pathetic. It also detects things like Adobe's crappy License Manager creating bogus "services" repeatedly.
Use Spyware Terminator or SuperAntispyware instead of Windows Defender and use a decent brand name AV instead of anything Microsoft might sell OR give away free.
The only advantage to a free Microsoft product is that the company idiots who don't run AV because they're too cheap might actually use it. I've got one small business client I had to put Comodo AV on their machines - even thought Comodo detection rates suck - because they're just too cheap to pay for Kaspersky or Avast.
Not only that, I go to the Star Trek site - it wants me to download the "latest Apple QuickTime". Yo, dudes, I play MOV files on my Linux desktop. Don't check to see if I have QuickTime on the goddamn box, just PLAY THE FUCKING MOVIE TRAILER!
Christ...
So I have to go find some Youtube or whatever that shows me what is probably one of the more confusing trailers I've ever seen. It looks like we have to sit through Kirk and Spock's entire life before we get to the point where they're on the Enterprise. I hope the movie is three or four hours long, then, because that's gonna take some time.
So far I'm not impressed.
The Watchmen trailer, however, seems to track the graphic novel very closely. And I could play it.
Miguel de Icaza is not exactly the guy I would turn to for the last word on open source since his sole function appears to be to create a copy of a Microsoft product that nobody really needs in the OSS community. de Icaza has been criticized roundly by the SAME PEOPLE who criticize Novell for just being involved with cloning.NET.
Not that interoperability with Microsoft.NET isn't a help for those corporations who want it. But de Icaza could have picked something considerably more valuable to OSS - namely, a Visual Basic for Applications clone that would allow OpenOffice to run Microsoft Office macros and programs. That would have massively increased the penetration of OSS into corporations.
A.NET clone on the other hand, while useful, is not nearly as important for OSS to penetrate corporations as VBA.
Also, there is no such thing as "patent-encumbered" until your ass is in court being sued. Which is to say that de Icaza is not a frickin' lawyer. The fact that there is a patent covenant applied to Moonlight from Novell is irrelevant unless someone who downloads it from elsewhere actually gets sued. Which hasn't happened and isn't likely to happen - and if it does happen, and Microsoft wins, then nobody else will care unless THEY get caught using it. Like who the hell can even necessarily prove WHERE they got it from.
Also, if Red Hat and Ubuntu went away, everybody would migrate to Novell and no one would care. That's called having a choice. The same is not true of Microsoft as every corporation locked in to that company should know.
Bottom line: I don't give a shit what de Icaza says nor what you THINK he said. The notion that Novell is not part of the OSS community is brain dead.
"Novell seem more interested in taking customers from Red Hat than "increasing Linux penetration" i.e. taking customers from MS."
What part of Red Hat and Novell being competitors don't you comprehend? As in, what part of the word "business" don't you comprehend?
"but now Novell seems to have joined MS as an enemy of freedom."
There's a lot of "seem" in your post - as in "what the fuck do I know - it just SEEMS that way".
The reality is that Novell hasn't done one damn thing that has actually had any damaging effect on either Linux or OSS in general. That's the bottom line.
You know, the die-hard haters who come out of the woodwork every time Novell is mentioned, dredging up the years old Microsoft deal, which I predicted at the time would have zero impact on Linux and FOSS and have been vindicated in that prediction - except for the haters.
These people really don't give a damn about Linux or FOSS - all they care about is establishing that they're more "moral" than everyone else by opposing any interoperability deals with Microsoft. The fact that the average corporation couldn't care less and only wants some assurance that their Linux deployment will work with their Microsoft deployment is ignored by these morons. The fact that this allows Novell to improve, however small, Linux's penetration into the data center and corporations doesn't interest them either. The fact that whatever Novell agreed to in the deal in terms of "patent protection" is overwhelmingly irrelevant to any future patent cases (which so far haven't materialized and are unlikely to - and unlikely to be won by Microsoft when they do, as countless people have pointed out) doesn't matter to these clowns either.
Only their juvenile emotional well-being matters to them - and of course, damaging the emotional well-being of everyone else who disagrees with their fanaticism.
The only LIKELY reason humans could die off is because of Transhumans - and by definition, that's an outcome we should all get behind.
Look, within fifty to 75 years, there will be a "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans. From this, there are only three possible outcomes:
1) Humans try to destroy Transhumans and are themselves exterminated.
2) Transhumans transmogrify humans into Transhumans - and nobody will complain once that's done.
3) Transhumans ignore humans and go off and do their own thing in space or other worlds. leaving the chimps to extermiante themselves via one of the listed "disasters". Bottom line for Transhumans: who cares?
The most likely outcome is the fourth: some humans get exterminated, some get transmogrified, some get ignored.
The probability of that outcome approaches unity, compared to all the other "disasters".
Oh, just the general problems you have with any OS. For instance, KWin crashes periodically on my openSUSE 10.3, usually after heavy Firefox use, so I usually blame Firefox for it. Also, it seems for some reason every time I update the system lately, the permissions on the zypp-checkupdates-wrapper get changed for no known reason and the updater applet can't check for updates until I reset the permissions. Little crap like that.
My basic point is that all software is crap. Some is worse than others. Windows is worse than Linux, but Linux still has serious problems in usability, distro QA, etc. It's just a fact that the software industry is lucky it can get anything to work at all. To call this stuff "software engineering" is to insult REAL engineers. It's all "seat of the pants" design and testing. Unless it's for a nuclear plant or the space shuttle or something else that somebody is putting real money into testing, the stuff simply isn't reliable, maintainable, secure, efficient, and easy to use compared to what it could be.
It's all just "good enough" - which in most cases means "not quite good enough."
At least Linux is evolving quickly - or at least the infrastructure is, not so much the kernel any more. Windows 7 is just going to be Windows Vista with some bandaids.
Windows 7 might be marginally better than Vista by the time it's released - over a year from now - but that merely means Microsoft has made everybody wait another three years to upgrade XP.
Microsoft still ends up selling you morons crap because, quite frankly, most of you WANT to bend over for Bill Gates because he's rich and you're not. It's simple alpha-beta chimpanzee behavior.
I reiterate what I've said for years now:
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
Seriously, the IT industry needs to start moving away from the Microsoft environment because the company has demonstrated repeatly that it cannot produce a decent product for a decent price. The corporations need to understand that making Bill Gates the richest guy in the world is not an effective use of their capital - especially in the middle of the worst recession since 1981, which still threatens to turn into "Depression 2.0".
None of the objections to doing so - training expense, lack of applications, blah, blah - are relevant over the long run. Everything was engineered to work with Windows over two decades - it can be re-engineered to work with open source standards similarly. Bite the bullet and do it. As Dick Marcinko used to tell his RED CELL SEAL Team, "You don't have to like it. You just have to do it."
If you don't, you'll keep paying through the nose to Bill Gates both direct costs and productivity loss for the rest of your corporate life.
It's no surprise that Gates and company are primarily interested in thinking up general ideas, grabbing patents on them and then beating people over the head to pay them for the ideas. This has been Gates' MO since day one - pick the pockets of every single human being on the planet with a pocket. Gates is greedier than a member of the Russian-Jewish Mafia.
"Gary Flake, one of Microsoft's top Internet gurus" - there's an appropriate name for a Microsoft employee. They're all "flakes".
Microsoft basically is an organized crime group which has incorporated. Actually, one could say that about most large corporations.
Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews - but when you see the overall ratings dropping low, it's best to bypass that make and model, especially if there are a lot of reviews in total and the percentage of negative is way up there.
I was considering these drives for a client, but based on my research, there's no way I would touch them with a ten foot pole. Seagate 1TB drives aren't much better according to the reviews. Samsung drives seem to be better - considerably more positive reviews than negative. Even Hitachi 1TB drives are getting better reviews than Seagate or Western Digital these days - and I've stayed away from them since back when IBM sold them their defective Deskstars.
If you need more than 2TB in your box, best make sure you have enough drive bays to hold multiple 1TB or 750GB drives, because using 1.5TB is not a good idea. Either that or go for an eSATA external enclosure or NAS box with multiple drive bays. I'm considering an eSATA enclosure or an iSCSI SAN for the above mentioned client since some of his machines are Dells with not enough bays for the storage space we need for an individual workstation.
I've said for years now that Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a cosmetic upgrade, some fixes, and a couple new, totally uninteresting features (yeah, I'm really waiting for touchscreen so I can act like Tom Cruise!)
They couldn't sell you Vista so now they're making you wait another two years or so so they can - sell you Vista - because you don't want to keep using XP for the next ten years.
You just keep voting them in, year in and year out.
Someone once pointed out that if you put cheese in a maze, mice will navigate that maze until they find the cheese. But if you take the cheese out, eventually the mice will stop trying.
But with humans, once they think the cheese is in there, they'll keep navigating that maze no matter how many times they never find the cheese. Because they "know" the cheese is there.
Same thing with the state - people just keep on believing that if they just had the "right" people in the government, everything will magically work out just fine.
Humans vs robots - as Dr. Tim used to say, anyone who doesn't realize that they're 99.95 percent robotic is too stupid to talk to.
I have a digital media client who would switch to Linux in a heartbeat because he knows Windows is unreliable IF:
1) Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software was available for Linux (and, no, NONE of the available OSS video editing software comes close to Premiere Pro, so don't even mention it.)
2) The video capture cards available were supported in Linux. I think one or two might be, but most aren't.
Sure, this is a niche market. But it demonstrates the problems a small business can have when their mission critical stuff isn't supported by Linux.
I do want to test possibly running Adobe Premiere Pro in a Windows VM over Linux on a really fast quad-core system just to see what the performance hit actually is and whether performance compares to running native on a Pentium D or Pentium 4 which is what the client is running on now. But there still probably will be no way to access the video capture card drivers from the VM in such a setup. And I expect the performance hit to be so bad as to be unusable.
I'm not using Firefox 3.x until version.3 or.4 - or never if it continues to be unusable. I'll continue to use the memory hogging, memory fragmenting, memory leaking, crashing several times a day 2.x versions which are irritating but still usable.
Fix the bugs or watch Firefox lose out to other browsers. It's that simple. The attitude that developers have that nothing can be fixed because it's too hard is one reason why people despise the software industry. The bottom line is you don't release a software product with serious known bugs. Period.
I continue to believe Mozilla has no decent QA process and your excuses only reinforce that belief.
"That's fine, but a hard-to-trigger bug automatically gets lower priority than an easy-to-trigger bug. Surely you agree with that?"
No - severity of effect is what matters. And I happen to use right click a LOT! Which made Firefox 3.0 utterly UNUSEABLE for me. If the bug was in something I rarely used, I'd live with it.
"I'd love any pointers you may have on doing so."
Follow those links I gave you. If the Ubuntu build of 3.0.3 reproduces it repeatedly, you could start from there.
Also note what those guys said - click and hold appears to fix the problem, which would indicate to me that it's a timing issue on the mouse event delivery - and that would explain why it's hard to reproduce because it would depend on an individual's system load and configuration - possibly including any delays based on how many extension right click menu items are in the menu. One guy who had the problem had all kinds of extensions in his menu, although I don't have only a half dozen or less.
Slashdot Mirror
In small villages, people not only knew you, you knew them. You were all in it together, and the tribe made sure that everybody functioned as a unit. Being cast out likely meant death, so everybody cooperated because they were all subject to the same constraints on survival.
Do you know George W. Bush or Barack Obama or the people they are beholden to? Are they operating on the same principles and under the same constraints that you are?
Thought not.
The only way the world can get rid of privacy concerns is to get rid of the ability of the state to coerce people for its own reasons - which means get rid of the state.
None of this is relevant anyway - within fifty years, Transhumans will eradicate the state and probably a significant percentage of the human population.
Same old, same old crap complaint.
It is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT how many distros there are. Ninety five percent of the people use the top five or six - and anybody who isn't a Linux geek hasn't even heard of the others.
This is a bullshit complaint that crops up every time somebody talks about what's wrong with Linux, and it's absolutely irrelevant.
Linux distros need the following:
1) Better QA - stop releasing software that's not ready to be used. "Release early and often" does NOT mean "release CRAP"! Canonical a few versions ago released an installer that wouldn't allow you to leave the mount point management screen! WTF? That means the installer WAS NOT TESTED AT ALL! That sort of thing should be embarrassing for any software outfit.
2) Get better driver support from peripheral manufacturers. And that includes 64-bit support. In reality, this won't be solved until corporations start demanding better driver support from their main hardware distributors like Dell and HP, and then the hardware companies start demanding it from the peripheral manufacturers.
3) Straighten out the package mess. By that I mean all the main distros need to start tuning their package management systems for reliability (no more downed servers every time the repository needs to refresh), better dependency management, and speed (openSUSE has massively sped up its repository refreshes from 10.3 to 11.0 and even includes a "skip refresh" button, thank GOD!) Some consolidation of repositories between distros might be necessary, too, to allow more packages to run on more systems and reduce the need to compile from source, which, although easy, means the system is outside package management.
4) Fix ALL existing bugs BEFORE releasing new features that compound the bugs. This should be obvious but the entire IT industry continues to ignore this basic principle. You CANNOT fix bugs while introducing NEW ones - and if you haven't fixed the old bugs, you WILL introduce new ones. Duh!
5) Stop writing software "BY geeks FOR geeks" - i.e., stop issuing incomprehensible error messages, crashing with no clue why, with user interfaces even Steven Hawking couldn't figure out. In other words, learn to program CORRECTLY before "learning to program" in some language. Learn user interface guidelines. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. You are NOT better than everybody at Apple at this.
6) In other words, most of the above boil down to: check your ego at the keyboard. Stop assuming you're the world's greatest software designer, GUI designer, programmer, debugger, and system analyst. You're not. There are RULES for doing this stuff developed over the last forty years! Know them and don't break them unless you absolutely have to.
http://videos.summer-glau.net/view/372/tscc-2x07-12/
Prisons make a ton of money on pay phones for inmates. If the inmates evade that with cell phones, the prison loses money.
Of course, it's hardly likely that enough inmates can smuggle enough cell phones in to really hurt the prison's revenue, but in prison the rule is "if it isn't mandatory, it's prohibited". So they overreact to everything.
The excuse that inmates are using them for criminal purposes is just that - an excuse.
can somebody at Slashdot get on Google's ass?
Every time I switch a page here I have to wait 2-5 seconds for fucking "google-analytics" fucking server to respond. This wasn't happening a while back - what changed?
It's driving me fucking crazy. It makes Slashdot one of the slowest Web site I deal with daily (not counting the Sarah Connor Society Web site which has such a huge front page it takes a minute to fully load and some of it never stops loading).
Not to mention that when coming in to the front page, the fucking Slashdot "image" server takes forever to show...what? How many fucking IMAGES are on the front page that I have to wait for that POS?
Using the Internet these days is like living in the 1970's with fucking green screen monitors and mainframes that take a minute to respond. The only difference is we have color and multimedia. The waiting is incredibly tedious. Every single Web site does not have a) enough server power, and b) enough bandwidth to handle their loads. ALL of them. It's pathetic.
They consistently test near the bottom third of all the malware test suites I've ever read about.
Windows Defender in particular irritates the crap out of me because it reports tons of "suspected software" in the Windows event logs without being able to do anything about it - either shutting off the spurious messages or specifying that the software is safe. It's pathetic. It also detects things like Adobe's crappy License Manager creating bogus "services" repeatedly.
Use Spyware Terminator or SuperAntispyware instead of Windows Defender and use a decent brand name AV instead of anything Microsoft might sell OR give away free.
The only advantage to a free Microsoft product is that the company idiots who don't run AV because they're too cheap might actually use it. I've got one small business client I had to put Comodo AV on their machines - even thought Comodo detection rates suck - because they're just too cheap to pay for Kaspersky or Avast.
Not only that, I go to the Star Trek site - it wants me to download the "latest Apple QuickTime". Yo, dudes, I play MOV files on my Linux desktop. Don't check to see if I have QuickTime on the goddamn box, just PLAY THE FUCKING MOVIE TRAILER!
Christ...
So I have to go find some Youtube or whatever that shows me what is probably one of the more confusing trailers I've ever seen. It looks like we have to sit through Kirk and Spock's entire life before we get to the point where they're on the Enterprise. I hope the movie is three or four hours long, then, because that's gonna take some time.
So far I'm not impressed.
The Watchmen trailer, however, seems to track the graphic novel very closely. And I could play it.
Well, you could start keeping your mouth shut now and I'd forgive you for not reading my posts in the past.
Miguel de Icaza is not exactly the guy I would turn to for the last word on open source since his sole function appears to be to create a copy of a Microsoft product that nobody really needs in the OSS community. de Icaza has been criticized roundly by the SAME PEOPLE who criticize Novell for just being involved with cloning .NET.
Not that interoperability with Microsoft .NET isn't a help for those corporations who want it. But de Icaza could have picked something considerably more valuable to OSS - namely, a Visual Basic for Applications clone that would allow OpenOffice to run Microsoft Office macros and programs. That would have massively increased the penetration of OSS into corporations.
A .NET clone on the other hand, while useful, is not nearly as important for OSS to penetrate corporations as VBA.
Also, there is no such thing as "patent-encumbered" until your ass is in court being sued. Which is to say that de Icaza is not a frickin' lawyer. The fact that there is a patent covenant applied to Moonlight from Novell is irrelevant unless someone who downloads it from elsewhere actually gets sued. Which hasn't happened and isn't likely to happen - and if it does happen, and Microsoft wins, then nobody else will care unless THEY get caught using it. Like who the hell can even necessarily prove WHERE they got it from.
Also, if Red Hat and Ubuntu went away, everybody would migrate to Novell and no one would care. That's called having a choice. The same is not true of Microsoft as every corporation locked in to that company should know.
Bottom line: I don't give a shit what de Icaza says nor what you THINK he said. The notion that Novell is not part of the OSS community is brain dead.
"Novell seem more interested in taking customers from Red Hat than "increasing Linux penetration" i.e. taking customers from MS."
What part of Red Hat and Novell being competitors don't you comprehend? As in, what part of the word "business" don't you comprehend?
"but now Novell seems to have joined MS as an enemy of freedom."
There's a lot of "seem" in your post - as in "what the fuck do I know - it just SEEMS that way".
The reality is that Novell hasn't done one damn thing that has actually had any damaging effect on either Linux or OSS in general. That's the bottom line.
You know, the die-hard haters who come out of the woodwork every time Novell is mentioned, dredging up the years old Microsoft deal, which I predicted at the time would have zero impact on Linux and FOSS and have been vindicated in that prediction - except for the haters.
These people really don't give a damn about Linux or FOSS - all they care about is establishing that they're more "moral" than everyone else by opposing any interoperability deals with Microsoft. The fact that the average corporation couldn't care less and only wants some assurance that their Linux deployment will work with their Microsoft deployment is ignored by these morons. The fact that this allows Novell to improve, however small, Linux's penetration into the data center and corporations doesn't interest them either. The fact that whatever Novell agreed to in the deal in terms of "patent protection" is overwhelmingly irrelevant to any future patent cases (which so far haven't materialized and are unlikely to - and unlikely to be won by Microsoft when they do, as countless people have pointed out) doesn't matter to these clowns either.
Only their juvenile emotional well-being matters to them - and of course, damaging the emotional well-being of everyone else who disagrees with their fanaticism.
Fuck 'em.
How about I sell you to the crack whore you were born from, illiterate?
The only LIKELY reason humans could die off is because of Transhumans - and by definition, that's an outcome we should all get behind.
Look, within fifty to 75 years, there will be a "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans. From this, there are only three possible outcomes:
1) Humans try to destroy Transhumans and are themselves exterminated.
2) Transhumans transmogrify humans into Transhumans - and nobody will complain once that's done.
3) Transhumans ignore humans and go off and do their own thing in space or other worlds. leaving the chimps to extermiante themselves via one of the listed "disasters". Bottom line for Transhumans: who cares?
The most likely outcome is the fourth: some humans get exterminated, some get transmogrified, some get ignored.
The probability of that outcome approaches unity, compared to all the other "disasters".
Oh, just the general problems you have with any OS. For instance, KWin crashes periodically on my openSUSE 10.3, usually after heavy Firefox use, so I usually blame Firefox for it. Also, it seems for some reason every time I update the system lately, the permissions on the zypp-checkupdates-wrapper get changed for no known reason and the updater applet can't check for updates until I reset the permissions. Little crap like that.
My basic point is that all software is crap. Some is worse than others. Windows is worse than Linux, but Linux still has serious problems in usability, distro QA, etc. It's just a fact that the software industry is lucky it can get anything to work at all. To call this stuff "software engineering" is to insult REAL engineers. It's all "seat of the pants" design and testing. Unless it's for a nuclear plant or the space shuttle or something else that somebody is putting real money into testing, the stuff simply isn't reliable, maintainable, secure, efficient, and easy to use compared to what it could be.
It's all just "good enough" - which in most cases means "not quite good enough."
At least Linux is evolving quickly - or at least the infrastructure is, not so much the kernel any more. Windows 7 is just going to be Windows Vista with some bandaids.
Microsoft doesn't sell software - it sells lies.
Windows 7 might be marginally better than Vista by the time it's released - over a year from now - but that merely means Microsoft has made everybody wait another three years to upgrade XP.
Microsoft still ends up selling you morons crap because, quite frankly, most of you WANT to bend over for Bill Gates because he's rich and you're not. It's simple alpha-beta chimpanzee behavior.
I reiterate what I've said for years now:
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
Seriously, the IT industry needs to start moving away from the Microsoft environment because the company has demonstrated repeatly that it cannot produce a decent product for a decent price. The corporations need to understand that making Bill Gates the richest guy in the world is not an effective use of their capital - especially in the middle of the worst recession since 1981, which still threatens to turn into "Depression 2.0".
None of the objections to doing so - training expense, lack of applications, blah, blah - are relevant over the long run. Everything was engineered to work with Windows over two decades - it can be re-engineered to work with open source standards similarly. Bite the bullet and do it. As Dick Marcinko used to tell his RED CELL SEAL Team, "You don't have to like it. You just have to do it."
If you don't, you'll keep paying through the nose to Bill Gates both direct costs and productivity loss for the rest of your corporate life.
It's no surprise that Gates and company are primarily interested in thinking up general ideas, grabbing patents on them and then beating people over the head to pay them for the ideas. This has been Gates' MO since day one - pick the pockets of every single human being on the planet with a pocket. Gates is greedier than a member of the Russian-Jewish Mafia.
"Gary Flake, one of Microsoft's top Internet gurus" - there's an appropriate name for a Microsoft employee. They're all "flakes".
Microsoft basically is an organized crime group which has incorporated. Actually, one could say that about most large corporations.
Just check the reviews of these drives - indeed, most 1TB drives as well as the Seagate 1.5TB drives - on Newegg or TigerDirect. These drives die regularly - they have an astronomical rate of failure, regardless of what the manufacturers claim. Some are DOA from the store (some people blame this on the OEM packaging - but the reviews vary from drive company to drive company, suggesting the packaging is not the culprit.) Of course, I know that negative reviews on such sites tend to outweigh positive reviews - but when you see the overall ratings dropping low, it's best to bypass that make and model, especially if there are a lot of reviews in total and the percentage of negative is way up there.
I was considering these drives for a client, but based on my research, there's no way I would touch them with a ten foot pole. Seagate 1TB drives aren't much better according to the reviews. Samsung drives seem to be better - considerably more positive reviews than negative. Even Hitachi 1TB drives are getting better reviews than Seagate or Western Digital these days - and I've stayed away from them since back when IBM sold them their defective Deskstars.
If you need more than 2TB in your box, best make sure you have enough drive bays to hold multiple 1TB or 750GB drives, because using 1.5TB is not a good idea. Either that or go for an eSATA external enclosure or NAS box with multiple drive bays. I'm considering an eSATA enclosure or an iSCSI SAN for the above mentioned client since some of his machines are Dells with not enough bays for the storage space we need for an individual workstation.
disabling this Terminator.
I've said for years now that Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Windows 7 is Windows Vista with a cosmetic upgrade, some fixes, and a couple new, totally uninteresting features (yeah, I'm really waiting for touchscreen so I can act like Tom Cruise!)
They couldn't sell you Vista so now they're making you wait another two years or so so they can - sell you Vista - because you don't want to keep using XP for the next ten years.
It's that simple.
Labour is the same as the Tories.
Democrats are the same as Republicans.
You people never learn, do you?
You just keep voting them in, year in and year out.
Someone once pointed out that if you put cheese in a maze, mice will navigate that maze until they find the cheese. But if you take the cheese out, eventually the mice will stop trying.
But with humans, once they think the cheese is in there, they'll keep navigating that maze no matter how many times they never find the cheese. Because they "know" the cheese is there.
Same thing with the state - people just keep on believing that if they just had the "right" people in the government, everything will magically work out just fine.
Humans vs robots - as Dr. Tim used to say, anyone who doesn't realize that they're 99.95 percent robotic is too stupid to talk to.
You think Obama is going to make a difference?
Making Excuses for Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13698
The Limits of Change
What to expect from the Obama administration on the foreign policy front
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13709
Forget the Honeymoon
Getting down to bizness with Obama
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13728
as represented in his well-known article on same, this is the last person who should be a CTO of the US.
Plenty of people around with less hide-bound attitudes.
Matrox RT.X100 video capture card.
I have a digital media client who would switch to Linux in a heartbeat because he knows Windows is unreliable IF:
1) Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software was available for Linux (and, no, NONE of the available OSS video editing software comes close to Premiere Pro, so don't even mention it.)
2) The video capture cards available were supported in Linux. I think one or two might be, but most aren't.
Sure, this is a niche market. But it demonstrates the problems a small business can have when their mission critical stuff isn't supported by Linux.
I do want to test possibly running Adobe Premiere Pro in a Windows VM over Linux on a really fast quad-core system just to see what the performance hit actually is and whether performance compares to running native on a Pentium D or Pentium 4 which is what the client is running on now. But there still probably will be no way to access the video capture card drivers from the VM in such a setup. And I expect the performance hit to be so bad as to be unusable.
The dupes are the ones reading the dupe.
Or responding to it, like this one.
Fine.
I'm not using Firefox 3.x until version .3 or .4 - or never if it continues to be unusable. I'll continue to use the memory hogging, memory fragmenting, memory leaking, crashing several times a day 2.x versions which are irritating but still usable.
Fix the bugs or watch Firefox lose out to other browsers. It's that simple. The attitude that developers have that nothing can be fixed because it's too hard is one reason why people despise the software industry. The bottom line is you don't release a software product with serious known bugs. Period.
I continue to believe Mozilla has no decent QA process and your excuses only reinforce that belief.
"That's fine, but a hard-to-trigger bug automatically gets lower priority than an easy-to-trigger bug. Surely you agree with that?"
No - severity of effect is what matters. And I happen to use right click a LOT! Which made Firefox 3.0 utterly UNUSEABLE for me. If the bug was in something I rarely used, I'd live with it.
"I'd love any pointers you may have on doing so."
Follow those links I gave you. If the Ubuntu build of 3.0.3 reproduces it repeatedly, you could start from there.
Also note what those guys said - click and hold appears to fix the problem, which would indicate to me that it's a timing issue on the mouse event delivery - and that would explain why it's hard to reproduce because it would depend on an individual's system load and configuration - possibly including any delays based on how many extension right click menu items are in the menu. One guy who had the problem had all kinds of extensions in his menu, although I don't have only a half dozen or less.