Corporate policy everywhere these days (these days? Hell, since forever!) is that the customer is "the enemy". How can we extract all the customer's money while still preventing him from using our product, which is shit anyway, all under the guise of "intellectual property" and "support costs".
This is what you get when you have state-sponsored entities run by power-hungry fucktards.
The cyberpunk future of corporations running the world with an iron fist isn't the future - it's the past, the present, and the future.
Chimps like Bush are just the front men, or alternatively, wannabes using their political and military clout to cut their slice of the spoils from the rich.
Like in New Orleans and Watts, when people have nothing to lose as a result of some mess, they wake up to this and start shooting cops and burning down corporate buildings. Not effective, of course - you need to shoot politicians and their supporters, not buildings.
Better yet, build the tech to kill them all quietly and secretly. That's the Transhuman way.
I get my Epson C60 cartridges for $5.95 for black, $6.95 for color. They last as long as the Epson ones as far as I can tell. No problems with them at all, so far. Even if they didn't, paying one-sixth the price that Epson charges would be a deal.
Plus, after you've bought a couple, you get a ten percent off coupon emailed to you regularly. The last one I got was for 15%.
Obviously this ruling is an attempt by the printer companies to deal with the Asian undercutters who are producing cheaper, equally good cartridges. If your whole business model is to sell cheap printers and expensive ink cartridges, your business model looks shakey if anyone can make and sell the same cartridges for one-sixth your price.
This ruling was about refills, but you can bet the printer companies are working toward outlawing independently manufactured cartridges as well. The next generation of printers will not allow you to install any other cartridge but theirs, count on it. Of course, someone will figure out how to beat that, so the printer companies will turn to Congress.
They don't want to just control anything computer-related.
They want to control the PEOPLE that are computer-related. Every user, every developer. And then use that to proclaim themselves better than EVERYONE else.
THAT's the bottom line of primate behavior - every human HAS to be better than everyone else (in their own mind), or they get panic-stricken from the fear of death.
The Gnostics knew this two thousand years ago. They said that there was a need in humans that could not be satisfied by family, work, society, or anything else but the transcendence of the human condition. And that need is transcendence of death.
We Transhumans are not so afflicted because we do not fear death (the hardwired fear reaction in the brain remains, but it does not govern our every action) - but neither do we accept it. Thus, we activate the "fight" side of the "fight or flight" instinct.
Gates and Ballmer, Bush, practically everybody, are all down on the "flight" side. It may look like fight to people, but it's really flight. You only fight if you understand the core issue and make the right decision. That core decision is not to accept death. And that decision has corollaries which must be understood and implemented.
It's pathetic - with Gates or Ballmer's money, they could defeat death. They just don't know how. It's purely an inability to reason rationally about the issue because they are overwhelmed with fear.
And so they'll die scrambling for power instead of actually doing what is necessary to defeat death.
Appropriate, since their scrambling for power is what is holding back everyone else's chances of defeating death.
I love it when an ape like Ballmer gets upset because somebody fucked him over!
I'd love to see Bill's reaction, since it was probably worse. He's known for having a vicious temper, too. He used to scream at customers - big customers, at that.
If they can't use their monopoly to bully somebody, they get pissed.
Look, rocket scientist, I have Mandrake 10.1 on my system. I don't particularly need Linspire at all. I was merely testing it in live CD mode to see what the current version looked like and how it behaved, particularly from the point of view of a naive user since that's who this distro is intended for.
If it doesn't pass the Net test, it isn't adequate.
That simple.
As for the rest of your comments, shove them deep into your anus.
First it gave me a Konqueror message that "/mnt/cdrom0 was not found." Okay, I can let that slide.
And I admit it handled my old ViewSonic 6 monitor much better than most other distros do, including Knoppix. None of them get the horizontal sync right, and I have to tweak the X config. No surprise, it's an ancient monitor.
Then I tried getting on the Net. This thing uses that stupid plug icon in the system tray. Tells you nothing but that you're not connected, but does have a button for starting up the network profile dialog.
So I fire up the Control Center and try to set up the default network profile. Won't let me save the changes (after stupidly prompting me to) because I'm on a live CD - evidently it's not smart enough to change the active profile on the RAM disk or in memory or wherever the active profile is being held. It just says it can't "switch the active profile."
Okay, the default was for my Broadcom onboard NIC. Frankly, I can't remember which one is the DSL NIC, so maybe it's the D-Link (I think I switched them the time I installed Mandrake 10.1). So I tried the D-Link interface - no go there, either. Since you can't save the active profile and you can't save to a live CD, if the interface is wrong, you're stuck with the command line. I'm not wasting any more time with it.
So I send a rant to Linspire's support about how Knoppix seems to be the only distro able to simply detect my SBC DSL and get me on the Net in a minute, with a simple wizard.
I submit the support comment - and get a bunch of error messages because their servers are hammered and nothing works on their site any more - supposedly - that's Robertson's excuse.
So I send a similar rant to Mike from his blog. He responds that I must have a unique hardware situation. Well, no, I don't - I have a vanilla AMD-based clone with standard NICs, and nothing has been unsupported from Red Hat 7.3 on.
He says saving to a live CD would be a problem.
Duh. So how come Knoppix can set my config up?
Bottom line: Linspire fails the Net test. If a new user can't get on the Net in five minutes, the distro goes. When I upgraded from Red Hat 7.3 a while back, I first put on Fedora Core 3. It failed the same test. Mandrake 10.1 succeeded with somewhat less futzing around.
Linspire (and Fedora - and every other distro that can't do this) needs to revamp their Net connection methods to do what Knoppix does - scan the NICs (ALL of them, not stop on the first one), detect the PPPoE concentrator, and configure the system for a DSL connection, including user id and password for the ISP - which should be the only thing the user really needs to say, that and yes I use the ISP's DHCP.
This isn't rocket science, geeks. Find out how Knoppix does it, and then ALL OF YOU DO IT LIKE THAT. Stop this "Not Invented Here" bullshit.
Most of the people doing the raping and shooting will be black.
The percentage may be nearly equal in many cases, depending on the crime, but the majority will be black.
I spent eight years in the Federal pen. The three largest groups of people there are either white, black or Hispanic. Whites are the majority in many places, but whites outnumber blacks in the general society by five to one. So when you see a prison with one third white, one third black and one third Hispanic, whites are outnumbered way out of proportion to the general public distribution.
While this is caused by poor blacks being lured into drug dealing, and thus targeted by laws passed by whites intent on criminalizing race and using the drug business and the law to control other races (while enriching themselves both by controlling the drug trade AND forcing taxpayers to pay for an excessive law enforcement apparatus), the fact of the matter is - it works. Blacks and Hispanics end up being criminals, developing criminal attitudes and behavior, and ending up in jail.
And the ones not in jail are the ones doing most of the crime in NO right now. Count on it.
The real issue around NO is why there are fewer resources to aid in the rescue effort - the reason is Iraq. Most of the National Guard troops and resources are in Iraq, destroying another country, while NO sinks beneath the waves. There have been plenty of articles in the last couple days about how most of the funds for improving the levee system were diverted to the war in Iraq.
George Bush and the rightwing neocon fucktards bear PERSONAL responsibility for this disaster in NO.
I was going to respond citing lines of code for Windows and Linux, but the fucking stupid/. "lameness filter" - which itself is fucking lame - wouldn't accept the post because of supposed "junk characters" that were nowhere to be found in the post...
Anyway, the lines of code for Windows XP is supposedly 40-50 million lines of code, whereas for the Linux kernel, it is 6 million, and for a Linux distro like Red Hat or Debian (presumably including the two desktops and the utilities, and perhaps even the included apps), the figures range from 30 million to 213 million.
The most useful figure, though, is the Coverity study that showed Linux had five times fewer bugs than commercial products of the same size.
Given that Windows XP was released with, what, 65,000 bugs or whatever the figure was, supposedly, according to a Microsoft memo at the time, that's pretty good news.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with "upgrade cycles". It has to do with preventative maintenance.
It has to do with avoiding the cost of the failure when it does fail. You aren't going to be able to predict the timing of that failure, and the more important the job the machine is doing, the higher the cost of the failure.
You replace something before it fails to avoid the cost of the failure, not the cost of the box. A FREE box costs you money when it fails.
Now, if the box is just doing something simple like a firewall, the cost of the failure might be less than the cost of replacing it. But I'm talking about servers doing something that has dollar value or mission critical importance.
You replace those BEFORE they fail, not after.
If a corporation does not have an asset replacement policy in effect, they're incompetent. That simple.
Four years for the Sunblades is not necessarily obsolete.
Fifteen years from now, yes, they will be utterly obsolete, and totally pointless to be running them even if they do the job - because some newer machine will do the job BETTER AND CHEAPER (EVEN if you've totally paid off the old machine, it's STILL going to cost you money over a newer one because of one factor or another - if nothing else, because of the issue that no one knows what to do when it fails.)
There is such a thing as preventative maintenance - which means you replace something BEFORE it fails so you don't incur the expense of the actual failure. It's not the box cost you're worried about, it's the cost of the failure. A FREE box that fails costs money!
I wasn't talking about Visual Studio at that point in my post.
I was talking about Windows in general.
What I said about the original comment about IDEs vs text editors is that text editors these days are half-IDEs anyway. And you can manage projects from a lot of text editors. So Visual doesn't have a lock on that concept.
There are fifty million free archive programs out there that do just as much and more - and have for years.
I've NEVER used Winzip. I used to use a version of PowerArchiver. Currently I use ZipGenius.
I've never understood the need for fifty million features in archive programs either. I zip a bunch of files, I unzip 'em. Occasionally I try to repair a damaged one - which never works.
And do we really need any NEW archive formats that save 7% more space - with 200GB hard drives going for $100?
"The advantages of having inline help, syntax coloring, auto-completion, project organization, etc. in the native home of ASP.NET editing are just too many to think that another environment like a pure text editor would be a good idea."
I don't know too many text editors that DON'T have most of those features, albeit some of them may not as fully support ASP.Net.
The issue then becomes which IDE allows getting under the hood while still providing sufficient automation to enable productivity.
Meanwhile, the main point of the OP's comment was that a GUI (and by extension, closed source) conceals one's lack of direct knowledge of what is going on - knowledge that becomes critical when something goes wrong.
It's constantly true on Windows - something doesn't react the way you expected. On Linux, you can look at a config file. On Windows, you can't look at anything but some checkboxes scattered over half a dozen different dialogues and menu options. The only way to figure anything out is to step up to the next level and reconsider the entire process you're trying to do - essentially relearning the Windows interface for the process every time. Why? Because in fact it's terribly complicated. The GUI just makes it SEEM simple.
I keep telling people this, but they don't listen: Windows is totally NON-intuitive. It's operation is incredibly complicated and deliberately so - first, because it's Microsoft's way to use "featuritus" to lock in its customers, and second, because Microsoft has no clue how to make anything simple.
People think Windows is easy to use because you can point and click to copy a file or something. That's trivial. Try running one of their servers. Try even understanding Active Directory, or Group Policy interactions between the several different types of groups allowed. It's a conceptual nightmare.
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Corporate policy everywhere these days (these days? Hell, since forever!) is that the customer is "the enemy". How can we extract all the customer's money while still preventing him from using our product, which is shit anyway, all under the guise of "intellectual property" and "support costs".
This is what you get when you have state-sponsored entities run by power-hungry fucktards.
The cyberpunk future of corporations running the world with an iron fist isn't the future - it's the past, the present, and the future.
Chimps like Bush are just the front men, or alternatively, wannabes using their political and military clout to cut their slice of the spoils from the rich.
Like in New Orleans and Watts, when people have nothing to lose as a result of some mess, they wake up to this and start shooting cops and burning down corporate buildings. Not effective, of course - you need to shoot politicians and their supporters, not buildings.
Better yet, build the tech to kill them all quietly and secretly. That's the Transhuman way.
Have a nice day.
I get my Epson C60 cartridges for $5.95 for black, $6.95 for color. They last as long as the Epson ones as far as I can tell. No problems with them at all, so far. Even if they didn't, paying one-sixth the price that Epson charges would be a deal.
Plus, after you've bought a couple, you get a ten percent off coupon emailed to you regularly. The last one I got was for 15%.
Obviously this ruling is an attempt by the printer companies to deal with the Asian undercutters who are producing cheaper, equally good cartridges. If your whole business model is to sell cheap printers and expensive ink cartridges, your business model looks shakey if anyone can make and sell the same cartridges for one-sixth your price.
This ruling was about refills, but you can bet the printer companies are working toward outlawing independently manufactured cartridges as well. The next generation of printers will not allow you to install any other cartridge but theirs, count on it. Of course, someone will figure out how to beat that, so the printer companies will turn to Congress.
They don't want to just control anything computer-related.
They want to control the PEOPLE that are computer-related. Every user, every developer. And then use that to proclaim themselves better than EVERYONE else.
THAT's the bottom line of primate behavior - every human HAS to be better than everyone else (in their own mind), or they get panic-stricken from the fear of death.
The Gnostics knew this two thousand years ago. They said that there was a need in humans that could not be satisfied by family, work, society, or anything else but the transcendence of the human condition. And that need is transcendence of death.
We Transhumans are not so afflicted because we do not fear death (the hardwired fear reaction in the brain remains, but it does not govern our every action) - but neither do we accept it. Thus, we activate the "fight" side of the "fight or flight" instinct.
Gates and Ballmer, Bush, practically everybody, are all down on the "flight" side. It may look like fight to people, but it's really flight. You only fight if you understand the core issue and make the right decision. That core decision is not to accept death. And that decision has corollaries which must be understood and implemented.
It's pathetic - with Gates or Ballmer's money, they could defeat death. They just don't know how.
It's purely an inability to reason rationally about the issue because they are overwhelmed with fear.
And so they'll die scrambling for power instead of actually doing what is necessary to defeat death.
Appropriate, since their scrambling for power is what is holding back everyone else's chances of defeating death.
I love it when an ape like Ballmer gets upset because somebody fucked him over!
I'd love to see Bill's reaction, since it was probably worse. He's known for having a vicious temper, too. He used to scream at customers - big customers, at that.
If they can't use their monopoly to bully somebody, they get pissed.
Tough nookies, Steve. Deal with it - if you can.
Trademark the fucking name before you get in bed with companies who you might need to fork from.
See, Linus was smart. Which is why we call it Linux, and not Joomix or SCOnix.
Their editor needs to contribute some of his bag to their servers, since they're obviously not up to a
Look, rocket scientist, I have Mandrake 10.1 on my system. I don't particularly need Linspire at all. I was merely testing it in live CD mode to see what the current version looked like and how it behaved, particularly from the point of view of a naive user since that's who this distro is intended for.
If it doesn't pass the Net test, it isn't adequate.
That simple.
As for the rest of your comments, shove them deep into your anus.
Just because you have a system that Fedora can see doesn't mean everybody does - even though mine is a vanilla clone with all supported hardware.
Your reasoning skills need working on.
Well, I booted it as a live CD.
First it gave me a Konqueror message that "/mnt/cdrom0 was not found." Okay, I can let that slide.
And I admit it handled my old ViewSonic 6 monitor much better than most other distros do, including Knoppix. None of them get the horizontal sync right, and I have to tweak the X config. No surprise, it's an ancient monitor.
Then I tried getting on the Net. This thing uses that stupid plug icon in the system tray. Tells you nothing but that you're not connected, but does have a button for starting up the network profile dialog.
So I fire up the Control Center and try to set up the default network profile. Won't let me save the changes (after stupidly prompting me to) because I'm on a live CD - evidently it's not smart enough to change the active profile on the RAM disk or in memory or wherever the active profile is being held. It just says it can't "switch the active profile."
Okay, the default was for my Broadcom onboard NIC. Frankly, I can't remember which one is the DSL NIC, so maybe it's the D-Link (I think I switched them the time I installed Mandrake 10.1). So I tried the D-Link interface - no go there, either. Since you can't save the active profile and you can't save to a live CD, if the interface is wrong, you're stuck with the command line. I'm not wasting any more time with it.
So I send a rant to Linspire's support about how Knoppix seems to be the only distro able to simply detect my SBC DSL and get me on the Net in a minute, with a simple wizard.
I submit the support comment - and get a bunch of error messages because their servers are hammered and nothing works on their site any more - supposedly - that's Robertson's excuse.
So I send a similar rant to Mike from his blog. He responds that I must have a unique hardware situation. Well, no, I don't - I have a vanilla AMD-based clone with standard NICs, and nothing has been unsupported from Red Hat 7.3 on.
He says saving to a live CD would be a problem.
Duh. So how come Knoppix can set my config up?
Bottom line: Linspire fails the Net test. If a new user can't get on the Net in five minutes, the distro goes. When I upgraded from Red Hat 7.3 a while back, I first put on Fedora Core 3. It failed the same test. Mandrake 10.1 succeeded with somewhat less futzing around.
Linspire (and Fedora - and every other distro that can't do this) needs to revamp their Net connection methods to do what Knoppix does - scan the NICs (ALL of them, not stop on the first one), detect the PPPoE concentrator, and configure the system for a DSL connection, including user id and password for the ISP - which should be the only thing the user really needs to say, that and yes I use the ISP's DHCP.
This isn't rocket science, geeks. Find out how Knoppix does it, and then ALL OF YOU DO IT LIKE THAT. Stop this "Not Invented Here" bullshit.
I was right - it's his mental condition.
Now let's see, we're due to see this as a dupe around Sunday...
Need I say more?
Unfortunately, "the military" - i.e., the National Guard - are all in Iraq wasting money and manpower on a lost cause.
Already seen one article that says the Mayor was hoping for National Guard choppers to aid in reinforcing the levees.
Sorry - no choppers. All in Iraq.
Yeah, iron fist - like in Iraq.
I'll tell you what else is the truth.
Most of the people doing the raping and shooting will be black.
The percentage may be nearly equal in many cases, depending on the crime, but the majority will be black.
I spent eight years in the Federal pen. The three largest groups of people there are either white, black or Hispanic. Whites are the majority in many places, but whites outnumber blacks in the general society by five to one. So when you see a prison with one third white, one third black and one third Hispanic, whites are outnumbered way out of proportion to the general public distribution.
While this is caused by poor blacks being lured into drug dealing, and thus targeted by laws passed by whites intent on criminalizing race and using the drug business and the law to control other races (while enriching themselves both by controlling the drug trade AND forcing taxpayers to pay for an excessive law enforcement apparatus), the fact of the matter is - it works. Blacks and Hispanics end up being criminals, developing criminal attitudes and behavior, and ending up in jail.
And the ones not in jail are the ones doing most of the crime in NO right now. Count on it.
The real issue around NO is why there are fewer resources to aid in the rescue effort - the reason is Iraq. Most of the National Guard troops and resources are in Iraq, destroying another country, while NO sinks beneath the waves. There have been plenty of articles in the last couple days about how most of the funds for improving the levee system were diverted to the war in Iraq.
George Bush and the rightwing neocon fucktards bear PERSONAL responsibility for this disaster in NO.
I was going to respond citing lines of code for Windows and Linux, but the fucking stupid
Anyway, the lines of code for Windows XP is supposedly 40-50 million lines of code, whereas for the Linux kernel, it is 6 million, and for a Linux distro like Red Hat or Debian (presumably including the two desktops and the utilities, and perhaps even the included apps), the figures range from 30 million to 213 million.
The most useful figure, though, is the Coverity study that showed Linux had five times fewer bugs than commercial products of the same size.
Given that Windows XP was released with, what, 65,000 bugs or whatever the figure was, supposedly, according to a Microsoft memo at the time, that's pretty good news.
"Comparing Windows...to GNOME, I have to admit that Windows looks more elegant."
That was your first mistake - comparing it to GNOME.
GNOME is UGLY-FUGLY. That's one reason I use KDE - and one reason why TUX Magazine says people prefer KDE over GNOME three to one.
You forgot Windows premier attraction: security!
Or to paraphrase Dr. Noah (or Bill Gates):
..."
"I can imagine a world without DRM, without corrupted standards, without proprietary formats
"Q: You are for all that?"
"A: No, no, I'm against all that!"
Make Windows worth a shit.
No, a can of sardines which is supposed to only be used for trading.
(old joke)
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with "upgrade cycles". It has to do with preventative maintenance.
It has to do with avoiding the cost of the failure when it does fail. You aren't going to be able to predict the timing of that failure, and the more important the job the machine is doing, the higher the cost of the failure.
You replace something before it fails to avoid the cost of the failure, not the cost of the box. A FREE box costs you money when it fails.
Now, if the box is just doing something simple like a firewall, the cost of the failure might be less than the cost of replacing it. But I'm talking about servers doing something that has dollar value or mission critical importance.
You replace those BEFORE they fail, not after.
If a corporation does not have an asset replacement policy in effect, they're incompetent. That simple.
Four years for the Sunblades is not necessarily obsolete.
Fifteen years from now, yes, they will be utterly obsolete, and totally pointless to be running them even if they do the job - because some newer machine will do the job BETTER AND CHEAPER (EVEN if you've totally paid off the old machine, it's STILL going to cost you money over a newer one because of one factor or another - if nothing else, because of the issue that no one knows what to do when it fails.)
There is such a thing as preventative maintenance - which means you replace something BEFORE it fails so you don't incur the expense of the actual failure. It's not the box cost you're worried about, it's the cost of the failure. A FREE box that fails costs money!
This should be obvious.
I wasn't talking about Visual Studio at that point in my post.
I was talking about Windows in general.
What I said about the original comment about IDEs vs text editors is that text editors these days are half-IDEs anyway. And you can manage projects from a lot of text editors. So Visual doesn't have a lock on that concept.
Do they look mean?
Do they have long claws?
Watch your ass, researchers.
Why?
There are fifty million free archive programs out there that do just as much and more - and have for years.
I've NEVER used Winzip. I used to use a version of PowerArchiver. Currently I use ZipGenius.
I've never understood the need for fifty million features in archive programs either. I zip a bunch of files, I unzip 'em. Occasionally I try to repair a damaged one - which never works.
And do we really need any NEW archive formats that save 7% more space - with 200GB hard drives going for $100?
"The advantages of having inline help, syntax coloring, auto-completion, project organization, etc. in the native home of ASP.NET editing are just too many to think that another environment like a pure text editor would be a good idea."
I don't know too many text editors that DON'T have most of those features, albeit some of them may not as fully support ASP.Net.
The issue then becomes which IDE allows getting under the hood while still providing sufficient automation to enable productivity.
Meanwhile, the main point of the OP's comment was that a GUI (and by extension, closed source) conceals one's lack of direct knowledge of what is going on - knowledge that becomes critical when something goes wrong.
It's constantly true on Windows - something doesn't react the way you expected. On Linux, you can look at a config file. On Windows, you can't look at anything but some checkboxes scattered over half a dozen different dialogues and menu options. The only way to figure anything out is to step up to the next level and reconsider the entire process you're trying to do - essentially relearning the Windows interface for the process every time. Why? Because in fact it's terribly complicated. The GUI just makes it SEEM simple.
I keep telling people this, but they don't listen: Windows is totally NON-intuitive. It's operation is incredibly complicated and deliberately so - first, because it's Microsoft's way to use "featuritus" to lock in its customers, and second, because Microsoft has no clue how to make anything simple.
People think Windows is easy to use because you can point and click to copy a file or something. That's trivial. Try running one of their servers. Try even understanding Active Directory, or Group Policy interactions between the several different types of groups allowed. It's a conceptual nightmare.