You mean you install a new distro and then judge its worth by the look of the default theme? You don't change the theme first thing? You don't know how to install a custom theme if you don't like the preconfigured choices?
First impressions matter. It isn't fair, but it is true.
Custom themes are fine for personal and home use. Less so, perhaps, outside the cubicle, in the library or on the shop floor where dozens of machines may greet the visitor and systems must be shared.
But then again, my boxen run headless 98% of the time, so why should I care...
Words like "boxen" and "headless" automatically take you out of the world of 99.9% of users.
setting aside worthiness or difficulties of the OLPC project[1], what other technological device could really help people in such straits then?
Every year, more than two million children die of diarrhea and other sicknesses caused by dirty water and a lack of "access to sanitation." That is the common euphemism for the reality that more than a third of the world's people -- 2.6 billion -- have no decent place to go to the bathroom, while more than a billion get water for drinking, washing and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal feces.Toilets Underused to Fight Disease
She wants things to JustWork(tm), 'cause she's a luddite.
a "luddite" rebels against technology that threatens her employment. your soccer mom simply wants to get the weekly financial reports out on time so she can get home to her kids.
she has every right to expect tech that "just works."
In an enterprise Environment isn't always as simple as upgrading to the latest bleeding edge Linux, downloading the newest software versions, compiling, installing, uploading your configs and scripts and everything works flawlessly.
in what environment could a process so agonizing and fragile as this ever be called "simple?"
If not for the wars America would stay a middle level power with a mostly farming based economy
The last census in which the U.S. was 50% rural was in 1860. U.S.Steel was capitalized at one billion dollars in 1901. The U.S. had the money and resources in 1905 to undertake projects on the scale of the Panama Canal.
pumping and exporting oil like crazy while the real developed world aka Europe was shooting itself in the foot
Industrialization in the U.S. was coal-fired.
Oil exports were trivial in the years of greatest industrial development. U.S. Crude Oil Exports.
Why would a town of 80 people even use an electronic voting machine?
the better question to ask is why a village this size needs a mayor. in my home state, a village of eighty would be an unincorporated hamlet. governed by a township.
The votes should be accurate purely out of principle. Even if the leading candidate is winning with 99% of the votes and the losing candidate is 1 vote off, we must know what happened to that one vote so that the system can be improved.
Elections are about reaching a decision most people can live with. You will never get a cpunt that is free of error.
---which is why a successful politician learns to accept the close calls gracefully. He won't be rewarded (even by his firends) for introducing the uncertainty, expense, and delay of a recount.
Hopefully, the kid will have the good sense not to bring this attitude into a Singapore court.
How come..they're not responsible for what their users do, but I am?
Because you are the owner of a record of a limited-access household account.
If you want the legal protection of an ISP, and to share your connection with one hundred or so of your closest friends, you incorporate as a non-profit ISP and contract for service with an upstream provider.
if you take a fairly typical PC, it's not going to play the awesome, leading edge sort of games that real gamers play--and that they tend to throw in the face of Mac users. Yes, you can build a machine that beats the crap out of a Mac for gaming, but no, the average person doesn't buy into that market. Mahjongg and spider solitaire are going to play just fine on PCs and Macs.
The typical mid-line Dell will play most games with performance that is acceptable to anyone but the uber-gamer-Geek. You are not limited to Mah-jong.
In the OS world, you can have
-a non-userfriendly (at least not beginner-friendly) but technically superb system. Think of classic UNIX as an example.
-or as the other extreme, a pretty, newbie-friendly but unreliable system, like Windows 9x.
MSDOS and Windows put the PC on a hundred million desktops.
UNIX as a client OS wasn't to be found on a mass market micro with 8 MB of RAM and a 286 CPU.
Those who would tweak Architecture for a Marketing Advantage, deserve no Success and will not have it in the long run.
In the long run, we are all dead. But the OS tweaked for the market has yet to hurt Microsoft or Apple.
I don't foresee MS being being put back on the anti-trust spotlight anytime soon
There was never a popular majority demanding the break-up of Microsoft.
Anti-Trust sentiment in the U.S. is notoriously short-lived and the long-term consequences of a break-up are always second-guessed. Standard Oil. AT&T.
if you are writing a thriller novel about the disciplined planning and execution of some high profile illegal act, suspension of disbelief might go poorly if you only write casually or sloppily about the planned act. No more best seller for you.
the writer creates plausible illusions, nothing more.
that is why writers like Donald Westlake (no relation) love kidding the conventions of their own more serious crime novels.
think of what Mel Brooks in his prime would have made of Hannibal Lector.
Don't worry about whether Linux is taking over the gamer machines yet. Focus on getting Linux into corporation/government desktops. That will get the OEM's to start pre-loading it which will set the stage for the home user migration.
"Trickle Down" Geek-enomics.
The Geek sees himself as Libertarian. But his faith in top-down is Technocratic and authoritarian.
Geeks are always arguing about forks. But the one fork they never see is that of the home PC. It's an entirely different world now, with its own interests, needs and values.
What about writing novels, movie scripts, or what about those individuals in police agencies and federal agencies that think about planning crimes to prevent them.What you are saying is that it is illegal to think about carrying a crime out.
There is a world of difference between casually thinking about a crime and the disciplined planning of a criminal act that a reasonable person would be compelled to believe you had every intention to commit.
What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?
The person who doesn't share the Geek's obsession with DRM. The person who expects media play and PC gaming to "just work" out the box. The person who is in the market for a new and more capable OEM system. The person who likes the look and feel of the new OS and its backwards compatability with his existing software library.
The person who gave Microsoft 95% of the home PC market.
Take the Apple Challenge: Put a Vista machine one the Net, and IIRC, make sure a telent daemon and web server are also running and give out the admin password. If nobody can crack it, we'll believe you, otherwise STFU.
and this relevant to the parent whose kids are running Vista because...?
when you open services on the client side that users don't need and hand out administrative passwords like little bags of M&Ms --- the problem ain't with the OS.
At my university the bookstore sells XP Pro for $10. You can download Office Pro off of the website for free.Do you think MS is doing that to support higher education? I doubt it. I'm more certain that they see it as a cheap way of indoctrinating people to use MS products so that when they get out of college they are so used to using MS, that they don't even stop to think of anything else.
My college age nephews began with Windows 95 when they were eight years old.
The Geek needs to wrap his head around the idea that an entire generation of users has grown up with Windows and remains comfortable with Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
First impressions matter. It isn't fair, but it is true.
Custom themes are fine for personal and home use. Less so, perhaps, outside the cubicle, in the library or on the shop floor where dozens of machines may greet the visitor and systems must be shared.
But then again, my boxen run headless 98% of the time, so why should I care...
Words like "boxen" and "headless" automatically take you out of the world of 99.9% of users.
Every year, more than two million children die of diarrhea and other sicknesses caused by dirty water and a lack of "access to sanitation." That is the common euphemism for the reality that more than a third of the world's people -- 2.6 billion -- have no decent place to go to the bathroom, while more than a billion get water for drinking, washing and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal feces.Toilets Underused to Fight Disease
does anyone but a Geek a damn about bloat? install the program. run the program. no patching required.
a "luddite" rebels against technology that threatens her employment. your soccer mom simply wants to get the weekly financial reports out on time so she can get home to her kids.
she has every right to expect tech that "just works."
in what environment could a process so agonizing and fragile as this ever be called "simple?"
but that raises the obvious question: csn the really poor countries afford OLPC?
The last census in which the U.S. was 50% rural was in 1860. U.S.Steel was capitalized at one billion dollars in 1901. The U.S. had the money and resources in 1905 to undertake projects on the scale of the Panama Canal.
pumping and exporting oil like crazy while the real developed world aka Europe was shooting itself in the foot
Industrialization in the U.S. was coal-fired.
Oil exports were trivial in the years of greatest industrial development. U.S. Crude Oil Exports.
I'd say the deal sounds remiscent of Earthlink. I'd say I don't like the risks even as you define them.
the better question to ask is why a village this size needs a mayor. in my home state, a village of eighty would be an unincorporated hamlet. governed by a township.
Elections are about reaching a decision most people can live with. You will never get a cpunt that is free of error.
---which is why a successful politician learns to accept the close calls gracefully. He won't be rewarded (even by his firends) for introducing the uncertainty, expense, and delay of a recount.
The belief that an unlocked door is an invitatation to walk in unvited has never been widely shared in the world beyond Slashdot.
users outside your own household? no bandwidth caps or business-grade pricing?
For instance, it's possible that I'd be (stupidly) required to respond to a wiretapping order if law enforcemrnt came to me with one
you don't know what your legal exposure really is, do you?
Hopefully, the kid will have the good sense not to bring this attitude into a Singapore court.
How come..they're not responsible for what their users do, but I am?
Because you are the owner of a record of a limited-access household account.
If you want the legal protection of an ISP, and to share your connection with one hundred or so of your closest friends, you incorporate as a non-profit ISP and contract for service with an upstream provider.
The typical mid-line Dell will play most games with performance that is acceptable to anyone but the uber-gamer-Geek. You are not limited to Mah-jong.
Why do think a Splash screen is one of the most popular Firefox extensions?
The audio feedback to the user inspires confidence that the process is proceeding normally even when you are not around to watch.
-a non-userfriendly (at least not beginner-friendly) but technically superb system. Think of classic UNIX as an example. -or as the other extreme, a pretty, newbie-friendly but unreliable system, like Windows 9x.
MSDOS and Windows put the PC on a hundred million desktops.
UNIX as a client OS wasn't to be found on a mass market micro with 8 MB of RAM and a 286 CPU.
Those who would tweak Architecture for a Marketing Advantage, deserve no Success and will not have it in the long run.
In the long run, we are all dead. But the OS tweaked for the market has yet to hurt Microsoft or Apple.
You can stop right there. That is all the OEM and the big box retailer needs to know.
There was never a popular majority demanding the break-up of Microsoft. Anti-Trust sentiment in the U.S. is notoriously short-lived and the long-term consequences of a break-up are always second-guessed. Standard Oil. AT&T.
Why wait? You'll find XP Home SP2 Upgrade, retail boxed, on sale now at OfficeMax.com for $50.
the writer creates plausible illusions, nothing more.
that is why writers like Donald Westlake (no relation) love kidding the conventions of their own more serious crime novels.
think of what Mel Brooks in his prime would have made of Hannibal Lector.
"Trickle Down" Geek-enomics.
The Geek sees himself as Libertarian. But his faith in top-down is Technocratic and authoritarian.
Geeks are always arguing about forks. But the one fork they never see is that of the home PC. It's an entirely different world now, with its own interests, needs and values.
There is a world of difference between casually thinking about a crime and the disciplined planning of a criminal act that a reasonable person would be compelled to believe you had every intention to commit.
The person who doesn't share the Geek's obsession with DRM. The person who expects media play and PC gaming to "just work" out the box. The person who is in the market for a new and more capable OEM system. The person who likes the look and feel of the new OS and its backwards compatability with his existing software library.
The person who gave Microsoft 95% of the home PC market.
and this relevant to the parent whose kids are running Vista because...?
when you open services on the client side that users don't need and hand out administrative passwords like little bags of M&Ms --- the problem ain't with the OS.
My college age nephews began with Windows 95 when they were eight years old.
The Geek needs to wrap his head around the idea that an entire generation of users has grown up with Windows and remains comfortable with Windows.