To truly be the end of an era, they should give out the complete specs on their formats as well... I know it isn't going to happen but that would be more complete.
From the blurb:
Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN.
It's one thing not to RTFA....but at least you could read the fucking headline.
Jeez, these proprietary software guys never do anything innovative or original. The "Computer" and "Documents" icons are just so obviously copied from Ubuntu. All these proprietary software guys are great at reverse engineering stuff other, open-source developers have already invented, but you never see them innovate or create anything new. This is all just another example of it. Before long they'll kill the whole software industry and plunge us into a global recession, costing us jobs and putting all the world's software developers out of business!
Wow. This sounds like a problem, assuming we're talking about reasonably lightweight apps you're starting. Leave OpenOffice out of this for a second, as it does have some startup time issues. But if say, a text editor or an xterm takes that kind of time, I'd say your system has trouble...I've got Ubuntu on a P4-2.4GHz w/256M, Gentoo on an Athlon 2600+ w/256M, Gentoo on a mobile Athlon 2000+ w/512M, and Fedora Core 3 on a PII-450 w/512M, and none of them are that slow.
First things first, check to make sure you have DMA enabled on your drives. `hdparm/dev/device` ought to show you. If you don't, you'll want to check your kernel config and make sure you've got your IDE chipset support enabled; most of the problems I've seen with slow machines are due to this kind of thing. After that, I'd check `top` to see if anything's eating either the proc or the memory.
Failing that, I'd hit #linuxhelp on irc.freenode.net and ask around a bit. Smart folks there.
If it turns out there isn't a real issue, and things are just slow because SuSE is way heavier than what I run (doesn't seem likely, but...) you might look into prelinking. In particular, OpenOffice is said to start about twice as fast if it's prelinked, and a lot of KDE apps are sped way up as well....that'll probably help a lot in a SuSE environment, as it's all KDE based. It costs a bit of diskspace, but for most of that, the trade is well worth it.
Jesus, I read that post and thought for a second that it was the friend I just mentioned in my last post....but he doesn't have "coporate network SMB shares." Well, better yet!
I'm sorry if this seems lazy to you, but when I buy a brand new computer I expect it to be able to work without too much tweaking, in my history with Linux that just isn't possible.
Well, I don't know about lazy. But what I do know is that this is a completely different standard than people hold Microsoft to. Have you ever installed a normal, retail copy of Windows on a laptop? I have. It can be every bit as hairy as you're talking about. Special buttons don't work, ACPI weirdness, no drivers for various devices, etc. It's no picknick.
Instead, we all buy laptops with Windows already on them and configured for their eccentric hardware. We get an OEM Windows cd, so that when we reinstall, it already has all the drivers. Great deal...but not at all a fair comparison. If you want to make it easier on yourself, check into the chipsets in your linux-laptop-to-be and make sure stuff's supported before you buy it. That's what I did, and I can barely explain how happy I am with my Gentoo Fujitsu Lifebook. Every device in the system works perfectly, and I'm not jumping through hoops to make it happen.
PCMCIA cards. A normal user in Windows PnP will get these to work easily. Not necissarily the case in Linux. Especially if it's a wireless card. Granted this may not be considered hardware by you, but I would bet most people who know practically nothing about computers can get it to work on Windows.
That's fantastic...pick the worst example you ever could have. This is where the big misunderstanding comes into play: projection. You know that you can make a PCMCIA card work in Windows just fine; I'd wager you've got more than a decade of Windows experience, and know what you're doing. But now you've gone and assumed that everybody knows how to do this stuff. Let me tell you, I've worked in the service end of the consumer computer business....that's a pipe dream. Most folks don't know a thing about how to make those devices work.
And worse yet, the Windows situation for most of these things is actually worse than making them work in Linux. In Linux, nearly all the time, you plug a PCMCIA card in and it loads the needed module and does what it's supposed to do with it. If it's wireless, you can expect to be given an interface immediately. If it's a hard drive, expect it to get mounted. Sprint PCS card....ppp device. Etc. All these things would require driver disc two-steps and reboots in Windows, and not in the same order as each other. Have you ever plugged one of those things in and wandered through the driver installation dialogue that automatically pops up, only to later look at the instructions and see that they wanted you to install the driver before you plugged the device in, and now you have to go through some hoop (once when I did it, it was a registry hack) to get back to where you can start installing it?
I'll give you a real-world example. My friend, who is not a computer expert by any stretch, (honest to god) has an Ubuntu laptop (which I installed for him) and a Windows laptop. When he plugged in his new usb 2.0 PCMCIA adapter, and plugged in his usb hard drive to it, Linux mounted it at/media/PlugMeIn (the volume label), and put an icon on his desktop. When he did the same thing in the Windows machine, it pushed him through the driver process and didn't find anything. He came to me and asked me to find and install the drivers, which I did, grumbling.
Seriously, everybody acts like they have just totally forgotten what a pain in the ass drivers can be in Windows. You spend your whole life with the system, then check Linux out for a few months, things are different and some things are annoying, and suddenly all those Windows annoyances, spread out over so long and packed a lot denser into the early part of your experience, have faded in your memory. Don't forget, they were there.
Installing Linux "all the way to where granny can use it" would take about as long as the Kubuntu installation.
Well, I've installed Linux for some non-expert users, and I have to say, it's a good deal more complicated than that:
1)I want granny's computer to automatically update itself across the Internet.
2)Granny wants to be able to open pdfs in Firefox.
3)Granny wants to view flash webpages
4)Java too...
5)If I don't add the gnome clipboard daemon, granny doesn't understand why sometimes cut/paste doesn't seem to behave right.
6)Granny wants to watch DVD's.
7)If Granny's on PPPoE based ADSL, she'll need RP-PPPoE, and she doesn't know what it is.
8)Granny wants to run a multithreaded webserver with dynamic database-driven content.
Oh, wait....not sure about that last one. But no kidding on the rest....each of these things will require extra post-install work from me. And that may or may not be an exhaustive list, depending on the granny in question and my memory.
I ran desktop Linux (Redhat 7,8,9) on a Dell Inspiron notebook for about two years. Hardware support was most certainly NOT excellent.
RH7 was released in August 2000, 8 in September 2002, and 9 in March 2003. The most important advances in Linux hardware support (coldplug/hotplug, udev, autofs, the advent of good drivers and tools for nearly all wireless chips) were either not here or in their infancy. Please check this out again with a distribution released this year, and reevaluate. Seriously, pretty much every problem you mention above has been dealt with. As I said before, we've come a long way in a short time.
Wireless was an adventure to say the least - you had to buy a card that used one of a small set of chipsets if you wanted 802.11b to work.
Like I said, all the chipsets that matter at this point are working one way or another, and the broadcom g chipset is the only one I know of that requires much extra work. And ndiswrapper isn't too tough to get going anyway. If this issue is taken care of at build time, like HP should, it doesn't even matter, and if you're upgrading to wireless, look for one that says Linux on the box; they're out there, and it's no more trouble than checking to see if it's supported on Macs.
The only way I could get my scanner to work under SANE was to pretend it was a completely different scanner from a different manufacturer (and figuring that out took a bit of digging)!
What's the scanner come up as in Windows? Unless it just doesn't, and makes you go to the manufacturer's disc, I'll bet it's that same other scanner. Because some scanner vendors are just relabelling an OEM product. But really, it's moot now, because I'll bet if you try that out on a machine with modern hotplugging it'll come right up and SANE will automatically recognize it.
Only one digital camera would work with gphoto; for the others I had to use command-line tools that had been hacked together by other folks
Now this is the weird part....what cameras are these? I expect ghoto has come a ways since you looked, but more than that, nearly every camera I've seen just plugs right in and Linux mounts it like it was a scsi hard drive. Maybe one or two proprietary exceptions that might be weirder than that, but I would certainly say that's the exception.
And forget about my ATI Rage Mobility card - the drivers flat-out sucked. Printer support was spotty, although gimp-print had a decent (not great) driver for the second printer I bought.
At this point, both video-board manufacturers that matter have great Linux drivers. ATI's are already built into xorg, and NVidia's driver setup is integrated well into most distributions. As for the printers, again I agree that it's one of the tricky spots, but I still maintain that this story isn't any worse than my experiences with printers and Windows XP.
After two years of that I decided to just buy a Powerbook and get a "Linux" that just worked.
This is really the kicker. You complain so long about all these hardware problems with Linux, and then you bring in this crazily unfair comparison. You buy a box from a one-source OS and hardware vendor with the most tightly-controlled set of hardware sold today, and what an amazement, everything works. Look, you bought the exact hardware they want you to use with the system. If I got to tell you every component to put in your Linux laptop, down to each chipset in the thing, everything will work. It's a no-brainer.
Now, you'll laugh at this, but an equally unfair comparison is this: how well will OSX run on a Windows laptop? You're asking Linux to have the a 1:1 hardware support relationship with Windows, but nobody ever asks for Windows to support everything Linux does, or for Macs to run all the hardware either of the other two does. I just don't get why people hold Linux to a higher standard....it's now expected to support everything anyone else does.
For example, I have a duplex printer - if it's on XP. If it's on a Linux box it's a single-sider simply because the driver doesn't yet support it.
Ok, I'll believe that; it's one of the three areas I mentioned that still have a few issues. But I'll say this in retort: I have 2 printers at home, both of which I purchased when I primarily ran Windows 98, and both of which run happily (with no missing functionality) in Linux, and neither of which will work at all in Windows XP.
The point is simply that I'm unaware of an operating system that properly supports all the hardware out there. From my experience, I don't find Linux inferior in this regard; yet I still see posts like the one to which I replied every single time there's a Linux story here, or anywhere for that matter. It's complete bullshit, and has become one of my hotbuttons.
Look man, ndiswrapper is just not that hard. One config file, with one line, containing the path to the windows driver. It's not rocket science.
The part about this that always burns me is that the same people who whine so much about the impossibility of Linux hardware support don't hesitate to open regedit.
Well, despite the fact that I disagree with the basic point of his post, I must agree that I've not yet setup a Linux system "all the way to where granny can use it" without having to drop to the shell. Now, I think that's probably ok...I'd rather use the terminal anyway, and once I get done, she doesn't have to. That's the stem of my disagreement with the GP; I *can* setup a box so that the end-user doesn't need the shell....I just have to use it to get them there. HP should be able to do the same...although it remains to be seen whether they will.
But if you're looking for specifics, and keeping Ubuntu-centric here, head down to http://ubuntuguide.org/...don't get me wrong, I'm happy that the site is there. But that's about 50 examples of initial-configuration tasks that require the shell. In my opinion, every one of those tasks should either a)be done automatically (without asking) when you install the OS, b)be installation options, or c)be simple, no-terminal-needed operations.
If I only got to pick one thing for Ubuntu to do at install time that it's not doing now, it would be to give the user an appropriate/etc/apt/sources.list file.
Hope that helps; you're right, there definitely is a *lot* of usability work going on these days. I started with RedHat 5.2, and we've come a long, long way.
Chances are they are going to have to choose from a very small list (by comparison to a Windows machine) of upgrades that now work with their version of Linux.
For fuck's sake, why don't you actually try a Linux installation sometime, instead of perpetuating this ridiculous bullshit story of Linux's hardware support "problems." Send it back to HP? Are you on drugs?
Linux has excellent hardware support. There is one major wireless chipset that does not have native support, and thus requires you to use the windows driver through ndiswrapper. There are some winmodems that don't work, or are hard to make work. And there are a few printers yet out there that don't behave.
Now, to put that in perspective, lots of printers won't work with Windows XP. And lots of wireless cards won't work in Windows 9x. Various legacy stuff doesn't work on newer versions, and the number of times you'll need a third-party driver is vastly higher in my experience on Windows than Linux. I've got 3 usb->serial dongles; in XP, they each need a different driver, none of which came with the OS....if you want to use them with XP, you'd better have the CD that they came with. Each one is automatically recognized and assigned a device file when plugged into any modern Linux box. Same story with my Sprint PCS phone's data connection; Linux just recognizes it as an ACM device, and you can use the regular dialup setup. To do that in Windows, you have to find a driver, which is very difficult without buying a $40 outlook-sync program.
The truth of the matter is, more hardware will run on modern Linux than any single version of Windows ever produced. Your post was 100% sheer FUD. And if you disagree, and want to come back here and bitch and moan some more, why don't you start with theorizing at least one upgrade you can think of that a normal user would be able to do himself on Windows, but would have to send the box back to HP to accomplish on Linux. I dare you.
You're still going to be interfaced to the machine, and if only for safety reasons, your mind will instruct the remote machine to pull your consciousness to it, similar to telnetting to another machine, opening an FTP connection to your laptop, and pulling your files to the remote machine (download).
Dude, put that back in your ass from whence you pulled it.
Maybe they will restrict the operation to those who do things to their brain other than try to deaden it and give way to instinct.
As Aldous Huxley said, "An intellectual is someone who has found one thing that's more interesting than sex."
Huxley also thought mescaline was one of those interesting things. Quit being such a knee-jerk prude.
I do not think your parent poster's point requires a belief that drugs and sex are the only pleasures or interesting things in life for it to be valid. It merely requires a belief that both of those things are an integral part of living. Perhaps more broadly taken, the question is whether the computer that stores your brain will be able to engage in the multitude of physical pleasures and interactions we do every day. Would the computer housing your brain be able to go backpacking? Or skydiving, surfing, or driving really fast on a twisty road? The point is, living is more than thinking...it's also doing. Allowing your brain to keep functioning is one thing; to have a life worth living you must also be able to have a beer.
You have no facility in your own brain to initiate its upload to a computer.
Maybe you don't...my brain has an ftp client.
(Slightly) more seriously....how do you know that this future technology will not be initiated by a process in the brain rather than in the computer? It could require some special hypnotic or drug-induced "dump" which might then be captured by the machine.
In any case, I think we should use kermit for the transfer.
In all seriousness, though....that article is a good chuckle. He was calling for Apple to switch to Itanium for Christ's sake, and then license OS X for non-Apple hardware with a Windows compatibility layer. Bwahahaha! Come now, John, how do you dream this shit up?
Equally hairbrained is his theory of a dual-processor PowerPC/Itanium machine; he seems to have the idea that they could just duck-tape two motherboards together and have it pick and choose which processor to run what executable on...clearly, he's using drugs.
If Apple does this (which I am extremely skeptical of at this point) I expect it will be at the very lowest end....completely backwards from what Dvorak predicted. The reason is simple: IBM's Power architecture is plenty fast, and they aren't going to get a performance improvement by switching to Intel. The only benefit available from such a switch is cost.
Dvorak is one of the smartest writers in the industry
BWAAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!
No, seriously....you can stop right there. You can't shake a stick at all the outrageous trolling tripe that asshole spews these days. Inane conclusions without support all over the place, with an obvious bent toward the overdramatic and sensational....all with the goal of having us rant and rave about it and get him clicks. Hell, he effectively admitted it when he said MOG should get a medal for attracting page hits! That was the part that's so unbelievable....this column just makes it so clear that he has absolutely no concept that journalism is about more than maximizing readers.
Not that that's the only failing...I could also do without his "I'm so much better educated than you that I don't have to respond when you say I'm unethical" nonsense. What an egotistical cocksucker. His answer to everyone being pissed that he's completely ignoring any and all senses of morality *and* any principles of journalistic ethics was simply, "you guys aren't journalists, so you're below me and I'm not going to bother addressing the issue." Well, some of us have been to journalism school. And in fact, some journalistic ethics organizations sent open letters to MOG with their resolutions on the subject. The truth is, Dvorak is the only professional writer I've seen defend MOG, and with good reason.....this is way, way beyond the pale. Now, as to whether he only said that to get his own clicks (and thus doesn't really believe that what she did was ok) or whether he just really believes that a journalist really ought to do just any damned thing he/she wants to provoke readership, I guess that's an open question.
And while I'm at it, this bullshit harping on the Linux community for being zealots has got to go too. Dvorak sees a lot of zealotry probably....because he's off spewing FUD every week and people are pissed about it. You write a column yelling about how shitty Windows is, and I guarantee you'll have lunatic Windows users on your forums. Hell, you see those people on/., right?
The Linux community IS populated by lunatics. Microsoft don't even need to fight Linux. They can just sit back and watch the community built around it fall apart. Torn apart by the childish zealots who created the situation.
Right....falling right apart. Obviously. If your first sentence didn't give everyone enough warning to just completely discount every word from your mouth, surely this will fit the bill. If you think Linux or open source methods are just going to fade away into the night, I've got an extremely lucrative financial oportunity for you involving a transfer of large sums of money from my deceased Nigerian grandfather's bank account.
A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.
Am I the only guy that finds that really scary? I mean, I agree, we need to be pretty sure that a security fix isn't going to break other things....but my stress level on day 2 of knowing that my sshd has a remote-root-exploit would be pretty damned high. I would hope that my distro could check for breakage during the first day, before I start sucking down antacids to deal with my ulcer.
Hey Dvorak...quit posting on here to self-prove your Linux zealots theory. At least our forums will let you do it anonymously; that way you don't even have to go to the trouble of creating a new slashdot user named "L1nuxR00lz"
Slashdot Mirror
From your post:
To truly be the end of an era, they should give out the complete specs on their formats as well... I know it isn't going to happen but that would be more complete.
From the blurb:
Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN.
It's one thing not to RTFA ....but at least you could read the fucking headline.
It's all about dosage...
Jeez, these proprietary software guys never do anything innovative or original. The "Computer" and "Documents" icons are just so obviously copied from Ubuntu. All these proprietary software guys are great at reverse engineering stuff other, open-source developers have already invented, but you never see them innovate or create anything new. This is all just another example of it. Before long they'll kill the whole software industry and plunge us into a global recession, costing us jobs and putting all the world's software developers out of business!
Something tells me you aren't following the recommended procedure here.....use the beer *first* ....then follow the instructions on the condom.
Wow. This sounds like a problem, assuming we're talking about reasonably lightweight apps you're starting. Leave OpenOffice out of this for a second, as it does have some startup time issues. But if say, a text editor or an xterm takes that kind of time, I'd say your system has trouble...I've got Ubuntu on a P4-2.4GHz w/256M, Gentoo on an Athlon 2600+ w/256M, Gentoo on a mobile Athlon 2000+ w/512M, and Fedora Core 3 on a PII-450 w/512M, and none of them are that slow.
/dev/device` ought to show you. If you don't, you'll want to check your kernel config and make sure you've got your IDE chipset support enabled; most of the problems I've seen with slow machines are due to this kind of thing. After that, I'd check `top` to see if anything's eating either the proc or the memory.
First things first, check to make sure you have DMA enabled on your drives. `hdparm
Failing that, I'd hit #linuxhelp on irc.freenode.net and ask around a bit. Smart folks there.
If it turns out there isn't a real issue, and things are just slow because SuSE is way heavier than what I run (doesn't seem likely, but...) you might look into prelinking. In particular, OpenOffice is said to start about twice as fast if it's prelinked, and a lot of KDE apps are sped way up as well....that'll probably help a lot in a SuSE environment, as it's all KDE based. It costs a bit of diskspace, but for most of that, the trade is well worth it.
Good Luck!
For $29, this app delivers, per dollar, more fun and utility combined than anything else I've ever purchased.
I suggest you take a quick look at two products: beer and condoms.
Note to offworlders, including the parent poster and the author of the blurb: possessive pronouns do not contain apostrophes.
Well, piss. I've only got a VHS deck.
Try it clicked on the satelite view. That shows the whole earth, whereas the map view only has the U.S. and U.K.
Jesus, I read that post and thought for a second that it was the friend I just mentioned in my last post....but he doesn't have "coporate network SMB shares." Well, better yet!
I'm sorry if this seems lazy to you, but when I buy a brand new computer I expect it to be able to work without too much tweaking, in my history with Linux that just isn't possible.
Well, I don't know about lazy. But what I do know is that this is a completely different standard than people hold Microsoft to. Have you ever installed a normal, retail copy of Windows on a laptop? I have. It can be every bit as hairy as you're talking about. Special buttons don't work, ACPI weirdness, no drivers for various devices, etc. It's no picknick.
Instead, we all buy laptops with Windows already on them and configured for their eccentric hardware. We get an OEM Windows cd, so that when we reinstall, it already has all the drivers. Great deal...but not at all a fair comparison. If you want to make it easier on yourself, check into the chipsets in your linux-laptop-to-be and make sure stuff's supported before you buy it. That's what I did, and I can barely explain how happy I am with my Gentoo Fujitsu Lifebook. Every device in the system works perfectly, and I'm not jumping through hoops to make it happen.
PCMCIA cards. A normal user in Windows PnP will get these to work easily. Not necissarily the case in Linux. Especially if it's a wireless card. Granted this may not be considered hardware by you, but I would bet most people who know practically nothing about computers can get it to work on Windows.
That's fantastic...pick the worst example you ever could have. This is where the big misunderstanding comes into play: projection. You know that you can make a PCMCIA card work in Windows just fine; I'd wager you've got more than a decade of Windows experience, and know what you're doing. But now you've gone and assumed that everybody knows how to do this stuff. Let me tell you, I've worked in the service end of the consumer computer business....that's a pipe dream. Most folks don't know a thing about how to make those devices work.
And worse yet, the Windows situation for most of these things is actually worse than making them work in Linux. In Linux, nearly all the time, you plug a PCMCIA card in and it loads the needed module and does what it's supposed to do with it. If it's wireless, you can expect to be given an interface immediately. If it's a hard drive, expect it to get mounted. Sprint PCS card....ppp device. Etc. All these things would require driver disc two-steps and reboots in Windows, and not in the same order as each other. Have you ever plugged one of those things in and wandered through the driver installation dialogue that automatically pops up, only to later look at the instructions and see that they wanted you to install the driver before you plugged the device in, and now you have to go through some hoop (once when I did it, it was a registry hack) to get back to where you can start installing it?
I'll give you a real-world example. My friend, who is not a computer expert by any stretch, (honest to god) has an Ubuntu laptop (which I installed for him) and a Windows laptop. When he plugged in his new usb 2.0 PCMCIA adapter, and plugged in his usb hard drive to it, Linux mounted it at /media/PlugMeIn (the volume label), and put an icon on his desktop. When he did the same thing in the Windows machine, it pushed him through the driver process and didn't find anything. He came to me and asked me to find and install the drivers, which I did, grumbling.
Seriously, everybody acts like they have just totally forgotten what a pain in the ass drivers can be in Windows. You spend your whole life with the system, then check Linux out for a few months, things are different and some things are annoying, and suddenly all those Windows annoyances, spread out over so long and packed a lot denser into the early part of your experience, have faded in your memory. Don't forget, they were there.
Installing Linux "all the way to where granny can use it" would take about as long as the Kubuntu installation.
Well, I've installed Linux for some non-expert users, and I have to say, it's a good deal more complicated than that:
1)I want granny's computer to automatically update itself across the Internet.
2)Granny wants to be able to open pdfs in Firefox.
3)Granny wants to view flash webpages
4)Java too...
5)If I don't add the gnome clipboard daemon, granny doesn't understand why sometimes cut/paste doesn't seem to behave right.
6)Granny wants to watch DVD's.
7)If Granny's on PPPoE based ADSL, she'll need RP-PPPoE, and she doesn't know what it is.
8)Granny wants to run a multithreaded webserver with dynamic database-driven content.
Oh, wait....not sure about that last one. But no kidding on the rest....each of these things will require extra post-install work from me. And that may or may not be an exhaustive list, depending on the granny in question and my memory.
I ran desktop Linux (Redhat 7,8,9) on a Dell Inspiron notebook for about two years. Hardware support was most certainly NOT excellent.
RH7 was released in August 2000, 8 in September 2002, and 9 in March 2003. The most important advances in Linux hardware support (coldplug/hotplug, udev, autofs, the advent of good drivers and tools for nearly all wireless chips) were either not here or in their infancy. Please check this out again with a distribution released this year, and reevaluate. Seriously, pretty much every problem you mention above has been dealt with. As I said before, we've come a long way in a short time.
Wireless was an adventure to say the least - you had to buy a card that used one of a small set of chipsets if you wanted 802.11b to work.
Like I said, all the chipsets that matter at this point are working one way or another, and the broadcom g chipset is the only one I know of that requires much extra work. And ndiswrapper isn't too tough to get going anyway. If this issue is taken care of at build time, like HP should, it doesn't even matter, and if you're upgrading to wireless, look for one that says Linux on the box; they're out there, and it's no more trouble than checking to see if it's supported on Macs.
The only way I could get my scanner to work under SANE was to pretend it was a completely different scanner from a different manufacturer (and figuring that out took a bit of digging)!
What's the scanner come up as in Windows? Unless it just doesn't, and makes you go to the manufacturer's disc, I'll bet it's that same other scanner. Because some scanner vendors are just relabelling an OEM product. But really, it's moot now, because I'll bet if you try that out on a machine with modern hotplugging it'll come right up and SANE will automatically recognize it.
Only one digital camera would work with gphoto; for the others I had to use command-line tools that had been hacked together by other folks
Now this is the weird part....what cameras are these? I expect ghoto has come a ways since you looked, but more than that, nearly every camera I've seen just plugs right in and Linux mounts it like it was a scsi hard drive. Maybe one or two proprietary exceptions that might be weirder than that, but I would certainly say that's the exception.
And forget about my ATI Rage Mobility card - the drivers flat-out sucked. Printer support was spotty, although gimp-print had a decent (not great) driver for the second printer I bought.
At this point, both video-board manufacturers that matter have great Linux drivers. ATI's are already built into xorg, and NVidia's driver setup is integrated well into most distributions. As for the printers, again I agree that it's one of the tricky spots, but I still maintain that this story isn't any worse than my experiences with printers and Windows XP.
After two years of that I decided to just buy a Powerbook and get a "Linux" that just worked.
This is really the kicker. You complain so long about all these hardware problems with Linux, and then you bring in this crazily unfair comparison. You buy a box from a one-source OS and hardware vendor with the most tightly-controlled set of hardware sold today, and what an amazement, everything works. Look, you bought the exact hardware they want you to use with the system. If I got to tell you every component to put in your Linux laptop, down to each chipset in the thing, everything will work. It's a no-brainer.
Now, you'll laugh at this, but an equally unfair comparison is this: how well will OSX run on a Windows laptop? You're asking Linux to have the a 1:1 hardware support relationship with Windows, but nobody ever asks for Windows to support everything Linux does, or for Macs to run all the hardware either of the other two does. I just don't get why people hold Linux to a higher standard....it's now expected to support everything anyone else does.
For example, I have a duplex printer - if it's on XP. If it's on a Linux box it's a single-sider simply because the driver doesn't yet support it.
Ok, I'll believe that; it's one of the three areas I mentioned that still have a few issues. But I'll say this in retort: I have 2 printers at home, both of which I purchased when I primarily ran Windows 98, and both of which run happily (with no missing functionality) in Linux, and neither of which will work at all in Windows XP.
The point is simply that I'm unaware of an operating system that properly supports all the hardware out there. From my experience, I don't find Linux inferior in this regard; yet I still see posts like the one to which I replied every single time there's a Linux story here, or anywhere for that matter. It's complete bullshit, and has become one of my hotbuttons.
Look man, ndiswrapper is just not that hard. One config file, with one line, containing the path to the windows driver. It's not rocket science.
The part about this that always burns me is that the same people who whine so much about the impossibility of Linux hardware support don't hesitate to open regedit.
Well, despite the fact that I disagree with the basic point of his post, I must agree that I've not yet setup a Linux system "all the way to where granny can use it" without having to drop to the shell. Now, I think that's probably ok...I'd rather use the terminal anyway, and once I get done, she doesn't have to. That's the stem of my disagreement with the GP; I *can* setup a box so that the end-user doesn't need the shell....I just have to use it to get them there. HP should be able to do the same...although it remains to be seen whether they will.
...don't get me wrong, I'm happy that the site is there. But that's about 50 examples of initial-configuration tasks that require the shell. In my opinion, every one of those tasks should either a)be done automatically (without asking) when you install the OS, b)be installation options, or c)be simple, no-terminal-needed operations.
/etc/apt/sources.list file.
But if you're looking for specifics, and keeping Ubuntu-centric here, head down to http://ubuntuguide.org/
If I only got to pick one thing for Ubuntu to do at install time that it's not doing now, it would be to give the user an appropriate
Hope that helps; you're right, there definitely is a *lot* of usability work going on these days. I started with RedHat 5.2, and we've come a long, long way.
Chances are they are going to have to choose from a very small list (by comparison to a Windows machine) of upgrades that now work with their version of Linux.
For fuck's sake, why don't you actually try a Linux installation sometime, instead of perpetuating this ridiculous bullshit story of Linux's hardware support "problems." Send it back to HP? Are you on drugs?
Linux has excellent hardware support. There is one major wireless chipset that does not have native support, and thus requires you to use the windows driver through ndiswrapper. There are some winmodems that don't work, or are hard to make work. And there are a few printers yet out there that don't behave.
Now, to put that in perspective, lots of printers won't work with Windows XP. And lots of wireless cards won't work in Windows 9x. Various legacy stuff doesn't work on newer versions, and the number of times you'll need a third-party driver is vastly higher in my experience on Windows than Linux. I've got 3 usb->serial dongles; in XP, they each need a different driver, none of which came with the OS....if you want to use them with XP, you'd better have the CD that they came with. Each one is automatically recognized and assigned a device file when plugged into any modern Linux box. Same story with my Sprint PCS phone's data connection; Linux just recognizes it as an ACM device, and you can use the regular dialup setup. To do that in Windows, you have to find a driver, which is very difficult without buying a $40 outlook-sync program.
The truth of the matter is, more hardware will run on modern Linux than any single version of Windows ever produced. Your post was 100% sheer FUD. And if you disagree, and want to come back here and bitch and moan some more, why don't you start with theorizing at least one upgrade you can think of that a normal user would be able to do himself on Windows, but would have to send the box back to HP to accomplish on Linux. I dare you.
Hey jackass....I think he was asking for a tarball, not a lecture.
You're still going to be interfaced to the machine, and if only for safety reasons, your mind will instruct the remote machine to pull your consciousness to it, similar to telnetting to another machine, opening an FTP connection to your laptop, and pulling your files to the remote machine (download).
Dude, put that back in your ass from whence you pulled it.
Maybe they will restrict the operation to those who do things to their brain other than try to deaden it and give way to instinct.
As Aldous Huxley said, "An intellectual is someone who has found one thing that's more interesting than sex."
Huxley also thought mescaline was one of those interesting things. Quit being such a knee-jerk prude.
I do not think your parent poster's point requires a belief that drugs and sex are the only pleasures or interesting things in life for it to be valid. It merely requires a belief that both of those things are an integral part of living. Perhaps more broadly taken, the question is whether the computer that stores your brain will be able to engage in the multitude of physical pleasures and interactions we do every day. Would the computer housing your brain be able to go backpacking? Or skydiving, surfing, or driving really fast on a twisty road? The point is, living is more than thinking...it's also doing. Allowing your brain to keep functioning is one thing; to have a life worth living you must also be able to have a beer.
You have no facility in your own brain to initiate its upload to a computer.
Maybe you don't...my brain has an ftp client.
(Slightly) more seriously....how do you know that this future technology will not be initiated by a process in the brain rather than in the computer? It could require some special hypnotic or drug-induced "dump" which might then be captured by the machine.
In any case, I think we should use kermit for the transfer.
PCMag's John C. Dvorak predicted this...
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day...
In all seriousness, though....that article is a good chuckle. He was calling for Apple to switch to Itanium for Christ's sake, and then license OS X for non-Apple hardware with a Windows compatibility layer. Bwahahaha! Come now, John, how do you dream this shit up?
Equally hairbrained is his theory of a dual-processor PowerPC/Itanium machine; he seems to have the idea that they could just duck-tape two motherboards together and have it pick and choose which processor to run what executable on...clearly, he's using drugs.
If Apple does this (which I am extremely skeptical of at this point) I expect it will be at the very lowest end....completely backwards from what Dvorak predicted. The reason is simple: IBM's Power architecture is plenty fast, and they aren't going to get a performance improvement by switching to Intel. The only benefit available from such a switch is cost.
Dvorak is one of the smartest writers in the industry
BWAAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!
No, seriously....you can stop right there. You can't shake a stick at all the outrageous trolling tripe that asshole spews these days. Inane conclusions without support all over the place, with an obvious bent toward the overdramatic and sensational....all with the goal of having us rant and rave about it and get him clicks. Hell, he effectively admitted it when he said MOG should get a medal for attracting page hits! That was the part that's so unbelievable....this column just makes it so clear that he has absolutely no concept that journalism is about more than maximizing readers.
Not that that's the only failing...I could also do without his "I'm so much better educated than you that I don't have to respond when you say I'm unethical" nonsense. What an egotistical cocksucker. His answer to everyone being pissed that he's completely ignoring any and all senses of morality *and* any principles of journalistic ethics was simply, "you guys aren't journalists, so you're below me and I'm not going to bother addressing the issue." Well, some of us have been to journalism school. And in fact, some journalistic ethics organizations sent open letters to MOG with their resolutions on the subject. The truth is, Dvorak is the only professional writer I've seen defend MOG, and with good reason.....this is way, way beyond the pale. Now, as to whether he only said that to get his own clicks (and thus doesn't really believe that what she did was ok) or whether he just really believes that a journalist really ought to do just any damned thing he/she wants to provoke readership, I guess that's an open question.
And while I'm at it, this bullshit harping on the Linux community for being zealots has got to go too. Dvorak sees a lot of zealotry probably....because he's off spewing FUD every week and people are pissed about it. You write a column yelling about how shitty Windows is, and I guarantee you'll have lunatic Windows users on your forums. Hell, you see those people on /., right?
The Linux community IS populated by lunatics. Microsoft don't even need to fight Linux. They can just sit back and watch the community built around it fall apart. Torn apart by the childish zealots who created the situation.
Right....falling right apart. Obviously. If your first sentence didn't give everyone enough warning to just completely discount every word from your mouth, surely this will fit the bill. If you think Linux or open source methods are just going to fade away into the night, I've got an extremely lucrative financial oportunity for you involving a transfer of large sums of money from my deceased Nigerian grandfather's bank account.
A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.
Am I the only guy that finds that really scary? I mean, I agree, we need to be pretty sure that a security fix isn't going to break other things....but my stress level on day 2 of knowing that my sshd has a remote-root-exploit would be pretty damned high. I would hope that my distro could check for breakage during the first day, before I start sucking down antacids to deal with my ulcer.
Hey Dvorak...quit posting on here to self-prove your Linux zealots theory. At least our forums will let you do it anonymously; that way you don't even have to go to the trouble of creating a new slashdot user named "L1nuxR00lz"