1)I'm interested to see these bug reports due to the "nvidia black box"...you are aware that a good chunk of this thing (and all the kernel interface) is available in source, right?
2)And what's this about not having one compiled for your archetecture? Have you ever installed these? I did it this morning; I typed one command, a menu prompted me to accept a license, then looked for a version on nvidia's ftp site, didn't find one. So it compiled one for me. This was all every bit as easy as running a WISE installer in windows. That is, as long as you can read the instruction on the site where you downloaded the thing from that says "type 'sh nvidia-thingie'"
I have run a lot of video cards in a lot of Linux boxes. Some had open source drivers; most of these were good, a couple were not. Some had no drivers available, and I had to use a generic driver. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't. If I have my choice, I use an nvidia board...the drivers are easy to install, they're fast, you don't have to worry about getting the right module, and most of all they have a knack for just working immediately.
I wish those drivers were FOSS, but they aren't. I'm not too proud to run them.
Now...if I can just get the 3d on this ATI mobile radeon IGP320M going......
Well, it's not as though this would be the first system change ever forced on professors and uni faculty. Even ignoring the fact that Microsoft forces them through changing iterations of windows, we must consider that the Mac had a much larger presence once, and that *gasp* Unix workstations were once normal.
I went to a large state university in the midwest USA, and we had redhat desktops in our mathematics and engineering labs. At that time (a few years ago) they were just coming in, as replacements for SGI Irix gear. None of this really seemed to bother anybody; we really just needed a stable platform for mathematica, and of course a good programming environment. The general consensus was that Linux provided that much better than Irix had.
Windows, of course, was not even considered as a candidate...
In Japan, the only LEC is NTT. And they are governmentally regulated.
So...these differences in price (which are huge) are probably mostly due to regulation differences. Our government (US) has had tarriffs in place for a long time about what LEC's (local exchange carriers..your telco) have to charge for things. I have to assume that NTT is regulated to charge vastly less for an ADSL line than our telcos are. In conjunction with this I'm betting that the lines themselves were put in long after our phone lines, and that they are thusly capable of much higher speeds. It's a rough business, but it's just like the electric grid; we got it first, so we kinda beta-tested it for the rest of the world. Bunk.
Now we can fix this through better re-regulation. I for one don't believe in deregulation, and I don't think that matters much because we haven't seen any (everything labelled as deregulation so far that I've seen has really been reregulation, and in my oppinion it's all been worse than the regulation it's supposed to replace) but I do think that the attempts at changing our regulation have been misguided. We need telco (and cable and satallite) regulation that is focused on the health of consumers (not the health of the telco/cable/satallite compnys), and now.
That is certainly interesting. Of course, I would say that it is extremely unlikely that these users (perhaps some of them can reply and set us straight) get anywhere near those speeds on a regular basis, but then I would have to concede that they likely get vastly more than the 1.5mbps we are likely to see.
As for your questions...it is a really interesting question as to whether it would cost the ISP more to provide the higher bandwidth lines. I work for a small ISP, and I can tell you that a few users can really trash the circuit. Less than half a percent of our customers probably transfer 95% of the total for our network. But then, I don't know that it really matters that much whether the user has a big connection or not...some of our highest users of monthly transfer have 768/128k lines. It's just that they flatten the upstream all the time. Mostly users who have bigger lines pay more attention to such things; it's really hard to say whether upping the basic package would hurt us.
Of course, the impact of hacked/virused computers would be much more devestating...
This I can tell you, though. ISP's that aren't also either cable companies or telcos have it the worst. We pay our LEC $37.50 for every 768/128 ADSL line. And they don't provide bandwidth, tech support, equipment, or anything else...pretty much just the line work enabling us to run the service. Now how in the hell are we supposed to make money selling that? We charge $54.99/month, and our gross profit is probably about $1. Now, the LEC, who sells ADSL for $49.99, naturally makes 10 times that, at the very least. And from what I hear, the cable company's economics are even better.
Anyway, I digress. Thanks for providing the links to the information about Japanese services.
It's also interesting how similar this whole process is to bayesian filtering. In fact, it's almost identical, except with multiple analysis runs; every binary choice has a probability, and by taking a few hundred of these and using Bayes rule, you can get a probability of a disorder. The only difference between spam filtering is that you need to run the filter with the data for depression, and then run it again with the data for OCD, and then again.....
"I don't get it - aren't monopolies/price fixing illegal?"
No, not really. Common misconception. Most monopolies are illegal, but they can be legally sanctioned and even protected for a few reasons. One of the most widespread of these is companies that create expensive infrastructure. The idea is that it would be horribly inefficient to have a free market where companies all built their own phone lines, because they wouldn't work together and they would duplicate each other's infrastructure.
Picture New York City, a Very Attractive Market. There would be 25 telephone companies that all had a geographically comprehensive network there; you could get service from any of them and it would cost as low as market-possible. But it might cost arm+leg to connect to someone across the street who had another company, especially if that company didn't have a good contract with yours. And the market-possible price might even end up higher than they are now, because each company had to invest in running wire all over manhattan.
That's worst case, but you get the idea. It is easy to fall into a knee-jerk "regulation == bad" mentality, when in reality a lot of government regulation is damned handy. Think rural electrification or the EPA. In this case it's a hard call, but it is worth noting that most places that people point to where telecom is better than here (US) there is more regulation, not less. It's just that the regulation seems more tuned to the benefit of the consumer, rather than the telco....now, I personally think that our own "deregulation" efforts are a terrible fake that just re-regulate things for the benefit of those same telcos, but that's a different story entirely.
In other words, we don't need to get rid of regulation, we need *better* regulation.
I dunno; I work for an ISP and it is really rare to hear people really getting serious about the throughput. A few customers are that way, but mostly just due to testosterone. The other 95% of folks want reliability. That's what sells T lines; our SDSL can go faster than any T we'll sell, and it's cheaper to boot.
Most T's sold do *not* have "dedicated" bandwidth. Two other models are more common; either you get a T line that doesn't have a guaranteed throughput, or you get one that does, but you get charged for your average transfer at a certain percentile.
Yes, you *can* get a dedicated bandwidth T, but few people do, outside of the service providers themselves.
Ordinarily I would just let this go. But this guy is such a total cocksucker, I think I'll feel just a bit less disgusted if I dismantle his post.
"They don't have the same brain power that you or I have."
--Right. Like the brain power to detect dripping sarcasm in the parent post, as neither of you did? Or to notice its obvious relation to the story 4 down from this one? Or like the brain power required to see the fact that Blacks/Whites/Asians/etc. are actually *different species*? Man, that one even has the entirety of the scientific community fooled; you must be fucking brilliant!
"They are a distant relative to be sure, but they are less evolved than humans."
--What about my friend, a white man, his wife, who is black, and their daughter? Is she black, or white? And if she's black, does that make her a "distant relative" to her father? And while we're at it, doesn't the child by definition have to be "more evolved" than the parent? I mean, the child receives the full evolution inherent in the parent's genes, plus one more random resequencing.
"Have you ever noticed how similar Negroes are to the apes in a zoo."
--Have you ever noticed how questions tend to end with question marks? However, if you want to find out who's the more apeish, let's compare:
1)They say that, given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would write A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou.
2)By contrast, one braindead monkey could come up with your post while eating bugs out of your mother's hair.
"by Anonymous Coward"
--Got that right. Could have said "by Anonymous white-trash bitch who's daddy should have pulled out and left him as a cumstain on the backseat of his pinto."
In other news, fear is struck into the heart of Hillshire Farms, as a small British consortium has announced plans to import "bangers" to the United States.
Wait...how is that not free? I don't get it...I mean, sure, the license doesn't force other people to keep *derivative works* free, but so what? Does that somehow restrict you? Does the fact that Microsoft can use BSD code in Windows (and does) somehow infringe upon the freedom of the BSD I run? No. The software has still been made available on extremely permissive terms...it's still free software.
In fact, it's more free than GPL software....the GPL places lots of restrictions on distribution, impairing the user or developer's freedoms.
In other words, just because bsd-style licensors let people relicense the software doesn't mean the original software, while bsd-licensed, isn't free. It's the fact that *it* (and not necessarily anything added to it by other parties) was available at least once under that license...that's what makes it free.
BTW, yeah, I have an openbsd firewall, and two freebsd servers. And a bunch of linux desktops, including the one I work on all day. As it happens, I personally like the GPL approach better, mostly because of ideological issues with the software industry. But I can see both sides...lots of folks don't see any reason to keep people from commercializing their work. It's their work; I say let 'em.
Hey, jackass...that was a JOKE! Didn't you read the story 4 hours before this one quoting Bill Gates as saying exactly what I just said? I mean, my name is not Bill....hence the +5 Funny.
MSH, after all, interprets keystrokes to make a computer run commands. Obviously, this technology was stolen from System V UNIX, and represents a massive attempt to misappropriate SCO's *very extensive* intellectual property, and furthermore is clearly designed to destroy the value of SCO's incredible products as well as our massive revenue stream.
If MS does not cease and desist this both criminally- and civilly-actionable thievery, we will not only revoke their UNIX license, we will also require that a)any and all current and future Windows products, now obviously derivitive works of System V UNIX, will be sold with an accompanying SCO IP License costing $699 per CPU, and b) all current users of Windows immediately acquire said license from SCO. No arguments about these products not including MSH or any SCO IP or code will be entertained.
If you have a problem with this, we'll see you in court. Meanwhile, our stock price will continue to rise, and I will continue to slowly sell off the 7,000 shares I bought last April for $7. That's $7 *total* for the 7,000, not $7 per share. That's right. So ante up, Billy, I make a truckload of cash even if I sink the ship. Which I fully intend to do.
Well, most all these posts are alike; the guys that say "yeah, this just shows Bill is an idiot" and the guys who say "no, Bill is right, it *is* the users' fault."
But I think to some degree this back/forth misses the point. Which is, it's both. The user/administrator has security responsibilities, no question. And so does the coder/vendor.
Now that said, I blame Microsoft. Why? Because they sold a system that requires a system administrator to my grandmother, and didn't sell her a system administrator, or even suggest that she get one. In fact, the marketing guys go on all day about how any idiot can use Windows...and then the apologists go on about how everyone needs to be a sysadmin to secure their own box...because security is the user's problem.
Which is exactly what this amounts to..."you don't need perfect code to have security" is what was said, but what was meant was "you can have security even while using software with known vulnerabilities." And that's just BS. Maybe you can, but not while keeping the functionality of the software in question...you can block port 80 to deal with an Apache vulnerability, but, um, you won't be serving web pages.
And while we're at it, ok, sure, no code is perfect. Big deal. Some code is very secure, and some isn't. Microsoft's, by and large, isn't.
And if you don't believe that Bill is shoving the responsibility away from them, just look at the messenger vulnerability. The MS response to this REMOTE ROOT EXPLOIT was to recommend that all *users* turn off the service "while we evaluate the need for a patch."
EVALUATE THE NEED FOR A PATCH? It's a REMOTE ROOT EXPLOIT!
Anyway, I almost never shout, but man...Bill's statements in this article and that response to that vulnerability really do show how these guys feel about this stuff. And it's pretty scary.
Well, clearly you aren't a very good salesman. Nothing wrong with that...just don't confuse it with an uninteresting product. I work at a small local ISP, and have found Mozilla to be an easy sell to most customers. And yes, my customers are just as clueless as the person you mention above.
The difference is that I show them the value of the features...and I suppose the ease of migration I offer through having the 1.4 installer on CD. But when you show them multiple webpages and they say they would never do that, I'm doing a google search and opening the links in new tabs...everyone recognizes the usefulness of that. And the popup blocking is popular too...as long as they aren't expected to configure it without help.
But the best selling point isn't the browser...it's the mail client. All you have to do is mention the percentage of viruses that come through Outlook Express, quickly show off the junk mail controls, and then run the import wizard that pulls in all their mail and addresses from OE. Set it as the default, and the vast majority of users won't ever look back.
And that's the point. Yes, if you want any clueless user to run Mozilla, you are going to at least walk them through all the stuff under edit->preferences, and you're going to have to explain the junk-mail controls and the tabs. And maybe they won't use all the features...I have yet to see a customer using type-ahead, and lots of them forget the tabs the first week. But they use it. And when they use IE again, they notice the popups. When they see their friend downloading his mail in OE, they notice all his junk mail.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the end it isn't any harder to use, and they have a reason why its better...so they use it. In the last year I've either installed or instructed-to-install more than 50 customers. I haven't yet had any complaints, and I've had lots of thanks.
It's been way more successful than my Linux evangelism, that's for damn sure;-)
Do you have evidence to that effect? I am aware that they crippled the Intel chips this way for the specmarks, but I have seen no evidence of them doing the same to the application benchmarks.
Maybe I missed the connnection...but these guys have been lying on benchmarks as long as I can remember (which, admittedly, is only about a decade)
Does anyone remember "bytemarks?"
If anything, I would say Gore is over at Dell someplace demanding a recount.
For my own part, I'm not going to put much stock in any Windows vs. OSX benchmarking; if I want to know raw hardware performance, I'll wait for linux to linux benches. If I want to know application performance, I'll look at specific application benches...for the apps I care about.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever man, those modules aren't that bad.
1)I'm interested to see these bug reports due to the "nvidia black box"...you are aware that a good chunk of this thing (and all the kernel interface) is available in source, right?
2)And what's this about not having one compiled for your archetecture? Have you ever installed these? I did it this morning; I typed one command, a menu prompted me to accept a license, then looked for a version on nvidia's ftp site, didn't find one. So it compiled one for me. This was all every bit as easy as running a WISE installer in windows. That is, as long as you can read the instruction on the site where you downloaded the thing from that says "type 'sh nvidia-thingie'"
I have run a lot of video cards in a lot of Linux boxes. Some had open source drivers; most of these were good, a couple were not. Some had no drivers available, and I had to use a generic driver. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't. If I have my choice, I use an nvidia board...the drivers are easy to install, they're fast, you don't have to worry about getting the right module, and most of all they have a knack for just working immediately.
I wish those drivers were FOSS, but they aren't. I'm not too proud to run them.
Now...if I can just get the 3d on this ATI mobile radeon IGP320M going......
Well, it's not as though this would be the first system change ever forced on professors and uni faculty. Even ignoring the fact that Microsoft forces them through changing iterations of windows, we must consider that the Mac had a much larger presence once, and that *gasp* Unix workstations were once normal.
I went to a large state university in the midwest USA, and we had redhat desktops in our mathematics and engineering labs. At that time (a few years ago) they were just coming in, as replacements for SGI Irix gear. None of this really seemed to bother anybody; we really just needed a stable platform for mathematica, and of course a good programming environment. The general consensus was that Linux provided that much better than Irix had.
Windows, of course, was not even considered as a candidate...
I forgot to mention...
In Japan, the only LEC is NTT. And they are governmentally regulated.
So...these differences in price (which are huge) are probably mostly due to regulation differences. Our government (US) has had tarriffs in place for a long time about what LEC's (local exchange carriers..your telco) have to charge for things. I have to assume that NTT is regulated to charge vastly less for an ADSL line than our telcos are. In conjunction with this I'm betting that the lines themselves were put in long after our phone lines, and that they are thusly capable of much higher speeds. It's a rough business, but it's just like the electric grid; we got it first, so we kinda beta-tested it for the rest of the world. Bunk.
Now we can fix this through better re-regulation. I for one don't believe in deregulation, and I don't think that matters much because we haven't seen any (everything labelled as deregulation so far that I've seen has really been reregulation, and in my oppinion it's all been worse than the regulation it's supposed to replace) but I do think that the attempts at changing our regulation have been misguided. We need telco (and cable and satallite) regulation that is focused on the health of consumers (not the health of the telco/cable/satallite compnys), and now.
That is certainly interesting. Of course, I would say that it is extremely unlikely that these users (perhaps some of them can reply and set us straight) get anywhere near those speeds on a regular basis, but then I would have to concede that they likely get vastly more than the 1.5mbps we are likely to see.
As for your questions...it is a really interesting question as to whether it would cost the ISP more to provide the higher bandwidth lines. I work for a small ISP, and I can tell you that a few users can really trash the circuit. Less than half a percent of our customers probably transfer 95% of the total for our network. But then, I don't know that it really matters that much whether the user has a big connection or not...some of our highest users of monthly transfer have 768/128k lines. It's just that they flatten the upstream all the time. Mostly users who have bigger lines pay more attention to such things; it's really hard to say whether upping the basic package would hurt us.
Of course, the impact of hacked/virused computers would be much more devestating...
This I can tell you, though. ISP's that aren't also either cable companies or telcos have it the worst. We pay our LEC $37.50 for every 768/128 ADSL line. And they don't provide bandwidth, tech support, equipment, or anything else...pretty much just the line work enabling us to run the service. Now how in the hell are we supposed to make money selling that? We charge $54.99/month, and our gross profit is probably about $1. Now, the LEC, who sells ADSL for $49.99, naturally makes 10 times that, at the very least. And from what I hear, the cable company's economics are even better.
Anyway, I digress. Thanks for providing the links to the information about Japanese services.
Jeff is absolutely right.
It's also interesting how similar this whole process is to bayesian filtering. In fact, it's almost identical, except with multiple analysis runs; every binary choice has a probability, and by taking a few hundred of these and using Bayes rule, you can get a probability of a disorder. The only difference between spam filtering is that you need to run the filter with the data for depression, and then run it again with the data for OCD, and then again.....
"I don't get it - aren't monopolies/price fixing illegal?"
...now, I personally think that our own "deregulation" efforts are a terrible fake that just re-regulate things for the benefit of those same telcos, but that's a different story entirely.
No, not really. Common misconception. Most monopolies are illegal, but they can be legally sanctioned and even protected for a few reasons. One of the most widespread of these is companies that create expensive infrastructure. The idea is that it would be horribly inefficient to have a free market where companies all built their own phone lines, because they wouldn't work together and they would duplicate each other's infrastructure.
Picture New York City, a Very Attractive Market. There would be 25 telephone companies that all had a geographically comprehensive network there; you could get service from any of them and it would cost as low as market-possible. But it might cost arm+leg to connect to someone across the street who had another company, especially if that company didn't have a good contract with yours. And the market-possible price might even end up higher than they are now, because each company had to invest in running wire all over manhattan.
That's worst case, but you get the idea. It is easy to fall into a knee-jerk "regulation == bad" mentality, when in reality a lot of government regulation is damned handy. Think rural electrification or the EPA. In this case it's a hard call, but it is worth noting that most places that people point to where telecom is better than here (US) there is more regulation, not less. It's just that the regulation seems more tuned to the benefit of the consumer, rather than the telco.
In other words, we don't need to get rid of regulation, we need *better* regulation.
You have a source for those numbers?
I dunno; I work for an ISP and it is really rare to hear people really getting serious about the throughput. A few customers are that way, but mostly just due to testosterone. The other 95% of folks want reliability. That's what sells T lines; our SDSL can go faster than any T we'll sell, and it's cheaper to boot.
Dude, sorry, but you are way off.
Most T's sold do *not* have "dedicated" bandwidth. Two other models are more common; either you get a T line that doesn't have a guaranteed throughput, or you get one that does, but you get charged for your average transfer at a certain percentile.
Yes, you *can* get a dedicated bandwidth T, but few people do, outside of the service providers themselves.
Ok...I'm willing to say that :P
Ordinarily I would just let this go. But this guy is such a total cocksucker, I think I'll feel just a bit less disgusted if I dismantle his post.
"They don't have the same brain power that you or I have."
--Right. Like the brain power to detect dripping sarcasm in the parent post, as neither of you did? Or to notice its obvious relation to the story 4 down from this one? Or like the brain power required to see the fact that Blacks/Whites/Asians/etc. are actually *different species*? Man, that one even has the entirety of the scientific community fooled; you must be fucking brilliant!
"They are a distant relative to be sure, but they are less evolved than humans."
--What about my friend, a white man, his wife, who is black, and their daughter? Is she black, or white? And if she's black, does that make her a "distant relative" to her father? And while we're at it, doesn't the child by definition have to be "more evolved" than the parent? I mean, the child receives the full evolution inherent in the parent's genes, plus one more random resequencing.
"Have you ever noticed how similar Negroes are to the apes in a zoo."
--Have you ever noticed how questions tend to end with question marks? However, if you want to find out who's the more apeish, let's compare:
1)They say that, given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would write A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou.
2)By contrast, one braindead monkey could come up with your post while eating bugs out of your mother's hair.
"by Anonymous Coward"
--Got that right. Could have said "by Anonymous white-trash bitch who's daddy should have pulled out and left him as a cumstain on the backseat of his pinto."
...but didn't we see this the day before yesterday?
In other news, fear is struck into the heart of Hillshire Farms, as a small British consortium has announced plans to import "bangers" to the United States.
Wait...how is that not free? I don't get it...I mean, sure, the license doesn't force other people to keep *derivative works* free, but so what? Does that somehow restrict you? Does the fact that Microsoft can use BSD code in Windows (and does) somehow infringe upon the freedom of the BSD I run? No. The software has still been made available on extremely permissive terms...it's still free software.
In fact, it's more free than GPL software....the GPL places lots of restrictions on distribution, impairing the user or developer's freedoms.
In other words, just because bsd-style licensors let people relicense the software doesn't mean the original software, while bsd-licensed, isn't free. It's the fact that *it* (and not necessarily anything added to it by other parties) was available at least once under that license...that's what makes it free.
BTW, yeah, I have an openbsd firewall, and two freebsd servers. And a bunch of linux desktops, including the one I work on all day. As it happens, I personally like the GPL approach better, mostly because of ideological issues with the software industry. But I can see both sides...lots of folks don't see any reason to keep people from commercializing their work. It's their work; I say let 'em.
Hey, jackass...that was a JOKE! Didn't you read the story 4 hours before this one quoting Bill Gates as saying exactly what I just said? I mean, my name is not Bill. ...hence the +5 Funny.
...perfect code is irrelevant to security! Didn't you hear me?!
-Bill
I wonder what Ballmer uses to replace the 19th century technology the rest of us use for human-waste disposal?
Darl, you idiot, you know we patented the shell last year!
-Jeff Bezos
Amazon.com
MSH, after all, interprets keystrokes to make a computer run commands. Obviously, this technology was stolen from System V UNIX, and represents a massive attempt to misappropriate SCO's *very extensive* intellectual property, and furthermore is clearly designed to destroy the value of SCO's incredible products as well as our massive revenue stream.
If MS does not cease and desist this both criminally- and civilly-actionable thievery, we will not only revoke their UNIX license, we will also require that a)any and all current and future Windows products, now obviously derivitive works of System V UNIX, will be sold with an accompanying SCO IP License costing $699 per CPU, and b) all current users of Windows immediately acquire said license from SCO. No arguments about these products not including MSH or any SCO IP or code will be entertained.
If you have a problem with this, we'll see you in court. Meanwhile, our stock price will continue to rise, and I will continue to slowly sell off the 7,000 shares I bought last April for $7. That's $7 *total* for the 7,000, not $7 per share. That's right. So ante up, Billy, I make a truckload of cash even if I sink the ship. Which I fully intend to do.
Kiss it,
Darl
Well, most all these posts are alike; the guys that say "yeah, this just shows Bill is an idiot" and the guys who say "no, Bill is right, it *is* the users' fault."
But I think to some degree this back/forth misses the point. Which is, it's both. The user/administrator has security responsibilities, no question. And so does the coder/vendor.
Now that said, I blame Microsoft. Why? Because they sold a system that requires a system administrator to my grandmother, and didn't sell her a system administrator, or even suggest that she get one. In fact, the marketing guys go on all day about how any idiot can use Windows...and then the apologists go on about how everyone needs to be a sysadmin to secure their own box...because security is the user's problem.
Which is exactly what this amounts to..."you don't need perfect code to have security" is what was said, but what was meant was "you can have security even while using software with known vulnerabilities." And that's just BS. Maybe you can, but not while keeping the functionality of the software in question...you can block port 80 to deal with an Apache vulnerability, but, um, you won't be serving web pages.
And while we're at it, ok, sure, no code is perfect. Big deal. Some code is very secure, and some isn't. Microsoft's, by and large, isn't.
And if you don't believe that Bill is shoving the responsibility away from them, just look at the messenger vulnerability. The MS response to this REMOTE ROOT EXPLOIT was to recommend that all *users* turn off the service "while we evaluate the need for a patch."
EVALUATE THE NEED FOR A PATCH? It's a REMOTE ROOT EXPLOIT!
Anyway, I almost never shout, but man...Bill's statements in this article and that response to that vulnerability really do show how these guys feel about this stuff. And it's pretty scary.
"Well, there goes the neighborhood..."
-11-year-old boy
....but I already *had* control of the MGS camera...how else could I have taken those pictures of Metal Gear Ray at the end of the tanker level!?
Well, clearly you aren't a very good salesman. Nothing wrong with that...just don't confuse it with an uninteresting product. I work at a small local ISP, and have found Mozilla to be an easy sell to most customers. And yes, my customers are just as clueless as the person you mention above.
;-)
The difference is that I show them the value of the features...and I suppose the ease of migration I offer through having the 1.4 installer on CD. But when you show them multiple webpages and they say they would never do that, I'm doing a google search and opening the links in new tabs...everyone recognizes the usefulness of that. And the popup blocking is popular too...as long as they aren't expected to configure it without help.
But the best selling point isn't the browser...it's the mail client. All you have to do is mention the percentage of viruses that come through Outlook Express, quickly show off the junk mail controls, and then run the import wizard that pulls in all their mail and addresses from OE. Set it as the default, and the vast majority of users won't ever look back.
And that's the point. Yes, if you want any clueless user to run Mozilla, you are going to at least walk them through all the stuff under edit->preferences, and you're going to have to explain the junk-mail controls and the tabs. And maybe they won't use all the features...I have yet to see a customer using type-ahead, and lots of them forget the tabs the first week. But they use it. And when they use IE again, they notice the popups. When they see their friend downloading his mail in OE, they notice all his junk mail.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the end it isn't any harder to use, and they have a reason why its better...so they use it. In the last year I've either installed or instructed-to-install more than 50 customers. I haven't yet had any complaints, and I've had lots of thanks.
It's been way more successful than my Linux evangelism, that's for damn sure
Do you have evidence to that effect? I am aware that they crippled the Intel chips this way for the specmarks, but I have seen no evidence of them doing the same to the application benchmarks.
Maybe I missed the connnection...but these guys have been lying on benchmarks as long as I can remember (which, admittedly, is only about a decade)
Does anyone remember "bytemarks?"
If anything, I would say Gore is over at Dell someplace demanding a recount.
For my own part, I'm not going to put much stock in any Windows vs. OSX benchmarking; if I want to know raw hardware performance, I'll wait for linux to linux benches. If I want to know application performance, I'll look at specific application benches...for the apps I care about.