A few months ago my housemates and I moved to a new house, taking our cable service with us. We just took the cable modem we had from before to the new house, where cable was already installed, and advised the cable company that we had done this.
This was apparently all fine and we should have service within an hour. A few hours later, I became frustrated and called back and got transferred to the tech support people. The first wall of support folks seems to have the function of asking what OS you use and transferring you to a "real" tech. We have a box running linux doing routing/NAT for our network, but I figured saying that would just cause me grief so I said "Windows 2000".
This turned out to be a big mistake. It turns out that the previous tennents of the house had been disconnected for having some stupid worm, so they wanted me to prove I'd patched my Windows 2000 box with Windows Update before they'd help me further. I just insisted I had, thinking it'd be easy, but they wanted the patch identification numbers from the Windows Update installation!
With no way to find these out, I just decided to be honest with the man. I explained that there was not a Windows machine connected to the cable modem and that I had just said that thinking they'd balk at the idea of a linux system. He seemed to ignore what I was saying and demanded I read out five numbers starting with Q from some dialog box in Windows 2000.
Becoming more than a little frustrated, I said that I had no way to do that and that there was no way the worms could be on my system. He was having none of it, so remembering that the worm he was trying to patch me for was Windows 2000 only I asked him what would happen if I phoned back and told them I was using Windows 98. He offered to transfer me to the "Windows 98" tech, and I agreed figuring that I wouldn't get any further here.
After waiting in the queue for 20 minutes, I got a connection to the Windows 98 tech who was the same guy I was talking to before! Both he and I knew he'd just put me back in the pool to try to get rid of me but by chance I'd ended up back on his line again. I very politely explained that my Windows 98 system would not connect to the Internet and he, with an appropriate amount of smarm, started going through the Windows 98 procedure he had laid out, which did not include patch installations.
I just played along with the little game, answering the questions correctly and pretending I was going through the motions. He knew I wasn't as well as I wasn't even trying to make it sound like I was.
Once we got through all that, he finally helped me. Apparently they have a special version of their online signup page which you must go through before Internet service is enabled at a new address. I wish they could have just told me that in the first place, as the first thing I said was "I have moved to a new address and transferred my cable service".
It would appear that all these "anonymous" peer-to-peer networks just make all users infringe rather than just those who choose to.
When I run a FreeNet node, items of data from other people are placed, in part, on my hard drive. If one of these items is part of a copyright-protected work, then the original distributor has committed copyright infringment. However, that is only the first copy. Any time someone else retrieves that item there is a chance that my PC will now supply some parts of the item, making another copy and thus infringing copyright.
Essentially any FreeNet user has a high probability of committing copyright infringment and cannot control this as he or she has no idea what data is all hashed up and encrypted in the data store. By this reasoning, it could be argued that it is in fact illegal to use FreeNet. I don't necessarily agree, but the fact that this possible argument exists could cause problems for anonymous peer-to-peer networks in the future.
This is sad, because anonymous networks have other uses beyond covert distribution of material protected by copyright, such as bypassing censorship.
Can't they host their own open-source projects rather than sucking SourceForge's teats?
SourceForge is great for projects which otherwise wouldn't have a home, but Microsoft is more than capable of running their own SourceForge-like system.
That is unless, of course, they are just throwing WTL into the void and hoping someone else will look after it because they've got no interest in it anymore.
At this point you're not really supposed to use it, you are supposed to develop it.
Its time will come, assuming enough people are interested and contribute. I don't know anything about audio or video compression so I already counted myself out!
While I am not a lawyer, I assume that SourceForge could get into some trouble for distributing a patent-infringing work even if the BBC are untouchable.
I don't know much about radio broadcasting, so this is just a general background question.
It would appear from what you and others have said that there is a legally-acceptable power level at which people are allowed to transmit without a licence.
With some cooperation, would it be acceptable and feasible for several people to broadcast the same signal to increase the broadcast area? The source signal could perhaps be streamed over a LAN (in the case of a college), for example.
I guess this is really two questions. Firstly, is what I'm proposing physically possible/sensible, and secondly, would it be legal?
At this point the only realistic way to "fix" charset handling would be to have servers use unicode internally but optionally translate data to and from other charsets for specific clients, so mIRC users can have stuff translated to their system's ANSI charset, and so on.
Of course, characters outside the chosen charset would be unintelligible, but anyone who cares will hopefully just use a unicode-able client.
Although you can't get compatible alpha transparency (there is a filter hack which someone else posted but that requires browser sniffing) you can control that background colour so that it isn't the Windows default colour.
What you need to do is set the field in the PNG file which specifies the background colour. How to do that in your graphics program of choice is left as an exercise. Alternatively, you could try just hacking the relevant field by hand in a binary file editor. The format specs can be found by searching Google.
"Too many distributions" was the point I was trying to reach, albeit in an overly roundabout way.
They're all called "Something Linux", so whenever someone hears about "That Linux Thing" they've got five or six (major) choices before they even start.
Therefore my proposal is to stop having a million things called Linux, and instead have a million things called Linux and one thing called something else which happens to have Linux under it. This last thing will, essentially, be another distro of Linux. However, it won't be called Linux, which is the important thing. Hopefully, if a company sorts it out, it'll come in a retail box too. These two things (it not being called linux and it coming in a box with a manual) will ultimately make users feel better about the whole thing, since they don't feel like they've made a confusing choice before they begin (Mandrake vs. Red Hat vs. ???) and they get something tangible.
This is, presumably, what LindowsOS was going for. I've never used that, so I don't know why it didn't do too well. Perhaps it was poor marketing, or some technical reason. LindowsOS had the right idea, though, in my opinion. A few more tries and we might get it right. As long as they aren't called Linux, they won't be percieved as more of "that Linux thing". True, they'll still have to choose between Windows and this other OS, but at least there's some differences that they can readily appreciate between these: price and, eventually, freedom.
It'll take a while for people to appreciate freedom, but they'll get the idea eventually, with the media giants taking the liberties they continue to take.
My point was that if a user can be thrown off by something as simple as hiding the desktop, they're going to be confused a whole lot more by a completely different environment with different paradigms.
Fortunately, few systems use anything other than the defaults under Windows. This means that unless you find yourself using a system owned by a power user, you'll get a consistant experience.
Compare this to the Linux situation. There is no "default" as such. There are several defaults to choose from! That's choices before you've even started.
The situation most likely to work, I believe, is to treat linux as a "component" in an operating system, much like hardware manufacturers cobble together chipsets to produce consumer products. A group/company can produce an operating system which runs on the Linux kernel and market it as a desktop OS with UNIX underpinnings, much like Apple do with Mac OS X. There would, ideally, only be one canonical form of this and most desktop users probably wouldn't know or care about the fact that the Linux kernel is lying beneath.
From this premise, we could say that a linux distro is like a "software agent". They decide on a good suite of software for you, or whittle down your options so that you only have to choose between several broad categories.
Those who want real choice can build/customize their own distro!
Re:This is a well-known persuasive issue...
on
The Paradox of Choice
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The choices also must mean something. "Gnome or KDE?" or "SMB or IPP?" probably don't mean much to your average user, at least when they're getting started. If they need to make those choices before they can get any work done, it'll be considerably off-putting.
As much as I hate to say it, the problem isn't "hiding" the choice, it's making the "desktop" of every linux system the same, so that users can transfer knowledge. This is true of MacOS, and it's true of Windows within a given version. (MS are less good at this.)
If a user sits down at a high school linux system and learns how to start his or her favourite word processor, then sits down at another system elsewhere with a different Window manager and desktop environment... what now?
Sure, they'll learn not too quickly, but this is certainly offputting in the same way that people tend to get flustered whenever they use my Windows box... the desktop is disabled, and I was surprised at how many people only know how to launch applications from the desktop. Also, my Start Menu is categorised rather than everything being under "ArrogantLongCompanyNameSoft Ltd, Inc (R)". The categorisations are pretty simple: "Internet", "Office", "Graphics", "Sound and Music"... yet this minor difference throws people off. It's not what they know.
So what's my point? Linux will probably never be used on any desktop other than specific corporate desktops, because people can be trained by their company to use them there, while this isn't true of other situations and the training will not be easily transferrable due to the ability to completely change the environment.
What is more likely is that one day one of the Linux distros that aren't called Linux (such as LindowsOS) will get their "standard look and feel" right and eliminate the choices, and that particular distro will take hold, and most "normal" people won't realise it's that Linux thing under the hood any more than they realise their router or set top box uses the Linux kernel.
I'm not sure how much it cost because it was bundled with the PC at purchase, but my mother's computer runs Windows XP Home. If this isn't cheap, it damn well should be. I'm staying with my family for a few days and while here I had to do some maintenance on the computer to sort out some weird quirks that had happened with the user accounts.
Specifically, users had started to "vanish" from the "Welcome screen". My first thought was to pop into the user accounts control panel, and found that it's been turned into some web-alike unusable mess which doesn't allow anything by way of fine-grained control. My next idea was the MMC, where the "Local User Manager" (or whatever it's called) is used for most fine-grained account configuration, but I found that Microsoft had deliberately disabled that in the Home edition by making it display a message stating that I need the Pro version to do this. Fun.
Finally I found how to get at the old User Accounts control panel by searching Google (run "control userpasswords2") and was able to change my brother's forgotten password but was unable to get at my sister's now-hidden (but still existant; can log in through the type-in login screen) account.
I just gave up and disabled the "Welcome Screen". They've now lost the much-praised "Fast User Switching".
I certainly hope this version of Windows is cheap. It certainly deserves to be, given that Microsoft has actively stubbed out stuff to produce an artificially-cheaper product. It reminds me of the phone caller-id system; the telephone company go to the trouble to strip out the caller-id information until you pay them to stop. Talk about backwards...
Some parts of the class library are off-limits, but the important core stuff seems to be okay. A developer could, say, implement the guts of an app using the portable runtime libraries and then implement two or more sets of UI classes using different class libraries, which is probably a sensible approach to ensure the app fits in to each environment correctly anyway.
I don't use "word processors" but when a friend of mine needed one and we didn't have Word handy I installed OpenOffice on her (Windows 2000) system as a replacement, thinking that if she got Office later we could replace it easily enough with the export feature.
OpenOffice Writer was all I tried, and it seemed like a nice enough piece of software, but it was slow. It took a good two minutes to start up and the interface seemed unresponsive. At first I blamed it on her hardware (which, it has to be said, is a bit naff) but when we later got hold of an academic copy of Word 2000 and installed that it ran at a much less frustrating speed, starting up in ten seconds and the UI being responsive enough that you don't notice it.
What gives? Why is OpenOffice for Windows so much slower than Word 2000?
Stelios Haji-Ioannou opened a cinema (aka movie theater) in Milton Keynes, England which offered movies at very low prices by forcing customers to book in advance online. This cuts down the staffing costs. They also, initially at least, didn't sell refreshments and food and encouraged customers to bring their own food purchased elsewhere.
The movie industry saw this and, noticing what Stelios had done to the airline industry with his previous company EasyJet, refused to supply the EasyCinema with the latest releases to prevent them from creating a precedent forcing a decrease in prices at other cinemas.
EasyCinema is still around, which perhaps takes some clout of of my post, but it just serves to demonstrate that the movie industry is able to hurt cinemas which don't play along with their rules without requiring laws. EasyCinema still, to my knowledge, does not get movies on their day of official release, but I don't live in Milton Keynes so I don't pay that much attention! :)
My ISP has a three-user limit per account. They define this to mean that no more than three people at a time should be using the connection for anything.
My housemates and I violate this rule on a daily basis (there are four of us), so they're obviously not too hot on that part of the AUP, but I know quite a few ISPs have similar policies, some only allowing a single computer (no NAT) or a single person (hard to define), which would then require us and you to invest in multiple connections to legitimately all use the ISP for Internet access. That at least removes one "excuse" for excessive usage.
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A few months ago my housemates and I moved to a new house, taking our cable service with us. We just took the cable modem we had from before to the new house, where cable was already installed, and advised the cable company that we had done this.
This was apparently all fine and we should have service within an hour. A few hours later, I became frustrated and called back and got transferred to the tech support people. The first wall of support folks seems to have the function of asking what OS you use and transferring you to a "real" tech. We have a box running linux doing routing/NAT for our network, but I figured saying that would just cause me grief so I said "Windows 2000".
This turned out to be a big mistake. It turns out that the previous tennents of the house had been disconnected for having some stupid worm, so they wanted me to prove I'd patched my Windows 2000 box with Windows Update before they'd help me further. I just insisted I had, thinking it'd be easy, but they wanted the patch identification numbers from the Windows Update installation!
With no way to find these out, I just decided to be honest with the man. I explained that there was not a Windows machine connected to the cable modem and that I had just said that thinking they'd balk at the idea of a linux system. He seemed to ignore what I was saying and demanded I read out five numbers starting with Q from some dialog box in Windows 2000.
Becoming more than a little frustrated, I said that I had no way to do that and that there was no way the worms could be on my system. He was having none of it, so remembering that the worm he was trying to patch me for was Windows 2000 only I asked him what would happen if I phoned back and told them I was using Windows 98. He offered to transfer me to the "Windows 98" tech, and I agreed figuring that I wouldn't get any further here.
After waiting in the queue for 20 minutes, I got a connection to the Windows 98 tech who was the same guy I was talking to before! Both he and I knew he'd just put me back in the pool to try to get rid of me but by chance I'd ended up back on his line again. I very politely explained that my Windows 98 system would not connect to the Internet and he, with an appropriate amount of smarm, started going through the Windows 98 procedure he had laid out, which did not include patch installations.
I just played along with the little game, answering the questions correctly and pretending I was going through the motions. He knew I wasn't as well as I wasn't even trying to make it sound like I was.
Once we got through all that, he finally helped me. Apparently they have a special version of their online signup page which you must go through before Internet service is enabled at a new address. I wish they could have just told me that in the first place, as the first thing I said was "I have moved to a new address and transferred my cable service".
It would appear that all these "anonymous" peer-to-peer networks just make all users infringe rather than just those who choose to.
When I run a FreeNet node, items of data from other people are placed, in part, on my hard drive. If one of these items is part of a copyright-protected work, then the original distributor has committed copyright infringment. However, that is only the first copy. Any time someone else retrieves that item there is a chance that my PC will now supply some parts of the item, making another copy and thus infringing copyright.
Essentially any FreeNet user has a high probability of committing copyright infringment and cannot control this as he or she has no idea what data is all hashed up and encrypted in the data store. By this reasoning, it could be argued that it is in fact illegal to use FreeNet. I don't necessarily agree, but the fact that this possible argument exists could cause problems for anonymous peer-to-peer networks in the future.
This is sad, because anonymous networks have other uses beyond covert distribution of material protected by copyright, such as bypassing censorship.
Can't they host their own open-source projects rather than sucking SourceForge's teats?
SourceForge is great for projects which otherwise wouldn't have a home, but Microsoft is more than capable of running their own SourceForge-like system.
That is unless, of course, they are just throwing WTL into the void and hoping someone else will look after it because they've got no interest in it anymore.
At this point you're not really supposed to use it, you are supposed to develop it.
Its time will come, assuming enough people are interested and contribute. I don't know anything about audio or video compression so I already counted myself out!
While I am not a lawyer, I assume that SourceForge could get into some trouble for distributing a patent-infringing work even if the BBC are untouchable.
I don't know much about radio broadcasting, so this is just a general background question.
It would appear from what you and others have said that there is a legally-acceptable power level at which people are allowed to transmit without a licence.
With some cooperation, would it be acceptable and feasible for several people to broadcast the same signal to increase the broadcast area? The source signal could perhaps be streamed over a LAN (in the case of a college), for example.
I guess this is really two questions. Firstly, is what I'm proposing physically possible/sensible, and secondly, would it be legal?
At this point the only realistic way to "fix" charset handling would be to have servers use unicode internally but optionally translate data to and from other charsets for specific clients, so mIRC users can have stuff translated to their system's ANSI charset, and so on.
Of course, characters outside the chosen charset would be unintelligible, but anyone who cares will hopefully just use a unicode-able client.
There always has to be someone in office, and sadly people who don't take bribes are hard to find.
Although you can't get compatible alpha transparency (there is a filter hack which someone else posted but that requires browser sniffing) you can control that background colour so that it isn't the Windows default colour.
What you need to do is set the field in the PNG file which specifies the background colour. How to do that in your graphics program of choice is left as an exercise. Alternatively, you could try just hacking the relevant field by hand in a binary file editor. The format specs can be found by searching Google.
Hmmm... interesting. I'm not used to my watch and wallet being decorative! So I'm supposed to buy a wallet for every pair of shoes? :)
Good thing I'm not dating, I guess! I'm obviously hopeless at it!
Whoah....
How exactly do you match a belt and a pair of shoes? What if I don't wear a belt? ;)
"Too many distributions" was the point I was trying to reach, albeit in an overly roundabout way.
They're all called "Something Linux", so whenever someone hears about "That Linux Thing" they've got five or six (major) choices before they even start.
Therefore my proposal is to stop having a million things called Linux, and instead have a million things called Linux and one thing called something else which happens to have Linux under it. This last thing will, essentially, be another distro of Linux. However, it won't be called Linux, which is the important thing. Hopefully, if a company sorts it out, it'll come in a retail box too. These two things (it not being called linux and it coming in a box with a manual) will ultimately make users feel better about the whole thing, since they don't feel like they've made a confusing choice before they begin (Mandrake vs. Red Hat vs. ???) and they get something tangible.
This is, presumably, what LindowsOS was going for. I've never used that, so I don't know why it didn't do too well. Perhaps it was poor marketing, or some technical reason. LindowsOS had the right idea, though, in my opinion. A few more tries and we might get it right. As long as they aren't called Linux, they won't be percieved as more of "that Linux thing". True, they'll still have to choose between Windows and this other OS, but at least there's some differences that they can readily appreciate between these: price and, eventually, freedom.
It'll take a while for people to appreciate freedom, but they'll get the idea eventually, with the media giants taking the liberties they continue to take.
My point was that if a user can be thrown off by something as simple as hiding the desktop, they're going to be confused a whole lot more by a completely different environment with different paradigms.
Fortunately, few systems use anything other than the defaults under Windows. This means that unless you find yourself using a system owned by a power user, you'll get a consistant experience.
Compare this to the Linux situation. There is no "default" as such. There are several defaults to choose from! That's choices before you've even started.
The situation most likely to work, I believe, is to treat linux as a "component" in an operating system, much like hardware manufacturers cobble together chipsets to produce consumer products. A group/company can produce an operating system which runs on the Linux kernel and market it as a desktop OS with UNIX underpinnings, much like Apple do with Mac OS X. There would, ideally, only be one canonical form of this and most desktop users probably wouldn't know or care about the fact that the Linux kernel is lying beneath.
From this premise, we could say that a linux distro is like a "software agent". They decide on a good suite of software for you, or whittle down your options so that you only have to choose between several broad categories.
Those who want real choice can build/customize their own distro!
The choices also must mean something. "Gnome or KDE?" or "SMB or IPP?" probably don't mean much to your average user, at least when they're getting started. If they need to make those choices before they can get any work done, it'll be considerably off-putting.
As much as I hate to say it, the problem isn't "hiding" the choice, it's making the "desktop" of every linux system the same, so that users can transfer knowledge. This is true of MacOS, and it's true of Windows within a given version. (MS are less good at this.)
If a user sits down at a high school linux system and learns how to start his or her favourite word processor, then sits down at another system elsewhere with a different Window manager and desktop environment... what now?
Sure, they'll learn not too quickly, but this is certainly offputting in the same way that people tend to get flustered whenever they use my Windows box... the desktop is disabled, and I was surprised at how many people only know how to launch applications from the desktop. Also, my Start Menu is categorised rather than everything being under "ArrogantLongCompanyNameSoft Ltd, Inc (R)". The categorisations are pretty simple: "Internet", "Office", "Graphics", "Sound and Music"... yet this minor difference throws people off. It's not what they know.
So what's my point? Linux will probably never be used on any desktop other than specific corporate desktops, because people can be trained by their company to use them there, while this isn't true of other situations and the training will not be easily transferrable due to the ability to completely change the environment.
What is more likely is that one day one of the Linux distros that aren't called Linux (such as LindowsOS) will get their "standard look and feel" right and eliminate the choices, and that particular distro will take hold, and most "normal" people won't realise it's that Linux thing under the hood any more than they realise their router or set top box uses the Linux kernel.
I'm not sure how much it cost because it was bundled with the PC at purchase, but my mother's computer runs Windows XP Home. If this isn't cheap, it damn well should be. I'm staying with my family for a few days and while here I had to do some maintenance on the computer to sort out some weird quirks that had happened with the user accounts.
Specifically, users had started to "vanish" from the "Welcome screen". My first thought was to pop into the user accounts control panel, and found that it's been turned into some web-alike unusable mess which doesn't allow anything by way of fine-grained control. My next idea was the MMC, where the "Local User Manager" (or whatever it's called) is used for most fine-grained account configuration, but I found that Microsoft had deliberately disabled that in the Home edition by making it display a message stating that I need the Pro version to do this. Fun.
Finally I found how to get at the old User Accounts control panel by searching Google (run "control userpasswords2") and was able to change my brother's forgotten password but was unable to get at my sister's now-hidden (but still existant; can log in through the type-in login screen) account.
I just gave up and disabled the "Welcome Screen". They've now lost the much-praised "Fast User Switching".
I certainly hope this version of Windows is cheap. It certainly deserves to be, given that Microsoft has actively stubbed out stuff to produce an artificially-cheaper product. It reminds me of the phone caller-id system; the telephone company go to the trouble to strip out the caller-id information until you pay them to stop. Talk about backwards...
The t-shirts want to be free!
Some parts of the class library are off-limits, but the important core stuff seems to be okay. A developer could, say, implement the guts of an app using the portable runtime libraries and then implement two or more sets of UI classes using different class libraries, which is probably a sensible approach to ensure the app fits in to each environment correctly anyway.
Pah! Falling back on Perl is such a cop out. You'd be much cooler if you piped through at least five more filters and ended up at wc -l again!
:)
I don't use "word processors" but when a friend of mine needed one and we didn't have Word handy I installed OpenOffice on her (Windows 2000) system as a replacement, thinking that if she got Office later we could replace it easily enough with the export feature.
OpenOffice Writer was all I tried, and it seemed like a nice enough piece of software, but it was slow. It took a good two minutes to start up and the interface seemed unresponsive. At first I blamed it on her hardware (which, it has to be said, is a bit naff) but when we later got hold of an academic copy of Word 2000 and installed that it ran at a much less frustrating speed, starting up in ten seconds and the UI being responsive enough that you don't notice it.
What gives? Why is OpenOffice for Windows so much slower than Word 2000?
640 programs should be enough for anybody!
Faster processors should enable us to achieve more, not achieve the same old stuff much less efficiently.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou opened a cinema (aka movie theater) in Milton Keynes, England which offered movies at very low prices by forcing customers to book in advance online. This cuts down the staffing costs. They also, initially at least, didn't sell refreshments and food and encouraged customers to bring their own food purchased elsewhere.
The movie industry saw this and, noticing what Stelios had done to the airline industry with his previous company EasyJet, refused to supply the EasyCinema with the latest releases to prevent them from creating a precedent forcing a decrease in prices at other cinemas.
EasyCinema is still around, which perhaps takes some clout of of my post, but it just serves to demonstrate that the movie industry is able to hurt cinemas which don't play along with their rules without requiring laws. EasyCinema still, to my knowledge, does not get movies on their day of official release, but I don't live in Milton Keynes so I don't pay that much attention! :)
My ISP has a three-user limit per account. They define this to mean that no more than three people at a time should be using the connection for anything.
My housemates and I violate this rule on a daily basis (there are four of us), so they're obviously not too hot on that part of the AUP, but I know quite a few ISPs have similar policies, some only allowing a single computer (no NAT) or a single person (hard to define), which would then require us and you to invest in multiple connections to legitimately all use the ISP for Internet access. That at least removes one "excuse" for excessive usage.