IRC and instant messaging are not the same. You should probably not use Gaim to connect to IRC, and you should probably not use Bitlbee to connect to an IM network, if you have a choice. There are exceptional cases, of course, but, like most exceptional cases, they are rare.
IM offers fancy things like formatted messages, voice chat, and buddy lists that are not handled very well by Bitlbee.
IRC offers something a little less tangible. It has tradition and culture. The IRC way has stood the test of time. The user interface, which relies primarily on commands to operate clients and interact with servers, works extremely well and has been refined meticulously throughout IRC's long lifetime. Like Usenet (no jokes now!) compared with a Web forum, the rules of etiquette are observed much more strictly on IRC than on IM services. An IRC newb who goes into #apache and says HELLO! to everyone on the channel individually will be promptly LARTed by more experienced users. Perhaps this is what makes IRC overall more pleasant to use: it is more of a community. It still offers the most important functionality found in IM, as well. I reckon this makes it better, in a sense.
Everyone I know uses AIM. Everyone. It annoys the fuck out of me, because AIM absolutely sucks. I have no choice but to use AIM, however. Sure, gaim takes away the client-side suck, but there's still a lot of server-side suck I have to deal with.
I am frustrated with the instant messaging paradigm in general, particularly the buddy list, which just seems to me to be a suggestion to the user that he talk to everyone currently online. Some people take this suggestion literally:
person: hey me: Hey. What's up? person: nmu me: Not much. Just wondering why the fuck you're talking to me if you have nothing to say, you fat fuck. Go outside and play!
signal_to_noise_ratio--;
Sometimes I wonder if we really needed anything more than IRC.
Yeah! No more of these closed networks! Oh, I know - Let's make it like email, where servers talk to each other! We'll call it Jabber, or something like that! What a great idea!;)
Apple hasn't done this recently because the GUI is such a commonplace concept. Unix is not a very commonplace concept, however, so an easy-to-find tutorial of some sort in a Linux distro would be nice.
With Linspire, that $400 Dell box is $350. That's what I mean. The computers that come pre-bundled with Linspire at Wal-Mart are ultra cheap. Therein lies the attraction.
I'm never paying for an OS again in my life, though. My next computer comes with no operating system, and I'm not paying a dime for the Debian netinst CD I will have ready to load onto it.
Oh, and Debian is one of those distros that offers that uniqueness you were talking about. Linspire is designed to be an easy alternative to Windows with almost no learning curve. Debian and other distros like it are there to make a good OS, period. That's where the innovation happens.
Thanks for reaffirming what I just said. Linux has better hardware support than Windows in general, except when hardware vendors do not cooperate. That is to say, when they do not design their hardware on open specs for which Linux hackers can write their own drivers.
Besides video acceleration, the drivers for which are kept notoriously secret, I have never had a significant hardware problem with Linux. Even when the vendor's hardware support is shitty, there's almost always a GPL alternative written by someone who got tired of waiting for the vendor to fix the bugs in the original driver.
"I just would like that they would fuse or something...*dreams on*"
Yeah, probably not going to happen. Windows and GNU/Linux come from two very different computing paradigms. I predict that you will never see the jargon that is the Unix shell go away, in any distro. Not Gentoo, not Red Hat, not Linspire. Never. It may look cryptic, but it has been refined for decades into the animal it is today, and if you do the sort of work that the shell was designed for, there is no graphical substitute.
Remember as well that easy != Windowsesque. Look at the Mac OS. Though itself and Windows were very similar at a time, they have certainly gone their separate ways. The Mac is still generally considered to be the superior interface. Likewise, Linux desktops are actually pretty easy to use, even though a great deal of them make no significant effort to resemble Windows.
It should also be noted that although graphical configuration is less common in Unices than in desktop operating systems like Windows, this does not make the configuration file wrong. It is a different way of solving a problem, and if Linux were the system with 90% market share, some people would surely complain that Windows lacks easy-to-read configuration files.
Actually, I stopped using Mac OS X for good the other day. Now I exclusively use GNOME 2.8 as my desktop. Not even the latest stable version. I find it very easy to use and very functional, and it doesn't get in my way. I actually like not having to navigate to/Applications to get to all my programs. And since I'm getting a start with making music, I greatly appreciate being able to run programs like BEAST and csound that are either not as well supported on the Mac, or not supported as all.
The moral of the story is that Your Mileage May Vary. Use the whatever is the right tool for the job for YOU. I like the freedom and control offered to me by GNU/Linux, and I appreciate the polish of more recent iterations of Unix desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE. But if you prefer the practically zero configuration offered by such operating systems as Mac OS X or Windows (or even Linspire), by all means, don't feel pressured by us FOSS zealots. I still posit that free/open source software is inherently better than any commercial offering, but of course you're allowed to disagree.
It sounds like you just want Linux to be more like Windows. So why don't you just use Windows? (Linux has BETTER hardware support in general than Windows, by the way. It only runs into trouble when hardware vendors won't cooperate.)
Totem with gstreamer seems to handle most WMV files fine. Multimedia support is inconsistent in the open source community, but that doesn't mean that it's lacking. You need to know where to look.
Incidentally, I use Debian, which handled all sorts of multimedia playback right out of the box, so to speak. So in some cases, you don't even have to look at all.
No, I did not RTFA, but the blurb alone left me with some thoughts:
"The company, which was formerly known as Lindows, has gotten a lot of press for including their OS with pre-bundled computers."
That's not entirely true, as there are other Linux-based operating systems that also do this. Linspire has gotten press attention because it bundles their OS with major vendors' computers. You can walk into Wal-Mart today and buy a computer with Linspire pre-installed. This makes it unique.
I don't see what's so great about a voice-dictated setup process, either. To me, that just presents accessibility issues, and I'd personally be annoyed by it if there wasn't such a thing as a volume knob.
This is just me, though; I've never been a fan of holding the user's hand, no matter what the level of experience. I believe Carl Sagan once said something about the problems inherent in overly abstracting technology from the user.
Now, you might have wanted to ask how a GUI would help write the bash script. Well, it won't. But writing the bash script requires a whole different level of knowledge and expertise, and the people who write scripts aren't the ones who'd be using the GUI. However, if you do have a GUI front-end to your script, you'd probably attract a lot more users.
Of course, it's important to have the bash script in the first place so that someone who knows what he's doing can control it with another program. Modularity is something that Unix has and Windows doesn't. (It's also largely absent on the Mac.) Unfortunately, most graphical Unix apps don't properly utilize this advantage and instead try to act like the Mac OS or Windows, two operating systems that are fundamentally very different from Unix. And what we end up with is just free, copycat Windows. At just a slightly higher level of abstraction (you've added graphics and a file manager, essentially) the OS interface is completely different. Where's my scriptability? Where are all the filter programs for piping I/O? None of my apps seem to be using them. How come so many of these programs are so monolithic? This is anti-Unix!
Rather than imitating the founding fathers of the desktop, we should be trying to one-up them when we write graphical programs by designing them according to time-tested traditions. Graphics should add freedom to a user environment, not take it away.
I'd read that Intel had released Linux drivers for my wireless card about a year ago. I had figured that such support would have been integrated into Kubuntu, which was the most recent distribution at the time, but I was wrong.
That sounds about right. Ubuntu/kubuntu do not include any closed source drivers with their Linux distributions, and they never will.
One thing hackers will not do is sacrifice the freedom of their software for a little convenience. Until vendors cooperate, there will always be a steeper learning curve with Linux than with Windows or the Mac.
If you're a pocket-picking cracker with common sense, you'll probably realize that "Hey, this business card with nonsensical combinations of letters and numbers scribbled on it might actually have some sort of significance." Or maybe the owner just has an ASCII fetish.
Disassociating the passwords is of course a good idea *if* you must write down your passwords because this way if you just lose it, no one will know how to use the information. It doesn't protect you from a thief, however.
Which is why I specifically cited w3m, but you're right, there's probably some "next input field" keyboard shortcut that I'm too lazy to find out about.
Well, with the current pace of neuroscience's advancement, you'll probably be able to quite precisely move the cursor with your mind in a few years. When this happens, it will be heralded as a huge advancement in the field of Darth Vader simulators...
Slashdot Mirror
They do. It's called "Personalized Search."
Mac OS X and Linux use the same compiler collection.
/usr is often a separate partition from /, so that wouldn't work.
IRC and instant messaging are not the same. You should probably not use Gaim to connect to IRC, and you should probably not use Bitlbee to connect to an IM network, if you have a choice. There are exceptional cases, of course, but, like most exceptional cases, they are rare.
IM offers fancy things like formatted messages, voice chat, and buddy lists that are not handled very well by Bitlbee.
IRC offers something a little less tangible. It has tradition and culture. The IRC way has stood the test of time. The user interface, which relies primarily on commands to operate clients and interact with servers, works extremely well and has been refined meticulously throughout IRC's long lifetime. Like Usenet (no jokes now!) compared with a Web forum, the rules of etiquette are observed much more strictly on IRC than on IM services. An IRC newb who goes into #apache and says HELLO! to everyone on the channel individually will be promptly LARTed by more experienced users. Perhaps this is what makes IRC overall more pleasant to use: it is more of a community. It still offers the most important functionality found in IM, as well. I reckon this makes it better, in a sense.
Everyone I know uses AIM. Everyone. It annoys the fuck out of me, because AIM absolutely sucks. I have no choice but to use AIM, however. Sure, gaim takes away the client-side suck, but there's still a lot of server-side suck I have to deal with.
I am frustrated with the instant messaging paradigm in general, particularly the buddy list, which just seems to me to be a suggestion to the user that he talk to everyone currently online. Some people take this suggestion literally:
signal_to_noise_ratio--;
Sometimes I wonder if we really needed anything more than IRC.
Yeah! No more of these closed networks! Oh, I know - Let's make it like email, where servers talk to each other! We'll call it Jabber, or something like that! What a great idea! ;)
lol
Google Talk is another incentive to use GMail, which serves plenty of ads.
Apple hasn't done this recently because the GUI is such a commonplace concept. Unix is not a very commonplace concept, however, so an easy-to-find tutorial of some sort in a Linux distro would be nice.
With Linspire, that $400 Dell box is $350. That's what I mean. The computers that come pre-bundled with Linspire at Wal-Mart are ultra cheap. Therein lies the attraction.
I'm never paying for an OS again in my life, though. My next computer comes with no operating system, and I'm not paying a dime for the Debian netinst CD I will have ready to load onto it.
Oh, and Debian is one of those distros that offers that uniqueness you were talking about. Linspire is designed to be an easy alternative to Windows with almost no learning curve. Debian and other distros like it are there to make a good OS, period. That's where the innovation happens.
Thanks for reaffirming what I just said. Linux has better hardware support than Windows in general, except when hardware vendors do not cooperate. That is to say, when they do not design their hardware on open specs for which Linux hackers can write their own drivers.
Besides video acceleration, the drivers for which are kept notoriously secret, I have never had a significant hardware problem with Linux. Even when the vendor's hardware support is shitty, there's almost always a GPL alternative written by someone who got tired of waiting for the vendor to fix the bugs in the original driver.
"I just would like that they would fuse or something...*dreams on*"
Yeah, probably not going to happen. Windows and GNU/Linux come from two very different computing paradigms. I predict that you will never see the jargon that is the Unix shell go away, in any distro. Not Gentoo, not Red Hat, not Linspire. Never. It may look cryptic, but it has been refined for decades into the animal it is today, and if you do the sort of work that the shell was designed for, there is no graphical substitute.
Remember as well that easy != Windowsesque. Look at the Mac OS. Though itself and Windows were very similar at a time, they have certainly gone their separate ways. The Mac is still generally considered to be the superior interface. Likewise, Linux desktops are actually pretty easy to use, even though a great deal of them make no significant effort to resemble Windows.
It should also be noted that although graphical configuration is less common in Unices than in desktop operating systems like Windows, this does not make the configuration file wrong. It is a different way of solving a problem, and if Linux were the system with 90% market share, some people would surely complain that Windows lacks easy-to-read configuration files.
Actually, I stopped using Mac OS X for good the other day. Now I exclusively use GNOME 2.8 as my desktop. Not even the latest stable version. I find it very easy to use and very functional, and it doesn't get in my way. I actually like not having to navigate to /Applications to get to all my programs. And since I'm getting a start with making music, I greatly appreciate being able to run programs like BEAST and csound that are either not as well supported on the Mac, or not supported as all.
The moral of the story is that Your Mileage May Vary. Use the whatever is the right tool for the job for YOU. I like the freedom and control offered to me by GNU/Linux, and I appreciate the polish of more recent iterations of Unix desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE. But if you prefer the practically zero configuration offered by such operating systems as Mac OS X or Windows (or even Linspire), by all means, don't feel pressured by us FOSS zealots. I still posit that free/open source software is inherently better than any commercial offering, but of course you're allowed to disagree.
It sounds like you just want Linux to be more like Windows. So why don't you just use Windows? (Linux has BETTER hardware support in general than Windows, by the way. It only runs into trouble when hardware vendors won't cooperate.)
Totem with gstreamer seems to handle most WMV files fine. Multimedia support is inconsistent in the open source community, but that doesn't mean that it's lacking. You need to know where to look.
Incidentally, I use Debian, which handled all sorts of multimedia playback right out of the box, so to speak. So in some cases, you don't even have to look at all.
"If Linspire looks like Windows, why would anyone switch?"
It's cheaper.
No, I did not RTFA, but the blurb alone left me with some thoughts:
"The company, which was formerly known as Lindows, has gotten a lot of press for including their OS with pre-bundled computers."
That's not entirely true, as there are other Linux-based operating systems that also do this. Linspire has gotten press attention because it bundles their OS with major vendors' computers. You can walk into Wal-Mart today and buy a computer with Linspire pre-installed. This makes it unique.
I don't see what's so great about a voice-dictated setup process, either. To me, that just presents accessibility issues, and I'd personally be annoyed by it if there wasn't such a thing as a volume knob.
This is just me, though; I've never been a fan of holding the user's hand, no matter what the level of experience. I believe Carl Sagan once said something about the problems inherent in overly abstracting technology from the user.
Bingo.
Linux will never be "ready for the desktop" in the sense that it will never be Windows.
At least I hope that it will never be Windows. I look at KDE nowadays and I kinda go, "Eh..."
Of course, it's important to have the bash script in the first place so that someone who knows what he's doing can control it with another program. Modularity is something that Unix has and Windows doesn't. (It's also largely absent on the Mac.) Unfortunately, most graphical Unix apps don't properly utilize this advantage and instead try to act like the Mac OS or Windows, two operating systems that are fundamentally very different from Unix. And what we end up with is just free, copycat Windows. At just a slightly higher level of abstraction (you've added graphics and a file manager, essentially) the OS interface is completely different. Where's my scriptability? Where are all the filter programs for piping I/O? None of my apps seem to be using them. How come so many of these programs are so monolithic? This is anti-Unix!
Rather than imitating the founding fathers of the desktop, we should be trying to one-up them when we write graphical programs by designing them according to time-tested traditions. Graphics should add freedom to a user environment, not take it away.
That sounds about right. Ubuntu/kubuntu do not include any closed source drivers with their Linux distributions, and they never will.
One thing hackers will not do is sacrifice the freedom of their software for a little convenience. Until vendors cooperate, there will always be a steeper learning curve with Linux than with Windows or the Mac.
Not that learning is a particularly bad thing...
Sounds a lot more like "open source" to me.
If you're a pocket-picking cracker with common sense, you'll probably realize that "Hey, this business card with nonsensical combinations of letters and numbers scribbled on it might actually have some sort of significance." Or maybe the owner just has an ASCII fetish.
Disassociating the passwords is of course a good idea *if* you must write down your passwords because this way if you just lose it, no one will know how to use the information. It doesn't protect you from a thief, however.
Which is why I specifically cited w3m, but you're right, there's probably some "next input field" keyboard shortcut that I'm too lazy to find out about.
Well, with the current pace of neuroscience's advancement, you'll probably be able to quite precisely move the cursor with your mind in a few years. When this happens, it will be heralded as a huge advancement in the field of Darth Vader simulators...
And you just confused the smurf out of every Mac zealot going to this story to denounce the heresy of the superiority of the keyboard.