My current Athlon XP 2100+ is now 4 years old, certainly wasn't top of the range at the time
My mistake - 3 years old.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
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Sounds nice, would be nicer if it were true. If Microsoft doesn't innovate, how come they have the most widely used OS?
Since when did this conversation about web browsers branch out into every other product MS make?
if Microsoft doesn't innovate, how come they have the most widely used OS
Umm, lets see.... because IBM made this thing called a PC which went on to become the most popular architecture. And when they made it, they contracted Microsoft to supply the operating system. Microsoft couldn't write the OS themselves, so they bought someone else's OS (which happened to have most of it's ideas ripped off CP/M).
Then later, when the technically superior DR-DOS appeared, Microsoft ripped off many of DR-DOS's superior features (and infact, when they ripped off DR-DOS 6's disk compression idea they got into legal hotwater when it transpired that rather than coding it themselves they had illegally copied Stacker's code).
Microsoft went to the trouble of purposefully breaking Windows 3.0 so it displayed an error under non-MS DOSes. They then broke Windows 3.1 again so it wouldn't work at all under DR-DOS.
So no, sorry - I don't see any real innovation there. MS's original OS wasn't even theirs and they gained market position pretty much by chance (by IBM contracting them to provide the OS). They then used unethical and illegal tactics to keep the competetors out, locking the customers into the MS roadmap.
And remember that even Windows wasn't that innovative - both Xerox and Apple had produced similar systems long before Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon.
You should look closely at Microsoft's hitory - many of their most important ideas weren't originally theirs, many of their best selling products were bought or stolen from other companies rather than being originally written by MS and many of MS's competetors have been kept out of the market by unethical and illegal tactics..
And I don't see much competition to their Office package...
OpenOffice is pretty good... seems to run better on my Linux workstation than MS Office too...:) Oh, and OpenOffice is missing many of those MS Office "features" which serve only to piss you off.
Yup, and Firefox is just a poor imitation of Opera.
No, I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you there. I will admit that I use FireFox, but that's not coz I'm a zealot - I use it because it happens to do the best job. If I had a Mac I'd use Safari.
Now, when doing web development, I test against a number of browsers - Safari, FireFox, IE6, Opera, eLinks, Symbian Opera, etc. I can tell you that in that testing, the 2 browsers that cause me the most "standards compliance" problems are IE (by far) and Opera (nowhere near as bad as IE). Yes, ok, all of the browsers have some minor compliance bugs that I have to deal with, but IE and Opera are the worst.
Oh, and Opera insists on defaulting the a UA string that claims it's IE, which is just broken IMHO (and no I don't use the UA string for anything other than statistics, but it's still broken)....ah, and Opera doesn't do XSLT either ISTR... which is something that most other browsers (including IE) have done for years...
And the worst thing about Opera is the number of zealots who will shout and swear at you if you even suggest it might not be the best browser in the world... even though most of them only use it for surfing porn and probably haven't coded a standards complient (X)HTML site in their lives.
The one point I will repeat though is that *all* the browsers have rendering bugs, it's just that some browsers have more serious ones than others.
Noone ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Yes, the software's shit, but if it all blows up, well that's life. If you take a risk and roll out some other software when the "standard" is MS then it may pay off and you'll probably have less security nightmares, but if (when?) it does blow up, you are suddenly responsible for taking the risk in the first place instead of going with a "standard" (crap) solution.
Your point about the article pointing out security hoels in FF is a perfect example: Yes, all software has bugs in it. If you're choosing the best solution you have to weigh up how many problems you're going to have with each piece of software. You can't point at some software and say "we'll use that coz it has no bugs in it" (at least, if I was contracting an IT company and they came out with that kind of arguement they sure as hell wouldn't have the contract for much longer because it shows either incompetance or a deliberate lie to the customer).
So yes, there will always be an article showing that the software you're pushing has bugs in it. I guess the trick is to respond to "this article shows your software is insecure" with 10 articles showing why the alternative solution is worse.
At the end of the day though, a lot of people don't want to take a personal risk - go with microsoft and whilest it may be shit, you won't be held responsible.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
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If MS was seriously trying to limit the appeal of the Web, why push RSS (a relatively new web-based app) into the mainstream by including it in IE?
1. Bundle software that supports new standard 2. Wait for a critical mass of users to start using the software in their every day lives 3. Release new version of the software that adds support for microsoft-propriatory enhancements 4. Watch clueless users use the new "enhancements" without realising they're breaking compatability with every other piece of software out there 5. Watch competition suffer as the user perception of the competing software is that it's crap and doesn't support sites that work fine in the industry standard (read: Microsoft) software, even though those sites aren't at all standards complient.
And don't tell me you don't recognise the strategy...
Even most of the geeks I know don't have new computers. The 1GHz mark was the turning point - machines more than 1GHz are fast enough for most uses.
Yep, I can concur with this point. When I bought my P200MMX workstation, it was a fairly dogs-danglies PC. You couldn't get much faster at the time - I think 266 was about the fastest you could get in the Pentium MMX desktop CPU line. After 3 years it was really starting to show it's age, and after 5 it was painful. My current Athlon XP 2100+ is now 4 years old, certainly wasn't top of the range at the time, and is still perfectly fine speedwise.
Assuming it lasts that long, I'll probably still be happilly using it in another 3 years. (Ok, so the motherboard probably won't last that long - it's suffering from capacitor plague so I'm gonna have to replace the caps). Certainly the only times I find myself wishing for a faster CPU and more memory is when stitching massive panoramic photos.
I'm just waiting to see at what point the computer market collapses - there's only so much bullshitting the marketting people can do before even the most non-technical people realise that upgrading their 2.5 GHz machine to 3.5GHz really won't make web surfing over their 512K DSL any faster. Sooner or later, the majority of people are only going to bother replacing their PCs when important components start dieing (brings me back to capacitor plague...).
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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My point is that the thing the guy in the article said about not borrowing from the competition is wrong.
Thing is, borrowing good features from other products is fine - that's what makes free(dom) software so cool, you can use other people's good ideas without being sued into the ground and that makes the world a better place. However, if you want to appear to be actually producing a worthwhile product instead of just ripping off everyone else's, you have to do what Microsoft isn't doing - _innovate_! If your product uses some good ideas from other products, plus chucks a bunch of it's own innovative ideas into the mix too then it's probably going to be seen as a worthwhile product.
Of course, whilest MS is ripping off everyone else's ideas for free, you can guarantee that if they did do something innovative it'd be patented and anyone who tried to use that feature in their own product would get sued into the ground.
But depending on the distro, a lot of people would have trouble with CLI stuff, be it apt-get or RPMs or whatever else needed to be done.
I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with the modern GUI stuff - I've used Linux since well before there were GUIs to do administration tasks and so to this day I use the commandline for this stuff. However, I understand that Fedora can install RPMs from a GUI (Up2Date), I presume other dists have similar options.
Unless you have to find drivers for your dialup, ethernet, or wireless NIC.
I can agree about dialup and wireless, although dialup is getting less common these days (ok, so there are problems getting drivers for some of the crumby USB DSL modems too, but the simple way around that is to get a router instead). I think you probably have some fairly specialised ethernet chipset these days if you have problems getting your ethernet to work out of the box though.
Wireless is a problem - I used to recommend the PrismGT chipsets but you can't get them anymore and the replacement has no support (and worse, most of the manufacturers are selling cards with the new chipset under the same name, model number and even FCC ID as the originals!). The cards supported by MADwifi seem to be pretty good though, but I will agree that this is an area where you really have to shop around for supported hardware (and the MADwifi drivers aren't in the stock kernel so it does take some fiddling).
I am not a developer, but if more effort were put into writing drivers for linux, and consolidating that effort, wouldn't it be somewhat doable even without the help of the hardware manufacturers?
Without specs for the hardware, the only way you can build drivers for it is to reverse engineer the way the Windows drivers work (by watching PCI bus traffic, etc). This is very time consuming and you have no guarantee you've reverse engineered the whole specification - the hardware may have some behaviour you've never seen while reverse engineering and the first you'll know about it is when it blows up spectacularly in the field. Nor does it help when relatively modern chipsets are discontinued in favor of cheaper ones (which often need to do a lot more in software) - you've then got to start all over again. A good example is the aforementioned PrismGT wireless chipsets which have been replaced by a chipset that requires the software to do more work.
As much as I do enjoy using linux, these are all weaknesses compared to the major operating systems.
All operating systems have weaknesses and strengths. My personal view is that (for me) the strengths of Linux outweigh the weaknesses whereas the weaknesses of Windows outweigh it's strengths. Other people will of course have other views and that's great coz variety makes the world a better place.
What are they wanting to do? The GUI on modern distributions seems pretty userfriendly to me. The only difference I see between a modern linux and a modern windows is if linux goes wrong someone with knowledge can fix it, if windows goes wrong it's reinstally time.
2) check their spam daily
Yes.. most linuxes will let you do this pretty much out-of-the-box - most of them ship with Thunderbird and Evolution.
3) all of the programs they already know how to use already work on it.
If you can use Word, etc you can easilly use OOo - they are very similar. You will never get a point where all software is universally compatable with all operating systems - if you want windows software you run windows, if you want Mac software, you run a Mac, if you want Linux software, you run Linux. What you're asking for is like only buying a new car if you can use your old tyres, steering wheel and spark plugs with it.
5) the same hardware support they have in windows. That is, everything worked with windows when they bought that computer from Dell/Compaq/HP/Fujitsu, whatever. They didn't have to go hunt down drivers, troubleshoot anything
Right, because you *never* have to hunt down drivers or troubleshoot stuff under windows, windows is perfect. This is also something that cannot be "fixed" by the FOSS developers - it's purely down to the hardware manufacturers. If they refuse to release drivers and won't publish specs so 3rd parties can write them then support really is going to be sucky - the same would apply if they didn't release drivers for Windows.
I really have no idea why I haven't run into a single linux distro that supports my porn and mp3s without extra codec downloads.
That would be because the owners of those CODECs would sue a distributor into the ground if they tried to support them. There's not much you can do if people use patented codecs and the patent holders won't produce (or allow the production) of software to decode them. IMHO the patent laws should be fixed to allow anyone to provide support for patented algorithms if the patent holder refuses to do so for a reasonable price.
If it's going to even start to replace the current FORD offering it's going to have to come with paint, accept the already-standard-everywhere-else fuel, and be capable of doing all the simple stuff.
Well, my linux installations (Fedora) come with paint (a shiny GUI) and can do the simple stuff (comes with a word processor, web browser, email client, etc as standard). It can also do some of the more complex stuff out of the box (photo editing, web serving, etc).
But, IMHO my Linux car is better than the Microsoft car because it comes with a choice of paint colours which I can choose after I've bought it. And infact, if I want, I can install new paint myself. Also, my Linux car doesn't have to have a colony of worms flushed out of it's engine on a monthly basis.
Yes, by removing most of the choice you could probably increase the market share of Linux... but then, most of us use Linux instead of Windows because it gives us more choice, so if you remove all the reasons why Linux is better than Windows why would anyone switch anyway?
I have recently changed jobs - I was working for a company who used Linux on all the workstations and now I'm working for a company who use Windows on all the workstations. The difference is very noticable - in the old company each person had their workstation setup how _they_ wanted, in the new company everyone has their workstation set up how Microsoft wants. I can't help thinking I'd be more productive if my workstation did what I wanted.
Raise this line of thought to the astrological level, with train timetables being replaced by planetary almanacs, then there is the conclusion that being born at different times leads you to different paths in life.
Following on from your explanation, it could be said that the universe destined NASA to complete the Deep Impact mission anyway...:)
I guess a comparable example would be if someone's job at the station was to set the clock at 9am every day - so the adjustment of the clock was predicted/caused (depending on your perspective) by the clock itself.
(No, I don't believe in astrology but I'm just playing devil's advocate here:)
Actually, it is saying that if you invite a Kelloggs salesman into your home to try and pitch you some cornflakes, it should not be illegal for you to also invite a salesman for a competing product at the same time.
Errm, isn't the competing salesman kinda just barging in without your permission though (since the competing advertisments are being produced by a piece of adware you probably didn't even want in the first place)?
WhenU didn't change the content of 1800Contacts' web pages. It popped up new pages with competitors ads. The whole case is muddied, if the report is accurate in saying that the court found the screen to be like a retailer
Sounds to me like the ruling is saying I could make my own brand product... say cornflakes, and wander into the supermarket with a truck load of them and start selling my own brand boxes of cornflakes right infront of the supermarket's branded ones... Sorry, but if I go into a specific shop, I don't expect that shop's competetors to be in the shop and keep beating me around the head with the product _they_ stock instead...
Offshore servers are pretty useless. If you're transmitting to the US you can be held to answer in a US court. Regardless of where your server might happen to be, if you have assets in the US banking system, they can be siezed. Likewise, if you set foot in the US, you can be arrested. Courts take a very broad view of their jurisdiction.
If you and your server aren't in the US, have no assets in the US, will never set foot in the US and are infact in a country that doesn't give a shit about the US and it's laws, it really doesn't matter a damn if a US court finds you guilty of breaking some US law - there's nothing they can _do_ about it.
IANAL, but I also think there's a difference between doing business in the US and providing a free service to people in the US (and indeed probably a difference between doing business _in_ the US and doing business _with_ the US).
If I'm in a country that makes it legal for me to put my music collection on a public web server and someone from a country where that isn't legal decides to download from that server, AFAIK that doesn't suddenly make me a criminal. (And yes, I know there have been cases where the US have pressured other countries to arrest people who have technically broken no local laws - I have no idea what the legal position is on that).
Infact, given what happened to indymedia I've got to say that it looks like hosting your corporate servers in a US-unfriendly country might be a very good plan, even if you're not doing anything illegal, just so the US can't utter the T-word and take them away for a few weeks without notice or reason - I'm guessing that losing all your servers is fairly damaging to your business.
After all, it's not really the IDEA of ads on Web pages that's the problem, it's the QUANTITY.
Actually, for me it's not about quantity, it's about quality. I have no problem with static banner ads, google's textual ads, etc. The ones I do block are the ones that are designed specifically to be annoying - Flash ads that suck up my CPU time, animated GIFs with horrible flashing colours on them which can't help but distract you from what you're actually interested in on the site, popups, etc. And the worst type, IMHO, which seem to be gradually appearing - banner ads that play sound and loud music.
If people stick to non-intrusive, targetted adverts then I will see them and occasionally click on them when they are advertising something that looks interesting. If they insist on annoying the hell out of me then I'll just add them to adblock... and usually they annoy me to the point that I add the entire advertiser's domain to adblock rather than bothering to filter only the annoying ones.
This is _exactly_ the same as advertising through spam, direct sales, high pressure sales, etc - I will never buy from these methods of advertising because they annoy the hell out of me. It amazes me the number of people who complain about spam, telesales, door-to-door salesmen, etc but then quite happilly buy from those advertising methods without even considering that their sale is one of the reasons those advertising methods are used.
Maybe not this site, but certainly other sites can and do operate at a loss.
Ok, lets pick a site that practically everyone uses - Google. How exactly are they going to provide free services without the financial support of their advertising systems? Or are you going to give them your creditcard number every time you search?
Well there are a lot of insecure machines out there. Mostly run by people who have no idea how to lock them down, or have no software firewall or anti-malware software.
Yes, and isn't this a good reason as any to shutdown those machines before they do any more damage? Just because you don't know how to secure your machine, you don't have the right to plug it in to the internet insecurely and cause untold damage to third parties. Similarly, if you don't know how to drive a car, you don't have the right to get in one and try driving it down the street, potentially injurring or killing other people in the process.
Yeah but what if someone infected a system and used it as a Zombie to do attacks from? How can the counter-attack program tell the difference between a real attack and one launched by a zombie system?
Errm, a zombie attacking you _is_ a real attack - taking down a compromised machine that is attacking the public network seems like a legitimate thing to do.
and the owner of said machine will be ticked off that I launched an attack on his/her machine/network and report my IP to my ISP and try to get my access rights removed.
Isn't this like going to the police to complain the heroine you just bought wasn't the real deal? Complaining that someone retaliated against your criminal activities seems like a really stupid idea coz you're gonna end up in about as much trouble as the person you're complaining about.
Meanwhile the attacker keeps infecting a random IP somewhere in the world and has the malware do the attacking for him/her, and does not get caught.
However, if each of his zombies gets taken down almost as soon as it starts attacking, it makes it a lot harder for the cracker. Also, I think that directing some of the crap at the people who run insecure machines which get zombied wouldn't necessarilly be a bad thing since it would help them wake up to the realities of security on the Internet.
I'm reminded of a quote from The Matrix - "If you're not one of us, you're one of them" - i.e. if you're not secure then you're potentially going to be used as a platform to launch an attack from.
iptables is awful - poorly documented and has a terrible syntax that means you have to dive into random HOWTO docs on the internet to get anything done.
Actually, I find the man page for iptables _very_ well written and the iptables syntax is pretty intuitive for the most part (the only bits I find slightly unintuitive are the physdev kludges for 802.1d support). I guess it's all down to what you're used to - I've been using iptables on an almost daily basis since it was invented (and ipchains before that and the aweful ipfwadm before that).
If you want undocumented, look at the tc command (actually, I lie - there is some reasonable documentation at LARTC for tc, but you have to know where to look).
"You know what I found? Right in the kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch."
The thing is, almost certainly the only reason you don't see similar comments in the Windows kernel source is because the source is not available.
I for one prefer developers to comment things that don't look quite right rather than ignoring them - asking "is this right?" isn't a crime, and it may be something so trivially unimportant that it's not worth spending the time investigating it further unless it proves to cause a problem.
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My current Athlon XP 2100+ is now 4 years old, certainly wasn't top of the range at the time
My mistake - 3 years old.
Sounds nice, would be nicer if it were true. If Microsoft doesn't innovate, how come they have the most widely used OS?
:)
Since when did this conversation about web browsers branch out into every other product MS make?
if Microsoft doesn't innovate, how come they have the most widely used OS
Umm, lets see.... because IBM made this thing called a PC which went on to become the most popular architecture. And when they made it, they contracted Microsoft to supply the operating system. Microsoft couldn't write the OS themselves, so they bought someone else's OS (which happened to have most of it's ideas ripped off CP/M).
Then later, when the technically superior DR-DOS appeared, Microsoft ripped off many of DR-DOS's superior features (and infact, when they ripped off DR-DOS 6's disk compression idea they got into legal hotwater when it transpired that rather than coding it themselves they had illegally copied Stacker's code).
Microsoft went to the trouble of purposefully breaking Windows 3.0 so it displayed an error under non-MS DOSes. They then broke Windows 3.1 again so it wouldn't work at all under DR-DOS.
So no, sorry - I don't see any real innovation there. MS's original OS wasn't even theirs and they gained market position pretty much by chance (by IBM contracting them to provide the OS). They then used unethical and illegal tactics to keep the competetors out, locking the customers into the MS roadmap.
And remember that even Windows wasn't that innovative - both Xerox and Apple had produced similar systems long before Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon.
You should look closely at Microsoft's hitory - many of their most important ideas weren't originally theirs, many of their best selling products were bought or stolen from other companies rather than being originally written by MS and many of MS's competetors have been kept out of the market by unethical and illegal tactics..
And I don't see much competition to their Office package...
OpenOffice is pretty good... seems to run better on my Linux workstation than MS Office too...
Oh, and OpenOffice is missing many of those MS Office "features" which serve only to piss you off.
Yup, and Firefox is just a poor imitation of Opera.
...ah, and Opera doesn't do XSLT either ISTR... which is something that most other browsers (including IE) have done for years...
No, I'm sorry but I have to disagree with you there. I will admit that I use FireFox, but that's not coz I'm a zealot - I use it because it happens to do the best job. If I had a Mac I'd use Safari.
Now, when doing web development, I test against a number of browsers - Safari, FireFox, IE6, Opera, eLinks, Symbian Opera, etc. I can tell you that in that testing, the 2 browsers that cause me the most "standards compliance" problems are IE (by far) and Opera (nowhere near as bad as IE). Yes, ok, all of the browsers have some minor compliance bugs that I have to deal with, but IE and Opera are the worst.
Oh, and Opera insists on defaulting the a UA string that claims it's IE, which is just broken IMHO (and no I don't use the UA string for anything other than statistics, but it's still broken).
And the worst thing about Opera is the number of zealots who will shout and swear at you if you even suggest it might not be the best browser in the world... even though most of them only use it for surfing porn and probably haven't coded a standards complient (X)HTML site in their lives.
The one point I will repeat though is that *all* the browsers have rendering bugs, it's just that some browsers have more serious ones than others.
Why do people so doggedly support Microsoft?
Noone ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Yes, the software's shit, but if it all blows up, well that's life. If you take a risk and roll out some other software when the "standard" is MS then it may pay off and you'll probably have less security nightmares, but if (when?) it does blow up, you are suddenly responsible for taking the risk in the first place instead of going with a "standard" (crap) solution.
Your point about the article pointing out security hoels in FF is a perfect example: Yes, all software has bugs in it. If you're choosing the best solution you have to weigh up how many problems you're going to have with each piece of software. You can't point at some software and say "we'll use that coz it has no bugs in it" (at least, if I was contracting an IT company and they came out with that kind of arguement they sure as hell wouldn't have the contract for much longer because it shows either incompetance or a deliberate lie to the customer).
So yes, there will always be an article showing that the software you're pushing has bugs in it. I guess the trick is to respond to "this article shows your software is insecure" with 10 articles showing why the alternative solution is worse.
At the end of the day though, a lot of people don't want to take a personal risk - go with microsoft and whilest it may be shit, you won't be held responsible.
If MS was seriously trying to limit the appeal of the Web, why push RSS (a relatively new web-based app) into the mainstream by including it in IE?
1. Bundle software that supports new standard
2. Wait for a critical mass of users to start using the software in their every day lives
3. Release new version of the software that adds support for microsoft-propriatory enhancements
4. Watch clueless users use the new "enhancements" without realising they're breaking compatability with every other piece of software out there
5. Watch competition suffer as the user perception of the competing software is that it's crap and doesn't support sites that work fine in the industry standard (read: Microsoft) software, even though those sites aren't at all standards complient.
And don't tell me you don't recognise the strategy...
Even most of the geeks I know don't have new computers. The 1GHz mark was the turning point - machines more than 1GHz are fast enough for most uses.
Yep, I can concur with this point. When I bought my P200MMX workstation, it was a fairly dogs-danglies PC. You couldn't get much faster at the time - I think 266 was about the fastest you could get in the Pentium MMX desktop CPU line. After 3 years it was really starting to show it's age, and after 5 it was painful. My current Athlon XP 2100+ is now 4 years old, certainly wasn't top of the range at the time, and is still perfectly fine speedwise.
Assuming it lasts that long, I'll probably still be happilly using it in another 3 years. (Ok, so the motherboard probably won't last that long - it's suffering from capacitor plague so I'm gonna have to replace the caps). Certainly the only times I find myself wishing for a faster CPU and more memory is when stitching massive panoramic photos.
I'm just waiting to see at what point the computer market collapses - there's only so much bullshitting the marketting people can do before even the most non-technical people realise that upgrading their 2.5 GHz machine to 3.5GHz really won't make web surfing over their 512K DSL any faster. Sooner or later, the majority of people are only going to bother replacing their PCs when important components start dieing (brings me back to capacitor plague...).
My point is that the thing the guy in the article said about not borrowing from the competition is wrong.
Thing is, borrowing good features from other products is fine - that's what makes free(dom) software so cool, you can use other people's good ideas without being sued into the ground and that makes the world a better place. However, if you want to appear to be actually producing a worthwhile product instead of just ripping off everyone else's, you have to do what Microsoft isn't doing - _innovate_! If your product uses some good ideas from other products, plus chucks a bunch of it's own innovative ideas into the mix too then it's probably going to be seen as a worthwhile product.
Of course, whilest MS is ripping off everyone else's ideas for free, you can guarantee that if they did do something innovative it'd be patented and anyone who tried to use that feature in their own product would get sued into the ground.
But depending on the distro, a lot of people would have trouble with CLI stuff, be it apt-get or RPMs or whatever else needed to be done.
I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with the modern GUI stuff - I've used Linux since well before there were GUIs to do administration tasks and so to this day I use the commandline for this stuff. However, I understand that Fedora can install RPMs from a GUI (Up2Date), I presume other dists have similar options.
Unless you have to find drivers for your dialup, ethernet, or wireless NIC.
I can agree about dialup and wireless, although dialup is getting less common these days (ok, so there are problems getting drivers for some of the crumby USB DSL modems too, but the simple way around that is to get a router instead). I think you probably have some fairly specialised ethernet chipset these days if you have problems getting your ethernet to work out of the box though.
Wireless is a problem - I used to recommend the PrismGT chipsets but you can't get them anymore and the replacement has no support (and worse, most of the manufacturers are selling cards with the new chipset under the same name, model number and even FCC ID as the originals!). The cards supported by MADwifi seem to be pretty good though, but I will agree that this is an area where you really have to shop around for supported hardware (and the MADwifi drivers aren't in the stock kernel so it does take some fiddling).
I am not a developer, but if more effort were put into writing drivers for linux, and consolidating that effort, wouldn't it be somewhat doable even without the help of the hardware manufacturers?
Without specs for the hardware, the only way you can build drivers for it is to reverse engineer the way the Windows drivers work (by watching PCI bus traffic, etc). This is very time consuming and you have no guarantee you've reverse engineered the whole specification - the hardware may have some behaviour you've never seen while reverse engineering and the first you'll know about it is when it blows up spectacularly in the field. Nor does it help when relatively modern chipsets are discontinued in favor of cheaper ones (which often need to do a lot more in software) - you've then got to start all over again. A good example is the aforementioned PrismGT wireless chipsets which have been replaced by a chipset that requires the software to do more work.
As much as I do enjoy using linux, these are all weaknesses compared to the major operating systems.
All operating systems have weaknesses and strengths. My personal view is that (for me) the strengths of Linux outweigh the weaknesses whereas the weaknesses of Windows outweigh it's strengths. Other people will of course have other views and that's great coz variety makes the world a better place.
1) so easy to use, even they can do it
What are they wanting to do? The GUI on modern distributions seems pretty userfriendly to me. The only difference I see between a modern linux and a modern windows is if linux goes wrong someone with knowledge can fix it, if windows goes wrong it's reinstally time.
2) check their spam daily
Yes.. most linuxes will let you do this pretty much out-of-the-box - most of them ship with Thunderbird and Evolution.
3) all of the programs they already know how to use already work on it.
If you can use Word, etc you can easilly use OOo - they are very similar. You will never get a point where all software is universally compatable with all operating systems - if you want windows software you run windows, if you want Mac software, you run a Mac, if you want Linux software, you run Linux. What you're asking for is like only buying a new car if you can use your old tyres, steering wheel and spark plugs with it.
5) the same hardware support they have in windows. That is, everything worked with windows when they bought that computer from Dell/Compaq/HP/Fujitsu, whatever. They didn't have to go hunt down drivers, troubleshoot anything
Right, because you *never* have to hunt down drivers or troubleshoot stuff under windows, windows is perfect. This is also something that cannot be "fixed" by the FOSS developers - it's purely down to the hardware manufacturers. If they refuse to release drivers and won't publish specs so 3rd parties can write them then support really is going to be sucky - the same would apply if they didn't release drivers for Windows.
I really have no idea why I haven't run into a single linux distro that supports my porn and mp3s without extra codec downloads.
That would be because the owners of those CODECs would sue a distributor into the ground if they tried to support them. There's not much you can do if people use patented codecs and the patent holders won't produce (or allow the production) of software to decode them. IMHO the patent laws should be fixed to allow anyone to provide support for patented algorithms if the patent holder refuses to do so for a reasonable price.
If it's going to even start to replace the current FORD offering it's going to have to come with paint, accept the already-standard-everywhere-else fuel, and be capable of doing all the simple stuff.
Well, my linux installations (Fedora) come with paint (a shiny GUI) and can do the simple stuff (comes with a word processor, web browser, email client, etc as standard). It can also do some of the more complex stuff out of the box (photo editing, web serving, etc).
But, IMHO my Linux car is better than the Microsoft car because it comes with a choice of paint colours which I can choose after I've bought it. And infact, if I want, I can install new paint myself. Also, my Linux car doesn't have to have a colony of worms flushed out of it's engine on a monthly basis.
Yes, by removing most of the choice you could probably increase the market share of Linux... but then, most of us use Linux instead of Windows because it gives us more choice, so if you remove all the reasons why Linux is better than Windows why would anyone switch anyway?
I have recently changed jobs - I was working for a company who used Linux on all the workstations and now I'm working for a company who use Windows on all the workstations. The difference is very noticable - in the old company each person had their workstation setup how _they_ wanted, in the new company everyone has their workstation set up how Microsoft wants. I can't help thinking I'd be more productive if my workstation did what I wanted.
If you are depending on the user agent string, your web site design is flawed already.
Sad but true: MS actually promote relying on UA strings in ASP by recommending you use browser detection functions which they provide.
Because the new IE included in Longhorn includes Clippy saying "Hey, something about your grammer isn't right!" when posting to slashdot!
Clippy: "You look like you're downloading a virus, do you need help with that?"
You can never stop watching for those barbarians, else you will wake up to find 24 hours porn programming on all TV stations.
:)
Sorry, this is a bad thing?
Raise this line of thought to the astrological level, with train timetables being replaced by planetary almanacs, then there is the conclusion that being born at different times leads you to different paths in life.
:)
:)
Following on from your explanation, it could be said that the universe destined NASA to complete the Deep Impact mission anyway...
I guess a comparable example would be if someone's job at the station was to set the clock at 9am every day - so the adjustment of the clock was predicted/caused (depending on your perspective) by the clock itself.
(No, I don't believe in astrology but I'm just playing devil's advocate here
Actually, it is saying that if you invite a Kelloggs salesman into your home to try and pitch you some cornflakes, it should not be illegal for you to also invite a salesman for a competing product at the same time.
Errm, isn't the competing salesman kinda just barging in without your permission though (since the competing advertisments are being produced by a piece of adware you probably didn't even want in the first place)?
WhenU didn't change the content of 1800Contacts' web pages. It popped up new pages with competitors ads. The whole case is muddied, if the report is accurate in saying that the court found the screen to be like a retailer
Sounds to me like the ruling is saying I could make my own brand product... say cornflakes, and wander into the supermarket with a truck load of them and start selling my own brand boxes of cornflakes right infront of the supermarket's branded ones... Sorry, but if I go into a specific shop, I don't expect that shop's competetors to be in the shop and keep beating me around the head with the product _they_ stock instead...
Offshore servers are pretty useless. If you're transmitting to the US you can be held to answer in a US court. Regardless of where your server might happen to be, if you have assets in the US banking system, they can be siezed. Likewise, if you set foot in the US, you can be arrested. Courts take a very broad view of their jurisdiction.
If you and your server aren't in the US, have no assets in the US, will never set foot in the US and are infact in a country that doesn't give a shit about the US and it's laws, it really doesn't matter a damn if a US court finds you guilty of breaking some US law - there's nothing they can _do_ about it.
IANAL, but I also think there's a difference between doing business in the US and providing a free service to people in the US (and indeed probably a difference between doing business _in_ the US and doing business _with_ the US).
If I'm in a country that makes it legal for me to put my music collection on a public web server and someone from a country where that isn't legal decides to download from that server, AFAIK that doesn't suddenly make me a criminal. (And yes, I know there have been cases where the US have pressured other countries to arrest people who have technically broken no local laws - I have no idea what the legal position is on that).
Infact, given what happened to indymedia I've got to say that it looks like hosting your corporate servers in a US-unfriendly country might be a very good plan, even if you're not doing anything illegal, just so the US can't utter the T-word and take them away for a few weeks without notice or reason - I'm guessing that losing all your servers is fairly damaging to your business.
After all, it's not really the IDEA of ads on Web pages that's the problem, it's the QUANTITY.
Actually, for me it's not about quantity, it's about quality. I have no problem with static banner ads, google's textual ads, etc. The ones I do block are the ones that are designed specifically to be annoying - Flash ads that suck up my CPU time, animated GIFs with horrible flashing colours on them which can't help but distract you from what you're actually interested in on the site, popups, etc. And the worst type, IMHO, which seem to be gradually appearing - banner ads that play sound and loud music.
If people stick to non-intrusive, targetted adverts then I will see them and occasionally click on them when they are advertising something that looks interesting. If they insist on annoying the hell out of me then I'll just add them to adblock... and usually they annoy me to the point that I add the entire advertiser's domain to adblock rather than bothering to filter only the annoying ones.
This is _exactly_ the same as advertising through spam, direct sales, high pressure sales, etc - I will never buy from these methods of advertising because they annoy the hell out of me. It amazes me the number of people who complain about spam, telesales, door-to-door salesmen, etc but then quite happilly buy from those advertising methods without even considering that their sale is one of the reasons those advertising methods are used.
Maybe not this site, but certainly other sites can and do operate at a loss.
Ok, lets pick a site that practically everyone uses - Google. How exactly are they going to provide free services without the financial support of their advertising systems? Or are you going to give them your creditcard number every time you search?
Well there are a lot of insecure machines out there. Mostly run by people who have no idea how to lock them down, or have no software firewall or anti-malware software.
Yes, and isn't this a good reason as any to shutdown those machines before they do any more damage? Just because you don't know how to secure your machine, you don't have the right to plug it in to the internet insecurely and cause untold damage to third parties. Similarly, if you don't know how to drive a car, you don't have the right to get in one and try driving it down the street, potentially injurring or killing other people in the process.
Yeah but what if someone infected a system and used it as a Zombie to do attacks from? How can the counter-attack program tell the difference between a real attack and one launched by a zombie system?
Errm, a zombie attacking you _is_ a real attack - taking down a compromised machine that is attacking the public network seems like a legitimate thing to do.
and the owner of said machine will be ticked off that I launched an attack on his/her machine/network and report my IP to my ISP and try to get my access rights removed.
Isn't this like going to the police to complain the heroine you just bought wasn't the real deal? Complaining that someone retaliated against your criminal activities seems like a really stupid idea coz you're gonna end up in about as much trouble as the person you're complaining about.
Meanwhile the attacker keeps infecting a random IP somewhere in the world and has the malware do the attacking for him/her, and does not get caught.
However, if each of his zombies gets taken down almost as soon as it starts attacking, it makes it a lot harder for the cracker. Also, I think that directing some of the crap at the people who run insecure machines which get zombied wouldn't necessarilly be a bad thing since it would help them wake up to the realities of security on the Internet.
I'm reminded of a quote from The Matrix - "If you're not one of us, you're one of them" - i.e. if you're not secure then you're potentially going to be used as a platform to launch an attack from.
Like, demand to fly in the cargo bay of the aircraft with your bag, so the baggage handlers don't have a chance to interfere with it?
This is akin to the police confiscating your computer and then planting material on the hard drive - nothing you can do about it in either case.
People get degrees to come up with this stuff.
:)
Powerpoint? Google?
P.S. "Cheerios" refers to the "O" shaped pieces of cereal, and suggests that they're a fun and "cheery" way to start the morning.
"cheery" "morning"... nope, those words never belong that close together
iptables is awful - poorly documented and has a terrible syntax that means you have to dive into random HOWTO docs on the internet to get anything done.
Actually, I find the man page for iptables _very_ well written and the iptables syntax is pretty intuitive for the most part (the only bits I find slightly unintuitive are the physdev kludges for 802.1d support). I guess it's all down to what you're used to - I've been using iptables on an almost daily basis since it was invented (and ipchains before that and the aweful ipfwadm before that).
If you want undocumented, look at the tc command (actually, I lie - there is some reasonable documentation at LARTC for tc, but you have to know where to look).
and I have kissed a girl
:)
Was she your mother?
"You know what I found? Right in the kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch."
The thing is, almost certainly the only reason you don't see similar comments in the Windows kernel source is because the source is not available.
I for one prefer developers to comment things that don't look quite right rather than ignoring them - asking "is this right?" isn't a crime, and it may be something so trivially unimportant that it's not worth spending the time investigating it further unless it proves to cause a problem.