It's called a "virtual private network" and you can not hack it from the internet.
That kind of thinking is exactly why we get massive security holes. Of course its possible to crack a VPN - you just crack one of the endpoint routers.
That's rather bias. It also means that people are no longer able to circumvent geo locks on media content, avoiding the current media distribution models and laws. Some people are protecting their privacy, but I would guess the vast majority just want to watch Game of Thrones.
Why exactly is circumventing region locks a bad thing? The businesses selling me stuff make use of the global market to get the cheapest raw materials and labour; why is the customer not allowed to use the global market too? In many cases the region locked content isn't even _available_ to some regions, which seems counterproductive for both the consumer and the vendor.
The make it such a "rich" interface that I can't easily tell what is info and what is an actionable button. Then add in the fact that once you find a button and tap it, the whole screen changes and you have a whole new set of information and buttons to try to process (and god forbid the buttons stay in the same place or follow and common pattern from screen to screen).
I think half the trouble is they are trying to make a good first impression rather than a good lasting impression, because its the first impression that sells - people look at the cars *in the show room* and fiddle with the entertainment system and obviously they prefer the one that looks really flashy. The only time they get to use it in anger, where functionality is more important the flashyness is after they've parted with their money.
Same reason why most laptops are now glossy screens instead of antiglare screens - in the showroom the glossy screens look brighter and sharper, so people spend their money on those machines; but in real-world use, the anti-glare screens are nicer because they don't have horrendous reflections all over them all the time while you're trying to work.
The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:
Out of interest, why ditch a distro because you don't like some of the defaults? Switching desktop environment is pretty trivial, there are plenty of others packaged for Fedora.
Dunno about anyone else, but I use certain pieces of software because they happen to do a good job for what I'm using them for, not because they are popular. I don't really see any merit in ranking distros by popularity. Also, Fedora is primarilly a bleeding-edge testing distro, so I wouldn't necessarilly expect it to be as popular as something more stable.
Pioneer AppRadio looks ideal - basically mirrors your phone's screen on it's 7" display. You need to do a bit of hacking to unlock the full potential, but the basic idea is brilliant.
The only real down-side is that the FM radio side sucks. If you mainly listen to playlists on your phone though it isn't a big issue.
I really don't want to be using a touch-screen interface while driving at all. If I want to change radio station/volume/whatever I want nice tactile buttons that I can feel without taking my eyes off the road, touch screen systems in cars are a disaster.
Re:Fedora 19 features the 3.9.0 kernel.
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Oh what I wished Red Hat did that to RHEL. They provide a distribution that should last for ten years, but keep the kernel at the same version. Yeah right 2.6.18, that will last forever.
Well it depends rather on what you mean by "last for years". The point of LTS releases like RHEL is that you install it and you get: 1. Bugfixes 2. Security patches 3. Very little breakage from any updates
What you explicitly don't get is new features every few months, because as soon as you go down the "upgrade for features" path, point (3) goes right out of the window. LTS releases are about installing a system and having it do the same old job day in day out for years, they aren't about installing a system and having the latest shiny features on it throughout its life. If you want all the latest features on every update, then thats what Fedora is all about, but with "regular new shiny" comes "regular new breakage" and there's not a lot you can do about that: "great stability", "new features" - pick any one.
Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?
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Do the "New Generation" of programmers, Have no fucking clue?
These idiots that have taken for granted the existing stable conventions, One's they cut their teeth on. And now thinking they know better - By going down this Tablet interface path - With everyone along with it?
Who's going down a "tablet interface path"? I'm assuming you're talking about Gnome 3, and whilst it looks *vaguely* "tablety" I don't think I'd want to use it without a keyboard and mouse (and FWIW I find it works very well on both my desktop and laptop - I've not tried it on a tablet so I can't comment there but on my normal workstations it seems to work better for me than any other DE I've used).
2. Desktops - Stable. (We really wan't DESKTOP's in their traditional sense. We don't want hybrid touch screen desktops or tablet interfaces.
Desktops are where hard and complicated work is done. Multi Screen - ie. Multi reference info while you work etc.)
My multi-screen desktop seems to work just fine with Fedora running Gnome 3. I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be...
2.5. Desktops - Yuppy. There will be some that want BLING on their desktop, So as long as the Tablet UI can be installed on a desktop
AS an OPTION then this will keep those happy too. Key word here is OPTION. It's not the default for a "Desktop".
Again, assuming you're referring to Gnome 3 as a "tablet UI" (I'm not sure why you think it's a tablet UI, but lets ignore that for a minute), in what way is it not optional? If you don't like it, there are plenty of other DEs packaged for fedora, why not switch to one of them instead of bitching that you somehow don't have an option (which seems to equate to "I can't be arsed to change the defaults, all computers must come pre-configured exactly how I like them and everyone else be damned").
Am I the only person in the world that thinks Gnome 3 is actually pretty cool? Once I stopped bellyaching about being forced to do things a different way I actually started getting things done faster and with less mucking about. It still beats out the 'Metro' interface if you ask me and it seems like they are getting ready for touch which seems reasonable at this point in the road.
No, I've liked Gnome 3 from day 1 - I had hated the "windows-alike" DEs like Gnome 2 and had been using Enlightenment 17 (development release) for years, but when Gnome 3 came along it seemed like about the best DE I'd used so I switched. There are, of course, niggles and WTFs (things like not being able to disable the screen blanker - I mean, really, would it have been way too confusing for users if there was a "never" option in the screen timeout dropdown?), but you get niggles with all DEs.
What I don't get is why every time Slashdot has an article about Fedora, most of the posts boil down to "Fedora's shit because it has Gnome 3" - seriously, no one's forcing you to use Gnome 3, if you don't like it there are plenty of other DEs packaged for Fedora; don't condemn the whole distro just because one of its defaults doesn't sit well with you and you're too lazy to do the trivial job of changing it.
Hell, it surprises me someone hasn't set up a company specifically using the DNC list as their "good leads" list
Why are people who have opted out of telemarketing calls likely to be "good leads"? I would think they are the least likely people to take you up on whatever you're offering.
Would you like to hear all the humour misunderstandings Europeans have regarding the United States, or are you only interested in stories that make Americans look dumb?
I was relaying a personal experience... I suspect that its one of those cases where getting offended says more about the offendee than the offender...
"New York City may be the first state"? Thats like watching a game show where the contestant is asked for a country in Europe that is fancy and them saying London or Paris.
I did have an american ask me is Wales was a city in London a few years ago (and yes, he was dead serious...)
2. Windows still doesn't have proper package management. Which leads to...
"Add/Remove Programs"? "Programs And Features"? What's that then, Scotch mist?
"Add/Remove Programs" isn't a package manager.
When you install software on Windows, you run an installer program which extracts a bunch of files from some variety of archive (format is installer-specific) and scatters the files all over the drive. Then when you remove a program you run an uninstaller program that was bundled with that software (hopefully - if they didn't bundle one you're screwed), and you hope that uninstaller will delete all the files (and only the files) that the installer created. There's no dependency resolution, so every possibility that you'll remove some library that another bit of software needed, etc.
On the other hand, a package manager is a standard bit of software that comes with the OS and keeps track of everything: When you install a package, the package manager extracts a bunch of files from a standard-format archive and enters metadata about those files into its database. It also figures out if that package depends on any other packages and ensures that those dependencies are installed. When you uninstall a package, the package manager checks the dependencies and prevents you uninstalling something that is required by another package you have installed (so you don't break things), and consults its metadata database to ensure it cleans up everything that is owned by that package.
So is it Microsoft's job as a commercial vendor to make sure every app that runs on the platform-du-jour updates at the same time?
I don't think this discussion was a "whose job is it?" argument - it was a "what do you find to be done better on Linux than Windows". Bringing up the automatic package updates thing seems reasonable - whether or not you believe its MS's responsibility or not, you can't get away from the fact that there *is* is usability difference between an OS that provides centralised updating functionality, and an OS that requires every application to implement their own ad-hoc system. This isn't about passing around blame, just about noting that there are differences and that this is important to some users.
Not even GNU/Linux does that.
Most modern distributions do exactly that. For example, lets take Fedora: Fedora run a fairly extensive YUM repository of packages themselves that all comes preconfigured. If all the software on your machine is installed from the Fedora repository then it will all get updated at the same time, through the same system. Occasionally you may find that some package you want isn't in the Fedora repository though - usually you'd find a third party YUM repository, enable that repository on your machine and install the package from there. Since all of these updates are happening through YUM, they do all happen at the same time, even through they are coming from different repositories.
You can set applications in both systems to update on certain days/times, or you can write a script.
Ok, yes, you *can* shoot yourself in the foot by overriding the systems that are provided. I think the point is that modern Linux distibutions provide a standardised package management/updating system and most software you're going to install will utilise that system. Windows, on the other hand, doesn't provide any package management/updates framework, so applications *have* to provide their own ad-hoc system. I think another point that should be mentioned here is that under Linux the updates generally happen in the background without requiring intervention, whereas updates to Windows software often involve asking the user, shutting down applications and occasionally even rebooting.
Opposite here. Never really used windows except at work where it's all we have and is misery personified. I got my first computer in 1983, a Commodore 64 with the big clunky 1541 disk drive. 64 Kilobytes of Ram (48K free) and 170K of storage on 5.25" floppies.
Lets see.. I started off on a Commodore 64, with tape drive. Later got a disk drive and ran GEOS on it, which was pretty good (one of the few WYSIWYG systems at the time).
Then got a 286, which shipped with Windows 2... And we pretty much immediately decided that Windows 2 was useless and a complete waste of time - having been happy with GEOS on the commodore we replaced Windows with GeoWorks, which seemed far superior.
The 286 got replaced with a 486, which shipped with Windows 3.1 - again, we pretty much concluded that Windows 3.1 was crap and installed GeoWorks on it, since that still seemed superior to Windows. We carried on for a few years running a combination of GeoWorks and DesqView (I don't think you could run them at the same time, but that was more the era of picking the right tool for the job you wanted to do rather than having a do-everything system).
Around 1994ish I joined the Windows beta programme and installed Windows 95 - that was actually the first Windows worth having IMHO. And largely for its ability to multitask DOS things rather than for its own applications.
A 486 laptop and P200 desktop later and Win98 came along, which I switched to but it didnt' seem a big step up from Win95. By that time I'd already been running Linux on the desktop off and on for a couple of years. Windows 98 became my main desktop OS and Linux was my server OS.
In 2000 I started working in a company which was entirely a Linux shop, so I was working exclusively with a Linux desktop. A couple of years later I replaced my home desktop and ditched Win98 in the process, opting to use Linux exclusively since I had found it pretty much did everything I needed, and was more versatile than Windows.
Since 2000, I've spent 2 years working for one company who's policy was for a Windows machine to be on every desk; every other place I've worked has been exclusively Linux. And in that company, since my work was entirely Linux based, the Windows XP machine was just used as a supplementary X server for my Linux workstation. So I can pretty much say I haven't used Windows for anything serious since the early 2000s; not because I specifically wanted to reject Windows, but because Linux fitted my needs better.
Maybe its because I'm more used to Linux, but both OS X and Windows feel more "clunky" to me. Sure, their UIs are sometimes a bit more polished, but there seems to be lost functionality that I continually miss, and parts of the UIs that just don't seem to work in the way I'd expect.
But even so, Linux on the Desktop will never be a "mainstream thing."
It could do, but I suspect it won't be GNU/Linux. Remember that ChromeOS and Android are both Linux - I have no idea why anyone would want to run them on the desktop, but Google seems to have a lot of influence and people follow even if what they are doing is nonsensical.
Windows (and DOS before it) was always designed to be a desktop system... a non-critical desktop system. And of course, it has critical mass which is why "everything works best on it."
I'm going to disagree with that. I fundamentally don't think that "everything works best" on Windows - I think that different types of software work "best" on different OSes (often not because of the OS itself - often simply because the best software for that job only happens to be available for one OS). I don't think you can point to any one OS and say "this is the best for everything" or even "this is the best for most things" - I think the vast majority of stuff is equally usable on all OSes and usually its just a couple of minor things that decides which OS is best for you.
Similarly, all OSes have their own failings - often most of those failings won't affect your specific work (but will affect someone else's), and also you get used to working around the failings of the OS you usually use.
I'm convinced that most of the "OS A is better than OS B" arguments are down to the fact that A and B have different features and different problems - the users of A will find, upon trying B that some feature they have got used to using isn't there; meanwhile the users of B will find the same problem with A. And similarly, the users of A will have got used to working around the problems they usually see, but upon switching to B they will find a whole new set of problems (and ignore the fact that all the problems they usually work around without thinking aren't there anymore).
So why won't there ever be a year of the Linux Desktop? Well... that's because it's the desktop itself that's on it way out.
The desktop certainly isn't on its way out. A lot of home users are finding that tablets are fine for the spot of web browsing that they do so the home desktop market is vanishing, but in industry the desktop isn't going anywhere. You're not going to find secretaries typing up letters/emails on a tablet; you're not going to find a programmer sitting in the office coding on a tablet; you're not going to find a professional photographer photoshopping their photos on a tablet; you won't find a pathologist typing up their reports on a tablet, etc. In some cases, desktops are being replaced by laptops (but laptops and desktops generally run the same software, so from a software perspective you can treat them the same); tablets are certainly *supplementing* desktops, but on the whole the desktop is here to stay for a good while yet.
Answering the original question: what keeps me off Windows is largely that I've used Linux pretty much exclusively for the past 13 years (and spent a good amount of time using Linux in the 3-4 years prior to that) and it basically does everything I need from my OS. Even if Windows also did everything I need, it would take a long time for me to relearn everything (e.g. learning how to drive powershell instead of bash would be a pain) and it would cost money, so what's the point in switching? That said, on the odd occasion I have to deal with windows problems, it still seems much less versatile - its still centred around pointy-clicky stuff, which whilst user friendly is not as versatile as being able to pipe together the outputs of a bunch of simple commands. And going back to my above "people don't like migrating because some feature is missing from the new OS" statement above - I rely heavily on sloppy-focus, which is something no other OS manages to do. I would hate to be without the ability to use half-hidden windows, especially on a small laptop screen.
The old "If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument. Except in the same week, it was demonstrated that if you said things the current administration didn't like, the power of an arm of the government would be brought to bear on you.
I think in the administration's eyes, saying things they don't like comes under "doing wrong" so the argument is still valid:)
FFS, The Woolwich murder was *not* terrorism - it was murder, plain and simple. Terrorism is inciting fear in the masses in order to elicit a political change - did a single murder cause the masses to become exceptionally fearful? I don't think so. Why does this murder do anything more to cause fear than any of the other numerous racially/politically motivated murders which are unfortunately reasonably common? It doesn't. I'm certainly not quaking in fear for my life - I'm far more likey to be gravely injured while being robbed than attacked for political reasons.
So we'll go back to the definition of terrorism - inciting fear to elicit political change. After every incident, the British Government keeps telling us that if we don't let them pass new legislation that infringes on our civil liberties then we won't be safe from "terrorists". After the Woolwich killing the Communications Data Bill was revived despite previously being demolished on its previous appearance. The justification was that if the security services couldn't spy on everyone then we would all be in grave danger of being killed by terrorists. In the case of the Woolwich murder it seems that this isn't in any way justified - the people who carried it out were already known to the security services; they didn't need any new legislation to spy on them, a court order would've done the trick just as well.
After the April Jones murder, the Online Safety Bill was revived by the government - because apparently all our kids are in danger of being murdered by kiddy fiddlers and that censoring the internet will somehow set all the nutters on the straight and narrow. And yet there seems to be no evidence to support this - it is supposition that porn leads to criminal behaviour, it could be equally possible that there would be more of this criminal behaviour if people *couldn't* relieve themselves through porn. I don't know the answer, but it seems a pretty bad idea to blindly enact laws without much evidence either way - most of the anti-kiddy-porn laws seem to be "I find what you're into distasteful, so you should be locked up" rather than actually designed to stop people getting hurt. To compound these problems, the politicians seem to be conflating protecting the kids from porn with preventing the adults getting at kiddy-porn, which are two separate issues; the Online Safety Bill is supposidly about protecting the kids from being exposed to porn, but its being pushed in response to an adult abusing a child - a completely separate problem.
So I ask, who are the terrorists? Who is inciting fear for a political end? I would say its the government - they are going out of their way to tell people to be scared after every incident in order to push new legislation that people would otherwise find unacceptable; surely _that_ is exactly what terrorism is?
When I was growing up, there were a fair number of IRA bombings and they were always played down to avoid stirring up fear. These days the people in power seem to have realised that they don't need to pull the trigger to benefit from the effects of being a terrorist, they only need to stir up fear surrounding existing incidents instead. The terrorists seem to be winning.
What we're talking about here is IPv6 for the WAN interface on your router. Pretty much nobody should need IPv6 internally right now.
That doesn't really make sense. Unless you're going to do some horrendous ALG on the router, you are going to need IPv6 both internally and externally in order to talk to IPv6 services - running IPv6 on the router's WAN interface but only IPv4 internally isn't going to help you (also there's almost no reason not to run IPv6 internally anyway)
Where is the advantage to home users if they use IPv6?
Well, this is the problem. For the majority of home users there is very little advantage _at the moment_, so even if they know enough to shop around for a v6 connection they probably won't bother. And the vast majority of users don't know the first thing about how the internet works, so wouldn't know to shop around for a v6 connection anyway.
Its basically a chicken & egg problem: The people who are going to have problems with the IPv4 address shortage are the server operators, who would want to roll out IPv6-only services. However, the server operators aren't going to be able to roll out v6-only services while the consumers don't have v6 connections. Similarly, until there are v6-only services there's little reason for end users to go to the effort of implementing ipv6 on their own networks.
So the only way this problem is really going to get solved is for IPv6 connections to be rolled out relatively transparently for the users. This is all doable - the ISP can implement IPv6 on their networks so the users don't have to know to shop around for an ISP that does v6; the ISPs can start shipping out v6-capable routers to their new customers instead of continuing to ship IPv4-only routers. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of the ISPs are also not interested in investing in their infrastructure (they cite the face that their users aren't actively asking for it, which of course they aren't). My personal preference is to avoid ISPs that aren't implementing IPv6 infrastructure, because it seems incredibly short-sighted, but of course most people won't know anything about this.
For a very restricted subset of users, IPv6 will be useful - it allows devices inside the network to be directly addressed from outside the network, which is certainly useful. But as mentioned, this is a very small number of users.
This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.
A simple stateful firewall will mitegate the dangers of scanners just as well as a NAT. In fact, the extensive address-space in IPv6 actually makes scanning much less effective since the vast majority of the addresses a scanner is going to try aren't even in use.
The growth of high capacity load balancers for web servers and other network services has also helped tremendously
And the growth of virtualisation has done the exact opposite.
The result has been that the great need for IPv6 simply has not yet occurred, and is unlikely to occur for another 10 years.
The great need on the consumer end has indeed not yet occurred, and probably won't for some time. On the ISP side too, most of the ISPs still have plenty of IPv4 addresses to go around, and can start reclaiming them off internal systems when they start feeling the pinch.
On the datacentre side, things are a bit different though. The people who are going to feel the pinch are the people operating the servers - that is where running out of IP addresses is going to be a real problem that won't be solvable with NAT (in some cases you'll be able to use an ALG to reduce problems, in other cases you won't).
On the consumer side, going forward the requirement for IPv6 will be twofold: 1. Accessing services that are IPv6-only. This *will* happen simply by virtue of the server operators not having enough v4 addresses. We'll probably see "reduced services" on IPv4 with extra features available for IPv6 users. This is especially true where the services are only intended to serve the local area - for example, a recent analysis of Google's data showed that over 10% of users in switzerland have IPv6 access, whilst only 0.22% in the UK do. Given a naive linear extrapolation, we might say that at some point in the future switzerland could have 99% of users with IPv6 access whilst the UK has around 2%. This would mean launching an IPv6-only service aimed at the swiss would be viable (and probably common), but would be inaccessible to most people in the UK. Splitting the internet like that would certainly be a bad thing, and people feeling increasingly cut off from useful services is what will drive both the ISPs and the end users to implement IPv6. 2. An increasing number of technologies just don't play well with NAT (and there are good reasons for this - this isn't just "short sighted designers of broken protocols"). And those technologies are becoming more popular. There is motivation there for people to eliminate the NAT problem by switching to v6.
Providing public, routable IP addresses puts them at risk of attack at all times
No; putting things on the internet with no firewall in front of them puts them at risk of attack. If you think your RFC1918 address is unroutable or that NAT is in any way protecting you, I suggest you go re-educate yourself. The *only* thing NAT does is place a requirement on people to run a stateful firewall (since that's required for NAT to work); running the firewall without NAT would give you exactly the same protection with none of the headaches that NAT causes.
But its still difficult to get an ipv6 home connection in many areas. I can see that for years to come we will have an ipv6 backbone, ipv6 in amjor organisations but most people connected via NAT and an IPv4 isp
In the UK at least, it isn't difficult to get an IPv6 connection. However, you need to know you want one when you shop around, as the majority of ISPs still don't do it. If you're an "average user" and therefore know nothing of IPv6 or how the internet works, adoption is at rock bottom because: 1. You need to be clued up enough to ask an ISP if they offer v6 (the "big 4" don't) 2. You need to be clued up enough to know when the ISP is lieing 3. You need to be clued up enough to buy an IPv6 capable router (most still don't, even the ones that are labelled "ipv6 ready", which actually means "no IPv6 support at all but we might issue a firmware upgrade at some point in the future if we can be arsed, which we probably can't)
Given all of these factors, the chances of the clueless masses getting IPv6 connectivity are extremely slim.
Things are quite bad with the ISP-side adoption - PlusNet seem to have decided not to roll out IPv6 at all (they pulled the plug on all the v6 trials, announced CGNAT and don't seem to have made any comment about IPv6 since). Virgin Media are going to roll out IPv6 in 2012! (yes, that didn't happen either, despite all their press about it, and like plusnet they've gone very quiet on the subject).
ISP's telling porkies is a problem too; although that's more on the corporate connections side. I had a customer looking for a new 100Mbps leased line internet connection. We advised them that purchasing anything that doesn't do IPv6 would be silly, so they asked the prospective ISPs. Eclipse said they did IPv6, so they went with them, paid quite a lot up-front to get the line laid, etc. Then it transpired that Eclipse didn't offer v6 at all - Eclipse clarified that their network is IPv6 capable but they don't offer IPv6 connections to customers (i.e. they lied in order to get the contract). 2 years later and there's still no IPv6 on that connection.
They managed by beating the children into submission. The ipad is a much better approach.
I disagree. A Windows 8 tablet is a better approach - much heavier than an ipad, so much more effective when used to beat the children into submission.
Yeah I was trying to figure that bit out, isn't T1 nowadays just dsl broken up into 64kbps channels?
Depends what you mean by "DSL". T1, E1 and BRI are all examples of digital subscriber line. They don't use ADSL / VDSL technologies though and are significantly slower than you'd expect from the modern usage of the term "DSL" - i.e. T1 is about 1.5Mbps, E1 is 2Mbps and BRI is 144Kbps.
The question seems to use copper wire and ISDN interchangeably. In the UK the DSL you mention runs over those copper wires, so they aren't going anywhere.
The copper wires aren't going anywhere any time soon, but no business bigger than a couple of employees uses POTS lines for telephony - they have a single POTS line sat there exclusively for the ADSL connection (and possibly to run an ancient fax machine) and all the telephony will go via another route.
Most usually, the PSTN connection is handled by a PRI (E1 line divided into 30 voice (B) channels and an ISDN signalling (D) channel), or for smaller offices one or two BRIs (2 B channels + D channel). I'm inclined to say that the PRIs aren't going away any time soon. There is certainly a growing trend to use VoIP gateways instead of dedicated PRIs for some new installations (especially for smaller installations), but I don't see many people ripping out their existing PRIs to migrate to VoIP yet. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but it will take a while.
(BT aren't helping themselves though - we've had installations which we ended up using VoIP for because BT screwed up the PRI installation so badly - better to give the customer a VoIP connection than leave them without phones for weeks because of BT's incompetence.)
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It's called a "virtual private network" and you can not hack it from the internet.
That kind of thinking is exactly why we get massive security holes. Of course its possible to crack a VPN - you just crack one of the endpoint routers.
That's rather bias. It also means that people are no longer able to circumvent geo locks on media content, avoiding the current media distribution models and laws. Some people are protecting their privacy, but I would guess the vast majority just want to watch Game of Thrones.
Why exactly is circumventing region locks a bad thing? The businesses selling me stuff make use of the global market to get the cheapest raw materials and labour; why is the customer not allowed to use the global market too? In many cases the region locked content isn't even _available_ to some regions, which seems counterproductive for both the consumer and the vendor.
The make it such a "rich" interface that I can't easily tell what is info and what is an actionable button. Then add in the fact that once you find a button and tap it, the whole screen changes and you have a whole new set of information and buttons to try to process (and god forbid the buttons stay in the same place or follow and common pattern from screen to screen).
I think half the trouble is they are trying to make a good first impression rather than a good lasting impression, because its the first impression that sells - people look at the cars *in the show room* and fiddle with the entertainment system and obviously they prefer the one that looks really flashy. The only time they get to use it in anger, where functionality is more important the flashyness is after they've parted with their money.
Same reason why most laptops are now glossy screens instead of antiglare screens - in the showroom the glossy screens look brighter and sharper, so people spend their money on those machines; but in real-world use, the anti-glare screens are nicer because they don't have horrendous reflections all over them all the time while you're trying to work.
The endless Gnome 3 vs 2 discussions are all very well (I ditched Fedora because of it), but in the end let the voters decide:
Out of interest, why ditch a distro because you don't like some of the defaults? Switching desktop environment is pretty trivial, there are plenty of others packaged for Fedora.
And looking at the latest Distrowatch page hit rankings (which is what that article was using):
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity,
it now is 5th.
Dunno about anyone else, but I use certain pieces of software because they happen to do a good job for what I'm using them for, not because they are popular. I don't really see any merit in ranking distros by popularity. Also, Fedora is primarilly a bleeding-edge testing distro, so I wouldn't necessarilly expect it to be as popular as something more stable.
Pioneer AppRadio looks ideal - basically mirrors your phone's screen on it's 7" display. You need to do a bit of hacking to unlock the full potential, but the basic idea is brilliant.
The only real down-side is that the FM radio side sucks. If you mainly listen to playlists on your phone though it isn't a big issue.
I really don't want to be using a touch-screen interface while driving at all. If I want to change radio station/volume/whatever I want nice tactile buttons that I can feel without taking my eyes off the road, touch screen systems in cars are a disaster.
Oh what I wished Red Hat did that to RHEL. They provide a distribution that should last for ten years, but keep the kernel at the same version. Yeah right 2.6.18, that will last forever.
Well it depends rather on what you mean by "last for years". The point of LTS releases like RHEL is that you install it and you get:
1. Bugfixes
2. Security patches
3. Very little breakage from any updates
What you explicitly don't get is new features every few months, because as soon as you go down the "upgrade for features" path, point (3) goes right out of the window. LTS releases are about installing a system and having it do the same old job day in day out for years, they aren't about installing a system and having the latest shiny features on it throughout its life. If you want all the latest features on every update, then thats what Fedora is all about, but with "regular new shiny" comes "regular new breakage" and there's not a lot you can do about that: "great stability", "new features" - pick any one.
Do the "New Generation" of programmers, Have no fucking clue?
These idiots that have taken for granted the existing stable conventions, One's they cut their teeth on.
And now thinking they know better - By going down this Tablet interface path - With everyone along with it?
Who's going down a "tablet interface path"? I'm assuming you're talking about Gnome 3, and whilst it looks *vaguely* "tablety" I don't think I'd want to use it without a keyboard and mouse (and FWIW I find it works very well on both my desktop and laptop - I've not tried it on a tablet so I can't comment there but on my normal workstations it seems to work better for me than any other DE I've used).
2. Desktops - Stable. (We really wan't DESKTOP's in their traditional sense. We don't want hybrid touch screen desktops or tablet interfaces.
Desktops are where hard and complicated work is done. Multi Screen - ie. Multi reference info while you work etc.)
My multi-screen desktop seems to work just fine with Fedora running Gnome 3. I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be...
2.5. Desktops - Yuppy. There will be some that want BLING on their desktop, So as long as the Tablet UI can be installed on a desktop
AS an OPTION then this will keep those happy too. Key word here is OPTION. It's not the default for a "Desktop".
Again, assuming you're referring to Gnome 3 as a "tablet UI" (I'm not sure why you think it's a tablet UI, but lets ignore that for a minute), in what way is it not optional? If you don't like it, there are plenty of other DEs packaged for fedora, why not switch to one of them instead of bitching that you somehow don't have an option (which seems to equate to "I can't be arsed to change the defaults, all computers must come pre-configured exactly how I like them and everyone else be damned").
Am I the only person in the world that thinks Gnome 3 is actually pretty cool? Once I stopped bellyaching about being forced to do things a different way I actually started getting things done faster and with less mucking about. It still beats out the 'Metro' interface if you ask me and it seems like they are getting ready for touch which seems reasonable at this point in the road.
No, I've liked Gnome 3 from day 1 - I had hated the "windows-alike" DEs like Gnome 2 and had been using Enlightenment 17 (development release) for years, but when Gnome 3 came along it seemed like about the best DE I'd used so I switched. There are, of course, niggles and WTFs (things like not being able to disable the screen blanker - I mean, really, would it have been way too confusing for users if there was a "never" option in the screen timeout dropdown?), but you get niggles with all DEs.
What I don't get is why every time Slashdot has an article about Fedora, most of the posts boil down to "Fedora's shit because it has Gnome 3" - seriously, no one's forcing you to use Gnome 3, if you don't like it there are plenty of other DEs packaged for Fedora; don't condemn the whole distro just because one of its defaults doesn't sit well with you and you're too lazy to do the trivial job of changing it.
Hell, it surprises me someone hasn't set up a company specifically using the DNC list as their "good leads" list
Why are people who have opted out of telemarketing calls likely to be "good leads"? I would think they are the least likely people to take you up on whatever you're offering.
Would you like to hear all the humour misunderstandings Europeans have regarding the United States, or are you only interested in stories that make Americans look dumb?
I was relaying a personal experience... I suspect that its one of those cases where getting offended says more about the offendee than the offender...
"New York City may be the first state"? Thats like watching a game show where the contestant is asked for a country in Europe that is fancy and them saying London or Paris.
I did have an american ask me is Wales was a city in London a few years ago (and yes, he was dead serious...)
Also, surveys are rather a waste of time...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
2. Windows still doesn't have proper package management. Which leads to...
"Add/Remove Programs"? "Programs And Features"? What's that then, Scotch mist?
"Add/Remove Programs" isn't a package manager.
When you install software on Windows, you run an installer program which extracts a bunch of files from some variety of archive (format is installer-specific) and scatters the files all over the drive. Then when you remove a program you run an uninstaller program that was bundled with that software (hopefully - if they didn't bundle one you're screwed), and you hope that uninstaller will delete all the files (and only the files) that the installer created. There's no dependency resolution, so every possibility that you'll remove some library that another bit of software needed, etc.
On the other hand, a package manager is a standard bit of software that comes with the OS and keeps track of everything: When you install a package, the package manager extracts a bunch of files from a standard-format archive and enters metadata about those files into its database. It also figures out if that package depends on any other packages and ensures that those dependencies are installed. When you uninstall a package, the package manager checks the dependencies and prevents you uninstalling something that is required by another package you have installed (so you don't break things), and consults its metadata database to ensure it cleans up everything that is owned by that package.
So is it Microsoft's job as a commercial vendor to make sure every app that runs on the platform-du-jour updates at the same time?
I don't think this discussion was a "whose job is it?" argument - it was a "what do you find to be done better on Linux than Windows". Bringing up the automatic package updates thing seems reasonable - whether or not you believe its MS's responsibility or not, you can't get away from the fact that there *is* is usability difference between an OS that provides centralised updating functionality, and an OS that requires every application to implement their own ad-hoc system. This isn't about passing around blame, just about noting that there are differences and that this is important to some users.
Not even GNU/Linux does that.
Most modern distributions do exactly that. For example, lets take Fedora: Fedora run a fairly extensive YUM repository of packages themselves that all comes preconfigured. If all the software on your machine is installed from the Fedora repository then it will all get updated at the same time, through the same system. Occasionally you may find that some package you want isn't in the Fedora repository though - usually you'd find a third party YUM repository, enable that repository on your machine and install the package from there. Since all of these updates are happening through YUM, they do all happen at the same time, even through they are coming from different repositories.
You can set applications in both systems to update on certain days/times, or you can write a script.
Ok, yes, you *can* shoot yourself in the foot by overriding the systems that are provided. I think the point is that modern Linux distibutions provide a standardised package management/updating system and most software you're going to install will utilise that system. Windows, on the other hand, doesn't provide any package management/updates framework, so applications *have* to provide their own ad-hoc system. I think another point that should be mentioned here is that under Linux the updates generally happen in the background without requiring intervention, whereas updates to Windows software often involve asking the user, shutting down applications and occasionally even rebooting.
4. Malware and adware is thick on Windows.
It's thick on GNU/Linux as well, yo
Opposite here. Never really used windows except at work where it's all we have and is misery personified. I got my first computer in 1983, a Commodore 64 with the big clunky 1541 disk drive. 64 Kilobytes of Ram (48K free) and 170K of storage on 5.25" floppies.
Lets see.. I started off on a Commodore 64, with tape drive. Later got a disk drive and ran GEOS on it, which was pretty good (one of the few WYSIWYG systems at the time).
Then got a 286, which shipped with Windows 2... And we pretty much immediately decided that Windows 2 was useless and a complete waste of time - having been happy with GEOS on the commodore we replaced Windows with GeoWorks, which seemed far superior.
The 286 got replaced with a 486, which shipped with Windows 3.1 - again, we pretty much concluded that Windows 3.1 was crap and installed GeoWorks on it, since that still seemed superior to Windows. We carried on for a few years running a combination of GeoWorks and DesqView (I don't think you could run them at the same time, but that was more the era of picking the right tool for the job you wanted to do rather than having a do-everything system).
Around 1994ish I joined the Windows beta programme and installed Windows 95 - that was actually the first Windows worth having IMHO. And largely for its ability to multitask DOS things rather than for its own applications.
A 486 laptop and P200 desktop later and Win98 came along, which I switched to but it didnt' seem a big step up from Win95. By that time I'd already been running Linux on the desktop off and on for a couple of years. Windows 98 became my main desktop OS and Linux was my server OS.
In 2000 I started working in a company which was entirely a Linux shop, so I was working exclusively with a Linux desktop. A couple of years later I replaced my home desktop and ditched Win98 in the process, opting to use Linux exclusively since I had found it pretty much did everything I needed, and was more versatile than Windows.
Since 2000, I've spent 2 years working for one company who's policy was for a Windows machine to be on every desk; every other place I've worked has been exclusively Linux. And in that company, since my work was entirely Linux based, the Windows XP machine was just used as a supplementary X server for my Linux workstation. So I can pretty much say I haven't used Windows for anything serious since the early 2000s; not because I specifically wanted to reject Windows, but because Linux fitted my needs better.
Maybe its because I'm more used to Linux, but both OS X and Windows feel more "clunky" to me. Sure, their UIs are sometimes a bit more polished, but there seems to be lost functionality that I continually miss, and parts of the UIs that just don't seem to work in the way I'd expect.
But even so, Linux on the Desktop will never be a "mainstream thing."
It could do, but I suspect it won't be GNU/Linux. Remember that ChromeOS and Android are both Linux - I have no idea why anyone would want to run them on the desktop, but Google seems to have a lot of influence and people follow even if what they are doing is nonsensical.
Windows (and DOS before it) was always designed to be a desktop system... a non-critical desktop system. And of course, it has critical mass which is why "everything works best on it."
I'm going to disagree with that. I fundamentally don't think that "everything works best" on Windows - I think that different types of software work "best" on different OSes (often not because of the OS itself - often simply because the best software for that job only happens to be available for one OS). I don't think you can point to any one OS and say "this is the best for everything" or even "this is the best for most things" - I think the vast majority of stuff is equally usable on all OSes and usually its just a couple of minor things that decides which OS is best for you.
Similarly, all OSes have their own failings - often most of those failings won't affect your specific work (but will affect someone else's), and also you get used to working around the failings of the OS you usually use.
I'm convinced that most of the "OS A is better than OS B" arguments are down to the fact that A and B have different features and different problems - the users of A will find, upon trying B that some feature they have got used to using isn't there; meanwhile the users of B will find the same problem with A. And similarly, the users of A will have got used to working around the problems they usually see, but upon switching to B they will find a whole new set of problems (and ignore the fact that all the problems they usually work around without thinking aren't there anymore).
So why won't there ever be a year of the Linux Desktop? Well... that's because it's the desktop itself that's on it way out.
The desktop certainly isn't on its way out. A lot of home users are finding that tablets are fine for the spot of web browsing that they do so the home desktop market is vanishing, but in industry the desktop isn't going anywhere. You're not going to find secretaries typing up letters/emails on a tablet; you're not going to find a programmer sitting in the office coding on a tablet; you're not going to find a professional photographer photoshopping their photos on a tablet; you won't find a pathologist typing up their reports on a tablet, etc. In some cases, desktops are being replaced by laptops (but laptops and desktops generally run the same software, so from a software perspective you can treat them the same); tablets are certainly *supplementing* desktops, but on the whole the desktop is here to stay for a good while yet.
Answering the original question: what keeps me off Windows is largely that I've used Linux pretty much exclusively for the past 13 years (and spent a good amount of time using Linux in the 3-4 years prior to that) and it basically does everything I need from my OS. Even if Windows also did everything I need, it would take a long time for me to relearn everything (e.g. learning how to drive powershell instead of bash would be a pain) and it would cost money, so what's the point in switching? That said, on the odd occasion I have to deal with windows problems, it still seems much less versatile - its still centred around pointy-clicky stuff, which whilst user friendly is not as versatile as being able to pipe together the outputs of a bunch of simple commands. And going back to my above "people don't like migrating because some feature is missing from the new OS" statement above - I rely heavily on sloppy-focus, which is something no other OS manages to do. I would hate to be without the ability to use half-hidden windows, especially on a small laptop screen.
The old "If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument. Except in the same week, it was demonstrated that if you said things the current administration didn't like, the power of an arm of the government would be brought to bear on you.
I think in the administration's eyes, saying things they don't like comes under "doing wrong" so the argument is still valid :)
Woolwich stabbing attack.
FFS, The Woolwich murder was *not* terrorism - it was murder, plain and simple. Terrorism is inciting fear in the masses in order to elicit a political change - did a single murder cause the masses to become exceptionally fearful? I don't think so. Why does this murder do anything more to cause fear than any of the other numerous racially/politically motivated murders which are unfortunately reasonably common? It doesn't. I'm certainly not quaking in fear for my life - I'm far more likey to be gravely injured while being robbed than attacked for political reasons.
So we'll go back to the definition of terrorism - inciting fear to elicit political change. After every incident, the British Government keeps telling us that if we don't let them pass new legislation that infringes on our civil liberties then we won't be safe from "terrorists". After the Woolwich killing the Communications Data Bill was revived despite previously being demolished on its previous appearance. The justification was that if the security services couldn't spy on everyone then we would all be in grave danger of being killed by terrorists. In the case of the Woolwich murder it seems that this isn't in any way justified - the people who carried it out were already known to the security services; they didn't need any new legislation to spy on them, a court order would've done the trick just as well.
After the April Jones murder, the Online Safety Bill was revived by the government - because apparently all our kids are in danger of being murdered by kiddy fiddlers and that censoring the internet will somehow set all the nutters on the straight and narrow. And yet there seems to be no evidence to support this - it is supposition that porn leads to criminal behaviour, it could be equally possible that there would be more of this criminal behaviour if people *couldn't* relieve themselves through porn. I don't know the answer, but it seems a pretty bad idea to blindly enact laws without much evidence either way - most of the anti-kiddy-porn laws seem to be "I find what you're into distasteful, so you should be locked up" rather than actually designed to stop people getting hurt. To compound these problems, the politicians seem to be conflating protecting the kids from porn with preventing the adults getting at kiddy-porn, which are two separate issues; the Online Safety Bill is supposidly about protecting the kids from being exposed to porn, but its being pushed in response to an adult abusing a child - a completely separate problem.
So I ask, who are the terrorists? Who is inciting fear for a political end? I would say its the government - they are going out of their way to tell people to be scared after every incident in order to push new legislation that people would otherwise find unacceptable; surely _that_ is exactly what terrorism is?
When I was growing up, there were a fair number of IRA bombings and they were always played down to avoid stirring up fear. These days the people in power seem to have realised that they don't need to pull the trigger to benefit from the effects of being a terrorist, they only need to stir up fear surrounding existing incidents instead. The terrorists seem to be winning.
What we're talking about here is IPv6 for the WAN interface on your router. Pretty much nobody should need IPv6 internally right now.
That doesn't really make sense. Unless you're going to do some horrendous ALG on the router, you are going to need IPv6 both internally and externally in order to talk to IPv6 services - running IPv6 on the router's WAN interface but only IPv4 internally isn't going to help you (also there's almost no reason not to run IPv6 internally anyway)
Where is the advantage to home users if they use IPv6?
Well, this is the problem. For the majority of home users there is very little advantage _at the moment_, so even if they know enough to shop around for a v6 connection they probably won't bother. And the vast majority of users don't know the first thing about how the internet works, so wouldn't know to shop around for a v6 connection anyway.
Its basically a chicken & egg problem: The people who are going to have problems with the IPv4 address shortage are the server operators, who would want to roll out IPv6-only services. However, the server operators aren't going to be able to roll out v6-only services while the consumers don't have v6 connections. Similarly, until there are v6-only services there's little reason for end users to go to the effort of implementing ipv6 on their own networks.
So the only way this problem is really going to get solved is for IPv6 connections to be rolled out relatively transparently for the users. This is all doable - the ISP can implement IPv6 on their networks so the users don't have to know to shop around for an ISP that does v6; the ISPs can start shipping out v6-capable routers to their new customers instead of continuing to ship IPv4-only routers. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of the ISPs are also not interested in investing in their infrastructure (they cite the face that their users aren't actively asking for it, which of course they aren't). My personal preference is to avoid ISPs that aren't implementing IPv6 infrastructure, because it seems incredibly short-sighted, but of course most people won't know anything about this.
For a very restricted subset of users, IPv6 will be useful - it allows devices inside the network to be directly addressed from outside the network, which is certainly useful. But as mentioned, this is a very small number of users.
This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.
A simple stateful firewall will mitegate the dangers of scanners just as well as a NAT. In fact, the extensive address-space in IPv6 actually makes scanning much less effective since the vast majority of the addresses a scanner is going to try aren't even in use.
The growth of high capacity load balancers for web servers and other network services has also helped tremendously
And the growth of virtualisation has done the exact opposite.
The result has been that the great need for IPv6 simply has not yet occurred, and is unlikely to occur for another 10 years.
The great need on the consumer end has indeed not yet occurred, and probably won't for some time. On the ISP side too, most of the ISPs still have plenty of IPv4 addresses to go around, and can start reclaiming them off internal systems when they start feeling the pinch.
On the datacentre side, things are a bit different though. The people who are going to feel the pinch are the people operating the servers - that is where running out of IP addresses is going to be a real problem that won't be solvable with NAT (in some cases you'll be able to use an ALG to reduce problems, in other cases you won't).
On the consumer side, going forward the requirement for IPv6 will be twofold:
1. Accessing services that are IPv6-only. This *will* happen simply by virtue of the server operators not having enough v4 addresses. We'll probably see "reduced services" on IPv4 with extra features available for IPv6 users. This is especially true where the services are only intended to serve the local area - for example, a recent analysis of Google's data showed that over 10% of users in switzerland have IPv6 access, whilst only 0.22% in the UK do. Given a naive linear extrapolation, we might say that at some point in the future switzerland could have 99% of users with IPv6 access whilst the UK has around 2%. This would mean launching an IPv6-only service aimed at the swiss would be viable (and probably common), but would be inaccessible to most people in the UK. Splitting the internet like that would certainly be a bad thing, and people feeling increasingly cut off from useful services is what will drive both the ISPs and the end users to implement IPv6.
2. An increasing number of technologies just don't play well with NAT (and there are good reasons for this - this isn't just "short sighted designers of broken protocols"). And those technologies are becoming more popular. There is motivation there for people to eliminate the NAT problem by switching to v6.
Providing public, routable IP addresses puts them at risk of attack at all times
No; putting things on the internet with no firewall in front of them puts them at risk of attack. If you think your RFC1918 address is unroutable or that NAT is in any way protecting you, I suggest you go re-educate yourself. The *only* thing NAT does is place a requirement on people to run a stateful firewall (since that's required for NAT to work); running the firewall without NAT would give you exactly the same protection with none of the headaches that NAT causes.
But its still difficult to get an ipv6 home connection in many areas. I can see that for years to come we will have an ipv6 backbone, ipv6 in amjor organisations but most people connected via NAT and an IPv4 isp
In the UK at least, it isn't difficult to get an IPv6 connection. However, you need to know you want one when you shop around, as the majority of ISPs still don't do it. If you're an "average user" and therefore know nothing of IPv6 or how the internet works, adoption is at rock bottom because:
1. You need to be clued up enough to ask an ISP if they offer v6 (the "big 4" don't)
2. You need to be clued up enough to know when the ISP is lieing
3. You need to be clued up enough to buy an IPv6 capable router (most still don't, even the ones that are labelled "ipv6 ready", which actually means "no IPv6 support at all but we might issue a firmware upgrade at some point in the future if we can be arsed, which we probably can't)
Given all of these factors, the chances of the clueless masses getting IPv6 connectivity are extremely slim.
Things are quite bad with the ISP-side adoption - PlusNet seem to have decided not to roll out IPv6 at all (they pulled the plug on all the v6 trials, announced CGNAT and don't seem to have made any comment about IPv6 since). Virgin Media are going to roll out IPv6 in 2012! (yes, that didn't happen either, despite all their press about it, and like plusnet they've gone very quiet on the subject).
ISP's telling porkies is a problem too; although that's more on the corporate connections side. I had a customer looking for a new 100Mbps leased line internet connection. We advised them that purchasing anything that doesn't do IPv6 would be silly, so they asked the prospective ISPs. Eclipse said they did IPv6, so they went with them, paid quite a lot up-front to get the line laid, etc. Then it transpired that Eclipse didn't offer v6 at all - Eclipse clarified that their network is IPv6 capable but they don't offer IPv6 connections to customers (i.e. they lied in order to get the contract). 2 years later and there's still no IPv6 on that connection.
They managed by beating the children into submission. The ipad is a much better approach.
I disagree. A Windows 8 tablet is a better approach - much heavier than an ipad, so much more effective when used to beat the children into submission.
Yeah I was trying to figure that bit out, isn't T1 nowadays just dsl broken up into 64kbps channels?
Depends what you mean by "DSL". T1, E1 and BRI are all examples of digital subscriber line. They don't use ADSL / VDSL technologies though and are significantly slower than you'd expect from the modern usage of the term "DSL" - i.e. T1 is about 1.5Mbps, E1 is 2Mbps and BRI is 144Kbps.
The question seems to use copper wire and ISDN interchangeably. In the UK the DSL you mention runs over those copper wires, so they aren't going anywhere.
The copper wires aren't going anywhere any time soon, but no business bigger than a couple of employees uses POTS lines for telephony - they have a single POTS line sat there exclusively for the ADSL connection (and possibly to run an ancient fax machine) and all the telephony will go via another route.
Most usually, the PSTN connection is handled by a PRI (E1 line divided into 30 voice (B) channels and an ISDN signalling (D) channel), or for smaller offices one or two BRIs (2 B channels + D channel). I'm inclined to say that the PRIs aren't going away any time soon. There is certainly a growing trend to use VoIP gateways instead of dedicated PRIs for some new installations (especially for smaller installations), but I don't see many people ripping out their existing PRIs to migrate to VoIP yet. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but it will take a while.
(BT aren't helping themselves though - we've had installations which we ended up using VoIP for because BT screwed up the PRI installation so badly - better to give the customer a VoIP connection than leave them without phones for weeks because of BT's incompetence.)
Car analogy, Motorcycle = quick, Ferrari = Fast
There's a problem with your car analogy... a motorcycle isn't a car.