You can do that in Windows' CLI, both the old one and the new Monad one.
The Windows CLI really is nowhere near as powerful as Bash - if you think it is you really can't have used Bash seriously. As for Monad, I have no experience of it, so my only comment is that at least Microsoft have finally realised that people _do_ want a decent CLI.
Lots and lots of "stuff"... but you can't name a single one.
I already did - batch processing of images, grepping for stuff in large numbers of files, general file management - they are all things I use the CLI for. I note that you haven't bothered to explain what you use the GUI for.
Tell me what "the job" is, and I might be able to address this.
There are *lots* of jobs where the GUI isn't always the most appropriate tool for the job. As an example, how about administering a remote system.
You didn't get to the part where you explain to me how that's a bad thing.
So you think it is a Good Thing forcing web developers to jump through lots of hoops to support IE and not introducing any new features for the end users? IE is a pretty good example of why a monopoly is a Bad Thing: Microsoft killed off NS4 - yes, it was crap but the main reason it got killed off was because they started shipping IE with the OS. Then, with no competition, MS stopped all development on IE and let it stagnate for years - no new features for the consumers at all. It was only when competing browsers became _significantly_ better than IE (for example, providing popup blockers, tabbed browsing, etc) that Microsoft bothered to do any more development. Is that a good situation for anyone (except MS)?
I don't "face pain" when I "switch" from OS X to Windows
Then I guess OS X and Windows share enough features to make it fairly pain free. But once again I have to reiterate: having a *different* feature set seems a pretty bad reason for declaring that a system sucks - if I were to take that view then from my perspective, Windows and OS X both suck because they don't have *all* the features I regularly use under Linux.
I do experience pain each and every time I try out Linux.
And yet you have utterly failed to explain why this is. The only reasons you've cited are that copy/paste and drag/drop don't work - they both work absolutely fine for me (and not just for plain text). Maybe you should better explain what problems you are facing.
If you DO want the goofy custom crap, like installing it on an ancient computer, or using some strange hardware, only then would you use the "Other" option and have to trawl through options-- but you're an advanced user, so you wouldn't mind that.
No user, advanced or otherwise, wants to spend hours trawling through these options.
You're criticizing the plan with moronic examples that show you didn't spend more than a millisecond even thinking about it. Maybe it is unworkable, and I'd like an *actual* example why, but your idiotic examples? Don't waste my time.
How is it moronic to ask how the existing vendors can resolve fundamental differences in they way they want things to work?
That's exactly the type of 1984 doublespeak bullshit I don't want to see. The only purpose is to confuse the hell out of people to make it sound more important than it actually is.
No, it really isn't - there is a big difference between non-Free open source software and Free open source software. Just saying "open source" is not good enough. This difference is big enough that most of the Free software (Linux included) almost certainly wouldn't exist if the original developers had tried to use a non-Free open source licence.
But you shouldn't expend any effort making it easy/usable when there's a lot of work to be done on the features that 99.99% of the people use.
I'm clearly missing your point here. Your original comment was "geeks hate the GUI, they spit on it" - I have merely tried to explain that this is not true - lots of geeks find the GUI useful. In response you have attacked me for suggesting that the command line is also useful.
I also suspect that most of the development effort expended on the command line is by people developing stuff that they themselves want - they are spending their time doing this work because it makes *their* lives better, not to make some one else's life better.
Ok, let's say I run a hospital pharmacy. Name an open source pharmacy management/drug interaction program, then explain to me how it's better than the closed source version.
But this is a specialist task - we're not talking about specialist tasks, we're talking about "normal" users. I'm sure if I pointed at the vast amount of Free specialist software development tools available you would slap me down for making arguments about something so specialist that only a small number of users (geeks) care.
1) I don't know what "sloppy focus" is.
The ability to focus windows by just moving the mouse over them instead of having to click on them.
2) So OS X and Windows have a more consistent layer model and don't let you break it for trivial purposes like Linux does, ok.
I find Linux's layer model quite consistent and I certainly don't consider this stuff trivial. I make a lot of use of partially obscured windows - it allows me to make better use of my screen space. Think of it this way - if you have a number of pieces of paper on your desk, partially overlapping, you can still write on the exposed bit of the bottom one without having to raise it to the top. In fact, raising it to the top may well obscure another one of the papers which you are referencing.
4) Virtual desktops are confusing and difficult from a usability standpoint, and completely break the entire desktop model. It's an anti-feature, great for people who can keep the entire computer state in their heads at all times (like Linux geeks who hate GUIs), but terrible for all other users.
They may be confusing for some people. They certainly aren't confusing for everyone and they don't require you to keep your entire computer state in your head. I use it for dividing my desktop up into separate jobs - if I'm in the middle of something and someone interrupts me and asks me to do another job I can switch to a clean desktop and get on with that. When I've finished that job I can switch back to what I was doing before - all my win
The people who want crazy flexibility and options would get distro 3
Whereupon they are required to trawl through thousands of options - that's enough to put anyone off. I for one prefer to pick a distro that suits my purposes rather than hand-configure everything. But then, I'm not a Gentoo user.:)
I dunno, they'll just have to figure it out somehow.
No, you are suggesting an idea that appears to be unworkable and then refusing to explain how to make it workable.
I'm also not a fan of the 1984-esque "Free" doublespeak you guys got going... please just say open source.
Open source and Free are not the same thing - Free implies open source but the converse is not true. There are a lot of open source licences which are not Free.
Then buy better "closed" software.
Why? Most of the time there is a piece of Free software that does the job better. My experience is that *in general* closed software is of lower quality than Free software (there are many exceptions), so given the choice I'm going to pick the Free stuff because it's more likely to be of high quality.
Copy and paste works fine under Linux... for text. And even then, I had problems with formatted text-- in my experience, Linux applications tended to lose the formatting. For virtually any other type of data, it fails miserably.
Works for me.
I'll take you up on that. Name one.
I'll name a bunch, off the top of my head... * Sloppy focus (and yes, I know you can turn it on in Windows with TweakUI but it breaks far too much stuff) * The ability to use partially obscured windows without having to raise them * Window shading * Virtual desktops * Powerful commandline * Select/Paste
And there are some more recent things too, such as Compiz's Scale and Desktop Cube plugins which I find very useful.
Stuff only something like 0.01% of the population ever does. Using the CLI as a basis for promoting an OS to the general public is ridiculous.
So because only 0.01% (which I seriously think is a massive underestimate) of the population does something we shouldn't even bother to provide that feature?
90% of people only use 10% of their system's functionality. But each person uses a different 10%. Just providing the features that most people use leads to suckage.
Even software development now is almost all done in GUI IDEs.
I am a professional software developer and I do my software development using vim and make. A very large proportion of the other developers I know do the same.
What exactly is the task you're doing so regularly that the CLI is so suited for?
There is no one thing - it's lots of stuff. I find myself regularly hitting the commandline to do stuff that would just be plain painful in a GUI. For example, bulk operations on a directory of files (photos, for example). And the number of times I cobble together a quick commandline consisting of grep, sed, etc to apply stuff to a particular set of files and suchlike is uncountable. Sure, it's something that "normal" people probably won't do (they will struggle through with the GUI spending hours doing something that I could've done in 5 minutes), but that doesn't seem like a good reason to *prevent* people doing this stuff by not providing a decent commandline.
A powerful GUI that doesn't support drag&drop?
Well, as I said, I have never found a need to use drag & drop so I can't really comment.
Actually, I just tried it - seems to work pretty well. I can drag images from Nautilus into OpenOffice, random selections of text and images from FireFox into OpenOffice, selections from all sorts of applications into Nautilus. I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
Like what? Like I asked above, what task exactly is it you are constantly using the CLI to do? I'm a pretty geeky guy, and I use a CLI maybe once a year, and that's only because
Under which laws? And in what countries specifically? Or are you referring to some international laws or agreements? If you're going to make a bold claim like this, you need to have something (anything) to back it up.
In certain jurisdictions there are laws regarding free trade. For example, in the EU it is illegal to restrict trade between member states (DVD region 2 covers the whole of the EU, so technically this is not placing such a restriction on trade). New Zealand and Australia, however, have declared region coding to be illegal. Several governments have also suggested that it contravenes global WTO free trade treaties (not that the US seems to give a damn about treaties they have signed).
If you want crappy old hardware, you install "other" and check the "crappy old hardware" box on the extremely flexible installer.
Extremely flexible and easy to use don't go hand in hand - you are suggesting replacing the current vast choice in distros with one enormous installer that presents every option anyone might possibly ever want. I'm pretty sure that pretty much every user is going to be put off by an installer with thousands of options (have you tried configuring the Linux kernel? You're talking about an installer like that but worse.)
If you want long-term support, there's no reason CentOS or RedHat couldn't provide long-term support to the standardized GNOME and KDE distros.
Ok, so lets say you have Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. all offering support to a single distro. What happens when Red Hat wants the distro they are supporting to work one way and Canonical want it to work in another? Also, how are the vendors going to make their offering stand out from the other vendors?
If you care about "Free" software, then you're an irredeemable geek and you should have no say in any software that you expect average normal human beings to use. Because nobody cares.
Clearly people _do_ care, because otherwise you wouldn't have people developing Free software. I happen to have very valid reasons for wanting a completely Free distribution - I believe that Free software (in general) works better than proprietary software. My experience of closed software is that it is pretty unstable and bugridden by comparison. This is something that *everyone* should care about - whether their computer is going to randomly crash on them frequently.
Also, irredeemable geeks need operating systems too - you were suggesting replacing all other Linux distros with a single big megadistro - what are the geeks who do care about this stuff going to use now you've abolished the distros that offer what they want?
Yes, but why not an actual choice that the end-user can understand? A meaningful choice? If you give the end-user 2 distros with GNOME, one of which is "Free" and one of which isn't... are they going to be able to tell the difference? It's just confusing to everyone involved.
It depends on how knowledgeable the user is - very knowledgeable users want this choice whilst the completely unknowledgeable people won't be able to tell the difference between Linux and Windows. Where do you draw the line?
Similarly, people may not necessarilly care about the specifics such as Freeness, but they may care about the results (for example, peer review leading to better, more stable and more secure software).
"Here, pick between these two. They're both 99.9% identical." "Then why make me pick?"
Because that 0.1% might be significant.
I'm not going to argue with your opinion of Windows' GUI, other than to say it's extremely misguided.
I don't see how you can consider it misguided. The Linux UI doesn't work the way you (a Windows user) expect it to work, the Windows UI doesn't work the way I (a Linux user) expect - what's the difference?
at least drag&drop and copy&paste work 99% of the time.
I can't say I ever use drag & drop so I can't comment, but copy and paste works just fine under Linux.
In fact, it works better than under Windows - I mean, in Windows I select some text, then move my pointer to the place I want to paste it and middle click but nothing seems to happen.
No, this is a "Foo doesn't have the features Bar had in 1998, and you want me to switch to Foo... why?" problem.
This works both ways - I'm sure you can point at a bunch of features that Windows had in 1998 and Linux still doesn't have, but I can point at a whole load of features I have used on a daily basis in Linux since before 1998 which Windows still doesn't do. I'm afraid this is very much a case of "the feature sets aren't identical" than "foo is better than bar".
So, the system is in place, and if you don't like it, then too bad. Does it really kill you to wait an extra few months?
Well, it actually doesn't affect me at all since I won't be buying any HD movies until I can play them with Free software. However, the problem is that they are using a (almost certainly) illegal restriction on free trade which prevents people from taking advantage of pricing differentials across the world (all the while the studios *are* taking advantage of pricing differentials. For example, they get the DVDs pressed in Asia because it is cheaper - why should they be allowed to do this but their customers not?). Also, what do you do when a movie is not released in your region and never will be? Seems a pretty sucky position to be in...
But, there's a reason that you delay release dates. For instance, a movie can come out here, get a lot of good press (ratatouille) and it can result in a lot of people in another country to go see it. This positive press allows you to spend less on advertising because you can then reduce the amount you advertise in foreign cinemas. Don't think there isn't a reason that the studios do it this way.
You can't have your cake and eat it - if you want to save on advertising by staggering released dates and taking advantage of the public's impatience, don't complain when people get impatient and import content.
I personally don't even get why there are more than three distros: KDE, GNOME and "other/roll your own". What's the point of 26 distros, all of which use GNOME as a desktop environment, when all you end up seeing is GNOME?
KDE and Gnome are desktop environments, not distros.
The reason there are lots of distros is because they meet different requirements. These requirements may be technical, ethical, etc. For example, if you want a distro that runs on crappy old hardware, Damn Small Linux is probably quite a good choice. Or if you want a distro that only uses Free software, you could go with Fedora. For long term support, something like CentOS or RHEL, etc.
Choice is good - it allows you to pick the system that works best for you and helps keep innovation going.
It's extremely upsetting to use a "modern" OS, and have stuff that worked fine in Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.0 not work in Linux. It's like going back in time... the real problem is that Linux developers are playing catch-up with Windows and Macintosh by adding things like 3D accelerated graphics, when the old fashioned basics (like universal drag&drop support) never get done.
I'm afraid that, as someone who doesn't normally use Windows I find I have the same problem when I sit in front of a Windows machine - stuff that works fine in Linux doesn't work under Windows. I find that Windows is playing catching with Linux when it comes to usability, and the Windows commandline is an utter joke. I was quite shocked when I saw Aero for the first time too - it's really quite poor compared to Beryl.
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
For "normal" OSes, the established desktop ones, the desktop environment is part of the OS.
I haven't been forced to choose a desktop environment for many many years - boot up and there's Gnome. If you want to change it you can, but you have to go out of your way to do so.
Doesn't that just make much more sense?
No, it really doesn't - by artificially restricting what desktop environment can be used you make it so that people can't configure their systems to behave how they want. Sure, lots of people don't need this choice but I don't see that as any reason to take it away from those who do.
Time = money
In many situations that is completely false - "time = money" is only true if you would have otherwise been doing something that would have paid you.
There's no clear signpost as to what's the "right" distro for beginners(UBUNTU UBUNTU UBUNTU, but newbies won't know that, go google "which linux distro should I choose?" and get back to me when the top result isn't a TEN QUESTION QUIZ.
That's because there is no "right" distro. It all depends on what you want to do and what your ethics are. (No, Ubuntu isn't always the answer.)
Which is the "right" version of Windows to get? I mean, there are lots of different editions of both XP and Vista...
XP was the standard for Windows for 5 or 6 years, and it went through 2 major revisions in that time. OS X revs approximately every 18 months, and is on the fifth version to ship since 2000.
So choose the distro that's appropriate to what you want (this comes back to my "there is no 'right' distro" point above). If you want all the latest shiny and don't mind getting cut on the bleeding edge, get a rapid release cycle distro such as Fedora. On the other hand, if you just want something that Just Works for years on end, get one of the long term support distros.
Similarly, the barrage of choice that assaults users of linux systems is a detriment to the newbie.
Have you *used* Gnome in the past few years?! It has pretty much no choice to "assault" you (to the point that a lot of people get pissed off at having even less configurability than Windows).
Having to pick window managers in 2008 is a disgrace.
I haven't been made to pick a window manager in *years*. When you install Fedora or CentOS, for example, it gives you Gnome with Metacity. You can turn on "desktop effects" if you want and this will get you Compiz instead, but from the user's perspective they look the same other than some pretty animations so the user doesn't need to know or care that they just picked a different window manager. Sure, you _can_ go and choose another window manager if you want but only if you go out of your way - nothing makes you do it.
Ubuntu understands this, which is why it's been such a phenomenal success
Actually, having used a variety of distributions I have to say that many of them are on par with Ubuntu (in fact I find Fedora a lot easier to use myself). I think the reason why Ubuntu is so popular is mainly because Canonical seem to be quite a bit better at shouting about themselves than other people (they probably have a much bigger marketing budget too).
Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with Ubuntu, but I certainly think that claiming it's the be all and end all is very shortsighted. You must choose a distro based on a lot of factors - Ubuntu meets some people's needs, other distros meet others.
Both of these appeared on Blu Ray in the US while they were still showing in cinemas in Europe.
The solution here is to set sane release dates for stuff (both in cinema and on disc) instead of locking out your customers (also, there are a lot of suggestions that region coding is an illegal restriction on free trade... shame no one's sued the studios yet).
Honestly, if you release stuff in one country before another, you really can't complain when people take it upon themselves to import it (through legal or illegal means).
This seems pretty silly - just because a website uses javascript doesn't mean it *requires* it. Well designed web sites work just fine without JS but if you have it then they give you an enhanced experience.
It was suggested a while ago that SCO's assets wouldn't be able to anywhere near cover the amount they owe Novell, so I shall sit back and watch Novell suck a big chunk of this investment out of SCO.:)
This is faith - there is no way to scientifically determine if this is the case or not.
I also believe that I will not suffocate from the air evacuating to a corner of the room
This can be scientifically shown to be extremely improbable.
None of those statements are impossible, they are all just overwhelmingly unlikely. I require no more faith to not believe in god(s) than I do to believe that the all Earth's interatomic bonds will *not* spontaneously disassociate in the next hour.
Where is your empirical evidence proving the existence of God to be extremely unlikely? We can know from experience that the other things you mention are highly improbable, but as far as the existence of God goes, there is no way you can determine this by experience.
Though, to be bluntly honest, I think the chances of Earth's "existence faliure" is a damn sight higher than your logic-warping, untestable, and unecesssary uncreated creator.
Ignoring the fact that you are arguing against a religion I do not have, you have just stated that the existence of a creator is untestable, which rather supports my point.
Frankly, agnosticism is the PC position one takes when they lack the conviction to say "There may be god(s), but I will waste no more thought on it than I would on getting struck by an asteroid." All agnostic really means is "willing to waffle on a mind-bogglingly likely assertion to not offend the theists."
No, sorry - some people believe that there is no God (this is atheism). This is a religion since these people hold a belief despite there being no evidence to support this belief. Other people believe in a God - again, a religion, there is no evidence to support the belief. Then there are the agnosticists - these people do not believe one way or the other since there is no evidence one way or the other. (Note that I am talking about the existence or nonexistence of a God (which is untestable) - I am not talking about creationism.
This certificate can be suspended or revoked (and individual engineers disciplined) in the case of incompetence. One can easily imagine that this could happen to a Microsoft.
But can you imagine the hell that would ensue if Microsoft lost it's licence to write code? I mean, there are loads of civil engineering companies - if the one maintaining your bridge gets its licence revoked, you can contract someone else to maintain it. But with a monopoly software vendor like Microsoft, what would happen if they lost their licence? Who would support all the MS products out there? This is especially true with closed source software, which just plain isn't maintainable by anyone else, but even if it were open source I still wonder if there would be enough capable companies to take on the job of supporting all of MS's customers...
Actually I see this as complementing the open-source system by formalizing peer review of code. Also, I would suggest that most of the people who designed open source software are not necessarily amateurs; they may have other jobs in software, and many of them are paid for their open-source contributions.
It seems like quite a problem to regulate this though. You have a piece of Free software that was originally written by someone who may either be an amateur or a professional. Then, over the years more people, who may also be either amateurs or professionals, add and modify bits to it.
Whilst I like the idea of nice stable software, I think regulating it so that *only* licensed software engineers can write code would pretty much kill much of the innovation in software.
I'm sure that if random people were allowed to build bridges (and the materials cost them practically nothing) we'd have lots more innovation even though a lot of them would regularly fall down.
For the record, even though I am a professional software developer I certainly don't consider myself to be an engineer. As far as I'm concerned, an engineer is someone who writes provably (as far as possible) correct code - such as that used in safety of life systems (fly by wire, etc.). I am a software developer - I don't write code that I mathematically prove to be correct, my "proof" is that when I drive a few trucks over the bridge it doesn't fall down (this is the case for most software developers). The two disciplines are very different and I have a lot of respect for the software engineers, but software engineering is really expensive compared to normal development. Can you imagine the cost of writing the Linux kernel, or the whole of Windows, or the whole of OpenOffice if it was engineered with mathematical proof of the correctness of the code? (Hell, Windows might even justify its astronomical price tag then:)
I guess the thing is that shiny features are more important to the general public than stability - a company who engineers software properly is going to spend the time proving its correctness rather than adding shiny new features. It's not as if someone dies every time Word crashes...
You keep saying the US but are you aware there are American's living IN the US who don't want to be in a war? It's a great majority of us if you listen to the news and hear the poll numbers coming in.
I am fully aware that a lot of Americans don't want war. However, I was replying to someone who was advocating a nuclear response to 9/11 who seemed to think it would "solve the problem". And indeed it would probably "solve the problem" by wiping the US from the face of the map so that the US *government* would no longer be in a position to piss everyone else off. The fact that a large number of US citizens who are anti-war get caught in the cross fire makes very little difference.
Don't confused the Government we have with the people.
I wasn't - the people really play no part in the aforementioned scenario since the people don't control the nuclear weapons.
The problem with that solution is that, as you've shown with your characterization of "the anti-nuclear brigade", it's easy to frame disagreement as ignorance and thereby dismiss it.
My characterisation of the "anti-nuclear brigade" was nothing to do with disagreement with them. The UK has recently been going through a consultation period to decide on the future of our electricity generation capacity. Reading the comments which have been submitted by the public to the various discussions and consultations, it is clear that a very sizable chunk of the population are anti-nuclear based on an extremely out of date and superficial knowledge of the technologies involved.
I have absolutely no problem at all with people disagreeing with my (or anyone else's) views - the problem is that there is a danger of making (detrimental) policy to satisfy the uninformed public, even though the policy decisions have absolutely no basis in fact, rather than having people who actually understand the subject matter making informed choices to benefit the population as a whole.
Whoever writes the background knowledge tests will control the terms of the debate.
I did cite that as a problem, yes. No, I don't have a solution.
In the UK, the argument that not everyone is equally qualified to express an opinion was historically used to deny the vote
That may be, but there is truth in the argument - some policy decisions require an in-depth understanding of very complex problems. Some of the public will attempt to research the problem before casting a vote, but the vast majority will react based on superficial, inaccurate knowledge.
Do you really think it's possible to define criteria for voting that won't be misused by the enfranchised to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised?
I don't know. But I do believe that having uninformed people making decisions could be as dangerous as denying people the ability to make decisions. As it stands at the moment, I think the enfranchised are already able to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised. For example, the media (much of which is controlled by a very small number of players) is able to spin stories so that the public will hysterically demand a government decision go one way or the other. News Corp, for example, can bias their media coverage and this will cause the public opinion to be biased.
I find it a very difficult problem - on the one hand I don't want bad decisions to be made under the weight of mis/uninformed public opinion, but on the other I am cynical of the government doing the Right Thing and think that members of the public who are well informed should have some say. I certainly don't have the answers - I'm just throwing it up for discussion.
Let me help you out here: the sentence "100 Mbps fiber to the home and WiMAX are already deployed in Europe." doesn't mean "universally deployed" or "widely available", it means there exists places in Europe where it has been deployed and commercially available, nothing less and nothing more.
In that case, 100Mbps FTTP is already deployed in the US (there are a few small areas where it is being used).
Also, I'm under the impression that Wimax isn't really being used much in Europe since we have HSDPA which does a similar job.
AFAIK, the UK doesn't have a lot of fiber in the ground, so don't hold your breath.
There's a fair amount of fibre around the UK, and the 21CN rollout is going to end up installing a whole lot more. However, I don't think anyone is seriously thinking about doing a country-wide FTTP deployment yet - the next steps are going to be ADSL2+ (which has been rolled out by some unbundled ISPs over the past few years) and fibre to the kerb. Every so often some ISP makes a press release about trialling 100Mbps FTTP but I question the merits of upgrading the local loop much further until the network infrastructure is improved since it is rare that people can saturate their current 8Mbps or 25Mbps connections at the moment.
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You can do that in Windows' CLI, both the old one and the new Monad one.
The Windows CLI really is nowhere near as powerful as Bash - if you think it is you really can't have used Bash seriously. As for Monad, I have no experience of it, so my only comment is that at least Microsoft have finally realised that people _do_ want a decent CLI.
Lots and lots of "stuff"... but you can't name a single one.
I already did - batch processing of images, grepping for stuff in large numbers of files, general file management - they are all things I use the CLI for. I note that you haven't bothered to explain what you use the GUI for.
Tell me what "the job" is, and I might be able to address this.
There are *lots* of jobs where the GUI isn't always the most appropriate tool for the job. As an example, how about administering a remote system.
You didn't get to the part where you explain to me how that's a bad thing.
So you think it is a Good Thing forcing web developers to jump through lots of hoops to support IE and not introducing any new features for the end users? IE is a pretty good example of why a monopoly is a Bad Thing: Microsoft killed off NS4 - yes, it was crap but the main reason it got killed off was because they started shipping IE with the OS. Then, with no competition, MS stopped all development on IE and let it stagnate for years - no new features for the consumers at all. It was only when competing browsers became _significantly_ better than IE (for example, providing popup blockers, tabbed browsing, etc) that Microsoft bothered to do any more development. Is that a good situation for anyone (except MS)?
I don't "face pain" when I "switch" from OS X to Windows
Then I guess OS X and Windows share enough features to make it fairly pain free. But once again I have to reiterate: having a *different* feature set seems a pretty bad reason for declaring that a system sucks - if I were to take that view then from my perspective, Windows and OS X both suck because they don't have *all* the features I regularly use under Linux.
I do experience pain each and every time I try out Linux.
And yet you have utterly failed to explain why this is. The only reasons you've cited are that copy/paste and drag/drop don't work - they both work absolutely fine for me (and not just for plain text). Maybe you should better explain what problems you are facing.
If you DO want the goofy custom crap, like installing it on an ancient computer, or using some strange hardware, only then would you use the "Other" option and have to trawl through options-- but you're an advanced user, so you wouldn't mind that.
No user, advanced or otherwise, wants to spend hours trawling through these options.
You're criticizing the plan with moronic examples that show you didn't spend more than a millisecond even thinking about it. Maybe it is unworkable, and I'd like an *actual* example why, but your idiotic examples? Don't waste my time.
How is it moronic to ask how the existing vendors can resolve fundamental differences in they way they want things to work?
That's exactly the type of 1984 doublespeak bullshit I don't want to see. The only purpose is to confuse the hell out of people to make it sound more important than it actually is.
No, it really isn't - there is a big difference between non-Free open source software and Free open source software. Just saying "open source" is not good enough. This difference is big enough that most of the Free software (Linux included) almost certainly wouldn't exist if the original developers had tried to use a non-Free open source licence.
But you shouldn't expend any effort making it easy/usable when there's a lot of work to be done on the features that 99.99% of the people use.
I'm clearly missing your point here. Your original comment was "geeks hate the GUI, they spit on it" - I have merely tried to explain that this is not true - lots of geeks find the GUI useful. In response you have attacked me for suggesting that the command line is also useful.
I also suspect that most of the development effort expended on the command line is by people developing stuff that they themselves want - they are spending their time doing this work because it makes *their* lives better, not to make some one else's life better.
Ok, let's say I run a hospital pharmacy. Name an open source pharmacy management/drug interaction program, then explain to me how it's better than the closed source version.
But this is a specialist task - we're not talking about specialist tasks, we're talking about "normal" users. I'm sure if I pointed at the vast amount of Free specialist software development tools available you would slap me down for making arguments about something so specialist that only a small number of users (geeks) care.
1) I don't know what "sloppy focus" is.
The ability to focus windows by just moving the mouse over them instead of having to click on them.
2) So OS X and Windows have a more consistent layer model and don't let you break it for trivial purposes like Linux does, ok.
I find Linux's layer model quite consistent and I certainly don't consider this stuff trivial. I make a lot of use of partially obscured windows - it allows me to make better use of my screen space. Think of it this way - if you have a number of pieces of paper on your desk, partially overlapping, you can still write on the exposed bit of the bottom one without having to raise it to the top. In fact, raising it to the top may well obscure another one of the papers which you are referencing.
4) Virtual desktops are confusing and difficult from a usability standpoint, and completely break the entire desktop model. It's an anti-feature, great for people who can keep the entire computer state in their heads at all times (like Linux geeks who hate GUIs), but terrible for all other users.
They may be confusing for some people. They certainly aren't confusing for everyone and they don't require you to keep your entire computer state in your head. I use it for dividing my desktop up into separate jobs - if I'm in the middle of something and someone interrupts me and asks me to do another job I can switch to a clean desktop and get on with that. When I've finished that job I can switch back to what I was doing before - all my win
Couldn't google sue any ISP that alters their pages in any way?
I thought Google already did (but no, I can't cite a source off the top of my head).
The people who want crazy flexibility and options would get distro 3
:)
Whereupon they are required to trawl through thousands of options - that's enough to put anyone off. I for one prefer to pick a distro that suits my purposes rather than hand-configure everything. But then, I'm not a Gentoo user.
I dunno, they'll just have to figure it out somehow.
No, you are suggesting an idea that appears to be unworkable and then refusing to explain how to make it workable.
I'm also not a fan of the 1984-esque "Free" doublespeak you guys got going... please just say open source.
Open source and Free are not the same thing - Free implies open source but the converse is not true. There are a lot of open source licences which are not Free.
Then buy better "closed" software.
Why? Most of the time there is a piece of Free software that does the job better. My experience is that *in general* closed software is of lower quality than Free software (there are many exceptions), so given the choice I'm going to pick the Free stuff because it's more likely to be of high quality.
Copy and paste works fine under Linux... for text. And even then, I had problems with formatted text-- in my experience, Linux applications tended to lose the formatting. For virtually any other type of data, it fails miserably.
Works for me.
I'll take you up on that. Name one.
I'll name a bunch, off the top of my head...
* Sloppy focus (and yes, I know you can turn it on in Windows with TweakUI but it breaks far too much stuff)
* The ability to use partially obscured windows without having to raise them
* Window shading
* Virtual desktops
* Powerful commandline
* Select/Paste
And there are some more recent things too, such as Compiz's Scale and Desktop Cube plugins which I find very useful.
Stuff only something like 0.01% of the population ever does. Using the CLI as a basis for promoting an OS to the general public is ridiculous.
So because only 0.01% (which I seriously think is a massive underestimate) of the population does something we shouldn't even bother to provide that feature?
90% of people only use 10% of their system's functionality. But each person uses a different 10%. Just providing the features that most people use leads to suckage.
Even software development now is almost all done in GUI IDEs.
I am a professional software developer and I do my software development using vim and make. A very large proportion of the other developers I know do the same.
What exactly is the task you're doing so regularly that the CLI is so suited for?
There is no one thing - it's lots of stuff. I find myself regularly hitting the commandline to do stuff that would just be plain painful in a GUI. For example, bulk operations on a directory of files (photos, for example). And the number of times I cobble together a quick commandline consisting of grep, sed, etc to apply stuff to a particular set of files and suchlike is uncountable. Sure, it's something that "normal" people probably won't do (they will struggle through with the GUI spending hours doing something that I could've done in 5 minutes), but that doesn't seem like a good reason to *prevent* people doing this stuff by not providing a decent commandline.
A powerful GUI that doesn't support drag&drop?
Well, as I said, I have never found a need to use drag & drop so I can't really comment.
Actually, I just tried it - seems to work pretty well. I can drag images from Nautilus into OpenOffice, random selections of text and images from FireFox into OpenOffice, selections from all sorts of applications into Nautilus. I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
Like what? Like I asked above, what task exactly is it you are constantly using the CLI to do? I'm a pretty geeky guy, and I use a CLI maybe once a year, and that's only because
Under which laws? And in what countries specifically? Or are you referring to some international laws or agreements? If you're going to make a bold claim like this, you need to have something (anything) to back it up.
In certain jurisdictions there are laws regarding free trade. For example, in the EU it is illegal to restrict trade between member states (DVD region 2 covers the whole of the EU, so technically this is not placing such a restriction on trade). New Zealand and Australia, however, have declared region coding to be illegal. Several governments have also suggested that it contravenes global WTO free trade treaties (not that the US seems to give a damn about treaties they have signed).
If you want crappy old hardware, you install "other" and check the "crappy old hardware" box on the extremely flexible installer.
Extremely flexible and easy to use don't go hand in hand - you are suggesting replacing the current vast choice in distros with one enormous installer that presents every option anyone might possibly ever want. I'm pretty sure that pretty much every user is going to be put off by an installer with thousands of options (have you tried configuring the Linux kernel? You're talking about an installer like that but worse.)
If you want long-term support, there's no reason CentOS or RedHat couldn't provide long-term support to the standardized GNOME and KDE distros.
Ok, so lets say you have Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. all offering support to a single distro. What happens when Red Hat wants the distro they are supporting to work one way and Canonical want it to work in another? Also, how are the vendors going to make their offering stand out from the other vendors?
If you care about "Free" software, then you're an irredeemable geek and you should have no say in any software that you expect average normal human beings to use. Because nobody cares.
Clearly people _do_ care, because otherwise you wouldn't have people developing Free software. I happen to have very valid reasons for wanting a completely Free distribution - I believe that Free software (in general) works better than proprietary software. My experience of closed software is that it is pretty unstable and bugridden by comparison. This is something that *everyone* should care about - whether their computer is going to randomly crash on them frequently.
Also, irredeemable geeks need operating systems too - you were suggesting replacing all other Linux distros with a single big megadistro - what are the geeks who do care about this stuff going to use now you've abolished the distros that offer what they want?
Yes, but why not an actual choice that the end-user can understand? A meaningful choice? If you give the end-user 2 distros with GNOME, one of which is "Free" and one of which isn't... are they going to be able to tell the difference? It's just confusing to everyone involved.
It depends on how knowledgeable the user is - very knowledgeable users want this choice whilst the completely unknowledgeable people won't be able to tell the difference between Linux and Windows. Where do you draw the line?
Similarly, people may not necessarilly care about the specifics such as Freeness, but they may care about the results (for example, peer review leading to better, more stable and more secure software).
"Here, pick between these two. They're both 99.9% identical."
"Then why make me pick?"
Because that 0.1% might be significant.
I'm not going to argue with your opinion of Windows' GUI, other than to say it's extremely misguided.
I don't see how you can consider it misguided. The Linux UI doesn't work the way you (a Windows user) expect it to work, the Windows UI doesn't work the way I (a Linux user) expect - what's the difference?
at least drag&drop and copy&paste work 99% of the time.
I can't say I ever use drag & drop so I can't comment, but copy and paste works just fine under Linux.
In fact, it works better than under Windows - I mean, in Windows I select some text, then move my pointer to the place I want to paste it and middle click but nothing seems to happen.
No, this is a "Foo doesn't have the features Bar had in 1998, and you want me to switch to Foo... why?" problem.
This works both ways - I'm sure you can point at a bunch of features that Windows had in 1998 and Linux still doesn't have, but I can point at a whole load of features I have used on a daily basis in Linux since before 1998 which Windows still doesn't do. I'm afraid this is very much a case of "the feature sets aren't identical" than "foo is better than bar".
So, the system is in place, and if you don't like it, then too bad. Does it really kill you to wait an extra few months?
Well, it actually doesn't affect me at all since I won't be buying any HD movies until I can play them with Free software. However, the problem is that they are using a (almost certainly) illegal restriction on free trade which prevents people from taking advantage of pricing differentials across the world (all the while the studios *are* taking advantage of pricing differentials. For example, they get the DVDs pressed in Asia because it is cheaper - why should they be allowed to do this but their customers not?). Also, what do you do when a movie is not released in your region and never will be? Seems a pretty sucky position to be in...
Hence the reason for region encoding.
Which is almost certainly illegal (shame no one has been sued yet).
But, there's a reason that you delay release dates. For instance, a movie can come out here, get a lot of good press (ratatouille) and it can result in a lot of people in another country to go see it. This positive press allows you to spend less on advertising because you can then reduce the amount you advertise in foreign cinemas. Don't think there isn't a reason that the studios do it this way.
You can't have your cake and eat it - if you want to save on advertising by staggering released dates and taking advantage of the public's impatience, don't complain when people get impatient and import content.
I personally don't even get why there are more than three distros: KDE, GNOME and "other/roll your own". What's the point of 26 distros, all of which use GNOME as a desktop environment, when all you end up seeing is GNOME?
KDE and Gnome are desktop environments, not distros.
The reason there are lots of distros is because they meet different requirements. These requirements may be technical, ethical, etc. For example, if you want a distro that runs on crappy old hardware, Damn Small Linux is probably quite a good choice. Or if you want a distro that only uses Free software, you could go with Fedora. For long term support, something like CentOS or RHEL, etc.
Choice is good - it allows you to pick the system that works best for you and helps keep innovation going.
It's extremely upsetting to use a "modern" OS, and have stuff that worked fine in Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.0 not work in Linux. It's like going back in time... the real problem is that Linux developers are playing catch-up with Windows and Macintosh by adding things like 3D accelerated graphics, when the old fashioned basics (like universal drag&drop support) never get done.
I'm afraid that, as someone who doesn't normally use Windows I find I have the same problem when I sit in front of a Windows machine - stuff that works fine in Linux doesn't work under Windows. I find that Windows is playing catching with Linux when it comes to usability, and the Windows commandline is an utter joke. I was quite shocked when I saw Aero for the first time too - it's really quite poor compared to Beryl.
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
For "normal" OSes, the established desktop ones, the desktop environment is part of the OS.
I haven't been forced to choose a desktop environment for many many years - boot up and there's Gnome. If you want to change it you can, but you have to go out of your way to do so.
Doesn't that just make much more sense?
No, it really doesn't - by artificially restricting what desktop environment can be used you make it so that people can't configure their systems to behave how they want. Sure, lots of people don't need this choice but I don't see that as any reason to take it away from those who do.
Time = money
In many situations that is completely false - "time = money" is only true if you would have otherwise been doing something that would have paid you.
Or, hell, just playing Guitar Hero 3
So you get paid to play Guitar Hero 3?
There's no clear signpost as to what's the "right" distro for beginners(UBUNTU UBUNTU UBUNTU, but newbies won't know that, go google "which linux distro should I choose?" and get back to me when the top result isn't a TEN QUESTION QUIZ.
That's because there is no "right" distro. It all depends on what you want to do and what your ethics are.
(No, Ubuntu isn't always the answer.)
Which is the "right" version of Windows to get? I mean, there are lots of different editions of both XP and Vista...
XP was the standard for Windows for 5 or 6 years, and it went through 2 major revisions in that time. OS X revs approximately every 18 months, and is on the fifth version to ship since 2000.
So choose the distro that's appropriate to what you want (this comes back to my "there is no 'right' distro" point above). If you want all the latest shiny and don't mind getting cut on the bleeding edge, get a rapid release cycle distro such as Fedora. On the other hand, if you just want something that Just Works for years on end, get one of the long term support distros.
Similarly, the barrage of choice that assaults users of linux systems is a detriment to the newbie.
Have you *used* Gnome in the past few years?! It has pretty much no choice to "assault" you (to the point that a lot of people get pissed off at having even less configurability than Windows).
Having to pick window managers in 2008 is a disgrace.
I haven't been made to pick a window manager in *years*. When you install Fedora or CentOS, for example, it gives you Gnome with Metacity. You can turn on "desktop effects" if you want and this will get you Compiz instead, but from the user's perspective they look the same other than some pretty animations so the user doesn't need to know or care that they just picked a different window manager. Sure, you _can_ go and choose another window manager if you want but only if you go out of your way - nothing makes you do it.
Ubuntu understands this, which is why it's been such a phenomenal success
Actually, having used a variety of distributions I have to say that many of them are on par with Ubuntu (in fact I find Fedora a lot easier to use myself). I think the reason why Ubuntu is so popular is mainly because Canonical seem to be quite a bit better at shouting about themselves than other people (they probably have a much bigger marketing budget too).
Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with Ubuntu, but I certainly think that claiming it's the be all and end all is very shortsighted. You must choose a distro based on a lot of factors - Ubuntu meets some people's needs, other distros meet others.
# you don't need to defrag ext2. it doesn't get fragmented
This is misinformation. ext2 (And ext3) _do_ get fragmented. They just don't fragment as badly as other more simplistic filesystems such as FAT.
Both of these appeared on Blu Ray in the US while they were still showing in cinemas in Europe.
The solution here is to set sane release dates for stuff (both in cinema and on disc) instead of locking out your customers (also, there are a lot of suggestions that region coding is an illegal restriction on free trade... shame no one's sued the studios yet).
Honestly, if you release stuff in one country before another, you really can't complain when people take it upon themselves to import it (through legal or illegal means).
JavaScript (yes) = Punish website
JavaScript (no) = Reward website
JavaScript OnLoad = Double punish website
This seems pretty silly - just because a website uses javascript doesn't mean it *requires* it. Well designed web sites work just fine without JS but if you have it then they give you an enhanced experience.
HTML/XHTML compliance = Reward website
HTML/XHTML not compliance = Punish website
Sadly Google doesn't properly support XHTML, so if you are punished anyway for using XHTML (why?!)
RSS feed = Reward website
RSS feeds are not appropriate for all websites - rewarding people for using inappropriate technologies is silly.
US$100m isn't already serious money?
:)
Given the value of the dollar at the moment, $100m is about enough to buy a pack of chewing gum isn't it?
It was suggested a while ago that SCO's assets wouldn't be able to anywhere near cover the amount they owe Novell, so I shall sit back and watch Novell suck a big chunk of this investment out of SCO. :)
I don't understand why universities dont just 'loose' these records.
That didn't really make sense... did you mean 'lose'?
As a point of fact, I belive there is no God
This is faith - there is no way to scientifically determine if this is the case or not.
I also believe that I will not suffocate from the air evacuating to a corner of the room
This can be scientifically shown to be extremely improbable.
None of those statements are impossible, they are all just overwhelmingly unlikely. I require no more faith to not believe in god(s) than I do to believe that the all Earth's interatomic bonds will *not* spontaneously disassociate in the next hour.
Where is your empirical evidence proving the existence of God to be extremely unlikely? We can know from experience that the other things you mention are highly improbable, but as far as the existence of God goes, there is no way you can determine this by experience.
Though, to be bluntly honest, I think the chances of Earth's "existence faliure" is a damn sight higher than your logic-warping, untestable, and unecesssary uncreated creator.
Ignoring the fact that you are arguing against a religion I do not have, you have just stated that the existence of a creator is untestable, which rather supports my point.
Frankly, agnosticism is the PC position one takes when they lack the conviction to say "There may be god(s), but I will waste no more thought on it than I would on getting struck by an asteroid." All agnostic really means is "willing to waffle on a mind-bogglingly likely assertion to not offend the theists."
No, sorry - some people believe that there is no God (this is atheism). This is a religion since these people hold a belief despite there being no evidence to support this belief. Other people believe in a God - again, a religion, there is no evidence to support the belief. Then there are the agnosticists - these people do not believe one way or the other since there is no evidence one way or the other. (Note that I am talking about the existence or nonexistence of a God (which is untestable) - I am not talking about creationism.
Atheist and proud. You can mock it all you'd like -- I'll smile and nod at you.
There's no offense to be had when you have a lack of faith.
Atheists do not have a lack of faith - they have faith that there is no God. If you had a lack of faith you would be an agnosticist, not an atheist.
no where near the challenge of containing 22 gallons of the most highly combustible fluid on earth.
Yeah, but most people don't drive around with a car full of the most combustible fluid on earth... (hint: petroleum spirit isn't this fluid).
This certificate can be suspended or revoked (and individual engineers disciplined) in the case of incompetence. One can easily imagine that this could happen to a Microsoft.
:)
But can you imagine the hell that would ensue if Microsoft lost it's licence to write code? I mean, there are loads of civil engineering companies - if the one maintaining your bridge gets its licence revoked, you can contract someone else to maintain it. But with a monopoly software vendor like Microsoft, what would happen if they lost their licence? Who would support all the MS products out there? This is especially true with closed source software, which just plain isn't maintainable by anyone else, but even if it were open source I still wonder if there would be enough capable companies to take on the job of supporting all of MS's customers...
Actually I see this as complementing the open-source system by formalizing peer review of code. Also, I would suggest that most of the people who designed open source software are not necessarily amateurs; they may have other jobs in software, and many of them are paid for their open-source contributions.
It seems like quite a problem to regulate this though. You have a piece of Free software that was originally written by someone who may either be an amateur or a professional. Then, over the years more people, who may also be either amateurs or professionals, add and modify bits to it.
Whilst I like the idea of nice stable software, I think regulating it so that *only* licensed software engineers can write code would pretty much kill much of the innovation in software.
I'm sure that if random people were allowed to build bridges (and the materials cost them practically nothing) we'd have lots more innovation even though a lot of them would regularly fall down.
For the record, even though I am a professional software developer I certainly don't consider myself to be an engineer. As far as I'm concerned, an engineer is someone who writes provably (as far as possible) correct code - such as that used in safety of life systems (fly by wire, etc.). I am a software developer - I don't write code that I mathematically prove to be correct, my "proof" is that when I drive a few trucks over the bridge it doesn't fall down (this is the case for most software developers). The two disciplines are very different and I have a lot of respect for the software engineers, but software engineering is really expensive compared to normal development. Can you imagine the cost of writing the Linux kernel, or the whole of Windows, or the whole of OpenOffice if it was engineered with mathematical proof of the correctness of the code? (Hell, Windows might even justify its astronomical price tag then
I guess the thing is that shiny features are more important to the general public than stability - a company who engineers software properly is going to spend the time proving its correctness rather than adding shiny new features. It's not as if someone dies every time Word crashes...
You keep saying the US but are you aware there are American's living IN the US who don't want to be in a war? It's a great majority of us if you listen to the news and hear the poll numbers coming in.
I am fully aware that a lot of Americans don't want war. However, I was replying to someone who was advocating a nuclear response to 9/11 who seemed to think it would "solve the problem". And indeed it would probably "solve the problem" by wiping the US from the face of the map so that the US *government* would no longer be in a position to piss everyone else off. The fact that a large number of US citizens who are anti-war get caught in the cross fire makes very little difference.
Don't confused the Government we have with the people.
I wasn't - the people really play no part in the aforementioned scenario since the people don't control the nuclear weapons.
With P2P (even legitimate) and video rental services, people can easily saturate their connections, and they do.
I have *never* seen P2P saturate an 8Mbps connection. This is probably because the vast majority of the P2P users have abysmal upstream speeds.
The problem with that solution is that, as you've shown with your characterization of "the anti-nuclear brigade", it's easy to frame disagreement as ignorance and thereby dismiss it.
My characterisation of the "anti-nuclear brigade" was nothing to do with disagreement with them. The UK has recently been going through a consultation period to decide on the future of our electricity generation capacity. Reading the comments which have been submitted by the public to the various discussions and consultations, it is clear that a very sizable chunk of the population are anti-nuclear based on an extremely out of date and superficial knowledge of the technologies involved.
I have absolutely no problem at all with people disagreeing with my (or anyone else's) views - the problem is that there is a danger of making (detrimental) policy to satisfy the uninformed public, even though the policy decisions have absolutely no basis in fact, rather than having people who actually understand the subject matter making informed choices to benefit the population as a whole.
Whoever writes the background knowledge tests will control the terms of the debate.
I did cite that as a problem, yes. No, I don't have a solution.
In the UK, the argument that not everyone is equally qualified to express an opinion was historically used to deny the vote
That may be, but there is truth in the argument - some policy decisions require an in-depth understanding of very complex problems. Some of the public will attempt to research the problem before casting a vote, but the vast majority will react based on superficial, inaccurate knowledge.
Do you really think it's possible to define criteria for voting that won't be misused by the enfranchised to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised?
I don't know. But I do believe that having uninformed people making decisions could be as dangerous as denying people the ability to make decisions. As it stands at the moment, I think the enfranchised are already able to gain greater power at the expense of the disenfranchised. For example, the media (much of which is controlled by a very small number of players) is able to spin stories so that the public will hysterically demand a government decision go one way or the other. News Corp, for example, can bias their media coverage and this will cause the public opinion to be biased.
I find it a very difficult problem - on the one hand I don't want bad decisions to be made under the weight of mis/uninformed public opinion, but on the other I am cynical of the government doing the Right Thing and think that members of the public who are well informed should have some say. I certainly don't have the answers - I'm just throwing it up for discussion.
Let me help you out here: the sentence "100 Mbps fiber to the home and WiMAX are already deployed in Europe." doesn't mean "universally deployed" or "widely available", it means there exists places in Europe where it has been deployed and commercially available, nothing less and nothing more.
In that case, 100Mbps FTTP is already deployed in the US (there are a few small areas where it is being used).
Also, I'm under the impression that Wimax isn't really being used much in Europe since we have HSDPA which does a similar job.
AFAIK, the UK doesn't have a lot of fiber in the ground, so don't hold your breath.
There's a fair amount of fibre around the UK, and the 21CN rollout is going to end up installing a whole lot more. However, I don't think anyone is seriously thinking about doing a country-wide FTTP deployment yet - the next steps are going to be ADSL2+ (which has been rolled out by some unbundled ISPs over the past few years) and fibre to the kerb. Every so often some ISP makes a press release about trialling 100Mbps FTTP but I question the merits of upgrading the local loop much further until the network infrastructure is improved since it is rare that people can saturate their current 8Mbps or 25Mbps connections at the moment.