On this much I agree -- I'm very much a fan of having users be in control of their own systems, so long as they're willing to accept the responsibility for whatever they've changed.
On that note, I might try to see if they can have their pay docked that $75/year...
Thing is, neither of the examples you give were intended by developers at all.
Yes. That was precisely my point.
I understand that's the nature of so-called "emergent gameplay", but these are one-in-a-million abberations, and both required direct involvement from the developers running the game (in that they were special dev-controlled in-game events).
In the Eve case, the direct involvement actually caused the opposite of the intended effect.
In the Everquest case, the direct involvement (beyond creating the event in the first place) almost ruined it. Making the creature go poof at 30% was not cool.
Actually designing a game to support and encourage such gameplay would be virtually impossible. How do you design a system to reliably produce unexpected results that are actually enjoyable?
By designing a system that allows such things to happen.
In particular, by:
- Creating wide open game mechanics
- Using them consistently yourself (Sleeper could be killed, it was just hard)
- Examine every angle for gameplay implications first -- bugs can be fun.
Another example of "emergent gameplay" -- In Halo 2, attempting to attack someone with the sword from close enough will charge at them (faster than a player can normally move) and attack. There was a bug in which switching weapons between the sword and something else -- like a sniper rifle -- could cause this effect to be triggered from much farther away -- like, sniper range.
Bungie fixed this in multiplayer, so people couldn't cheat. They left it in single-player, since it's actually somewhat difficult and very fun when you pull it off, and apparently doesn't cause any other critical bugs.
YOU know that a Mac and a PC are pretty much just Intel boxes now and I know they are pretty much Intel boxes now, but the public?
Knows that a Mac can run Windows.
The problem is the Linux boxes today look NO different than what I can get from Dell, HP, or hell even Tigerdirect.
It isn't enough for the software inside to look different? Frankly, Compiz looks better than Vista, to my eyes.
Why do you think the Windows Netbooks are totally slaughtering the Linux Netbooks, even while placing a decade old OS(XP) against the newest and coolest Linux has to offer? Because they look like every other Windows box they have ever had
Really? The EEE looked like no Windows box I have ever seen.
No, Windows is slaughtering Linux there partly for all the same reasons it always has -- it isn't "better enough" -- and partly because Microsoft and the vendors have generally either not shown a significant markup for Windows vs Linux on those machines, or they've made the Windows ones more powerful, so that even a Linux user might want to buy the better Windows version and format it with Linux.
I have installed more copies of OO.O and had to deal with more "downgrade rights" with Vista than I care to name, because folks honestly despise them.
Unfortunately, not enough to make a difference, so far.
But you are wrong about having to learn new MSFT OSes pre Vista. To this day one of my most requested "mods" is to "make it look like the old one" which is of course right click on start>click properties>Classic start menu which makes it the same old boring ass grey that has been Windows since Win95.
I suppose if they are willing to pay others to do that...
However, many parts of XP behave differently than 2K -- the system tray now hides icons. The control panel has been rearranged, and it is more than just skin-deep...
For that matter, 95 behaved considerably differently than 3.1, which behaved considerably differently than DOS.
I do think it has changed recently -- if anything, people have gotten lazier. Vista isn't that much of a change over XP compared to 95 over 3.1, but Vista is where people are actually talking about moving to Linux, or staying with XP for another five years, rather than dealing with the newness.
Even so, the vast majority just follow the herd.
Because you will never get folks to accept the Dell they just bought won't do the same thing the Dell they had does and that is a good thing.
It seems that this was at least somewhat true with Vista.
I think your approach would be very helpful, but I don't think it's necessary. After all, one of the main selling points about Linux is freedom for the users -- I realize you think people don't care, and it isn't high on the list of priorities, but it is something they appreciate once they understand.
People do like Hackintoshes... So I think the way this would work is, you demonstrate your shiny new UbuntuBook, and if they aren't ready to buy new hardware, you point out that it will run on a PC.
At $20 an hour it doesn't take but 1, maybe 2 show stoppers to pay for the cost of XP Home, which will make all those troubles magically go away.
I am a bit surprised... XP Home doesn't have its own, similar problems? You don't find yourself having to dig them out from under a pile of spyware?
No campaigning, no petitioning, no marching or demonstrating â" just call and switch...
It is incredibly difficult to find an area where this is possible. For most of us, it's "move and switch" or "stay and deal".
Slashdot is not the forum, where utilities are regularly discussed.
Irrelevant. The question was whether this is something people have complaints about it. I think you've answered that.
water quality varies widely and is regulated not by customer demand, but by bureaucracies at town, state, and federal level...
I would certainly trust a bureaucracy which at least theoretically has my best interests at heart, than a corporation which has only its bottom line to consider. I mean, you don't want to be in the situation where you just "call and switch" because the water actually started causing health problems.
Granted, these aren't entirely mutually exclusive -- but we still have things like health inspectors, and they do occasionally find disturbing things.
Why do they still need to come to my house to read the meter? Why do they need to come over to turn off non-payers (and charge the delinquents extra $15 or so for the pleasure)?
Do you honestly think the private sector would get rid of either of these?
Coming to your house to read the meter -- maybe. Extra $15 to turn off non-payers? I'd be surprised if it wasn't an extra $50.
Why wouldn't the utilities offer hot water as extra service (doing so would allow heating centrally â" and, possibly, for less), or really cold water to cool houses down in summer?
I suppose that might work. It might also end up being less efficient. Right now, the most efficient hot water heater I know of actually heats water as it enters the building, rather than storing it in a tank to heat.
The answer is, government ownership kills innovation â" and leads to inferior service.
The answer is, it is not black and white. There are just as many corrupt, creaky, broken corporate bureaucracies as government bureaucracies. And while it's rare, you do occasionally see a lean, mean, governmental machine.
Net neutrality, like water quality, is something the government at least needs to regulate. Copyright is arguable. The right to tinker absolutely should not be interfered with by the government -- at least the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA needs to go, now.
Of course, given your sig, it seems unlikely I will hear any sort of well thought out opinions out of you -- more kneejerk, symbolic reactions.
The difference you're missing is "multiplayer" vs "massively multiplayer".
What makes WoW worth playing is that it weaves an interesting, huge, persistent, shared world, not that this world has an interesting plot.
I'm sure the plot helps, but face it, eventually you run out of plot. Eventually, you have to make your own. To the hardcore players, the plot of WoW matters about as much as the plot of Counter-Strike does to any but the most casual CS player.
That, and there's simply more to do in WoW. How many times can you play de_dust before it gets boring?
I understand that there's a certain challenge and art that's lost -- that of the narrative. This is still possible, but more difficult, and often users can completely throw off your plans. It has to be a much faster-paced, more dynamic story -- the kind you live as a GM, not the kind you write as an author.
But now you have the completely different problem, just as challenging, of balancing gameplay mechanics, storyline, politics, and everything else that makes up a community.
Ultimately, it's likely to be more frustrating for you, but more fun for the gamers -- which is really the point.
One example, a well-known story from Eve Online: The developers created a long event, with a fair amount of plot and depth. The first part of it involved getting a bunch of small ships to attack some huge battlecruiser, that they had no business fighting -- but get enough small players together, and they'd have a shot. Great way for newbies to have some fun.
Problem is, some fairly powerful pirates -- possibly a guild or two -- got wind of this, killed the target ship, then set up an ambush and massacred all the newbies.
The bad: That whole plotline, and all the work that had gone into it, had to be scrapped.
The good: This story has become legend. It actually makes me want to play Eve, knowing my actions, as a player, could have that much impact on the game.
Another, probably more well-known example: The Sleeper, in Everquest. This was a creature that is several times more powerful than gods in that game -- in fact, if I'm not mistaken, several thousand times more powerful than any one god. It can only be awoken once per server, and once awake, you only get one attempt to kill it, or it can never be attempted again on that server.
This creature was simply not intended to be killed.
However, instead of actually making it invincible, the developers just gave it insanely high vitality, and the ability to pretty much one-hit anything, and sometimes several things at once. This is cool -- using actual game mechanics, rather than top-down "make it so" directives, to enforce the idea that this thing is hardcore.
Well, some players killed it. It took about 300 players or so, but they did it.
And again, this is exactly what the developers did not want. In fact, the first attempt, they simply deleted the creature when it got to around 30%. Players were outraged enough that, once they were sure that killing it wouldn't cause a bug, they reset the event and allowed the players to try again. This time, they won.
The point isn't that you shouldn't bother to create well-written, finely-crafted events. In fact, without a rich world around him, and without his own nicely scripted event, The Sleeper would just be another dragon. Yawn.
The point is that players will do things that are completely unexpected. They'll do things that surprise you, frustrate you, and go directly against what you intended.
And you will never understand this medium until you understand that this is the best thing that can happen. Games are great because this can happen.
If I went to the trouble to throw out my entire system and start over, just to get Ubuntu,
You kind of have to do that to get OS X. You certainly have to do that if you want to compare on a level playing-field -- if your computer was designed to run Windows, be glad Ubuntu runs on it at all.
Yes, Ubuntu has excellent hardware support. But there's always going to be something weird and something new.
I have yet to see a Linux setup where they didn't skimp you on the hardware
Odd. Dell seems to be decent.
Well, failing that, what you could do is find a system which can ship with Linux, and get the Windows model. Even that is risky -- my laptop has a different wireless card on the Ubuntu version.
they have already HAD 14 YEARS of Windows "education"
Much of which is useless, as they've had to re-learn with each upgrade. OpenOffice is likely easier to learn than Office 2007, for people who have used older versions of Office.
Either you make it behave like Windows or fail, because you don't have the "cool" factor on your side like Mac has.
I'd much rather see it be "cool" than see it cripple itself by behaving like Windows.
To a certain extent, I understand. But it's a dangerous direction.
The only problem in our diverging viewpoints that I can see is that you seem to think folks WANT to learn new things,
I haven't said that, either.
are able to grasp things like complex and frankly dangerous Unix commands.
Haven't said that, either. The user should not have to know about the CLI, beyond (maybe) being able to paste commands from my IM window into their terminal, and paste the output back to me.
Trying to sell "free as in freedom" won't work,
Dude, you are ranting, and you clearly haven't been paying attention. I haven't used the words "free as in freedom" once in this whole fucking thread.
Linux doesn't have multi million dollar ad campaigns,
I have yet to see a Linux only "killer app" that would make folks throw away all their hardware and software just to learn Ubuntu.
1) No need to throw away your hardware. However, if you use hardware you purchased for Windows or OS X, and you're complaining that Linux is harder to setup, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Try buying, say, a Vista laptop, and installing XP. Windows is no better than Linux in this regard, except that Windows has better pre-install options.
2) The "killer app" thing? You're pretty much echoing my arguments back to me. Click up a few times and you'll find me saying this:
Linux has to be better than Windows in many ways before someone is willing to switch. And emulating Windows (better AD integration, for example) is important, but not nearly as important as developing the things that truly differentiate us.
A "killer app" is one of those things.
So if you want the Windows users you will have to conform to them, not vice versa.
As I've said, this way leads to ReactOS, and to stagnation. I would much rather have Linux stay small than go that route.
Did Firefox have to conform to IE's bugs to get where it is today?
And believe it or not, users do respond to innovation, and to new and different ideas. Marketing alone isn't enough to sell OS X -- it has to actually be worth the expense and the effort, in some way other than "my laptop is shiny aluminum".
I haven't seen anything in the Linux world that would make my customers throw out all their previous knowledge and hardware just to run it.
It also doesn't require throwing out all of your previous knowledge. You've
And none of those get you as far as (your example) jQuery does on the web. As a ex-Mac user, I can assure that every one of those toolkits is fundamentally flawed on at *least* OS X, and most are flawed on Windows as well. For example, GTK+ can't even use the OS-standard Open/Save dialogs.
Swing? Really?
Being able to use OS-specific features is nice, but not a requirement. The important point is whether you can provide a consistent UI across platforms -- whether portability is actually to the "crosscompile and forget" stage, or even "compile once, run anywhere".
I can say that I haven't really seen Windows-specific Java apps, except where they go out of their way to use either MS Java features or Windows-only libraries.
I agree that the web is better, but not so much for those reasons. There's a whole different set of reasons it's better, but I'm not sure they quite add up to "easier to develop for".
Server 2003, Vista, and Server 2008 are supposed to have 100% CLI coverage.
I will say that having things accessible via the commandline is not sufficient to have a good CLI. Nor is a good shell sufficient. But if that's true, it's definitely better than what I remember.
And yes I tried Ubuntu, the last being 8.04 I believe. I had problems with sound and resolution and both times was told to launch bash.
Did you buy it with Ubuntu preinstalled?
As the other poster noted, something as simple as a "run as admin" button, which if you are going to enforce security on Windows users is mandatory, is non existent in the default configuration.
The vast majority of situations, from before Vista existed, would automatically prompt for the sudo password.
As for Exchange, the Windows world owns the business, especially SMBs. If you expect to gain a foothold in that world you have to learn to play nice.
For SMBs, I'd start out trying to convince them to switch their server infrastructure to Linux. Nothing for the users to learn, easier admin for the admin types.
Just as the Samba folks added supported for SMB so too does anyone who intends to gain a foothold in the business need to support Exchange.
And this is being worked on. Actually, it's done, but probably lacking a few things...
You are well educated with most likely an IT background and things like scripts and CLI come easy to you.
That is true. I have also worked with users who do not have an IT background, and found that Linux is just as easy for them as other platforms.
That is, not always easy, but not particularly horrible. There are practical concerns, like "Will Quickbooks work?" But that's not a problem with the UI, unless you argue that Wine should be installed by default.
They are used to a Windows world where everything comes with a shiny CD that has a nice video of a pretty girl or nice guy that holds their hand and walks them through even the simplest job, such as installing their new printer.
I prefer to plug in a printer and have it autodetected. But there's also "open up 'system' and look for anything that says 'printer' on it, then click 'add'."
thinking that because shell scripts are easy for YOU that they should be easy for THEM equals total failure.
I have never said this. Old, old strawman. Shame on you.
You simply have to decide if the changes required are worth pursuing to gain them as customers.
I would say, if they have no willingness to learn, then the changes are not worth it, because it would turn Linux into ReactOS.
They have to have some willingness to learn. Oh, they'll claim they have none, and that they have no time for it, but it happens anyway. The question is whether that learning is obvious and a struggle, or whether it's "natural" and "intuitive".
But computers are practically the only system for which people demand this sort of "intuitiveness". Anything else, in any other job, or with any other tool, you'd require training, and you wouldn't expect to know how to use it without that training, no matter how simple it looks.
For instance: I know, in principle, how I would use a jackhammer. But in reality, there's all sorts of details I'd need to know, like how to hold it without hurting myself, how it's powered, what I might need in terms of earmuffs/goggles, etc.
Every teenager thinks they know how to drive. Obvious enough -- this pedal is gas, this pedal is brake, turn the wheel left and it goes left... Ok, now how do you adjust your mirrors, or your seat? How do you tune the radio? Where's the gearshift? When do you signal? How do you dig it out from under a foot of snow? Or a half inch of ice? How often do you need to change the oil?
I haven't even gone into the stuff you need to know when you open the hood.
If computers are to improve in any meaningful way -- and in particular, if computer security is going to improve in any meaningful way -- we are going to have to get past this attitude that computers should require zero learning, and
No, you're doing the math wrong. That's not "the rest of the world", that's "the rest of the *web developers* in the world".
Somehow seems at odds with Microsoft's focus on developers, developers, developers, developers.
For every web developer user who wants standards support, there are maybe a thousand non-web-developer users who want more speed, more browser features, better usability, better security, etc.
Other browsers have generally been ahead of the curve here, for a long time. Honestly, the last time IE had any sort of advantage was against Netscape 4.
It's not really web-ready, as it doesn't have plug-in support or even Javascript at the moment, and it's super-slow... but if Microsoft were to replace the rendering engine of IE, they'd use that one, since it's developed in-house.
Ah, NIH syndrome at its finest. All these other engines have plenty of javascript support, plugins, and speed.
Contrast this to Google and Apple -- Apple adopted KHTML to make Webkit, and Google adopted Webkit. How long did it take each of them to go from zero to a decent browser?
More Slashdot posting?
Back at ya.
Look, whether you like (or admit) it or not, IE shares something like 95% of the standard with every other browser. That's damned good.
Wine implements something like 95% of the Windows API. That's also damned good.
What matters is what's in that missing 5%.
If you were writing a cross-platform desktop application, you'd find that virtually every widget works entirely different between OS X, Windows, Gnome, and KDE...
Fortunately, for desktop applications, there's gtk+, qt, wxwidgets, tk, even swing and such.
And while things like jQuery are starting to make this easier on the Web, it's still not fun. The sad thing is, there is actually a standard there -- whereas there isn't really a standard for cross-platform application development.
Unless you count things like Java. So IE is kind of like when Microsoft broke Java.
Your job *is* easy.
My job, I have to use Javascript, HTML, and CSS on the client-side, unless I'm feeling really masochistic and decide to use Flash.
On the server-side, I can use whatever I want, and that is helpful. But the client is limited to precisely those technologies.
Were I developing desktop applications, I'd have a much wider selection of frameworks to choose from, with far fewer implementation differences... It's also possible I wouldn't have to deal with things like HTTP at all, depending on what I was building.
For one thing, CSS has multiple measures, some of which are machine-relative and some of which aren't. Why can't I set the height of something to "5em + 5px"?
Good point, I suppose that would be useful. I guess the kludge is to stack some divs inside it... ew.
The fact that you *also* lacked the imagination to come up with a scenario like this just tells me that you've been working in CSS too long.
That, or I just don't often run into that scenario -- I tend towards simpler designs.
IE had a Javascript debugger before Firefox existed,
Debugging is part of what Firebug does. The DOM inspector and the live CSS tweaking is equally useful.
Unless you like the fact that one application can't bring down the entire system quite as easily.
In practice, how often did that happen?
Probably about as often as it did on Win95, come to think of it.
They added always-visible text labels to the Dock?
Possibly. However, the size absolutely is configurable, and I wouldn't be
I'll correct you a bit further -- there are different kinds of physical access. For instance, a public computer lab might have machines which have their case locked, both to prevent it from being opened and to prevent it from being locked down, BIOS locked and configured to boot only from hard disk, bootloader locked, etc.
On such a machine, there's really not a lot you can do to compromise it without some sort of actual software vulnerability or misconfiguration. You might be able to add a physical keylogger -- maybe -- depends how kiosk-ified it is.
However, this does not appear to be such an attack. Rather, it seems this is an attack which requires you to boot the machine off of some other media. Most machines are wide open to this in many ways -- the more frightening one was PXE; just plug a laptop into the same network and own every machine as it boots.
But Vista is not unique in this respect, and I cannot imagine how an OS could protect itself against such an attack. And even network boots can be secured, if you can add just a kernel and initrd to local storage.
FYI, Vista has good drivers out-of-the-box. XP does too, if you have a XP SP2 disk, but the original XP disk doesn't include them.
XP SP3 did not include the video drivers for my laptop. Tried nvidia.com, they told me to contact the manufacturer. Tried dell.com, they only had Vista drivers. Ended up having to chat with a Dell tech, who gave me links to various drivers for other models in the same series.
All told, the process of setting up all my drivers took several hours.
Ubuntu, it was all just there, out of the box. It had its own problems, but I did not have to spend several hours just tracking down drivers before I could even get started.
I could have, but if you're trying to convince me, you'd do better defining terms that aren't commonly-known.
I don't define other terms that aren't commonly-known, like UAC, or Acid2, etc. Common etiquette is: When you don't know something, go to justfuckinggoogleit.com and at least make an effort before you run your mouth.
"Standards-compliant" isn't a feature. It's a fucking waste of time. Let's spend 80% of our developer time changing parts of the program that end-users NEVER SEE, only web developers do.
Yes, so that the rest of the world can spend an extra 20% of their time, on every single website, to benefit your browser.
How about this: Since everyone else is already much closer, why not ditch Trident and embed Webkit or Gecko?
Oh, and despite that, web developers will have to test in each browser *anyway*. So you're barely saving even that tiny percentage of users any time anyway.
Clearly, you are not a web developer.
I can develop in Firefox. I can then test in other browsers to make sure it still works -- and it does. Maybe once every several months I introduce a problem that doesn't show up in Firefox, but does in other browsers.
Except IE. That's several times a week, sometimes several times a day. And never something trivial, usually some brutally ugly hack that I have to add. There's a reason I now maintain an ie.css file on any site I have to make work on IE.
Maybe you're jealous of my "easy" job, but if IE was gone tomorrow, I'd have 20% more time to spend doing something useful. And we all know what happens with 20% time.
Of course, you've shown your cards, you're squarely an MS fanboi -- so I am sure, in your world, other browsers should just suck it up and conform to the defacto standard, and the Web should go back to the 90's habit of slapping "best viewed in IE x.x" disclaimers on the page and calling it a day.
Oh, and despite that, web development is still a shit process because the web standards are shit anyway.
Not an excuse for breaking them, and making it even less fun.
CSS can't even do math! Seriously, WTF.
CSS is a styling language. WTF do I need math for?
Nobody in the real world ever picked their web browser due to standards support.
Which has no bearing on its measure of a browser's worth.
And I've yet to have a single person convince me that the XHTML standard is worthwhile. What's the point of a webpage validating as XML? What does it gain me that I can't already do?
The ability to parse it -- quickly -- with an XML parser. It's also the basis for things like microformats.
It's just a giant waste of W3C time
Honestly, how much time was it?
"Standards-compliance" is just a gigantic geek-wank started by some pissy web developers who think their already-extremely-easy job is just too hard.
Oh, first the standards were crap, and now the job is "easy"?
It has equivalents to each of those. They don't have the same name
Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...
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OK, so I looked briefly for such an add-on, and the only one I saw had poor reviews (uneditable blacklist of words, plus the words would display for a couple seconds before being replaced by ***).
It should be trivial to create a Greasemonkey script, but it would have the same limitations.
The habits really aren't that bad, unless you're already familiar with computers.
There's a certain amount of familiarity which really should be expected by now. For example:
In a sane world, clicking a link saying something like "WARNING! YOU HAVE A VIRUS!" shouldn't infect your computer with a virus.
In a sane world, when that homeless guy says he needs money for food, he'll actually spend it on food, not beer and hookers.
In a sane world, when the stranger says "I've got candy in my van!", he really does, and you can leave whenever you want.
You know what? In a truly sane world, people wouldn't be so fucking gullible. All it takes is the tiniest smidge of healthy skepticism, and she'd be safe.
Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...
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Piracy and the PSP
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Just be forewarned... this will bork your views of plenty of other posters, not just people who have posted profanity.
That is true of any filter. For example:
Not that anyone who uses Profanity Blacklist will ever read this post, since on occasion I use profanity.
Yet your post would be totally appropriate for children without the "fuckers" at the end.
I'd rather see kids exposed to the occasional F-word than miss out on valuable education. After all, if they're on Slashdot (and not 4chan), the truly disturbing posts will be slammed to -1 before they have a chance to see them anyway.
You're either a liar, or the last version of Windows you used was Windows 98. Either way, wrong.
XP. Sometimes it works, but it did not seem to automatically hotplug. And this was, of course, once drivers were installed -- drivers that Ubuntu and OS X provide out of the box.
My snarky point was that Linux has multiple GUIs, so you can't just say "the GUI is better" without specifying WHICH ONE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!
Actually, I can, partly because having multiple GUIs is a feature. But since we were talking about Ubuntu, there are also things in GNOME that I'd miss on Windows.
Anyway, your definition of "better" seems to equate to "more configurable."
Nope. Equates to "can do what I want." Configurability is part of that, but that's a means to an end.
For example, the keystrokes I mentioned in KWin simply do not exist, configurable or not, on Windows or OS X. If they did exist, they were not discoverable. Usability is more than discoverability, but discoverability helps.
The other example, well...
I can't judge "sloppy focus" unless you bother to explain what it is.
Most GUIs, including most Linux GUIs (by default), default to click-to-focus. That is, keyboard focus stays in the window it is until you explicitly switch to another window, by alt+tabbing or clicking.
Another option is focus-follows-mouse -- whatever the mouse is on top of has keyboard focus.
Sloppy focus is basically focus-follows-mouse, only it ignores the root window -- that is, if I move the mouse over the desktop, focus stays in the last window I was on.
A quick Google would've shown you that, by the way.
Another feature, which I don't enable, is a delayed raise -- after half a second or so (configurable) of hovering over a window, it's raised. I figure, that's either too long to wait when I could just click, or it's too short and I'll raise something I don't want. Besides, it's useful to have keyboard focus on a window which is underneath another one I'm looking at -- kind of an ad-hoc "always on top".
Speaking of which, it's been awhile since I've even tried to do this elsewhere, but I can right-click the title bar of a window, choose Advanced -> Keep Above Others. Windows certainly allows always-on-top windows, but I haven't seen the window manager itself support this.
I could go on...
despite all that it's *still* just on-par with IE.
So, IE passes Acid2 now? IE can render my standards-compliant pages now? And I suppose IE has Adblock, Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug now?
Of course you're going to question that last statement. But Firefox on this computer right now refuses to save cookies, for no reason whatsoever.
Yay, more anecdote wars. You've never seen IE do something similar?
I've cleared cookies, cleared the cache, disabled add-ons, checked the Options to ensure cookies were enabled, and nothing's fixed it. Maybe tonight I'll wipe it and reinstall, see if that helps.
Actually, I can think of a few things you haven't done that might help, and I suspect reinstalling Firefox alone won't help.
No, not going to tell you. You were pretty much an asshole from post 1. I suppose you can take solace in that Microsoft won't refuse to help you for personal reasons -- they'll just find another reason to refuse to help you.
1) Didn't appreciate the quality of Mac OS 9's UI. i.e. casual users who don't notice things like that
Not sure how relevant that is, especially when "casual users" are often used as a barometer of how "usable" an interface is.
2) Moved to Macintosh only after OS X came out, so they have no frame of reference
That's me -- the few times I used a Mac before that, the technical problems you've mentioned were a serious obstacle.
But, there are things I liked about the post OS X world, strictly from a UI perspective, compared to what I remember from OS9. The dock is one; Bash is another.
And there are things it's never done, like sloppy focus.
The wifi dongle: Depends on the manufacturer. However, wifi which "just works" internally will also just work on a USB dongle.
Just for fun: Gigabit ExpressCard. ZERO configuration. Plug into laptop, plug into ethernet, done.
Capture card: I honestly don't know, I haven't tried. However, given KnoppMyth, I would think that the creators of that distro wouldn't expect their users to configure a capture card (via the commandline) on every single boot. And again, USB doesn't really change it much.
HDTV antenna is almost certainly part of that capture card, or it's a capture card of its own.
I'd be shocked if the vast majority of users have any of these.
Linux can't auto-detect what resolution the monitor is, but it *can* somehow telepathically tell which monitor consumers are going to buy with their new computer?
I didn't say it can't. I said the problem is avoidable.
Trivial example: Buy a new computer with the monitor. Obvious example is a laptop.
Your point applies to laptops, well, until the user makes use of the conveniently-placed VGA/DVI port on the side of it,
HDMI, in my case. Works fine.
but for desktops, just admit it: Linux *sucks* at configuring monitors. It sucks at doing it automatically, it sucks at doing it manually, it just sucks at it.
I'll admit that it could be better. I dispute that it's as bad as you claim.
Windows doesn't tend to autodetect monitors very well. OS X does, but still requires me to configure it for anything other than "clone mode", which is retarded under most circumstances -- and it absolutely WILL NOT configure a laptop to not use its internal screen. My powerbook's screen broke, and even if I use that handy little DVI port, my choices are to either use dual-monitor mode (in which one monitor, the one with the dock, is hidden), or use clone mode, in which my desktop monitor is limited to exactly the Powerbook's resolution, or worse.
By the way: "just admit it"? What is this, high school? I'm out.
That may be done because it's relatively easy compared to PhotoShop, and/or because they are afraid of losing the market to cheaper/FOSS alternatives.
I suspect they would port PhotoShop, if desktop Linux became a sufficiently large market. After all, Photoshop is still on OS X.
Reader: there are better alternatives to this.
Indeed; I use Okular. But the fact that it's been ported means Adobe clearly is capable of doing Linux ports, when they want to.
Luckily the free alternative pdf viewers do not have that restriction,
Well, some restrictions, they do -- for instance, if you purchase a DRM'd PDF eBook, don't expect to be able to open it with anything but Reader. In fact, it won't even open with Reader on Linux, last I tried.
Most technical eBooks, oddly enough, tend to be published independently and in a PDF which is at worst slightly watermarked.
But what is hilarious is the checkbox in Okular's settings: "Obey DRM limitations". Enabled by default, trivial to disable, and just as much fun as bypassing DVDs forcing you to watch previews by putting them in VLC.
Right there you hit the nail on the head, and did not notice it!
I noticed it...
Here's the difference: They have a grant that isn't local. It's a state grant, if I understand.
And, grants don't necessarily imply the kind of oversight I'm talking about. Lisco has a grant, which distorts the market, yes. But I can't march down to the town hall and demand that grant money back, especially when they are technically using it for what they promised -- just with a few restrictions that I, personally, consider unreasonable.
The problem is, of course, that you can't anticipate (with a grant like that) every single law you'd have to follow, and it wouldn't be fair to the grantee to suddenly change the rules and demand your money back. However, government projects get canceled all the time.
Let me ask you this: How are utilities handled? When was the last time anyone here bitched about their water bill? Literal hydraulic despotism doesn't happen, and it's precisely because of government interference.
Even in high school, most could bring a PC. Remember, we are talking about gamers.
However, as gamers with money tend to buy new computers, and as it tends to be difficult to upgrade a machine rather than buying a new one (when you consider that the RAM and CPU socket will have changed by then, you WILL want a new video card, the only thing you won't care about is the hard disk, and there will be much bigger, cheaper onesn...)
So, we'd always have one or two older, but still serviceable machines. Maybe they'd have ebayed for some small amount, but it was nice having them around.
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I wouldn't lock down these settings
On this much I agree -- I'm very much a fan of having users be in control of their own systems, so long as they're willing to accept the responsibility for whatever they've changed.
On that note, I might try to see if they can have their pay docked that $75/year...
Thing is, neither of the examples you give were intended by developers at all.
Yes. That was precisely my point.
I understand that's the nature of so-called "emergent gameplay", but these are one-in-a-million abberations, and both required direct involvement from the developers running the game (in that they were special dev-controlled in-game events).
In the Eve case, the direct involvement actually caused the opposite of the intended effect.
In the Everquest case, the direct involvement (beyond creating the event in the first place) almost ruined it. Making the creature go poof at 30% was not cool.
Actually designing a game to support and encourage such gameplay would be virtually impossible. How do you design a system to reliably produce unexpected results that are actually enjoyable?
By designing a system that allows such things to happen.
In particular, by:
- Creating wide open game mechanics
- Using them consistently yourself (Sleeper could be killed, it was just hard)
- Examine every angle for gameplay implications first -- bugs can be fun.
Another example of "emergent gameplay" -- In Halo 2, attempting to attack someone with the sword from close enough will charge at them (faster than a player can normally move) and attack. There was a bug in which switching weapons between the sword and something else -- like a sniper rifle -- could cause this effect to be triggered from much farther away -- like, sniper range.
Bungie fixed this in multiplayer, so people couldn't cheat. They left it in single-player, since it's actually somewhat difficult and very fun when you pull it off, and apparently doesn't cause any other critical bugs.
YOU know that a Mac and a PC are pretty much just Intel boxes now and I know they are pretty much Intel boxes now, but the public?
Knows that a Mac can run Windows.
The problem is the Linux boxes today look NO different than what I can get from Dell, HP, or hell even Tigerdirect.
It isn't enough for the software inside to look different? Frankly, Compiz looks better than Vista, to my eyes.
Why do you think the Windows Netbooks are totally slaughtering the Linux Netbooks, even while placing a decade old OS(XP) against the newest and coolest Linux has to offer? Because they look like every other Windows box they have ever had
Really? The EEE looked like no Windows box I have ever seen.
No, Windows is slaughtering Linux there partly for all the same reasons it always has -- it isn't "better enough" -- and partly because Microsoft and the vendors have generally either not shown a significant markup for Windows vs Linux on those machines, or they've made the Windows ones more powerful, so that even a Linux user might want to buy the better Windows version and format it with Linux.
I have installed more copies of OO.O and had to deal with more "downgrade rights" with Vista than I care to name, because folks honestly despise them.
Unfortunately, not enough to make a difference, so far.
But you are wrong about having to learn new MSFT OSes pre Vista. To this day one of my most requested "mods" is to "make it look like the old one" which is of course right click on start>click properties>Classic start menu which makes it the same old boring ass grey that has been Windows since Win95.
I suppose if they are willing to pay others to do that...
However, many parts of XP behave differently than 2K -- the system tray now hides icons. The control panel has been rearranged, and it is more than just skin-deep...
For that matter, 95 behaved considerably differently than 3.1, which behaved considerably differently than DOS.
I do think it has changed recently -- if anything, people have gotten lazier. Vista isn't that much of a change over XP compared to 95 over 3.1, but Vista is where people are actually talking about moving to Linux, or staying with XP for another five years, rather than dealing with the newness.
Even so, the vast majority just follow the herd.
Because you will never get folks to accept the Dell they just bought won't do the same thing the Dell they had does and that is a good thing.
It seems that this was at least somewhat true with Vista.
I think your approach would be very helpful, but I don't think it's necessary. After all, one of the main selling points about Linux is freedom for the users -- I realize you think people don't care, and it isn't high on the list of priorities, but it is something they appreciate once they understand.
People do like Hackintoshes... So I think the way this would work is, you demonstrate your shiny new UbuntuBook, and if they aren't ready to buy new hardware, you point out that it will run on a PC.
At $20 an hour it doesn't take but 1, maybe 2 show stoppers to pay for the cost of XP Home, which will make all those troubles magically go away.
I am a bit surprised... XP Home doesn't have its own, similar problems? You don't find yourself having to dig them out from under a pile of spyware?
No campaigning, no petitioning, no marching or demonstrating â" just call and switch...
It is incredibly difficult to find an area where this is possible. For most of us, it's "move and switch" or "stay and deal".
Slashdot is not the forum, where utilities are regularly discussed.
Irrelevant. The question was whether this is something people have complaints about it. I think you've answered that.
water quality varies widely and is regulated not by customer demand, but by bureaucracies at town, state, and federal level...
I would certainly trust a bureaucracy which at least theoretically has my best interests at heart, than a corporation which has only its bottom line to consider. I mean, you don't want to be in the situation where you just "call and switch" because the water actually started causing health problems.
Granted, these aren't entirely mutually exclusive -- but we still have things like health inspectors, and they do occasionally find disturbing things.
Why do they still need to come to my house to read the meter?
Why do they need to come over to turn off non-payers (and charge the delinquents extra $15 or so for the pleasure)?
Do you honestly think the private sector would get rid of either of these?
Coming to your house to read the meter -- maybe. Extra $15 to turn off non-payers? I'd be surprised if it wasn't an extra $50.
Why wouldn't the utilities offer hot water as extra service (doing so would allow heating centrally â" and, possibly, for less), or really cold water to cool houses down in summer?
I suppose that might work. It might also end up being less efficient. Right now, the most efficient hot water heater I know of actually heats water as it enters the building, rather than storing it in a tank to heat.
The answer is, government ownership kills innovation â" and leads to inferior service.
The answer is, it is not black and white. There are just as many corrupt, creaky, broken corporate bureaucracies as government bureaucracies. And while it's rare, you do occasionally see a lean, mean, governmental machine.
Net neutrality, like water quality, is something the government at least needs to regulate. Copyright is arguable. The right to tinker absolutely should not be interfered with by the government -- at least the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA needs to go, now.
Of course, given your sig, it seems unlikely I will hear any sort of well thought out opinions out of you -- more kneejerk, symbolic reactions.
Do you honestly think Prince of Persia has no dev tools? How do you think it was created?
No, I don't think dev tools are a measure for how "complex" a game is, certainly not for the difficulty that went into it.
The difference you're missing is "multiplayer" vs "massively multiplayer".
What makes WoW worth playing is that it weaves an interesting, huge, persistent, shared world, not that this world has an interesting plot.
I'm sure the plot helps, but face it, eventually you run out of plot. Eventually, you have to make your own. To the hardcore players, the plot of WoW matters about as much as the plot of Counter-Strike does to any but the most casual CS player.
That, and there's simply more to do in WoW. How many times can you play de_dust before it gets boring?
I understand that there's a certain challenge and art that's lost -- that of the narrative. This is still possible, but more difficult, and often users can completely throw off your plans. It has to be a much faster-paced, more dynamic story -- the kind you live as a GM, not the kind you write as an author.
But now you have the completely different problem, just as challenging, of balancing gameplay mechanics, storyline, politics, and everything else that makes up a community.
Ultimately, it's likely to be more frustrating for you, but more fun for the gamers -- which is really the point.
One example, a well-known story from Eve Online: The developers created a long event, with a fair amount of plot and depth. The first part of it involved getting a bunch of small ships to attack some huge battlecruiser, that they had no business fighting -- but get enough small players together, and they'd have a shot. Great way for newbies to have some fun.
Problem is, some fairly powerful pirates -- possibly a guild or two -- got wind of this, killed the target ship, then set up an ambush and massacred all the newbies.
The bad: That whole plotline, and all the work that had gone into it, had to be scrapped.
The good: This story has become legend. It actually makes me want to play Eve, knowing my actions, as a player, could have that much impact on the game.
Another, probably more well-known example: The Sleeper, in Everquest. This was a creature that is several times more powerful than gods in that game -- in fact, if I'm not mistaken, several thousand times more powerful than any one god. It can only be awoken once per server, and once awake, you only get one attempt to kill it, or it can never be attempted again on that server.
This creature was simply not intended to be killed.
However, instead of actually making it invincible, the developers just gave it insanely high vitality, and the ability to pretty much one-hit anything, and sometimes several things at once. This is cool -- using actual game mechanics, rather than top-down "make it so" directives, to enforce the idea that this thing is hardcore.
Well, some players killed it. It took about 300 players or so, but they did it.
And again, this is exactly what the developers did not want. In fact, the first attempt, they simply deleted the creature when it got to around 30%. Players were outraged enough that, once they were sure that killing it wouldn't cause a bug, they reset the event and allowed the players to try again. This time, they won.
The point isn't that you shouldn't bother to create well-written, finely-crafted events. In fact, without a rich world around him, and without his own nicely scripted event, The Sleeper would just be another dragon. Yawn.
The point is that players will do things that are completely unexpected. They'll do things that surprise you, frustrate you, and go directly against what you intended.
And you will never understand this medium until you understand that this is the best thing that can happen. Games are great because this can happen.
If I went to the trouble to throw out my entire system and start over, just to get Ubuntu,
You kind of have to do that to get OS X. You certainly have to do that if you want to compare on a level playing-field -- if your computer was designed to run Windows, be glad Ubuntu runs on it at all.
Yes, Ubuntu has excellent hardware support. But there's always going to be something weird and something new.
I have yet to see a Linux setup where they didn't skimp you on the hardware
Odd. Dell seems to be decent.
Well, failing that, what you could do is find a system which can ship with Linux, and get the Windows model. Even that is risky -- my laptop has a different wireless card on the Ubuntu version.
they have already HAD 14 YEARS of Windows "education"
Much of which is useless, as they've had to re-learn with each upgrade. OpenOffice is likely easier to learn than Office 2007, for people who have used older versions of Office.
Either you make it behave like Windows or fail, because you don't have the "cool" factor on your side like Mac has.
I'd much rather see it be "cool" than see it cripple itself by behaving like Windows.
To a certain extent, I understand. But it's a dangerous direction.
The only problem in our diverging viewpoints that I can see is that you seem to think folks WANT to learn new things,
I haven't said that, either.
are able to grasp things like complex and frankly dangerous Unix commands.
Haven't said that, either. The user should not have to know about the CLI, beyond (maybe) being able to paste commands from my IM window into their terminal, and paste the output back to me.
Trying to sell "free as in freedom" won't work,
Dude, you are ranting, and you clearly haven't been paying attention. I haven't used the words "free as in freedom" once in this whole fucking thread.
Linux doesn't have multi million dollar ad campaigns,
Really?
I have yet to see a Linux only "killer app" that would make folks throw away all their hardware and software just to learn Ubuntu.
1) No need to throw away your hardware. However, if you use hardware you purchased for Windows or OS X, and you're complaining that Linux is harder to setup, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Try buying, say, a Vista laptop, and installing XP. Windows is no better than Linux in this regard, except that Windows has better pre-install options.
2) The "killer app" thing? You're pretty much echoing my arguments back to me. Click up a few times and you'll find me saying this:
Linux has to be better than Windows in many ways before someone is willing to switch. And emulating Windows (better AD integration, for example) is important, but not nearly as important as developing the things that truly differentiate us.
A "killer app" is one of those things.
So if you want the Windows users you will have to conform to them, not vice versa.
As I've said, this way leads to ReactOS, and to stagnation. I would much rather have Linux stay small than go that route.
Did Firefox have to conform to IE's bugs to get where it is today?
And believe it or not, users do respond to innovation, and to new and different ideas. Marketing alone isn't enough to sell OS X -- it has to actually be worth the expense and the effort, in some way other than "my laptop is shiny aluminum".
I haven't seen anything in the Linux world that would make my customers throw out all their previous knowledge and hardware just to run it.
It also doesn't require throwing out all of your previous knowledge. You've
Of course, there are other (probably easier) ways to escape virtualization as well
Interesting. I suspect Amazon might like to know about this.
And none of those get you as far as (your example) jQuery does on the web. As a ex-Mac user, I can assure that every one of those toolkits is fundamentally flawed on at *least* OS X, and most are flawed on Windows as well. For example, GTK+ can't even use the OS-standard Open/Save dialogs.
Swing? Really?
Being able to use OS-specific features is nice, but not a requirement. The important point is whether you can provide a consistent UI across platforms -- whether portability is actually to the "crosscompile and forget" stage, or even "compile once, run anywhere".
I can say that I haven't really seen Windows-specific Java apps, except where they go out of their way to use either MS Java features or Windows-only libraries.
I agree that the web is better, but not so much for those reasons. There's a whole different set of reasons it's better, but I'm not sure they quite add up to "easier to develop for".
Server 2003, Vista, and Server 2008 are supposed to have 100% CLI coverage.
I will say that having things accessible via the commandline is not sufficient to have a good CLI. Nor is a good shell sufficient. But if that's true, it's definitely better than what I remember.
And yes I tried Ubuntu, the last being 8.04 I believe. I had problems with sound and resolution and both times was told to launch bash.
Did you buy it with Ubuntu preinstalled?
As the other poster noted, something as simple as a "run as admin" button, which if you are going to enforce security on Windows users is mandatory, is non existent in the default configuration.
The vast majority of situations, from before Vista existed, would automatically prompt for the sudo password.
As for Exchange, the Windows world owns the business, especially SMBs. If you expect to gain a foothold in that world you have to learn to play nice.
For SMBs, I'd start out trying to convince them to switch their server infrastructure to Linux. Nothing for the users to learn, easier admin for the admin types.
Just as the Samba folks added supported for SMB so too does anyone who intends to gain a foothold in the business need to support Exchange.
And this is being worked on. Actually, it's done, but probably lacking a few things...
You are well educated with most likely an IT background and things like scripts and CLI come easy to you.
That is true. I have also worked with users who do not have an IT background, and found that Linux is just as easy for them as other platforms.
That is, not always easy, but not particularly horrible. There are practical concerns, like "Will Quickbooks work?" But that's not a problem with the UI, unless you argue that Wine should be installed by default.
They are used to a Windows world where everything comes with a shiny CD that has a nice video of a pretty girl or nice guy that holds their hand and walks them through even the simplest job, such as installing their new printer.
I prefer to plug in a printer and have it autodetected. But there's also "open up 'system' and look for anything that says 'printer' on it, then click 'add'."
thinking that because shell scripts are easy for YOU that they should be easy for THEM equals total failure.
I have never said this. Old, old strawman. Shame on you.
You simply have to decide if the changes required are worth pursuing to gain them as customers.
I would say, if they have no willingness to learn, then the changes are not worth it, because it would turn Linux into ReactOS.
They have to have some willingness to learn. Oh, they'll claim they have none, and that they have no time for it, but it happens anyway. The question is whether that learning is obvious and a struggle, or whether it's "natural" and "intuitive".
But computers are practically the only system for which people demand this sort of "intuitiveness". Anything else, in any other job, or with any other tool, you'd require training, and you wouldn't expect to know how to use it without that training, no matter how simple it looks.
For instance: I know, in principle, how I would use a jackhammer. But in reality, there's all sorts of details I'd need to know, like how to hold it without hurting myself, how it's powered, what I might need in terms of earmuffs/goggles, etc.
Every teenager thinks they know how to drive. Obvious enough -- this pedal is gas, this pedal is brake, turn the wheel left and it goes left... Ok, now how do you adjust your mirrors, or your seat? How do you tune the radio? Where's the gearshift? When do you signal? How do you dig it out from under a foot of snow? Or a half inch of ice? How often do you need to change the oil?
I haven't even gone into the stuff you need to know when you open the hood.
If computers are to improve in any meaningful way -- and in particular, if computer security is going to improve in any meaningful way -- we are going to have to get past this attitude that computers should require zero learning, and
No, you're doing the math wrong. That's not "the rest of the world", that's "the rest of the *web developers* in the world".
Somehow seems at odds with Microsoft's focus on developers, developers, developers, developers.
For every web developer user who wants standards support, there are maybe a thousand non-web-developer users who want more speed, more browser features, better usability, better security, etc.
Other browsers have generally been ahead of the curve here, for a long time. Honestly, the last time IE had any sort of advantage was against Netscape 4.
It's not really web-ready, as it doesn't have plug-in support or even Javascript at the moment, and it's super-slow... but if Microsoft were to replace the rendering engine of IE, they'd use that one, since it's developed in-house.
Ah, NIH syndrome at its finest. All these other engines have plenty of javascript support, plugins, and speed.
Contrast this to Google and Apple -- Apple adopted KHTML to make Webkit, and Google adopted Webkit. How long did it take each of them to go from zero to a decent browser?
More Slashdot posting?
Back at ya.
Look, whether you like (or admit) it or not, IE shares something like 95% of the standard with every other browser. That's damned good.
Wine implements something like 95% of the Windows API. That's also damned good.
What matters is what's in that missing 5%.
If you were writing a cross-platform desktop application, you'd find that virtually every widget works entirely different between OS X, Windows, Gnome, and KDE...
Fortunately, for desktop applications, there's gtk+, qt, wxwidgets, tk, even swing and such.
And while things like jQuery are starting to make this easier on the Web, it's still not fun. The sad thing is, there is actually a standard there -- whereas there isn't really a standard for cross-platform application development.
Unless you count things like Java. So IE is kind of like when Microsoft broke Java.
Your job *is* easy.
My job, I have to use Javascript, HTML, and CSS on the client-side, unless I'm feeling really masochistic and decide to use Flash.
On the server-side, I can use whatever I want, and that is helpful. But the client is limited to precisely those technologies.
Were I developing desktop applications, I'd have a much wider selection of frameworks to choose from, with far fewer implementation differences... It's also possible I wouldn't have to deal with things like HTTP at all, depending on what I was building.
For one thing, CSS has multiple measures, some of which are machine-relative and some of which aren't. Why can't I set the height of something to "5em + 5px"?
Good point, I suppose that would be useful. I guess the kludge is to stack some divs inside it... ew.
The fact that you *also* lacked the imagination to come up with a scenario like this just tells me that you've been working in CSS too long.
That, or I just don't often run into that scenario -- I tend towards simpler designs.
IE had a Javascript debugger before Firefox existed,
Debugging is part of what Firebug does. The DOM inspector and the live CSS tweaking is equally useful.
Unless you like the fact that one application can't bring down the entire system quite as easily.
In practice, how often did that happen?
Probably about as often as it did on Win95, come to think of it.
They added always-visible text labels to the Dock?
Possibly. However, the size absolutely is configurable, and I wouldn't be
I'll correct you a bit further -- there are different kinds of physical access. For instance, a public computer lab might have machines which have their case locked, both to prevent it from being opened and to prevent it from being locked down, BIOS locked and configured to boot only from hard disk, bootloader locked, etc.
On such a machine, there's really not a lot you can do to compromise it without some sort of actual software vulnerability or misconfiguration. You might be able to add a physical keylogger -- maybe -- depends how kiosk-ified it is.
However, this does not appear to be such an attack. Rather, it seems this is an attack which requires you to boot the machine off of some other media. Most machines are wide open to this in many ways -- the more frightening one was PXE; just plug a laptop into the same network and own every machine as it boots.
But Vista is not unique in this respect, and I cannot imagine how an OS could protect itself against such an attack. And even network boots can be secured, if you can add just a kernel and initrd to local storage.
FYI, Vista has good drivers out-of-the-box. XP does too, if you have a XP SP2 disk, but the original XP disk doesn't include them.
XP SP3 did not include the video drivers for my laptop. Tried nvidia.com, they told me to contact the manufacturer. Tried dell.com, they only had Vista drivers. Ended up having to chat with a Dell tech, who gave me links to various drivers for other models in the same series.
All told, the process of setting up all my drivers took several hours.
Ubuntu, it was all just there, out of the box. It had its own problems, but I did not have to spend several hours just tracking down drivers before I could even get started.
I could have, but if you're trying to convince me, you'd do better defining terms that aren't commonly-known.
I don't define other terms that aren't commonly-known, like UAC, or Acid2, etc. Common etiquette is: When you don't know something, go to justfuckinggoogleit.com and at least make an effort before you run your mouth.
"Standards-compliant" isn't a feature. It's a fucking waste of time. Let's spend 80% of our developer time changing parts of the program that end-users NEVER SEE, only web developers do.
Yes, so that the rest of the world can spend an extra 20% of their time, on every single website, to benefit your browser.
How about this: Since everyone else is already much closer, why not ditch Trident and embed Webkit or Gecko?
Oh, and despite that, web developers will have to test in each browser *anyway*. So you're barely saving even that tiny percentage of users any time anyway.
Clearly, you are not a web developer.
I can develop in Firefox. I can then test in other browsers to make sure it still works -- and it does. Maybe once every several months I introduce a problem that doesn't show up in Firefox, but does in other browsers.
Except IE. That's several times a week, sometimes several times a day. And never something trivial, usually some brutally ugly hack that I have to add. There's a reason I now maintain an ie.css file on any site I have to make work on IE.
Maybe you're jealous of my "easy" job, but if IE was gone tomorrow, I'd have 20% more time to spend doing something useful. And we all know what happens with 20% time.
Of course, you've shown your cards, you're squarely an MS fanboi -- so I am sure, in your world, other browsers should just suck it up and conform to the defacto standard, and the Web should go back to the 90's habit of slapping "best viewed in IE x.x" disclaimers on the page and calling it a day.
Oh, and despite that, web development is still a shit process because the web standards are shit anyway.
Not an excuse for breaking them, and making it even less fun.
CSS can't even do math! Seriously, WTF.
CSS is a styling language. WTF do I need math for?
Nobody in the real world ever picked their web browser due to standards support.
Which has no bearing on its measure of a browser's worth.
And I've yet to have a single person convince me that the XHTML standard is worthwhile. What's the point of a webpage validating as XML? What does it gain me that I can't already do?
The ability to parse it -- quickly -- with an XML parser. It's also the basis for things like microformats.
It's just a giant waste of W3C time
Honestly, how much time was it?
"Standards-compliance" is just a gigantic geek-wank started by some pissy web developers who think their already-extremely-easy job is just too hard.
Oh, first the standards were crap, and now the job is "easy"?
It has equivalents to each of those. They don't have the same name
OK, so I looked briefly for such an add-on, and the only one I saw had poor reviews (uneditable blacklist of words, plus the words would display for a couple seconds before being replaced by ***).
It should be trivial to create a Greasemonkey script, but it would have the same limitations.
I don't really care, though.
The habits really aren't that bad, unless you're already familiar with computers.
There's a certain amount of familiarity which really should be expected by now. For example:
In a sane world, clicking a link saying something like "WARNING! YOU HAVE A VIRUS!" shouldn't infect your computer with a virus.
In a sane world, when that homeless guy says he needs money for food, he'll actually spend it on food, not beer and hookers.
In a sane world, when the stranger says "I've got candy in my van!", he really does, and you can leave whenever you want.
You know what? In a truly sane world, people wouldn't be so fucking gullible. All it takes is the tiniest smidge of healthy skepticism, and she'd be safe.
Just be forewarned... this will bork your views of plenty of other posters, not just people who have posted profanity.
That is true of any filter. For example:
Not that anyone who uses Profanity Blacklist will ever read this post, since on occasion I use profanity.
Yet your post would be totally appropriate for children without the "fuckers" at the end.
I'd rather see kids exposed to the occasional F-word than miss out on valuable education. After all, if they're on Slashdot (and not 4chan), the truly disturbing posts will be slammed to -1 before they have a chance to see them anyway.
It's immune for now -- I suppose it's better than nothing, but she really should learn better habits, no matter what system she's on.
You're either a liar, or the last version of Windows you used was Windows 98. Either way, wrong.
XP. Sometimes it works, but it did not seem to automatically hotplug. And this was, of course, once drivers were installed -- drivers that Ubuntu and OS X provide out of the box.
My snarky point was that Linux has multiple GUIs, so you can't just say "the GUI is better" without specifying WHICH ONE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!
Actually, I can, partly because having multiple GUIs is a feature. But since we were talking about Ubuntu, there are also things in GNOME that I'd miss on Windows.
Anyway, your definition of "better" seems to equate to "more configurable."
Nope. Equates to "can do what I want." Configurability is part of that, but that's a means to an end.
For example, the keystrokes I mentioned in KWin simply do not exist, configurable or not, on Windows or OS X. If they did exist, they were not discoverable. Usability is more than discoverability, but discoverability helps.
The other example, well...
I can't judge "sloppy focus" unless you bother to explain what it is.
Most GUIs, including most Linux GUIs (by default), default to click-to-focus. That is, keyboard focus stays in the window it is until you explicitly switch to another window, by alt+tabbing or clicking.
Another option is focus-follows-mouse -- whatever the mouse is on top of has keyboard focus.
Sloppy focus is basically focus-follows-mouse, only it ignores the root window -- that is, if I move the mouse over the desktop, focus stays in the last window I was on.
A quick Google would've shown you that, by the way.
Another feature, which I don't enable, is a delayed raise -- after half a second or so (configurable) of hovering over a window, it's raised. I figure, that's either too long to wait when I could just click, or it's too short and I'll raise something I don't want. Besides, it's useful to have keyboard focus on a window which is underneath another one I'm looking at -- kind of an ad-hoc "always on top".
Speaking of which, it's been awhile since I've even tried to do this elsewhere, but I can right-click the title bar of a window, choose Advanced -> Keep Above Others. Windows certainly allows always-on-top windows, but I haven't seen the window manager itself support this.
I could go on...
despite all that it's *still* just on-par with IE.
So, IE passes Acid2 now? IE can render my standards-compliant pages now? And I suppose IE has Adblock, Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug now?
Of course you're going to question that last statement. But Firefox on this computer right now refuses to save cookies, for no reason whatsoever.
Yay, more anecdote wars. You've never seen IE do something similar?
I've cleared cookies, cleared the cache, disabled add-ons, checked the Options to ensure cookies were enabled, and nothing's fixed it. Maybe tonight I'll wipe it and reinstall, see if that helps.
Actually, I can think of a few things you haven't done that might help, and I suspect reinstalling Firefox alone won't help.
No, not going to tell you. You were pretty much an asshole from post 1. I suppose you can take solace in that Microsoft won't refuse to help you for personal reasons -- they'll just find another reason to refuse to help you.
1) Didn't appreciate the quality of Mac OS 9's UI. i.e. casual users who don't notice things like that
Not sure how relevant that is, especially when "casual users" are often used as a barometer of how "usable" an interface is.
2) Moved to Macintosh only after OS X came out, so they have no frame of reference
That's me -- the few times I used a Mac before that, the technical problems you've mentioned were a serious obstacle.
But, there are things I liked about the post OS X world, strictly from a UI perspective, compared to what I remember from OS9. The dock is one; Bash is another.
And there are things it's never done, like sloppy focus.
The wifi dongle: Depends on the manufacturer. However, wifi which "just works" internally will also just work on a USB dongle.
Just for fun: Gigabit ExpressCard. ZERO configuration. Plug into laptop, plug into ethernet, done.
Capture card: I honestly don't know, I haven't tried. However, given KnoppMyth, I would think that the creators of that distro wouldn't expect their users to configure a capture card (via the commandline) on every single boot. And again, USB doesn't really change it much.
HDTV antenna is almost certainly part of that capture card, or it's a capture card of its own.
I'd be shocked if the vast majority of users have any of these.
Linux can't auto-detect what resolution the monitor is, but it *can* somehow telepathically tell which monitor consumers are going to buy with their new computer?
I didn't say it can't. I said the problem is avoidable.
Trivial example: Buy a new computer with the monitor. Obvious example is a laptop.
Your point applies to laptops, well, until the user makes use of the conveniently-placed VGA/DVI port on the side of it,
HDMI, in my case. Works fine.
but for desktops, just admit it: Linux *sucks* at configuring monitors. It sucks at doing it automatically, it sucks at doing it manually, it just sucks at it.
I'll admit that it could be better. I dispute that it's as bad as you claim.
Windows doesn't tend to autodetect monitors very well. OS X does, but still requires me to configure it for anything other than "clone mode", which is retarded under most circumstances -- and it absolutely WILL NOT configure a laptop to not use its internal screen. My powerbook's screen broke, and even if I use that handy little DVI port, my choices are to either use dual-monitor mode (in which one monitor, the one with the dock, is hidden), or use clone mode, in which my desktop monitor is limited to exactly the Powerbook's resolution, or worse.
By the way: "just admit it"? What is this, high school? I'm out.
That may be done because it's relatively easy compared to PhotoShop, and/or because they are afraid of losing the market to cheaper/FOSS alternatives.
I suspect they would port PhotoShop, if desktop Linux became a sufficiently large market. After all, Photoshop is still on OS X.
Reader: there are better alternatives to this.
Indeed; I use Okular. But the fact that it's been ported means Adobe clearly is capable of doing Linux ports, when they want to.
Luckily the free alternative pdf viewers do not have that restriction,
Well, some restrictions, they do -- for instance, if you purchase a DRM'd PDF eBook, don't expect to be able to open it with anything but Reader. In fact, it won't even open with Reader on Linux, last I tried.
Most technical eBooks, oddly enough, tend to be published independently and in a PDF which is at worst slightly watermarked.
But what is hilarious is the checkbox in Okular's settings: "Obey DRM limitations". Enabled by default, trivial to disable, and just as much fun as bypassing DVDs forcing you to watch previews by putting them in VLC.
iCab indeed invented ad-filtering.
Are you sure it wasn't in proxies before that?
(Yes someday linux will also copy an efficient RSS reader too, probably)
Akregator seems OK, but I haven't really bothered to look for one.
Right there you hit the nail on the head, and did not notice it!
I noticed it...
Here's the difference: They have a grant that isn't local. It's a state grant, if I understand.
And, grants don't necessarily imply the kind of oversight I'm talking about. Lisco has a grant, which distorts the market, yes. But I can't march down to the town hall and demand that grant money back, especially when they are technically using it for what they promised -- just with a few restrictions that I, personally, consider unreasonable.
The problem is, of course, that you can't anticipate (with a grant like that) every single law you'd have to follow, and it wouldn't be fair to the grantee to suddenly change the rules and demand your money back. However, government projects get canceled all the time.
Let me ask you this: How are utilities handled? When was the last time anyone here bitched about their water bill? Literal hydraulic despotism doesn't happen, and it's precisely because of government interference.
Even in high school, most could bring a PC. Remember, we are talking about gamers.
However, as gamers with money tend to buy new computers, and as it tends to be difficult to upgrade a machine rather than buying a new one (when you consider that the RAM and CPU socket will have changed by then, you WILL want a new video card, the only thing you won't care about is the hard disk, and there will be much bigger, cheaper onesn...)
So, we'd always have one or two older, but still serviceable machines. Maybe they'd have ebayed for some small amount, but it was nice having them around.