- Wake-on-LAN for the work machine
- VPN + second machine at home
- VPN + home machine
- VPN + company laptop (home and work)
- Terminal server at work, with relevant stuff installed
- many, many more
Being religious in no way means you can't have a high IQ.
It almost certainly means, however, that you're willing to turn off that intellect when it comes to certain topics. If they can do that for religion, they can do that for Facebook.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that it's for "attention-starved tweens". I do avoid most of these services, though, because they are essentially walled gardens -- a modern version of the early 90's Internet, where you were an AOL user or a CompuServe user, and one couldn't talk to the other, unless you had an account with both. Similarly, you're Myspace or you're Facebook.
Then people got smart and implemented modern, interoperable browsing and email, where I can have an email address on my own domain, and I can send mail to AOL users, and they can reply, and I never have to have any sort of account with AOL. Same with browsing -- no need to remember "AOL Keywords", I just remember a domain (or a search term) and it works everywhere.
XFN and OpenID are steps in the right direction, but the adoption of those is way too low for me to get excited about social networks.
I am indirectly involved, as I pay Amazon, and Amazon pays their ISP.
In fact, I can only assume that Amazon pays considerably less than that, as even if we disregard what value they provide, they would of course be making a profit.
I am sure Apple has patented some of the cooler things about the new Macbooks. I have to admit, I want one, with that magnetic power plug, the solid aluminum case, etc.
But it's more than just costing more for the hardware -- they have exactly the same tax Microsoft does. If I buy a Mac, I will get OS X, there is no way around it.
What I really want is the option to buy a machine very similar to modern Macbooks, but with hardware known to support Linux, and without having to pay for an OS I don't intend to use.
That said, imagine if ReactOS actually successfully supports the Win32 driver model. That would be a big advantage because it makes it easy for hardware vendors to just continue supporting "Windows XP Compatible Operating Systems".
Maybe. The most important ones seem to get Linux shims, though -- for instance, Wireless would've been a big point, but ndiswrapper makes it easy.
I'm focusing on who you blame for the driver being shitty.
Yes, I covered that.
The manufacturer is under no obligation to provide the drivers
Yes, I agree. Repeating it doesn't make it any more relevant.
driver related stability issues are the fault of whoever made the drivers.
So if Microsoft were to hire a consulting firm to write all their drivers, and ban anyone else (including manufacturers) from writing drivers, who would be to blame for the shitty quality of those drivers?
By your logic, the consulting firm would be.
Certainly, Microsoft has no obligation to allow people to write drivers for their OS. Nor are they under any obligation to be fair in who they partner with. But they are clearly the ones most directly responsible for the fact that Windows drivers, from that point on, would most likely suck.
they didn't SELL you Linux support.
They also didn't sell me technical support, but I'd expect that if one was completely DOA, or acting very strangely, I could expect a response from the company.
Pure capitalism is fine. It's got nothing to do with ethics or common decency. Let's face it -- no one is going to eat Broadcom's lunch by knowing the specs -- or now the firmware, I suppose.
I am not suggesting they are evil or wrong for behaving this way, or that they should be expected to behave differently. But like a company which, say, dumps toxic waste, or sells "unlimited" connections that are quite capped and throttled, their actions are having an impact.
You seem unable to see this distinction, but I'm going to try to spell it out for you anyway, one more time: Saying they are to blame is not the same thing as saying they have an obligation, or that I have an entitlement. All I am saying is that they are the ones most directly responsible for this problem, and most able to resolve it.
If nVidia's shitty (unsigned) display drivers cause instability in Windows, it's nVidia's fault.
Partly, yes, and certainly by the above criteria. Also not relevant.
You don't get to blame Microsoft until they sign the shitty drivers
Which they do. Not only do they sign them, they give the manufacturers a cute little logo to put on the box. To me, that means Microsoft should at least share in the blame.
Likewise, you don't get to blame stability issues caused by ATI's shitty drivers in Linux on Red Hat, unless they specifically included them in the distro.
Ubuntu includes them, but with a clear warning, and the ability to disable them. I'm not sure how other distros handle it, but I suspect it's about the same.
However, Apple does have significantly fewer problems.
Simplest example: Try sleeping a Mac. Actually, you don't have to try -- close the Macbook, it goes to sleep. Open it, it wakes up.
Maybe Windows has improved, but it seems that if not at first, then eventually, there's some piece of hardware which either doesn't have the right driver, or has issues with the driver, or Windows just decides to shit itself when you try to resume...
The question isn't whether something has any driver problems, ever. It's whether it has driver problems so often that you'd consider the whole system unstable for that very reason.
Why should I recommend Ubuntu. Is it the right distro for everyone.
No, but it is popular, and it is better than Windows.
Popular, in open source, tends to correlate to goodness, except in extreme circumstances. This is because popularity doesn't just attract consumers, it attracts developers. This has both the indirect network effect Windows does -- anything that works on Linux, you can bet someone's grafted it onto Ubuntu, and either thrown up a package or written a howto -- and it has the more direct effect of speeding development on anything Ubuntu considers a core technology.
It's essentially this: Worse is better. Why recommend Linux, and not BSD or Solaris? Because Linux is popular.
After all, someone can always fork Ubuntu -- monopoly and monoculture does not mean death in nearly the same way as it does in proprietary software. Ubuntu cannot go out of business -- Canonical can, but Ubuntu will be forked and live on, as desktop Redhat was reborn as Fedora, as Netscape became Mozilla -- Ubuntu itself is a continual fork of Debian.
That, and Ubuntu does have commercial support (Canonical, Dell), it has desktop Linux pretty well done, and better than most others, it's based on Debian (I think RPM is icky, so I don't like Fedora)...
But mostly because it resolves that question. And it resolves the GNOME/KDE question, in much the same way -- you just use GNOME. If you want KDE, that implies you know enough to make your own decisions, so there's Kubuntu, and Xubuntu, and ubuntu-minimal + whatever your favorite WM/DE is, and there's always other distros, forks, and third-party repositories.
Personally, I use Ubuntu, but that doesn't put me too far off to help Ubuntu people -- it's all the same repositories anyway.
That's only worth it if people pick water slide parks based on how busy they are. If they mainly just select based on price and the 'Unlimited' feature then there isn't any point in building new slides.
Well, ultimately, they do pay attention -- AOL did see a bit of a decline.
But they also tend to pick water slide parks based on where they are. No one's going to move to another city just to visit the water slide.
Email is a different issue, easily solved, in most clients, by wrapping angle brackets around it. More intelligent clients will notice before it gets sent, and generate an actual HTML link.
According to GameSpot's [gamespot.com] review Day of Defeat is Half-Life mod released as standalone game.
Which has been adopted by Valve. Day of Defeat: Source has been released as both a standalone game, and as a game bundled with Half-Life 2, among other things.
Counter-Strike is another example, in which the roles are even more clearly defined as "good" and "evil" -- terrorists (who often have hostages, or are planting a bomb) and counter-terrorists. And the terrorists often win.
The key element isn't independence, it's multiplayer.
There is some functionality which will necessarily reduce performance, yes. But no other OS I know of requires a gig of RAM to run acceptably.
Moreover, there have been OSes which have run faster -- the 2.6 Linux kernel runs faster than 2.4. Windows 2000 runs faster, under certain circumstances (like accessing a floppy) than Windows 98.
Yet Vista is pretty much an automatic drop of some 10 FPS in various games, I'm told. And no, it doesn't magically make a DirectX 9 game look better -- just slower.
Yes, some amount of bloat is due to added functionality. Some of it is due to using higher level languages -- trading CPU cycles for programmer cycles.
And some of it is just gigantic fucking bloat.
However, when deciding to buy a new machine, why use an 8-9 year old operating system?
Mostly because it's better. In 8-9 years, Microsoft hasn't been able to beat XP, let alone their actual competitors.
When Microsoft controls the "vista capable" logo, the fact that a piece of hardware is branded "vista capable" means Microsoft has reviewed the driver and approved it. So absolutely, they should be responsible.
If they don't want to be responsible for a shitty drivers, they shouldn't hand out the logo to shitty drivers.
Correct. However, if they don't, it is them not supporting Linux, not the other way around.
Let's flip this around, since you seem fond of doing that. Would you apply the same logic to a Windows driver? That is, if a company released no Windows driver, no specs, and no documentation, would you consider it Microsoft's fault that said device doesn't work on Windows?
To make it even more concrete: When the iPod first came out, was anyone blaming Microsoft for not supporting it?
Of course not. You blame the manufacturer, and you likely don't buy their product.
Simply put, any given company has ZERO obligation to make their product what YOU want it to be; their only obligation is to make the product what they CLAIM it to be.
That is true. It doesn't change any of the above points.
I am not saying the manufacturer has any obligation to support Linux.
I am saying that if you consider it a bad thing for that hardware not to be supported, and you are looking for someone to blame, blame the manufacturers. It is not that difficult to publish specs.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be solved by:
- Wake-on-LAN for the work machine
- VPN + second machine at home
- VPN + home machine
- VPN + company laptop (home and work)
- Terminal server at work, with relevant stuff installed
- many, many more
Being religious in no way means you can't have a high IQ.
It almost certainly means, however, that you're willing to turn off that intellect when it comes to certain topics. If they can do that for religion, they can do that for Facebook.
For what it's worth, I don't agree that it's for "attention-starved tweens". I do avoid most of these services, though, because they are essentially walled gardens -- a modern version of the early 90's Internet, where you were an AOL user or a CompuServe user, and one couldn't talk to the other, unless you had an account with both. Similarly, you're Myspace or you're Facebook.
Then people got smart and implemented modern, interoperable browsing and email, where I can have an email address on my own domain, and I can send mail to AOL users, and they can reply, and I never have to have any sort of account with AOL. Same with browsing -- no need to remember "AOL Keywords", I just remember a domain (or a search term) and it works everywhere.
XFN and OpenID are steps in the right direction, but the adoption of those is way too low for me to get excited about social networks.
The irony is, of course, that one of the selling points of Flash is vector graphics, and one of the selling points of vector graphics is zoomability.
I am indirectly involved, as I pay Amazon, and Amazon pays their ISP.
In fact, I can only assume that Amazon pays considerably less than that, as even if we disregard what value they provide, they would of course be making a profit.
Dvorak has admitted in the past that he deliberately trolls in order to get traffic, and thus ad revenue.
I am therefore giving him neither traffic nor ad revenue, no matter how insightful his comment might be.
Multiple physical buttons, and HDMI out (not just DisplayPort). Please?
I am sure Apple has patented some of the cooler things about the new Macbooks. I have to admit, I want one, with that magnetic power plug, the solid aluminum case, etc.
But it's more than just costing more for the hardware -- they have exactly the same tax Microsoft does. If I buy a Mac, I will get OS X, there is no way around it.
What I really want is the option to buy a machine very similar to modern Macbooks, but with hardware known to support Linux, and without having to pay for an OS I don't intend to use.
Meaning either Amazon, or someone Amazon is paying.
Meaning my $0.17/gig is still going to pay for that.
That said, imagine if ReactOS actually successfully supports the Win32 driver model. That would be a big advantage because it makes it easy for hardware vendors to just continue supporting "Windows XP Compatible Operating Systems".
Maybe. The most important ones seem to get Linux shims, though -- for instance, Wireless would've been a big point, but ndiswrapper makes it easy.
I'm focusing on who you blame for the driver being shitty.
Yes, I covered that.
The manufacturer is under no obligation to provide the drivers
Yes, I agree. Repeating it doesn't make it any more relevant.
driver related stability issues are the fault of whoever made the drivers.
So if Microsoft were to hire a consulting firm to write all their drivers, and ban anyone else (including manufacturers) from writing drivers, who would be to blame for the shitty quality of those drivers?
By your logic, the consulting firm would be.
Certainly, Microsoft has no obligation to allow people to write drivers for their OS. Nor are they under any obligation to be fair in who they partner with. But they are clearly the ones most directly responsible for the fact that Windows drivers, from that point on, would most likely suck.
they didn't SELL you Linux support.
They also didn't sell me technical support, but I'd expect that if one was completely DOA, or acting very strangely, I could expect a response from the company.
Pure capitalism is fine. It's got nothing to do with ethics or common decency. Let's face it -- no one is going to eat Broadcom's lunch by knowing the specs -- or now the firmware, I suppose.
I am not suggesting they are evil or wrong for behaving this way, or that they should be expected to behave differently. But like a company which, say, dumps toxic waste, or sells "unlimited" connections that are quite capped and throttled, their actions are having an impact.
You seem unable to see this distinction, but I'm going to try to spell it out for you anyway, one more time: Saying they are to blame is not the same thing as saying they have an obligation, or that I have an entitlement. All I am saying is that they are the ones most directly responsible for this problem, and most able to resolve it.
If nVidia's shitty (unsigned) display drivers cause instability in Windows, it's nVidia's fault.
Partly, yes, and certainly by the above criteria. Also not relevant.
You don't get to blame Microsoft until they sign the shitty drivers
Which they do. Not only do they sign them, they give the manufacturers a cute little logo to put on the box. To me, that means Microsoft should at least share in the blame.
Likewise, you don't get to blame stability issues caused by ATI's shitty drivers in Linux on Red Hat, unless they specifically included them in the distro.
Ubuntu includes them, but with a clear warning, and the ability to disable them. I'm not sure how other distros handle it, but I suspect it's about the same.
Also, my sig kicks your sig's ass.
Haha. Neither in their current state would seriously be considered "Windows XP Compatible".
Yes, I know. Which doesn't answer my question.
You seem to be implying that ReactOS would be the better approach. I'm wondering why.
However, Apple does have significantly fewer problems.
Simplest example: Try sleeping a Mac. Actually, you don't have to try -- close the Macbook, it goes to sleep. Open it, it wakes up.
Maybe Windows has improved, but it seems that if not at first, then eventually, there's some piece of hardware which either doesn't have the right driver, or has issues with the driver, or Windows just decides to shit itself when you try to resume...
The question isn't whether something has any driver problems, ever. It's whether it has driver problems so often that you'd consider the whole system unstable for that very reason.
Why should I recommend Ubuntu. Is it the right distro for everyone.
No, but it is popular, and it is better than Windows.
Popular, in open source, tends to correlate to goodness, except in extreme circumstances. This is because popularity doesn't just attract consumers, it attracts developers. This has both the indirect network effect Windows does -- anything that works on Linux, you can bet someone's grafted it onto Ubuntu, and either thrown up a package or written a howto -- and it has the more direct effect of speeding development on anything Ubuntu considers a core technology.
It's essentially this: Worse is better. Why recommend Linux, and not BSD or Solaris? Because Linux is popular.
After all, someone can always fork Ubuntu -- monopoly and monoculture does not mean death in nearly the same way as it does in proprietary software. Ubuntu cannot go out of business -- Canonical can, but Ubuntu will be forked and live on, as desktop Redhat was reborn as Fedora, as Netscape became Mozilla -- Ubuntu itself is a continual fork of Debian.
That, and Ubuntu does have commercial support (Canonical, Dell), it has desktop Linux pretty well done, and better than most others, it's based on Debian (I think RPM is icky, so I don't like Fedora)...
But mostly because it resolves that question. And it resolves the GNOME/KDE question, in much the same way -- you just use GNOME. If you want KDE, that implies you know enough to make your own decisions, so there's Kubuntu, and Xubuntu, and ubuntu-minimal + whatever your favorite WM/DE is, and there's always other distros, forks, and third-party repositories.
Personally, I use Ubuntu, but that doesn't put me too far off to help Ubuntu people -- it's all the same repositories anyway.
Amazon doesn't mantain a network spanning an entire city either. They are responsible for the wires in their building, and no more.
So... what about those wires running to their building? Who's responsible for repairing them?
That's only worth it if people pick water slide parks based on how busy they are. If they mainly just select based on price and the 'Unlimited' feature then there isn't any point in building new slides.
Well, ultimately, they do pay attention -- AOL did see a bit of a decline.
But they also tend to pick water slide parks based on where they are. No one's going to move to another city just to visit the water slide.
...damn, that was not supposed to be anonymous. That's the second comment I've accidentally posted anonymously.
...which has what to do with an IM client?
Email is a different issue, easily solved, in most clients, by wrapping angle brackets around it. More intelligent clients will notice before it gets sent, and generate an actual HTML link.
According to GameSpot's [gamespot.com] review Day of Defeat is Half-Life mod released as standalone game.
Which has been adopted by Valve. Day of Defeat: Source has been released as both a standalone game, and as a game bundled with Half-Life 2, among other things.
Counter-Strike is another example, in which the roles are even more clearly defined as "good" and "evil" -- terrorists (who often have hostages, or are planting a bomb) and counter-terrorists. And the terrorists often win.
The key element isn't independence, it's multiplayer.
And what marketplace? SP2 isn't out yet.
Citation needed.
I want to agree with you, because that would be fucking hilarious, and it would just fill my heart with glee. But I'd like some evidence.
Of course, Turner is a businessman speaking to other businessmen,
And that's dangerous. What happens when these other businessmen go with Windows in an environment which demands a much more secure OS?
Do you really think ReactOS has a better shot at that than desktop Linux, with Wine?
More functionality means less performance.
Bullshit.
There is some functionality which will necessarily reduce performance, yes. But no other OS I know of requires a gig of RAM to run acceptably.
Moreover, there have been OSes which have run faster -- the 2.6 Linux kernel runs faster than 2.4. Windows 2000 runs faster, under certain circumstances (like accessing a floppy) than Windows 98.
Yet Vista is pretty much an automatic drop of some 10 FPS in various games, I'm told. And no, it doesn't magically make a DirectX 9 game look better -- just slower.
Yes, some amount of bloat is due to added functionality. Some of it is due to using higher level languages -- trading CPU cycles for programmer cycles.
And some of it is just gigantic fucking bloat.
However, when deciding to buy a new machine, why use an 8-9 year old operating system?
Mostly because it's better. In 8-9 years, Microsoft hasn't been able to beat XP, let alone their actual competitors.
Sad, but true.
When Microsoft controls the "vista capable" logo, the fact that a piece of hardware is branded "vista capable" means Microsoft has reviewed the driver and approved it. So absolutely, they should be responsible.
If they don't want to be responsible for a shitty drivers, they shouldn't hand out the logo to shitty drivers.
They are under no obligation to support Linux.
Correct. However, if they don't, it is them not supporting Linux, not the other way around.
Let's flip this around, since you seem fond of doing that. Would you apply the same logic to a Windows driver? That is, if a company released no Windows driver, no specs, and no documentation, would you consider it Microsoft's fault that said device doesn't work on Windows?
To make it even more concrete: When the iPod first came out, was anyone blaming Microsoft for not supporting it?
Of course not. You blame the manufacturer, and you likely don't buy their product.
Simply put, any given company has ZERO obligation to make their product what YOU want it to be; their only obligation is to make the product what they CLAIM it to be.
That is true. It doesn't change any of the above points.
I am not saying the manufacturer has any obligation to support Linux.
I am saying that if you consider it a bad thing for that hardware not to be supported, and you are looking for someone to blame, blame the manufacturers. It is not that difficult to publish specs.