most atheists that overgeneralize about Christians don't know much about christianity...
If you'd like to correct my understanding of Christianity, go right ahead, but I'm not sure it's related to my assessment of how I personally see Christians behave.
I realize that most Christians are able to operate in the real world just fine, that they are generally nice, well-adjusted people, and that when the religion goes against society and morality, society and morality win, though it may take a generation or two.
However, the fact remains, Christians do believe some pretty crazy stuff, with far less evidence than such extraordinary claims would require. I'm not trying to defend metlin (guy who started us on this tangent), but I did chuckle a little when I saw "I'm a Christian, he's a nut." It's a little bit like when mainstream Christians try to bash Mormonism or Scientology. Hey, I'm happy you're able to view the beliefs of others with a bit of skepticism and critical thinking, I just wish you'd apply it to your own beliefs, also.
Define "halfway decent". Can I do what I could do with Skype? That is, can I connect from behind pretty much any NAT router to anyone else in the world behind pretty much any NAT router of their own, using a central service only for control?
Is the voice/video component implemented well enough anywhere else such that I can expect to teleconference with a gtalk user from an entirely open source client?
Market penetration is pretty irrelevant -- the submitter mentioned that they "only skype each other". If SIP is easy enough, it's also more than good enough.
While I agree he's a nut, I would be careful throwing stones. Let me put it this way: As a Christian, you most likely believe some or all of this:
...a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Unlike some of the other posters, I don't really want to turn this into a religious argument, but might I suggest that you just leave it as "he's a nut", something we can all agree on.
Most people are generally nice, but there's always a vocal asshole on the Christian side -- maybe not representative, but it's there. More than that, the "most Christians" you're talking about never seem to have anything constructive to add to these discussions -- most Christians would rather avoid any discussion which requires them to examine the foundations of their beliefs.
Oh, and while I made the same assumption you did, it's not a given that this is an atheist. Quite a lot of religions manage to paint other religions as foolish, though rarely with as much success as those who paint all religion as foolish.
First, I use mplayer for video playback. There really aren't that many controls you could possibly use for this, and I don't know why I'd play twice as much in order to have buttons instead of arrow keys. Even if I cared about buttons, there's really no reason to care about them obscuring playback -- they're useful maybe 5% of the time, so if I use a player with buttons, they'll show up when I move the mouse.
We're not talking about children hunger in Africa, we're talking about damn smartphones.
I didn't mention children in Africa, you did. So let's talk about some damn smartphones.
In this specific context, a video store is an important feature, especially considering the hundreds of thousands of people who already installed the Netflix app on their Android phones.
...and you just made my point for me. If there's already a Netflix app for Android which can run on rooted phones, again, I'd find it truly depressing if an "important" feature to you is this one specific video store, when there is at least one other significant video store for Android already, and nothing stopping anyone from setting up another.
I'll admit it's not a feature I personally am likely to be impressed by, as I can't see wanting to watch video on a screen that small, but that's not the point. Even granting that video is important, even granting that an Android-specific video store is important, I still don't see why that particular video store is an issue.
Freedom is the ability to do real things that you might like to do without being constrained.
Like, say, view a pornographic app on your phone.
But never mind that -- you've already chosen a very odd view of freedom. If you're given the freedom to do a thing, and you didn't want to anyway, that doesn't count as freedom? Really?
Only for techies does this set of real things include "hacking on the source."
And yet, if this was actually irrelevant, we wouldn't have Linux to begin with. At the moment, Apple still pretty absurdly limits what can and cannot go in their app store, so even if most end-users would never develop an app, they are still affected by not being able to find apps which would fall afoul of these restrictions. Giving developers freedom does translate to end-user freedom.
Also, if you're really going to go here, jailbreaking a phone also falls into this set of real things.
Only for techies is it irrelevant if an app has "slight" compatibility problems with a handset...
You're again speaking in abstract terms without citing any actual apps with actual compatibility problems, and you're ignoring the part where this is generally accepted as the state of affairs in desktop computing -- how many apps have slight compatibility problems with the latest version of an OS?
Sit ten users in front of a Windows box, and the same ten users in front of a Linux box for the following hour. Then ask them: during which hour did you feel more free in your user of these computers?
These users have had how much time to be trained in Windows over the years, and you give them an hour to try out a new OS? I'd be very curious to repeat that experiment with users who had no experience with iOS, sitting them down in front of a computer and an iPad.
As a typical geek you will, of course, tell them that they are all wrong,
If someone claims to be free while I have them tied up, there are a few possibilities: Either they like being tied up (possible), or they don't realize that they are tied up. The reality of being restricted really isn't dependent on their opinion, however.
Now, I wouldn't tell them that they are wrong to prefer Windows, but I think if you don't ask the leading question about freedom, you might find they prefer it for being "easier to use," or, if they have a bit more insight, because it's closer to what they're familiar with.
Because they don't want to hack on the source.
Did I ever once claim they did? What's more, do you really think availability of source, or actual open-ness, doesn't affect end-users at all?
Consider Firefox. While most users couldn't identify this as the reason, open source and open-ness is why it was able to get the market share it has and why so many users prefer it, even if they're only just technical enough to install an add-on. Being open source meant Microsoft couldn't simply buy the Mozilla Foundation and kill Firefox. It also meant that, while most users don't care about hacking on the source, the one user who cared to hack on the source and add, say, popup blocking, or tabbed browsing, or an extension API, or write an extension like, say, Adblock, had a profound impact on how useful the browser is, and how much freedom there is, for every other user to try it.
Then there's the part where having an open standard drove the Web to places it really couldn't have gone if we were stuck in the "Works best with IE6" era. Without that, and without Firefox to challenge IE -- even if no users actually used Firefox -- the iPhone wouldn't exist in any recognizable form, because Webkit, if it existed at all, would be irrelevant. By contrast, today users have the freedom to use any browser they want, on devices which might not have had a browser at all if IE6 still ruled, and to expect most of the Web to jus
- Carrier locked, walled garden, locked-down out of the box = Little choice, little freedom
This is a problem. However, if the existence of these is enough to make Android "not open", then neither is Linux, BSD, or, well, anything. There are TVs which run Linux, and they sure as hell don't let you install anything you want on them. Those TVs are not open, therefore Linux isn't? Is that what you're saying?
- Must root to be able to use important features
Which?
- When you root, you are locked out of other important features
Again, which? The only one we know of so far is a single video store, far from the only video store. If that's "important" to you, I feel sorry for how empty your life must be.
- Fewer apps than iOS = Less choice = less freedom
Even if this were true, and it's not clear it is, the apps which we do have are barely restricted even in the official market, and you don't have to buy them from the official market. In fact, unless the carrier locks the device, there's nothing stopping you from installing software from other sources, and you don't need root to do so.
See if this helps: Let's suppose that all iOS had was fart apps, while Android has both fart apps and actually useful apps. Would iOS then have "more freedom" because it had 10 billion fart apps, while Android only had a few hundred useful apps that were actually unique and useful?
And I haven't even addressed the massive amount of additional freedom developers get. I mean, let's start with, I don't need to buy a Mac to develop with. I can choose my own tools to a large degree, but even if I go with the official SDK, I can keep right on using my Linux laptop, or even a desktop that isn't an overpriced workstation. If I can make a programming language compile to Android, I can use it -- there has never even been the threat of limiting it to one or two languages as Apple tried to do.
- Less polished user interface,
WTF does a user interface have to do with freedom?
more fragmentation = less flexibility,
Problem: The PC is already "fragmented", and Linux itself even moreso. What "flexibility" have they lost? And what "flexibility" is missing from Android, for that matter?
smaller userbase,
First, dead wrong -- Android actually has a much larger userbase. I don't know where you get that from.
Second, WTF does this have to do with freedom? Again, from this, I'd have to conclude that Linux and OS X are both less free than Windows.
less choice = less freedom
But you haven't shown less choice.
iPhone jailbreak == Android root
I can buy a Nexus S which is literally designed to be rooted. Where can I buy an iPhone that Apple hasn't tried their damndest to prevent me from rooting, let alone given me the tools to do it right in the official SDK?
After jailbreak == You can use all iTunes, Apple App Store, AND alternate sources
After rooting, the only thing I can't use is one video store. I suppose that puts a jailbreak ahead if I were to grant your premise that it's equivalent to rooting my Android phone -- except I don't need to root it to use alternate sources, and alternate sources pretty much make this video store irrelevant.
Vastly more apps == Vastly more choice, freedom
Even if there were numerically more apps, you haven't shown that this is "choice" in any meaningful sense.
Less fragmentation, more polish == More ease of use...
Do you not see the humour in the fact that one you've "rooted" your "open" phone, you're now locked out of the store run by the maker of that "open" phone?
I don't see the humor. I suppose I see the irony, but it doesn't in fact make the phone less open, any more than TiVo made Linux less open. The main difference is that it's not normal for Android phones to allow users to install their own OS without first finding an exploit of some sort, and that is a problem, but I don't see that being at all related to the video store -- the issue here is with the store, not the devices.
I'm just pointing out that Android fanboys are just as blind to the idiocy relating to their chosen platform as the Apple fanboys.
I suppose that's the definition of a fanboy, but I don't think you've shown that. Android as a whole is not idiotic, and neither is iOS. Aspects of them are idiotic, and I don't see anyone here "blind" to the problems with Android, though, curiously, there seem to be too many people who see the Apple App Store's closed nature as a good thing. Still, even among people who own iPhones, it seems like most people accept Apple's tyranny as something they can live with, not as something they'd prefer -- that is, they see it as a worthwhile exchange for a better experience overall.
You can't upload a straight/stander JEE app on it, and there is a substantial amount of effort to make sure your code is not completely dependent to GAE's specific architecture.
Not really. After all...
or a true-standard app/platform hosting like Heroku.
Unless Heroku has changed, it's all about running Ruby, right? It's possible to run Rails on App Engine. While it can sometimes take some effort to get your app working there, especially if it wasn't written with App Engine in mind, porting away from it isn't terribly difficult. Not only are there alternate implementations, but the main thing you'd be missing elsewhere is the datastore anyway, and there's a DataMapper adapter for App Engine.
The main thing I like about App Engine, though, is that until I outgrow the free tier, I've got free, decently-sized managed Ruby hosting -- seems to be much, much better than what Heroku's free tier gives me. And when I need to scale up, I just give them money, and it's Google, it'll scale.
The only other option I know of which really competes with that is AWS, but then I have to go back to managing instances myself, and it only lasts a year. That might work better for a startup, I suppose -- my initial motivation for GAE was one project that intends to always stay free, and another which only needs CPU a few times a month.
The biggest downside was instance spin-up time -- any given request might result in spinning up a brand-new JVM and instance of your app, which could take some 30 seconds, so any given HTTP request might take some 30 seconds. While this is technically always true, it is possible to reserve instances and pre-emptively boot other ones (for a very reasonable fee), so it's only a problem if (like me) you don't want to spend anything at all.
Disclaimer: I'm nominally the maintainer for dm-appengine, the DataMapper adapter for appengine-jruby.
Not only Linux and Mac, but it's open source now. After being blown away at how successful the original Humble Indie Bundle was, four out of the original five games went open source -- the only one which didn't is World of Goo.
anyone who bought their PS3 specifically for that purpose probably still has it running under 3.21 or maybe a CFW 3.55.
Likely, and it's likely a best practice to not allow updates (firmware or otherwise) to a cluster without having someone review it and maybe test it out on a single node. But I also don't think that the cluster people should be penalized as severely as if they were pirates because they expected a firmware update to not remove a feature they were relying on -- that's a reasonable expectation, especially when (again) this was something Sony had as a bullet point in their "Why you should buy a PS3" pitch.
It screwed the gamer+tinkerer that was bothered moreso by lost PSN access than loss of OtherOS.
Well, or lost both. It's particularly troubling because the PS3 would've made a decent home theater PC, which is also something Sony seemed to be pushing, and it doesn't seem far-fetched at all that someone would make it easy to install MythTV or XBMC on it. Then, suddenly, you have a choice between having your passive video and having your video games, including single-player games which use PSN as additional DRM.
On the topic of removable storage, I always read about disgruntled employees. That's no accident just poor QA on the part of the manufacturer.
From the manufacturer's standpoint, then, it's an accident. In the case of the Sony rootkit, they did deliberately set out to put additional DRM on their music CDs, and while they contracted with a third party to do so, it really doesn't look at all like this is a disgruntled employee trying to make either look bad, and they'd probably both be happy about it if the tech community hadn't made such a fuss about it.
If they were, we would've have so many people (old AND young) who have problems with them...
It couldn't possibly be the people that are the problem, could it?
It's crazy the number of interfaces that don't respect even the most BASIC UI design principles that were sometimes known before computers!
Sure, that's why I said "decent" and not "good." But I mean "decent" as in, while it's a skill that might be beyond most people, I'd imagine most Slashdotters can pick up most new GUIs in a matter of minutes, just by poking at different pieces to see what they do.
Cars are a great example -- you can't buy a new car that doesn't come equipped with $10k worth of pointless passive "safety" features, because the government knows most people can't drive so we must all pay the price to shield the incompetents from the consequences of their actions.
If you're talking about things like airbags, those aren't just to protect people who can't drive, it's also to protect you from other people who can't drive. Not every accident you're in is your fault.
I don't disagree here, though:
That's what's happening now to the internet, the powers that be are trying to make it idiot-proof and criminal-proof.
That's not really possible to do and have it in any way resemble the Internet that was so revolutionary, disruptive, and useful to begin with.
I am curious which part you're talking about, though. The anti-phishing stuff is relatively harmless, for example. The idea that DPI for broad-scale monitoring and censorship is OK to protect us from child porn is terrifying.
this is what I have to go through when all that's needed from them is, "excuse me, could you tell me again -- how do I do X?".
Even here, as exasperating as it is when that's all you really need, having the story gives me at least one thing that most users don't tell me, especially in online forums -- it gives you their actual goal.
For example, suppose someone asks me how to run Internet Explorer on Linux or a Mac. Knowing why they wanted to run it will go a long way towards making them happy. For example, if they didn't know what a web browser is or that other, better ones exist, introduce them to Firefox. If they're trying to use an IE-only website, you're going to want to know both that this is their goal, and which website -- will a simple user-agent hack work, would a different website help, or do you really need to help them set up IE under Wine or a VM?
I suppose for in-person support, it helps a lot if they start with a simple question like that, because it's still going to be faster for me to ask a few questions than to get their whole life story. But on any sort of Internet forum, giving at least some motivation is going to dramatically reduce the number of messages you have to send back and forth.
It seems to be especially bad with programming, because by the time someone asks for help, they've got a very specific question -- for example, "When I try to connect to Excel from Ruby, this library gives me this error. Help!" And this is one of those lucky questions where there's at least one obvious guess you could make about what their goal is, and what a better way to solve it might be -- for example, "Do you really need it to connect to Excel? Try this entirely other library which just knows how to read and write Excel files." Given that Ruby is used so often for web development, it'd be irresponsible not to ask that question -- you don't want people installing Excel on their webservers if they really don't need it.
I don't have any ready examples right now, but far too often, you have a question where it's not obvious what they're actually trying to do, but it's fairly obvious that whatever it is, they're going about it in the worst possible way. And again, I see this a lot in programming -- they'll submit a tiny code snippet, either because they're being helpful or because they don't want to share their whole project, but even if that snippet is executable, it's not always obvious what it is they're actually trying to do.
I suppose another way to get lucky is to find that their question has a simple answer, even if it's a bad idea. For example, "How do i read an entire file into a string?" You could ask them why they need to do that, or you could give them the one-liner that does that. I try to do both -- give them the snippet first, then ask them if they really need to do that, and if maybe reading the file line-by-line, seeking byte-by-byte, or mmapping might be better options.
I'm extremely patient and indulgent with them, and always keep my good humor -- but it's an act, they make me crazy!
That's why, as patient as I am, I'm still going to provide at least some sort of psychological sting to try to make sure they don't do it again. If this is a problem I've solved over and over, I train them to write this shit down in such a way that the next time it happens, they can find it in their notes instead of talking to me. If they say "It's broken," I might point out that this is like telling a doctor "It hurts," and that they might need to be a bit more specific.
I try not to be mean, and I don't think my approach would be tolerated if I did support for a living, but anyone who knows me personally and has asked me for help has learned at least one or two things that help them not ask me for help anymore.
As far as the linux debacle is concerned, we gotta be honest with ourselves and admit that only the/. crowd lost on that.
What about the cluster people? Or were you counting those as the slashdot crowd?
Should they remove features after sale? No, but its not going to impact their target audience all that much either.
They sold it, even to their target audience, as "It's not just a console, it's a computer, even a supercomputer." If they then turn around and remove the feature, even if their target audience doesn't notice or care, how is that in any way fair? If you sold minivans with turbochargers to a bunch of soccer moms, then went around stealing the turbochargers back, I think even the soccer moms (who really didn't need it to begin with) have the right to be outraged.
Im a bit more pissed off that users are now required to update to the latest firmware before playing offline games.
See, this wouldn't bother me at all, if it weren't for the fact that the latest firmware actually removes features. With the saner devices I buy, upgrading the firmware tends to improve the user experience, not randomly remove features.
I cant really comment on the whole rootkit incident because i've only read about it. Then again, think about all the nasty little surprises we've heard about with removable storage.
Well, which in particular? The most common thing I hear about is removable storage that comes with malware by accident. This was by design, as a DRM measure.
when I think of $evil_corp Sony isnt exactly #1. Somewhere in the top 10, but certainly not #1.
I might, at least among large technology companies. I don't see Microsoft doing anything close anymore -- the only real contender is Apple.
However, just as you said that big studios program for the console first and think about PC later you gotta think those same studios are writing their games for Windows first. Max and linux ports are an afterthough if they're given attention at all.
The difference between OpenGL and Direct3D is tiny compared to the difference between either of those and the most efficient ways to program for a console. Plus, you've got all the same hardware and interfaces. I'd be very curious to see how Valve games run on the Mac -- I can't imagine they'd be that much worse than in Windows.
I do miss the days when Linux had the advantage, though. Back when Quake 3 was the hot new shit that you'd use for benchmarking, we had the very interesting situation where it ran faster under Wine than Windows, and the native Linux port was faster still.
Mainstream devs will always produce games for he largest target market and that happens to be Windows PC right now.
And the more I support indie games, particularly Linux ones, the more I'm changing that trend, I hope. I'm certainly not content to take the approach that so many Linux users do -- give up on gaming on the desktop, thus removing one more reason to have Windows (and maybe never booting Windows at all after that), and get a console. As evil as Microsoft might be, the only modern console developer who doesn't seem to be actively evil is Nintendo -- I don't think the Wii is a joke (and I am still considering buying one), but I do think that if you're really going for gameplay over graphics, you get a lot of the same by sticking to Linux indie games on the PC.
Am i supposed to buy a Xbox360? I mean, MS has screwed me numerous times in the PC market...
Nothing you describe strikes me as anywhere near the malice of including a rootkit on a music CD, or removing a feature from a console which was a key selling point of said console, or the carelessness of exposing the sheer volume of personal information they have.
Should I avoid getting a xbox360? Where does that leave me if i wanna play games from this generation? PC? nope....I'd be giving into to Microsoft again.
Given that you need some sort of a PC -- that is, Personal Computer -- I don't really see how. You've still got Mac and Linux, and while I don't like the idea of paying for Windows any more than you do, it's at least an "open" platform in the sense that you get pretty much any indie game anyone wants to make for it.
Oh, and Nintendo Wii is a joke.
In what sense?
If it's graphics you care about, that's another point in favor of the PC, in theory. The problem here is that many modern games are designed for consoles, so there are a lot of PC games out there which, well, suck on the PC.
I guess my point is that you can differentiate one product or service from another in regards to a big corporation.
Yet what Sony's shown us lately is a lot of malice and contempt for their customers. Even if we ignore the rootkit, the PS3 shit so far has been far worse than Microsoft's typical MO.
For the moment, I'm alright with playing games on Windows using my "free" copy of Windows 7 provided by my school -- and I'm not likely to lose that product key, ever, Microsoft would have to actually invalidate it. Even here, it's the exception -- I booted Windows to play Portal 2, and then I went back to Linux. Busy as I am, I can't afford to spend much time gaming, which means I simply don't run out of games to play on Linux, DRM-free. It's not happening in the mainstream as much lately, but indie games seem to be using cross-platform support (Win/Mac/Linux) as a major selling point.
Whether they're from "this generation" depends what defines a generation. I mean, Aquaria is from 2007, years after this generation's consoles appeared -- and it's absolutely beautiful and really fun to play, and you absolutely should check it out, but it's still a side-scroller. Braid and Minecraft are like that, too -- not exactly state-of-the-art graphics, but cool concepts. Towards the higher end, there's stuff like Penumbra and Amnesia. And more than half the games I listed are open source, and I haven't even gotten into the well-known open source free-as-in-beer stuff -- Xonotic (was Nexuiz) is based on Darkplaces, which was based on Quake, but Nexuiz always felt like it had decently modern graphics, though most of it could be turned off for performance, and I imagine Xonotic will be the same. So there you go, there's even GPL'd games that could be considered "current-gen" unless you want to further define what you mean by that.
Except that to get to the point where you can cause irreversible damage, you need to already be firmly in the power user camp. Your example involves a commandline, something no average user really needs to see, unless they are literally pasting commands someone has sent them.
Even once you're in a commandline, if you know what that command does -- and if you don't, you really shouldn't be running it until you do -- but if you know what it does, you know that the -f option makes it pretty obvious that it's going to cause damage to something, and you'd better double-check where you're aiming.
In GUIs, pretty nearly universally, anything you do that's dangerous either comes with a giant "are you sure" message or three which explains exactly what it's about to do and why it's dangerous, or an "undo" feature in case it didn't do what you expected. I tend to lean towards 'undo', since it works equally well for the novice and the experienced user -- as an experienced user, I don't want to have to click through an "are you sure" dialog when I know what I'm doing, but some confirmation that I did what I thought I did is helpful. As a newbie, the "undo" button serves the same function as the "are you sure" button. Gmail does this decently well.
And as paranoid as I may be about screwing things up, there's no way I'm going to be able to learn anything without either very explicit instruction or license to experiment.
"You don't have a car? You HAVE to have a car. You'll love it. You can come visit us more often!" So they get a car so that they can come visit, but they aren't really interested in cars, they just want it to do something, and so they are not willing to expend much energy because it's not their hobby.
So when they don't change the oil, or don't fill up the tank, or always drive in 1st or 2nd gear in an automatic, or hit the accelerator instead of the brake or vice versa, we should forgive them because it's not their hobby.
I can't blame them for not wanting to expend energy, and for wanting computes to be magic machines which do what they want without them having to say a word. But I can blame them for not being willing to learn the most basic things about using and maintaining a computer, just like they have about a car, or a house, or...
...mine, to the extent that I have users, don't even do that much. You've just described exactly what the Bugzilla form typically asks for, and what other bug-reporting systems ask for. Most users just say "It's broken!" Seriously. If I'm lucky, I get "I can't do X."
What I then train them to do is to start by telling me, at the very least, what happened. What was the error message? If there wasn't one, what did it do that you didn't want, or not do that you did? And what was the situation that caused this?
While I really would prefer users who are able to tell me exactly as much information as I need, or at least not take it personally when I cut them off with their story, I'd much rather have too much information than too little.
My favorite example of too little information is from a friend who actually worked in IT, in academia. He once had a professor walk in, put a laptop on his desk, say "Fix it," and walk out. Seriously, these people manage to get PhDs and can't figure out that in order to fix anything, we need to know what's broken -- because with behavior like that, I'd feel perfectly justified by "fixing it" by wiping the OS and installing Linux. (I'd never actually do it, but I'd sure as hell be tempted.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you did there works. I mean...
most atheists that overgeneralize about Christians don't know much about christianity...
If you'd like to correct my understanding of Christianity, go right ahead, but I'm not sure it's related to my assessment of how I personally see Christians behave.
... And christian != crazy right wing nutjob
I realize that most Christians are able to operate in the real world just fine, that they are generally nice, well-adjusted people, and that when the religion goes against society and morality, society and morality win, though it may take a generation or two.
However, the fact remains, Christians do believe some pretty crazy stuff, with far less evidence than such extraordinary claims would require. I'm not trying to defend metlin (guy who started us on this tangent), but I did chuckle a little when I saw "I'm a Christian, he's a nut." It's a little bit like when mainstream Christians try to bash Mormonism or Scientology. Hey, I'm happy you're able to view the beliefs of others with a bit of skepticism and critical thinking, I just wish you'd apply it to your own beliefs, also.
Define "halfway decent". Can I do what I could do with Skype? That is, can I connect from behind pretty much any NAT router to anyone else in the world behind pretty much any NAT router of their own, using a central service only for control?
Is the voice/video component implemented well enough anywhere else such that I can expect to teleconference with a gtalk user from an entirely open source client?
Market penetration is pretty irrelevant -- the submitter mentioned that they "only skype each other". If SIP is easy enough, it's also more than good enough.
The only thing SIP is really lacking is NAT traversal, right?
While I agree he's a nut, I would be careful throwing stones. Let me put it this way: As a Christian, you most likely believe some or all of this:
...a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Unlike some of the other posters, I don't really want to turn this into a religious argument, but might I suggest that you just leave it as "he's a nut", something we can all agree on.
Most people are generally nice, but there's always a vocal asshole on the Christian side -- maybe not representative, but it's there. More than that, the "most Christians" you're talking about never seem to have anything constructive to add to these discussions -- most Christians would rather avoid any discussion which requires them to examine the foundations of their beliefs.
Oh, and while I made the same assumption you did, it's not a given that this is an atheist. Quite a lot of religions manage to paint other religions as foolish, though rarely with as much success as those who paint all religion as foolish.
Wait, so if someone makes the assessment that people who hear voices and believe in invisible friends are crazy, they're automatically a nihilist?
Sorry, atheist != nihilist.
Not terribly.
First, I use mplayer for video playback. There really aren't that many controls you could possibly use for this, and I don't know why I'd play twice as much in order to have buttons instead of arrow keys. Even if I cared about buttons, there's really no reason to care about them obscuring playback -- they're useful maybe 5% of the time, so if I use a player with buttons, they'll show up when I move the mouse.
For work, though, 1920x1200 works well.
We're not talking about children hunger in Africa, we're talking about damn smartphones.
I didn't mention children in Africa, you did. So let's talk about some damn smartphones.
In this specific context, a video store is an important feature, especially considering the hundreds of thousands of people who already installed the Netflix app on their Android phones.
...and you just made my point for me. If there's already a Netflix app for Android which can run on rooted phones, again, I'd find it truly depressing if an "important" feature to you is this one specific video store, when there is at least one other significant video store for Android already, and nothing stopping anyone from setting up another.
I'll admit it's not a feature I personally am likely to be impressed by, as I can't see wanting to watch video on a screen that small, but that's not the point. Even granting that video is important, even granting that an Android-specific video store is important, I still don't see why that particular video store is an issue.
Freedom is the ability to do real things that you might like to do without being constrained.
Like, say, view a pornographic app on your phone.
But never mind that -- you've already chosen a very odd view of freedom. If you're given the freedom to do a thing, and you didn't want to anyway, that doesn't count as freedom? Really?
Only for techies does this set of real things include "hacking on the source."
And yet, if this was actually irrelevant, we wouldn't have Linux to begin with. At the moment, Apple still pretty absurdly limits what can and cannot go in their app store, so even if most end-users would never develop an app, they are still affected by not being able to find apps which would fall afoul of these restrictions. Giving developers freedom does translate to end-user freedom.
Also, if you're really going to go here, jailbreaking a phone also falls into this set of real things.
Only for techies is it irrelevant if an app has "slight" compatibility problems with a handset...
You're again speaking in abstract terms without citing any actual apps with actual compatibility problems, and you're ignoring the part where this is generally accepted as the state of affairs in desktop computing -- how many apps have slight compatibility problems with the latest version of an OS?
Sit ten users in front of a Windows box, and the same ten users in front of a Linux box for the following hour.
Then ask them: during which hour did you feel more free in your user of these computers?
These users have had how much time to be trained in Windows over the years, and you give them an hour to try out a new OS? I'd be very curious to repeat that experiment with users who had no experience with iOS, sitting them down in front of a computer and an iPad.
As a typical geek you will, of course, tell them that they are all wrong,
If someone claims to be free while I have them tied up, there are a few possibilities: Either they like being tied up (possible), or they don't realize that they are tied up. The reality of being restricted really isn't dependent on their opinion, however.
Now, I wouldn't tell them that they are wrong to prefer Windows, but I think if you don't ask the leading question about freedom, you might find they prefer it for being "easier to use," or, if they have a bit more insight, because it's closer to what they're familiar with.
Because they don't want to hack on the source.
Did I ever once claim they did? What's more, do you really think availability of source, or actual open-ness, doesn't affect end-users at all?
Consider Firefox. While most users couldn't identify this as the reason, open source and open-ness is why it was able to get the market share it has and why so many users prefer it, even if they're only just technical enough to install an add-on. Being open source meant Microsoft couldn't simply buy the Mozilla Foundation and kill Firefox. It also meant that, while most users don't care about hacking on the source, the one user who cared to hack on the source and add, say, popup blocking, or tabbed browsing, or an extension API, or write an extension like, say, Adblock, had a profound impact on how useful the browser is, and how much freedom there is, for every other user to try it.
Then there's the part where having an open standard drove the Web to places it really couldn't have gone if we were stuck in the "Works best with IE6" era. Without that, and without Firefox to challenge IE -- even if no users actually used Firefox -- the iPhone wouldn't exist in any recognizable form, because Webkit, if it existed at all, would be irrelevant. By contrast, today users have the freedom to use any browser they want, on devices which might not have had a browser at all if IE6 still ruled, and to expect most of the Web to jus
Let's look at how open they are:
Yes, let's.
- Carrier locked, walled garden, locked-down out of the box = Little choice, little freedom
This is a problem. However, if the existence of these is enough to make Android "not open", then neither is Linux, BSD, or, well, anything. There are TVs which run Linux, and they sure as hell don't let you install anything you want on them. Those TVs are not open, therefore Linux isn't? Is that what you're saying?
- Must root to be able to use important features
Which?
- When you root, you are locked out of other important features
Again, which? The only one we know of so far is a single video store, far from the only video store. If that's "important" to you, I feel sorry for how empty your life must be.
- Fewer apps than iOS = Less choice = less freedom
Even if this were true, and it's not clear it is, the apps which we do have are barely restricted even in the official market, and you don't have to buy them from the official market. In fact, unless the carrier locks the device, there's nothing stopping you from installing software from other sources, and you don't need root to do so.
See if this helps: Let's suppose that all iOS had was fart apps, while Android has both fart apps and actually useful apps. Would iOS then have "more freedom" because it had 10 billion fart apps, while Android only had a few hundred useful apps that were actually unique and useful?
And I haven't even addressed the massive amount of additional freedom developers get. I mean, let's start with, I don't need to buy a Mac to develop with. I can choose my own tools to a large degree, but even if I go with the official SDK, I can keep right on using my Linux laptop, or even a desktop that isn't an overpriced workstation. If I can make a programming language compile to Android, I can use it -- there has never even been the threat of limiting it to one or two languages as Apple tried to do.
- Less polished user interface,
WTF does a user interface have to do with freedom?
more fragmentation = less flexibility,
Problem: The PC is already "fragmented", and Linux itself even moreso. What "flexibility" have they lost? And what "flexibility" is missing from Android, for that matter?
smaller userbase,
First, dead wrong -- Android actually has a much larger userbase. I don't know where you get that from.
Second, WTF does this have to do with freedom? Again, from this, I'd have to conclude that Linux and OS X are both less free than Windows.
less choice = less freedom
But you haven't shown less choice.
iPhone jailbreak == Android root
I can buy a Nexus S which is literally designed to be rooted. Where can I buy an iPhone that Apple hasn't tried their damndest to prevent me from rooting, let alone given me the tools to do it right in the official SDK?
After jailbreak == You can use all iTunes, Apple App Store, AND alternate sources
After rooting, the only thing I can't use is one video store. I suppose that puts a jailbreak ahead if I were to grant your premise that it's equivalent to rooting my Android phone -- except I don't need to root it to use alternate sources, and alternate sources pretty much make this video store irrelevant.
Vastly more apps == Vastly more choice, freedom
Even if there were numerically more apps, you haven't shown that this is "choice" in any meaningful sense.
Less fragmentation, more polish == More ease of use...
That is the only one I can give you, since:
larger community,
Factually wrong.
Do you not see the humour in the fact that one you've "rooted" your "open" phone, you're now locked out of the store run by the maker of that "open" phone?
I don't see the humor. I suppose I see the irony, but it doesn't in fact make the phone less open, any more than TiVo made Linux less open. The main difference is that it's not normal for Android phones to allow users to install their own OS without first finding an exploit of some sort, and that is a problem, but I don't see that being at all related to the video store -- the issue here is with the store, not the devices.
I'm just pointing out that Android fanboys are just as blind to the idiocy relating to their chosen platform as the Apple fanboys.
I suppose that's the definition of a fanboy, but I don't think you've shown that. Android as a whole is not idiotic, and neither is iOS. Aspects of them are idiotic, and I don't see anyone here "blind" to the problems with Android, though, curiously, there seem to be too many people who see the Apple App Store's closed nature as a good thing. Still, even among people who own iPhones, it seems like most people accept Apple's tyranny as something they can live with, not as something they'd prefer -- that is, they see it as a worthwhile exchange for a better experience overall.
And hey, AC, at least you've found a way to feel superior to fanboys of both.
You can't upload a straight/stander JEE app on it, and there is a substantial amount of effort to make sure your code is not completely dependent to GAE's specific architecture.
Not really. After all...
or a true-standard app/platform hosting like Heroku.
Unless Heroku has changed, it's all about running Ruby, right? It's possible to run Rails on App Engine. While it can sometimes take some effort to get your app working there, especially if it wasn't written with App Engine in mind, porting away from it isn't terribly difficult. Not only are there alternate implementations, but the main thing you'd be missing elsewhere is the datastore anyway, and there's a DataMapper adapter for App Engine.
The main thing I like about App Engine, though, is that until I outgrow the free tier, I've got free, decently-sized managed Ruby hosting -- seems to be much, much better than what Heroku's free tier gives me. And when I need to scale up, I just give them money, and it's Google, it'll scale.
The only other option I know of which really competes with that is AWS, but then I have to go back to managing instances myself, and it only lasts a year. That might work better for a startup, I suppose -- my initial motivation for GAE was one project that intends to always stay free, and another which only needs CPU a few times a month.
The biggest downside was instance spin-up time -- any given request might result in spinning up a brand-new JVM and instance of your app, which could take some 30 seconds, so any given HTTP request might take some 30 seconds. While this is technically always true, it is possible to reserve instances and pre-emptively boot other ones (for a very reasonable fee), so it's only a problem if (like me) you don't want to spend anything at all.
Disclaimer: I'm nominally the maintainer for dm-appengine, the DataMapper adapter for appengine-jruby.
Not only Linux and Mac, but it's open source now. After being blown away at how successful the original Humble Indie Bundle was, four out of the original five games went open source -- the only one which didn't is World of Goo.
anyone who bought their PS3 specifically for that purpose probably still has it running under 3.21 or maybe a CFW 3.55.
Likely, and it's likely a best practice to not allow updates (firmware or otherwise) to a cluster without having someone review it and maybe test it out on a single node. But I also don't think that the cluster people should be penalized as severely as if they were pirates because they expected a firmware update to not remove a feature they were relying on -- that's a reasonable expectation, especially when (again) this was something Sony had as a bullet point in their "Why you should buy a PS3" pitch.
It screwed the gamer+tinkerer that was bothered moreso by lost PSN access than loss of OtherOS.
Well, or lost both. It's particularly troubling because the PS3 would've made a decent home theater PC, which is also something Sony seemed to be pushing, and it doesn't seem far-fetched at all that someone would make it easy to install MythTV or XBMC on it. Then, suddenly, you have a choice between having your passive video and having your video games, including single-player games which use PSN as additional DRM.
On the topic of removable storage, I always read about disgruntled employees. That's no accident just poor QA on the part of the manufacturer.
From the manufacturer's standpoint, then, it's an accident. In the case of the Sony rootkit, they did deliberately set out to put additional DRM on their music CDs, and while they contracted with a third party to do so, it really doesn't look at all like this is a disgruntled employee trying to make either look bad, and they'd probably both be happy about it if the tech community hadn't made such a fuss about it.
If they were, we would've have so many people (old AND young) who have problems with them...
It couldn't possibly be the people that are the problem, could it?
It's crazy the number of interfaces that don't respect even the most BASIC UI design principles that were sometimes known before computers!
Sure, that's why I said "decent" and not "good." But I mean "decent" as in, while it's a skill that might be beyond most people, I'd imagine most Slashdotters can pick up most new GUIs in a matter of minutes, just by poking at different pieces to see what they do.
Cars are a great example -- you can't buy a new car that doesn't come equipped with $10k worth of pointless passive "safety" features, because the government knows most people can't drive so we must all pay the price to shield the incompetents from the consequences of their actions.
If you're talking about things like airbags, those aren't just to protect people who can't drive, it's also to protect you from other people who can't drive. Not every accident you're in is your fault.
I don't disagree here, though:
That's what's happening now to the internet, the powers that be are trying to make it idiot-proof and criminal-proof.
That's not really possible to do and have it in any way resemble the Internet that was so revolutionary, disruptive, and useful to begin with.
I am curious which part you're talking about, though. The anti-phishing stuff is relatively harmless, for example. The idea that DPI for broad-scale monitoring and censorship is OK to protect us from child porn is terrifying.
this is what I have to go through when all that's needed from them is, "excuse me, could you tell me again -- how do I do X?".
Even here, as exasperating as it is when that's all you really need, having the story gives me at least one thing that most users don't tell me, especially in online forums -- it gives you their actual goal.
For example, suppose someone asks me how to run Internet Explorer on Linux or a Mac. Knowing why they wanted to run it will go a long way towards making them happy. For example, if they didn't know what a web browser is or that other, better ones exist, introduce them to Firefox. If they're trying to use an IE-only website, you're going to want to know both that this is their goal, and which website -- will a simple user-agent hack work, would a different website help, or do you really need to help them set up IE under Wine or a VM?
I suppose for in-person support, it helps a lot if they start with a simple question like that, because it's still going to be faster for me to ask a few questions than to get their whole life story. But on any sort of Internet forum, giving at least some motivation is going to dramatically reduce the number of messages you have to send back and forth.
It seems to be especially bad with programming, because by the time someone asks for help, they've got a very specific question -- for example, "When I try to connect to Excel from Ruby, this library gives me this error. Help!" And this is one of those lucky questions where there's at least one obvious guess you could make about what their goal is, and what a better way to solve it might be -- for example, "Do you really need it to connect to Excel? Try this entirely other library which just knows how to read and write Excel files." Given that Ruby is used so often for web development, it'd be irresponsible not to ask that question -- you don't want people installing Excel on their webservers if they really don't need it.
I don't have any ready examples right now, but far too often, you have a question where it's not obvious what they're actually trying to do, but it's fairly obvious that whatever it is, they're going about it in the worst possible way. And again, I see this a lot in programming -- they'll submit a tiny code snippet, either because they're being helpful or because they don't want to share their whole project, but even if that snippet is executable, it's not always obvious what it is they're actually trying to do.
I suppose another way to get lucky is to find that their question has a simple answer, even if it's a bad idea. For example, "How do i read an entire file into a string?" You could ask them why they need to do that, or you could give them the one-liner that does that. I try to do both -- give them the snippet first, then ask them if they really need to do that, and if maybe reading the file line-by-line, seeking byte-by-byte, or mmapping might be better options.
I'm extremely patient and indulgent with them, and always keep my good humor -- but it's an act, they make me crazy!
That's why, as patient as I am, I'm still going to provide at least some sort of psychological sting to try to make sure they don't do it again. If this is a problem I've solved over and over, I train them to write this shit down in such a way that the next time it happens, they can find it in their notes instead of talking to me. If they say "It's broken," I might point out that this is like telling a doctor "It hurts," and that they might need to be a bit more specific.
I try not to be mean, and I don't think my approach would be tolerated if I did support for a living, but anyone who knows me personally and has asked me for help has learned at least one or two things that help them not ask me for help anymore.
As far as the linux debacle is concerned, we gotta be honest with ourselves and admit that only the /. crowd lost on that.
What about the cluster people? Or were you counting those as the slashdot crowd?
Should they remove features after sale? No, but its not going to impact their target audience all that much either.
They sold it, even to their target audience, as "It's not just a console, it's a computer, even a supercomputer." If they then turn around and remove the feature, even if their target audience doesn't notice or care, how is that in any way fair? If you sold minivans with turbochargers to a bunch of soccer moms, then went around stealing the turbochargers back, I think even the soccer moms (who really didn't need it to begin with) have the right to be outraged.
Im a bit more pissed off that users are now required to update to the latest firmware before playing offline games.
See, this wouldn't bother me at all, if it weren't for the fact that the latest firmware actually removes features. With the saner devices I buy, upgrading the firmware tends to improve the user experience, not randomly remove features.
I cant really comment on the whole rootkit incident because i've only read about it. Then again, think about all the nasty little surprises we've heard about with removable storage.
Well, which in particular? The most common thing I hear about is removable storage that comes with malware by accident. This was by design, as a DRM measure.
when I think of $evil_corp Sony isnt exactly #1. Somewhere in the top 10, but certainly not #1.
I might, at least among large technology companies. I don't see Microsoft doing anything close anymore -- the only real contender is Apple.
However, just as you said that big studios program for the console first and think about PC later you gotta think those same studios are writing their games for Windows first. Max and linux ports are an afterthough if they're given attention at all.
The difference between OpenGL and Direct3D is tiny compared to the difference between either of those and the most efficient ways to program for a console. Plus, you've got all the same hardware and interfaces. I'd be very curious to see how Valve games run on the Mac -- I can't imagine they'd be that much worse than in Windows.
I do miss the days when Linux had the advantage, though. Back when Quake 3 was the hot new shit that you'd use for benchmarking, we had the very interesting situation where it ran faster under Wine than Windows, and the native Linux port was faster still.
Mainstream devs will always produce games for he largest target market and that happens to be Windows PC right now.
And the more I support indie games, particularly Linux ones, the more I'm changing that trend, I hope. I'm certainly not content to take the approach that so many Linux users do -- give up on gaming on the desktop, thus removing one more reason to have Windows (and maybe never booting Windows at all after that), and get a console. As evil as Microsoft might be, the only modern console developer who doesn't seem to be actively evil is Nintendo -- I don't think the Wii is a joke (and I am still considering buying one), but I do think that if you're really going for gameplay over graphics, you get a lot of the same by sticking to Linux indie games on the PC.
Am i supposed to buy a Xbox360? I mean, MS has screwed me numerous times in the PC market...
Nothing you describe strikes me as anywhere near the malice of including a rootkit on a music CD, or removing a feature from a console which was a key selling point of said console, or the carelessness of exposing the sheer volume of personal information they have.
Should I avoid getting a xbox360? Where does that leave me if i wanna play games from this generation? PC? nope....I'd be giving into to Microsoft again.
Given that you need some sort of a PC -- that is, Personal Computer -- I don't really see how. You've still got Mac and Linux, and while I don't like the idea of paying for Windows any more than you do, it's at least an "open" platform in the sense that you get pretty much any indie game anyone wants to make for it.
Oh, and Nintendo Wii is a joke.
In what sense?
If it's graphics you care about, that's another point in favor of the PC, in theory. The problem here is that many modern games are designed for consoles, so there are a lot of PC games out there which, well, suck on the PC.
I guess my point is that you can differentiate one product or service from another in regards to a big corporation.
Yet what Sony's shown us lately is a lot of malice and contempt for their customers. Even if we ignore the rootkit, the PS3 shit so far has been far worse than Microsoft's typical MO.
For the moment, I'm alright with playing games on Windows using my "free" copy of Windows 7 provided by my school -- and I'm not likely to lose that product key, ever, Microsoft would have to actually invalidate it. Even here, it's the exception -- I booted Windows to play Portal 2, and then I went back to Linux. Busy as I am, I can't afford to spend much time gaming, which means I simply don't run out of games to play on Linux, DRM-free. It's not happening in the mainstream as much lately, but indie games seem to be using cross-platform support (Win/Mac/Linux) as a major selling point.
Whether they're from "this generation" depends what defines a generation. I mean, Aquaria is from 2007, years after this generation's consoles appeared -- and it's absolutely beautiful and really fun to play, and you absolutely should check it out, but it's still a side-scroller. Braid and Minecraft are like that, too -- not exactly state-of-the-art graphics, but cool concepts. Towards the higher end, there's stuff like Penumbra and Amnesia. And more than half the games I listed are open source, and I haven't even gotten into the well-known open source free-as-in-beer stuff -- Xonotic (was Nexuiz) is based on Darkplaces, which was based on Quake, but Nexuiz always felt like it had decently modern graphics, though most of it could be turned off for performance, and I imagine Xonotic will be the same. So there you go, there's even GPL'd games that could be considered "current-gen" unless you want to further define what you mean by that.
Except that to get to the point where you can cause irreversible damage, you need to already be firmly in the power user camp. Your example involves a commandline, something no average user really needs to see, unless they are literally pasting commands someone has sent them.
Even once you're in a commandline, if you know what that command does -- and if you don't, you really shouldn't be running it until you do -- but if you know what it does, you know that the -f option makes it pretty obvious that it's going to cause damage to something, and you'd better double-check where you're aiming.
In GUIs, pretty nearly universally, anything you do that's dangerous either comes with a giant "are you sure" message or three which explains exactly what it's about to do and why it's dangerous, or an "undo" feature in case it didn't do what you expected. I tend to lean towards 'undo', since it works equally well for the novice and the experienced user -- as an experienced user, I don't want to have to click through an "are you sure" dialog when I know what I'm doing, but some confirmation that I did what I thought I did is helpful. As a newbie, the "undo" button serves the same function as the "are you sure" button. Gmail does this decently well.
And as paranoid as I may be about screwing things up, there's no way I'm going to be able to learn anything without either very explicit instruction or license to experiment.
I can.
"You don't have a car? You HAVE to have a car. You'll love it. You can come visit us more often!" So they get a car so that they can come visit, but they aren't really interested in cars, they just want it to do something, and so they are not willing to expend much energy because it's not their hobby.
So when they don't change the oil, or don't fill up the tank, or always drive in 1st or 2nd gear in an automatic, or hit the accelerator instead of the brake or vice versa, we should forgive them because it's not their hobby.
I can't blame them for not wanting to expend energy, and for wanting computes to be magic machines which do what they want without them having to say a word. But I can blame them for not being willing to learn the most basic things about using and maintaining a computer, just like they have about a car, or a house, or...
...mine, to the extent that I have users, don't even do that much. You've just described exactly what the Bugzilla form typically asks for, and what other bug-reporting systems ask for. Most users just say "It's broken!" Seriously. If I'm lucky, I get "I can't do X."
What I then train them to do is to start by telling me, at the very least, what happened. What was the error message? If there wasn't one, what did it do that you didn't want, or not do that you did? And what was the situation that caused this?
While I really would prefer users who are able to tell me exactly as much information as I need, or at least not take it personally when I cut them off with their story, I'd much rather have too much information than too little.
My favorite example of too little information is from a friend who actually worked in IT, in academia. He once had a professor walk in, put a laptop on his desk, say "Fix it," and walk out. Seriously, these people manage to get PhDs and can't figure out that in order to fix anything, we need to know what's broken -- because with behavior like that, I'd feel perfectly justified by "fixing it" by wiping the OS and installing Linux. (I'd never actually do it, but I'd sure as hell be tempted.)