Yet despite the fact that Blender is both power and free, your typical consumer level user is far more likely to gravitate toward products like Carrara Studio, based almost entirely on it's presentation and interface design.
Honestly, never heard of it. I have, however, heard of Maya, which does run on Linux, and has since February of 2000.
Overall though, it's likely going to be a lot more difficult than it sounds to put a new face on Linux to make it pretty, useful and non-threatening to the average user.
I'd argue that in many, many ways, Linux already has this down, moreso than other OSes. The interface is no longer the obstacle, when the biggest complaints you hear from people are about things like unsupported hardware, or not being able to run quite all Linux apps (though Wine is getting better all the time).
The main reasons I think people complain about the Linux UI are:
It's not Windows. You grew up on Windows, so Windows makes sense to you. Even subconsciously, you will often evaluate an interface on its familiarity.
It emphasizes usability over discoverability. The learning curve might be steeper -- maybe -- but you will be more effective once you've got it down.
Let me give you an example:
On Linux, to install VLC, I type "sudo apt-get install vlc", and it installs. I then look in the menu for my app.
On OS X, to install VLC, I go to videolan.org, click "downloads", scroll through a confusing list of mirrors and architectures, say "screw it" and just download the Universal Binary. Safari likely asks me where to save it, and I choose the desktop. Then I go to the desktop and doubleclick it to mount, then drag the VLC icon to applications. Then I push the tiny eject icon next to the shortcut to the mounted volume, if I have a Finder window open -- otherwise, I drag it to the trash. Then I drag the disk image to the trash. Then I go to Applications looking for it, and drag it to the Dock.
On Windows, repeat the same steps for going to the website and scrolling through a confusing list of mirrors. IE likely asks me where to save it, and I choose the desktop. Then I go to the desktop, doubleclick it to run the installer. I then select a folder to install it to, agree to the license, and generally just continue hitting "next" until it finishes installing. When it says it's done, I close that window, and drag the installer to the recycle bin. I then empty the recycle bin.
The only way OS X ever wins is if you're one of those people who can manage to download and run the app from the mounted drive, but can't figure out how to install it (so that it can update itself properly). And that shaves a few steps off, but not all of them -- Linux still wins.
What about uninstalling? On Linux, it's "apt-get remove vlc && apt-get autoremove" -- a bit longer, but that's because I want to clean out unused libraries. On OS X, it's about the same -- drag the app to the trash, and empty the trash. On Windows, it's opening add/remove programs and looking for it there -- if you're lucky, it is there, and you can simply click uninstall. Then, it's entirely up to the app -- some just ask "are you sure", and some assume you want to reconfigure the app, and you have to figure out how to convince them to actually uninstall. Some have an uninstall program hidden somewhere in the Start Menu. And some actually require the install CD to uninstall.
I mention all of this because some people have been using this as an example of how Linux is not user-friendly -- it doesn't let you "just download and install", as if that's a simple process. It's not, but it's an easy process, because you already know how to do it -- you don't already know how to use apt, or Synaptic, when you start using Linux. But I do genuinely believe the Linux way of doing this is easier, once you know what you're doing.
Apple does this too, but their hardware requirements are automatically met by virtue of them selling the hardware themselves. Linux, OTOH, is both a low-end client and a high-end server. It fills the roles needed by users without bringing with it a hefty cost per unit.
Linux does this, too.
The difference is not so much that Apple can be sure that the performance needs are met, but that Windows does these flashy things so pathetically poorly. You can turn off most of the flashy crap in Vista, but it doesn't make Vista a usable OS. You can turn on as much flashy crap as you want on Linux or OS X, and it won't become as unusable as Vista.
You want subscription radio, a licensed Blu Ray player? The proprietary binary driver for your $400 video card. No problem.
Subscription radio I can sort of see... except that there are dozens of free radio streams out there, including at least one for my hometown. And it's a small town in Iowa, so that's pretty good.
Oh -- and podcasts.
But a licensed blu-ray player? Only needed because of DRM and patents. My Linux machine can play movies just fine, and would almost certainly be capable of playing Blu-Ray movies out of the box, were it not for that DRM. Still a real problem, but I can understand why Linux people wouldn't focus on it.
And WTF about the proprietary binary driver? I paid $400 for the video card -- are they seriously about to charge me more for the driver? More importantly, I paid $400 for the video card -- why don't they give me an open driver? Or at least some open specs.
In fact, this is already happening. Again, the only obstacle there is DRM. I can build a machine that will play HD movies just fine, and with open drivers -- but I have to crack the DRM first.
First, Windows developers aren't forced to beg the Ubuntu repo maintainers for their holy blessing in order to get an app into the catalog that appears when you launch the "Add/Remove Programs" utility.
A few developers run their own repositories. Depending on how well-run they are, it's usually trivial to add a new repository.
Second, because Windows dependably installs a particular set of libraries by default, there aren't the same dependency hassles on Windows as there are on Linux
And also because Windows developers like to compile things in, or include every DLL known to man in the installer. OS X developers are even worse -- rather than install shared libraries at all, they'd prefer to put everything in the.app folder, including binaries for every architecture known to man, just in case someone wants to move an app to another machine, rather than re-downloading it.
The enormous Debian/Ubuntu repository system that gobbles up people-hours in maintenance time and the graphical package search/installer tool is a band-aid on top of horrendous dependency and compatibility issues endemic to GNU/X11/Linux operating systems.
They are strengths of Linux, I think.
Let me put it this way: The VLC installer on Windows is 9.3 megs. The VLC DMG on OS X is 23.2 megs -- or 13.9 megs for a CPU-specific version, and you have to manually pick the version you need.
On Linux, you don't have to know what your CPU is, and the VLC download from the Medibuntu repository is a little over a megabyte. That's 1. Plus a ton of dependencies... Most of which may be shared among other apps -- mplayer in particular, but also encoders, possibly even gnash.
The same is true across the board -- Postfix is 1 meg, but the postfix-mysql plugin, which allows Postfix to do things like delivery/forwarding based on a MySQL query, is a separate package, less than 50k. If you know you'll be using Postfix with MySQL, just install postfix-mysql, and let it take care of the rest.
I could go on. Why should I be filling my disk -- and RAM -- with ten or twenty copies of the exact same code, just because the developer didn't understand shared libraries?
Perhaps the amount of work that is put into maintaining the packages is excessive, but the set of dependencies it's created is not a "bandaid", or a problem to be solved -- it is an end in itself. I have some ideas for how to reduce the administrative overhead of running a "distribution", but dropping dependencies isn't it.
The reason that alternative graphical shells aren't installed by default, or the reason that selecting a different graphical shell is not a big button on the login screen, is because the default one is really, really good.
I beg to differ.
And multiple optional graphical shells would only fragment the user base.
This is true, which is why Ubuntu picked one. However, I would say that the Windows graphical shell is very, very basic. It might be a replacement for Gnome -- maybe, if you install enough on top of it -- but it's not a replacement for KDE, or Fluxbox, or WMII, or many of the other alternatives.
The reason you can't use the command line to do even basic stuff is that the Linux command line is a whole lot better than the Windows command line.
There is actually a decent Windows commandline -- PowerShell -- but it's not the default. The reason you can't use the commandline to do even basic stuff is that Microsoft didn't even realize that was a feature until recently, and so many things simply do not have commandline support in Windows, or from Windows apps.
"Why can't I just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install?!?!"
Linux is not Windows. The longer you continue to delude yourself into thinking that it is Windows, the harder it will be.
That said, you can "just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install" -- it's just usually far easier to install with the package manager. And yes, that is true even from the commandline -- I know you don't like the commandline, but it's kind of hard to argue with "sudo apt-get install koffice" versus any MS Office installer. And remember, that's all that's required -- no clicking next-next-next, filling out your product key, name, age, mother's maiden name, etc, just to get to a fucking word processor.
"What is the difference between KDE and Gnome and why should it matter?!?!"
There are many differences. Try them both.
Why does this matter so much to you? That's like screaming "What is the difference between Linux and OSX and why should it matter?!?!" Just pick one. Or pick Ubuntu and let it choose for you.
"Why do I have to go to the command line interface to do even basic stuff?"
Be specific. I haven't had to go to the commandline in years. I still prefer it for a few things, though.
Trivial example: The Medibuntu project used to have GUI steps (presumably with screenshots) to walk you through the process. They found that it was much simpler, easier, and less prone to error to simply provide a one-liner for people to paste into a commandline.
Hell, until the latest release, Ubuntu wouldn't even let me attach a projector without a complicated edit to the Xorg config file.
You act as if this is trivial to do in Windows. You're right, you don't have to go to a commandline, but it is often harder than it needs to be, and the process varies based on your video card.
Oh, and this is supposed to improve with the next Ubuntu release, which is coming out this month. This being Ubuntu, that's not "real soon now" -- there's actually a date set some three weeks away.
I remember that ME was worse than 98, and that at the time, 98 SE was considered the best version to have.
And XP wasn't the version of NT that came in to save everyone from the 9x/ME branch -- according to Wikipedia, 2K was already out when ME was released.
And the Vista machines I've seen really, truly are that bad. I can see where it might be possible to get good hardware, and a good version of Vista, and a clean install, and it might run as fast as XP, with more eye candy.
And it's been a year now. After how long Vista took, do you really think Windows 7 is going to be out soon enough to matter? I admit it might, and I don't see Windows dying, but I do suspect there will be more than a few converts -- it seems that everyone I work with wants a Mac, actually.
nearly all your software won't work, including your accounting software won't run on it at all, period.
Wine is getting better all the time. Which accounting software is this, specifically?
Or the minefield of setting up dual screens
Currently a minefield anywhere but OS X, in my experience. It may "just work" on Ubuntu very soon, though.
or wifi
Again, improving all the time. And on my laptop -- just a random Toshiba one, on which lots of other things gave me grief (the VT instructions are disabled by the BIOS, for some reason) -- on this laptop, wifi just worked, out of the box, even during the install. With WPA. And unlike on Windows, it turned off the wifi by default when I plugged in a cable, rather than bugging me every few minutes with "Wireless network detected! Just in case your gigabit ethernet to a fiber Internet connection wasn't enough!" Yes, I can turn off the wireless by flipping a hardware switch, or by pressing some fn-combination, but that is an extra step beyond just plugging it in.
or getting your shiny new blackberry or iphone to sync contacts with
Haven't tried that, specifically. I do know that Amarok seems to notice when I plug in things like iPods, and it's ready to deal with them.
oh wait... no outlook...
Because Outlook is so efficient, and easy to interoperate with, and pretty...
Sure ubuntu etc have reached the point where you can build a basic web&email machine very quickly and its pretty simple, but go much beyond that and Linux throws plenty of obstacles into your path.
Contrast that with Vista, where there's a fair chance you won't even make it to a basic web&email machine. The one friend I know who is forced to use it at school (for a Vista class, no less) claims that it bluescreens frequently -- either every couple hours or several times an hour, he didn't say.
I suspect that it is much easier to upgrade the average person to Ubuntu than to Vista. Yes, there's always XP, but that won't last forever -- Ubuntu continues to evolve, and XP doesn't.
First... C drive? I'm guessing you grew up on Windows. On Ubuntu, that's probably/dev/sda, but you never know...
Vista is trying to force good application software design that runs against years of experience in the Windows world and it's going to take a long time for app makers to adjust to the new reality.
Actually, it might be simpler: Vista will die. Windows 7 will continue Vista's habit of making it not fun for the user when your app needs to do stuff it shouldn't, even if that user has an administrative account -- so new apps, or apps ported to w7, won't behave so stupidly. And it will run some older version of Windows, or a compatibility layer, in a VM, so that old apps can run on some admin account which has rights to do exactly nothing to the host w7 machine.
Might it be *that* difficult for our presumed teenage malfaiteurs to reboot on a removable media and mount / to reset root's password?
It might.
Case lock + BIOS password + bootloader password. Done.
Of course, it means you also need to train the admins to check for USB keyloggers... Or carry their own keyboards... Or simply rely on remote administration, and the assumption that the kids might be reasonably supervised.
configure basic user account, it's only a couple of clicks, not too hard now is it... install the apps and look for the program files folder and the HKLM keys and configure both to have user access.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the point of this concept of "limited user access"?
I mean, you do realize this is the equivalent of the old PHP tip of resolving "permission denied" errors by running a "chmod 777" on whatever directory you need to access... you do realize this is the equivalent of "chmod 777/usr -R", right?
Or even configure policies, they will block all exe's except the ones you describe in it.
I remember this -- it was so absurdly trivial to get around. Rename program-I-want-to-run.exe to notepad.exe, or iexplore.exe, or any other app that's allowed.
The only way I know of reliably kiosk-ifying Windows is to realize that Windows cannot be effectively locked down, and plan accordingly. Install it in a virtual machine, with its disk configured as a copy-on-write snapshot (which can be rolled back instantly), and save an image of the VM itself (RAM and all). At the first sign of trouble, or just whenever you feel like it (maybe when the machine has been idle for long enough), you kill the VM, then resume the known-good image.
As much as I hate to say it, it's possible to lock down a Windows desktop far more than GNOME or KDE.
Out of the box, maybe.
Why would I care about making the Desktop read-only? It's part of that user's profile.
Discarding the hard disk -- virtual machines + snapshots, or disk snapshots, period. Not really a solid GUI for that, though.
With tweaking you can get those badly written programs to work. It involves changing various permissions on the file system and registry. It's a PITA, but it can be done.
I guess the question is, then, whether getting those badly-written programs to work is more of a PITA than manually applying these other things like nuking the disk on reboot.
Also, it looks as though you're not really locking those apps down -- rather, you're altering permissions so that they can write to things which they shouldn't. Doesn't that defeat the point of all the other locking-down you do, short of the part where it nukes the disk on reboot? Does Windows have an answer yet to fakeroot + chroot for this? (Any app which thinks it needs root access, rare as such apps are, can be sandboxed on Linux without resorting to a full virtual machine.)
If you've set it in a reasonably public place, people might not check over your shoulder to see what you're doing on it, but they will notice if you start opening the case and poking inside.
And you are drastically trivializing that process, too. You'll need to be able to shut it down (which your user might not have rights to), then plug your extra IDE drive in... Whoops, that mobo only has one SATA port. What do you do now?
I mean, yes, given unlimited physical access, there's not much that can't be overcome in some way. You could pull the RAM -- it retains its memory, unreliably, but it's there. You could install a hardware keylogger, and come back later. You could pull the hard disk, put it in another computer, reset the password, then put it back in the kiosk-ified computer.
But really, we're talking about a somewhat public place, fairly limited time until you're discovered, probably security cameras anyway. Put a reasonably locked-down Linux there, and you're no longer the low-hanging fruit -- people will just go next door where they have admin rights to a Win2K box.
Also, while X terminals would be very secure, they'd also be a bit slower than even a netbooted PC.
While I'm sure that cuts costs and increases stability -- they can basically figure out who's unreliable, and whose drivers suck, and refuse to do business with them, or at least fix their drivers for them...
I doubt that has very much to do with OS design.
Keep in mind, OS X runs on the iPhone. Windows doesn't run on Windows Mobile -- Windows Mobile runs on Windows Mobile. That's the same OS that already runs on 32-bit and 64-bit, Intel and PPC, and transparently emulates PPC on Intel so that you don't have to know the difference when you upgrade.
That should tell you something about the respective flexibility of their OSes. Just because Apple doesn't port to other hardware doesn't mean they're incapable of it.
If Intel is right, there won't be much of an effect on existing games.
Intel is focusing on raytracers, something Crytek has specifically said that they will not do. Therefore, both Crysis and any sequels won't really see any improvement from Intel's approach.
If Intel is right, what we are talking about is the Crysis-killer -- a game that looks and plays much better than Crysis (and maybe with a plot that doesn't completely suck), and only on Intel hardware, not on nVidia.
Oh, and Beryl has been killed and merged. It's just Compiz now, and Compiz Fusion if you need more.
Seriously, there should be a word limit on the amount of legalese you can agree to in a single action, or for a single service.
Bonus if we can make it legally required that every contract have a human-readable summary, similar to the Creative Commons ones. Here's their summary of the GPLv2.
It is, however, worth being aware of. I, for one, will tend towards companies which stick to opt-in, or at least to a choice up front -- and away from companies who require you to opt-out of things.
I've had my registrar send several emails to me, and even hold the domain for a certain amount of time after it expired, so that I could renew a few days late.
Yes, they will happily sell it to a spammer, but it also takes almost no effort for them to keep you informed, and they don't really care if you keep it, either. I imagine they'd be perfectly happy selling 100% to spammers now, but it's seriously a "why the hell not" kind of decision.
The difference is, with snail spam, it's going to be delivered, and then you're going to have to deal with it. You're still going to pay the cost of throwing it away, recycling it, etc.
With email spam, there are several stages where you can block the connection before the mail is delivered, thus reducing the cost to you. Not completely eliminating it, but reducing it. I know of no similar steps to take with snail spam.
However, there is much more to spam than the simple distinction between spam and ham...
Really? Filter out the few hundred spams a day I get, and I can handle the rest myself.
However, the non-automatic negative responses can be much more effective in finding the holes the spam is creeping through, or in closing the windows of economic opportunity the spammer is trying to open.
In other words, you mark something as spam, and Google does some statistical analysis, and adjusts its filter. Done.
Similar problems with email addresses that are used for black hole disguises versus those that the spammer is using for valid replies or for address harvesting. A human can tell the differences quickly enough, but automatic approaches can't.
And I'd say, an automatic approach can easily enough identify which account is being used to send the spam. I think that's good enough -- let them use whatever they want for address harvesting or valid responses; what I care about is stopping it at the source.
And you're making the same stupid argument that I talked about before. Oh no! The Bill of Rights is no more! The country is doomed!
Whether you can see it or not, it is a reduction in rights, and it should be carefully considered. Given that a plane is effectively private property, it is entirely within the rights of the airline to impose their own rules, and again, entirely unnecessary for the government to lie for them.
I think you underestimate the sense of entitlement that many people seem to have about their phones.
Before it was phones, it was cigarettes. And I'm fairly sure those were not banned for any safety reason -- I would imagine it has a lot more to do with the fact that if someone's smoking on a plane, there's really nowhere that smoke won't get to.
If you're not being nice on my property, then I have the right to make you leave. If it's not my property, then I have the right to leave and get further away from you. But on an airplane, 6 miles up in the air, there's nowhere for either of us to go.
There is the possibility of banning you from flying with that airline again.
Since it's so much harder to deal with conflicts in the air, it makes a ton of sense to me to take some steps to avoid those conflicts.
And yet, I don't consider our government blatantly lying to us to be an acceptable step, full stop.
Look, I really don't care -- as long as I can still use a laptop, even an entirely disconnected one, I'm fine. If I can't do that, I'll bring a book. And I'm pretty much never bothered by conversations happening near me on a plane -- there's enough white noise from the engine that I can ignore it.
And consider -- they do allow air phones. It would also work well to simply ban voice calls and mandate text messages, if you're bothering someone. It simply doesn't add up -- it may be a reason you appreciate the cell phone ban, but it's not a reason it exists.
I just find it a bit disturbing that you're OK with a blanket government ban on a particular activity, under false pretenses, merely because it's annoying.
There are a few other things, like the upper left of the window itself, that aren't handled correctly... But I would guess by now that Slashdot has done this right, and according to the standards, so the only "craptastic" thing here is your web browser. (And mine.)
Depends on what you mean by "work better". It's been 6 months now since the 8800GT was released, and NVidia still hasn't delivered a usable Linux driver for it. 3D is as glitchy as hell, while Compiz flickers and jerks around.
From the article I read, the open ATI drivers don't yet have accelerated 3D. Something about 2D still being worked on.
And yes, I'm as eager to ditch nVidia as you -- for my part, I'd assumed my compositing issues were KDE-specific (as I actually just use KWin's compositing), and it also likes to leak large chunks of RAM -- xrestop will be some 20 megs, and X itself will be over 200. This may have been fixed recently, but for awhile, I was having to reboot regularly.
Of course, nVidia's drivers apparently suck on Vista, too, so yes, I'm getting out as soon as I can find a viable replacement. I might even go back to Intel.
I was basing this on the "people who spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card" -- that doesn't sound like a gamer to you?
Someone who makes games would still likely fit my description -- apparently, plenty of games still use mp3, which is really strange, when better codecs are available for free (flac, ogg). In addition, if they're employed, they probably don't buy their own computer.
And someone who has the original CDs is kind of rare now, vs someone who just has everything in iTunes, and couldn't tell you what format it's in.
In short, why would you, as a developer, use MP3 when you have total control over the software on which the music (or other sound) will be played back?
I'd have thought that "total control over the software" bit would have given it away...
The question is, why would game developers pay patent royalties for MP3 when there are better codecs available, for free? Because apparently, they do pay those royalties.
Firstly, there simply is no practical use for keeping a phone line engaged 100% of the time. There are many practical uses, which should have been readily apparent early on, and are only growing, for using as much bandwidth as you possibly can, most of the time.
The reasons for this should be obvious, but let me summarize them all: A phone call is all or nothing, and it's interactive. At least one person is using it interactively while making the call, and all calls are equally hard (or easy) to route. Bandwidth usage can scale -- thus, it can appear to work, for most people (who aren't using much bandwidth), yet can be absolutely abysmal for someone attempting to download a large file -- or even someone who watches a lot of YouTube. Also, many bandwidth uses are non-interactive -- you can leave something downloading and walk away -- completely non-applicable to the phone.
Second, as another poster said, phone companies are audited -- specifically, I almost never pick up a phone and get anything other than a dialtone. If that ever does happen, the phone companies build more infrastructure.
Finally, the problem with an IP network degrading gracefully here is, the ISP can pretend the problem doesn't exist. After all, there are a LOT of places where something could go wrong (spyware on your box? neighbor on your wireless?) which would make you think the ISP was throttling you, or overtaxed, when they really weren't.
Look: Your analogy sort of make sense, for phones. Now try it on power. "But if everyone started pulling power all at once, you'll start hitting the limits of the generators!" Yeah, just imagine if the power companies whined like that when summer hits and everyone turns on their air conditioners. Yes, occasionally, we run into the limits of the system -- and then they upgrade the system. Why shouldn't Internet function the same way?
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, never heard of it. I have, however, heard of Maya, which does run on Linux, and has since February of 2000.
I'd argue that in many, many ways, Linux already has this down, moreso than other OSes. The interface is no longer the obstacle, when the biggest complaints you hear from people are about things like unsupported hardware, or not being able to run quite all Linux apps (though Wine is getting better all the time).
The main reasons I think people complain about the Linux UI are:
Let me give you an example:
On Linux, to install VLC, I type "sudo apt-get install vlc", and it installs. I then look in the menu for my app.
On OS X, to install VLC, I go to videolan.org, click "downloads", scroll through a confusing list of mirrors and architectures, say "screw it" and just download the Universal Binary. Safari likely asks me where to save it, and I choose the desktop. Then I go to the desktop and doubleclick it to mount, then drag the VLC icon to applications. Then I push the tiny eject icon next to the shortcut to the mounted volume, if I have a Finder window open -- otherwise, I drag it to the trash. Then I drag the disk image to the trash. Then I go to Applications looking for it, and drag it to the Dock.
On Windows, repeat the same steps for going to the website and scrolling through a confusing list of mirrors. IE likely asks me where to save it, and I choose the desktop. Then I go to the desktop, doubleclick it to run the installer. I then select a folder to install it to, agree to the license, and generally just continue hitting "next" until it finishes installing. When it says it's done, I close that window, and drag the installer to the recycle bin. I then empty the recycle bin.
The only way OS X ever wins is if you're one of those people who can manage to download and run the app from the mounted drive, but can't figure out how to install it (so that it can update itself properly). And that shaves a few steps off, but not all of them -- Linux still wins.
What about uninstalling? On Linux, it's "apt-get remove vlc && apt-get autoremove" -- a bit longer, but that's because I want to clean out unused libraries. On OS X, it's about the same -- drag the app to the trash, and empty the trash. On Windows, it's opening add/remove programs and looking for it there -- if you're lucky, it is there, and you can simply click uninstall. Then, it's entirely up to the app -- some just ask "are you sure", and some assume you want to reconfigure the app, and you have to figure out how to convince them to actually uninstall. Some have an uninstall program hidden somewhere in the Start Menu. And some actually require the install CD to uninstall.
I mention all of this because some people have been using this as an example of how Linux is not user-friendly -- it doesn't let you "just download and install", as if that's a simple process. It's not, but it's an easy process, because you already know how to do it -- you don't already know how to use apt, or Synaptic, when you start using Linux. But I do genuinely believe the Linux way of doing this is easier, once you know what you're doing.
Linux does this, too.
The difference is not so much that Apple can be sure that the performance needs are met, but that Windows does these flashy things so pathetically poorly. You can turn off most of the flashy crap in Vista, but it doesn't make Vista a usable OS. You can turn on as much flashy crap as you want on Linux or OS X, and it won't become as unusable as Vista.
Subscription radio I can sort of see... except that there are dozens of free radio streams out there, including at least one for my hometown. And it's a small town in Iowa, so that's pretty good.
Oh -- and podcasts.
But a licensed blu-ray player? Only needed because of DRM and patents. My Linux machine can play movies just fine, and would almost certainly be capable of playing Blu-Ray movies out of the box, were it not for that DRM. Still a real problem, but I can understand why Linux people wouldn't focus on it.
And WTF about the proprietary binary driver? I paid $400 for the video card -- are they seriously about to charge me more for the driver? More importantly, I paid $400 for the video card -- why don't they give me an open driver? Or at least some open specs.
In fact, this is already happening. Again, the only obstacle there is DRM. I can build a machine that will play HD movies just fine, and with open drivers -- but I have to crack the DRM first.
A few developers run their own repositories. Depending on how well-run they are, it's usually trivial to add a new repository.
And also because Windows developers like to compile things in, or include every DLL known to man in the installer. OS X developers are even worse -- rather than install shared libraries at all, they'd prefer to put everything in the .app folder, including binaries for every architecture known to man, just in case someone wants to move an app to another machine, rather than re-downloading it.
They are strengths of Linux, I think.
Let me put it this way: The VLC installer on Windows is 9.3 megs. The VLC DMG on OS X is 23.2 megs -- or 13.9 megs for a CPU-specific version, and you have to manually pick the version you need.
On Linux, you don't have to know what your CPU is, and the VLC download from the Medibuntu repository is a little over a megabyte. That's 1. Plus a ton of dependencies... Most of which may be shared among other apps -- mplayer in particular, but also encoders, possibly even gnash.
The same is true across the board -- Postfix is 1 meg, but the postfix-mysql plugin, which allows Postfix to do things like delivery/forwarding based on a MySQL query, is a separate package, less than 50k. If you know you'll be using Postfix with MySQL, just install postfix-mysql, and let it take care of the rest.
I could go on. Why should I be filling my disk -- and RAM -- with ten or twenty copies of the exact same code, just because the developer didn't understand shared libraries?
Perhaps the amount of work that is put into maintaining the packages is excessive, but the set of dependencies it's created is not a "bandaid", or a problem to be solved -- it is an end in itself. I have some ideas for how to reduce the administrative overhead of running a "distribution", but dropping dependencies isn't it.
I beg to differ.
This is true, which is why Ubuntu picked one. However, I would say that the Windows graphical shell is very, very basic. It might be a replacement for Gnome -- maybe, if you install enough on top of it -- but it's not a replacement for KDE, or Fluxbox, or WMII, or many of the other alternatives.
There is actually a decent Windows commandline -- PowerShell -- but it's not the default. The reason you can't use the commandline to do even basic stuff is that Microsoft didn't even realize that was a feature until recently, and so many things simply do not have commandline support in Windows, or from Windows apps.
Linux is not Windows. The longer you continue to delude yourself into thinking that it is Windows, the harder it will be.
That said, you can "just download a piece of software and double-click on it to install" -- it's just usually far easier to install with the package manager. And yes, that is true even from the commandline -- I know you don't like the commandline, but it's kind of hard to argue with "sudo apt-get install koffice" versus any MS Office installer. And remember, that's all that's required -- no clicking next-next-next, filling out your product key, name, age, mother's maiden name, etc, just to get to a fucking word processor.
There are many differences. Try them both.
Why does this matter so much to you? That's like screaming "What is the difference between Linux and OSX and why should it matter?!?!" Just pick one. Or pick Ubuntu and let it choose for you.
Be specific. I haven't had to go to the commandline in years. I still prefer it for a few things, though.
Trivial example: The Medibuntu project used to have GUI steps (presumably with screenshots) to walk you through the process. They found that it was much simpler, easier, and less prone to error to simply provide a one-liner for people to paste into a commandline.
You act as if this is trivial to do in Windows. You're right, you don't have to go to a commandline, but it is often harder than it needs to be, and the process varies based on your video card.
Oh, and this is supposed to improve with the next Ubuntu release, which is coming out this month. This being Ubuntu, that's not "real soon now" -- there's actually a date set some three weeks away.
I remember that ME was worse than 98, and that at the time, 98 SE was considered the best version to have.
And XP wasn't the version of NT that came in to save everyone from the 9x/ME branch -- according to Wikipedia, 2K was already out when ME was released.
And the Vista machines I've seen really, truly are that bad. I can see where it might be possible to get good hardware, and a good version of Vista, and a clean install, and it might run as fast as XP, with more eye candy.
And it's been a year now. After how long Vista took, do you really think Windows 7 is going to be out soon enough to matter? I admit it might, and I don't see Windows dying, but I do suspect there will be more than a few converts -- it seems that everyone I work with wants a Mac, actually.
Wine is getting better all the time. Which accounting software is this, specifically?
Currently a minefield anywhere but OS X, in my experience. It may "just work" on Ubuntu very soon, though.
Again, improving all the time. And on my laptop -- just a random Toshiba one, on which lots of other things gave me grief (the VT instructions are disabled by the BIOS, for some reason) -- on this laptop, wifi just worked, out of the box, even during the install. With WPA. And unlike on Windows, it turned off the wifi by default when I plugged in a cable, rather than bugging me every few minutes with "Wireless network detected! Just in case your gigabit ethernet to a fiber Internet connection wasn't enough!" Yes, I can turn off the wireless by flipping a hardware switch, or by pressing some fn-combination, but that is an extra step beyond just plugging it in.
Haven't tried that, specifically. I do know that Amarok seems to notice when I plug in things like iPods, and it's ready to deal with them.
Because Outlook is so efficient, and easy to interoperate with, and pretty...
Oh wait, I was thinking of Kontact. Never mind.
Contrast that with Vista, where there's a fair chance you won't even make it to a basic web&email machine. The one friend I know who is forced to use it at school (for a Vista class, no less) claims that it bluescreens frequently -- either every couple hours or several times an hour, he didn't say.
I suspect that it is much easier to upgrade the average person to Ubuntu than to Vista. Yes, there's always XP, but that won't last forever -- Ubuntu continues to evolve, and XP doesn't.
First... C drive? I'm guessing you grew up on Windows. On Ubuntu, that's probably /dev/sda, but you never know...
Actually, it might be simpler: Vista will die. Windows 7 will continue Vista's habit of making it not fun for the user when your app needs to do stuff it shouldn't, even if that user has an administrative account -- so new apps, or apps ported to w7, won't behave so stupidly. And it will run some older version of Windows, or a compatibility layer, in a VM, so that old apps can run on some admin account which has rights to do exactly nothing to the host w7 machine.
It might.
Case lock + BIOS password + bootloader password. Done.
Of course, it means you also need to train the admins to check for USB keyloggers... Or carry their own keyboards... Or simply rely on remote administration, and the assumption that the kids might be reasonably supervised.
Doesn't that kind of defeat the point of this concept of "limited user access"?
I mean, you do realize this is the equivalent of the old PHP tip of resolving "permission denied" errors by running a "chmod 777" on whatever directory you need to access... you do realize this is the equivalent of "chmod 777 /usr -R", right?
I remember this -- it was so absurdly trivial to get around. Rename program-I-want-to-run.exe to notepad.exe, or iexplore.exe, or any other app that's allowed.
The only way I know of reliably kiosk-ifying Windows is to realize that Windows cannot be effectively locked down, and plan accordingly. Install it in a virtual machine, with its disk configured as a copy-on-write snapshot (which can be rolled back instantly), and save an image of the VM itself (RAM and all). At the first sign of trouble, or just whenever you feel like it (maybe when the machine has been idle for long enough), you kill the VM, then resume the known-good image.
Out of the box, maybe.
Why would I care about making the Desktop read-only? It's part of that user's profile.
Discarding the hard disk -- virtual machines + snapshots, or disk snapshots, period. Not really a solid GUI for that, though.
I guess the question is, then, whether getting those badly-written programs to work is more of a PITA than manually applying these other things like nuking the disk on reboot.
Also, it looks as though you're not really locking those apps down -- rather, you're altering permissions so that they can write to things which they shouldn't. Doesn't that defeat the point of all the other locking-down you do, short of the part where it nukes the disk on reboot? Does Windows have an answer yet to fakeroot + chroot for this? (Any app which thinks it needs root access, rare as such apps are, can be sandboxed on Linux without resorting to a full virtual machine.)
As is all security, really.
If you've set it in a reasonably public place, people might not check over your shoulder to see what you're doing on it, but they will notice if you start opening the case and poking inside.
And you are drastically trivializing that process, too. You'll need to be able to shut it down (which your user might not have rights to), then plug your extra IDE drive in... Whoops, that mobo only has one SATA port. What do you do now?
I mean, yes, given unlimited physical access, there's not much that can't be overcome in some way. You could pull the RAM -- it retains its memory, unreliably, but it's there. You could install a hardware keylogger, and come back later. You could pull the hard disk, put it in another computer, reset the password, then put it back in the kiosk-ified computer.
But really, we're talking about a somewhat public place, fairly limited time until you're discovered, probably security cameras anyway. Put a reasonably locked-down Linux there, and you're no longer the low-hanging fruit -- people will just go next door where they have admin rights to a Win2K box.
Also, while X terminals would be very secure, they'd also be a bit slower than even a netbooted PC.
While I'm sure that cuts costs and increases stability -- they can basically figure out who's unreliable, and whose drivers suck, and refuse to do business with them, or at least fix their drivers for them...
I doubt that has very much to do with OS design.
Keep in mind, OS X runs on the iPhone. Windows doesn't run on Windows Mobile -- Windows Mobile runs on Windows Mobile. That's the same OS that already runs on 32-bit and 64-bit, Intel and PPC, and transparently emulates PPC on Intel so that you don't have to know the difference when you upgrade.
That should tell you something about the respective flexibility of their OSes. Just because Apple doesn't port to other hardware doesn't mean they're incapable of it.
If Intel is right, there won't be much of an effect on existing games.
Intel is focusing on raytracers, something Crytek has specifically said that they will not do. Therefore, both Crysis and any sequels won't really see any improvement from Intel's approach.
If Intel is right, what we are talking about is the Crysis-killer -- a game that looks and plays much better than Crysis (and maybe with a plot that doesn't completely suck), and only on Intel hardware, not on nVidia.
Oh, and Beryl has been killed and merged. It's just Compiz now, and Compiz Fusion if you need more.
Seriously, there should be a word limit on the amount of legalese you can agree to in a single action, or for a single service.
Bonus if we can make it legally required that every contract have a human-readable summary, similar to the Creative Commons ones. Here's their summary of the GPLv2.
It is, however, worth being aware of. I, for one, will tend towards companies which stick to opt-in, or at least to a choice up front -- and away from companies who require you to opt-out of things.
I've had my registrar send several emails to me, and even hold the domain for a certain amount of time after it expired, so that I could renew a few days late.
Yes, they will happily sell it to a spammer, but it also takes almost no effort for them to keep you informed, and they don't really care if you keep it, either. I imagine they'd be perfectly happy selling 100% to spammers now, but it's seriously a "why the hell not" kind of decision.
The difference is, with snail spam, it's going to be delivered, and then you're going to have to deal with it. You're still going to pay the cost of throwing it away, recycling it, etc.
With email spam, there are several stages where you can block the connection before the mail is delivered, thus reducing the cost to you. Not completely eliminating it, but reducing it. I know of no similar steps to take with snail spam.
Really? Filter out the few hundred spams a day I get, and I can handle the rest myself.
In other words, you mark something as spam, and Google does some statistical analysis, and adjusts its filter. Done.
Similar problems with email addresses that are used for black hole disguises versus those that the spammer is using for valid replies or for address harvesting. A human can tell the differences quickly enough, but automatic approaches can't.And I'd say, an automatic approach can easily enough identify which account is being used to send the spam. I think that's good enough -- let them use whatever they want for address harvesting or valid responses; what I care about is stopping it at the source.
Whether you can see it or not, it is a reduction in rights, and it should be carefully considered. Given that a plane is effectively private property, it is entirely within the rights of the airline to impose their own rules, and again, entirely unnecessary for the government to lie for them.
Before it was phones, it was cigarettes. And I'm fairly sure those were not banned for any safety reason -- I would imagine it has a lot more to do with the fact that if someone's smoking on a plane, there's really nowhere that smoke won't get to.
There is the possibility of banning you from flying with that airline again.
And yet, I don't consider our government blatantly lying to us to be an acceptable step, full stop.
Look, I really don't care -- as long as I can still use a laptop, even an entirely disconnected one, I'm fine. If I can't do that, I'll bring a book. And I'm pretty much never bothered by conversations happening near me on a plane -- there's enough white noise from the engine that I can ignore it.
And consider -- they do allow air phones. It would also work well to simply ban voice calls and mandate text messages, if you're bothering someone. It simply doesn't add up -- it may be a reason you appreciate the cell phone ban, but it's not a reason it exists.
I just find it a bit disturbing that you're OK with a blanket government ban on a particular activity, under false pretenses, merely because it's annoying.
Looks fine under Konqueror, too.
There are a few other things, like the upper left of the window itself, that aren't handled correctly... But I would guess by now that Slashdot has done this right, and according to the standards, so the only "craptastic" thing here is your web browser. (And mine.)
From the article I read, the open ATI drivers don't yet have accelerated 3D. Something about 2D still being worked on.
And yes, I'm as eager to ditch nVidia as you -- for my part, I'd assumed my compositing issues were KDE-specific (as I actually just use KWin's compositing), and it also likes to leak large chunks of RAM -- xrestop will be some 20 megs, and X itself will be over 200. This may have been fixed recently, but for awhile, I was having to reboot regularly.
Of course, nVidia's drivers apparently suck on Vista, too, so yes, I'm getting out as soon as I can find a viable replacement. I might even go back to Intel.
I was basing this on the "people who spend tons of money on a computer only to throw in a cheap sound card" -- that doesn't sound like a gamer to you?
Someone who makes games would still likely fit my description -- apparently, plenty of games still use mp3, which is really strange, when better codecs are available for free (flac, ogg). In addition, if they're employed, they probably don't buy their own computer.
And someone who has the original CDs is kind of rare now, vs someone who just has everything in iTunes, and couldn't tell you what format it's in.
Here, let me rephrase it:
I'd have thought that "total control over the software" bit would have given it away...
The question is, why would game developers pay patent royalties for MP3 when there are better codecs available, for free? Because apparently, they do pay those royalties.
Firstly, there simply is no practical use for keeping a phone line engaged 100% of the time. There are many practical uses, which should have been readily apparent early on, and are only growing, for using as much bandwidth as you possibly can, most of the time.
The reasons for this should be obvious, but let me summarize them all: A phone call is all or nothing, and it's interactive. At least one person is using it interactively while making the call, and all calls are equally hard (or easy) to route. Bandwidth usage can scale -- thus, it can appear to work, for most people (who aren't using much bandwidth), yet can be absolutely abysmal for someone attempting to download a large file -- or even someone who watches a lot of YouTube. Also, many bandwidth uses are non-interactive -- you can leave something downloading and walk away -- completely non-applicable to the phone.
Second, as another poster said, phone companies are audited -- specifically, I almost never pick up a phone and get anything other than a dialtone. If that ever does happen, the phone companies build more infrastructure.
Finally, the problem with an IP network degrading gracefully here is, the ISP can pretend the problem doesn't exist. After all, there are a LOT of places where something could go wrong (spyware on your box? neighbor on your wireless?) which would make you think the ISP was throttling you, or overtaxed, when they really weren't.
Look: Your analogy sort of make sense, for phones. Now try it on power. "But if everyone started pulling power all at once, you'll start hitting the limits of the generators!" Yeah, just imagine if the power companies whined like that when summer hits and everyone turns on their air conditioners. Yes, occasionally, we run into the limits of the system -- and then they upgrade the system. Why shouldn't Internet function the same way?