I'll grant, I've never tried Second Life out, but I get the impression that it's the kind of system where everything hinges on the integrity of the users, even more so than in something like CounterStrike. It seems like the whole point of Second Life is role play, not trying to acquire assets as quickly as possible, so someone with such a strong level-grinding attitude that they're willing to cheat, while they may not do a whole lot of damage to the online world, is exceedingly unlikely to help in fostering the kind of place they want to have.
It's a bit heavy-handed, but not unreasonable, especially given how $#@#% epidemic online cheating is getting.
I see sloppy language like this coming from people who understand the distinction all the time, and it's beginning to bother me. I can't help but wonder if a lot of the resistance to evolution theory comes from people taking the language of evolution proponents too literally and thinking that scientists really do think that modern humans and modern chimpanzees interbred 6 million years ago, or that at some point 6-10 million years ago a group of chimpanzees exactly like modern ones just stopped evolving, and that the rest continued evolving to produce modern humans.
People who understand evolution know what they're talking about when they say "humans and chimps split at X date.)
Another purely pragmatic fear is that this would be nothing but a waste of time and money, and a distraction. This law effectively requires that law enforcement must put a respectable amount of effort into collecting and cataloguing what could be billions of encryption keys. (I couldn't even count the number of keys that I use offhand, not even counting SSL, which I assume they don't care about.) All of these keys have to be associated with their owners and users, what they're being used for, and what data they're being used to encrypt. That could easily grow to be one mess of a database.
A database that would be effectively useless. The only people who are going to provide keys are law-abiding citizens who provide them all and non-abiding citizens who provide all but the keys they don't want the gov't knowing about. Meaning none of the keys in the database will be useful for finding anything the law might need to know. Meanwhile, it's going to provide another distraction if they actually try to enforce it, because they'll have to start hunting down all the folks who are no threat, but don't provide keys because they don't know, don't care, or value their privacy. I'm completely lost as to what they think they can gain by maintaining this. It's not like this database would be particularly useful for, say, mounting a dictionary attack on data that was encrypted with an unknown key by a real shady figure.
I'm sure implementation details can vary how much this is going to pull resources away from real counterterrorism and law enforcement, but I can't see how this can possibly do anything but make counterterrorism and law enforcement more difficult. And I'm sure anybody worth their salt probably realizes this; I can't see why the true motive could be anything but irrational paranoia or a Big Brother attitude. (Of course, those are probably really the same thing.)
The same thing happened at my university. It's true that it was a nightmare to support, and it would be incredibly expensive up-front, but I imagine that in the long run it could be a Very Good Thing. If all ISPs started doing it, it would put a massive amount of pressure on a certain company that shall remain unnamed to make their product truly resistant to malware, which would in turn result in a massive decrease in the amount of money we spend on paying for spam and viruses and dealing with their side effects - essentially a several billiion dollar deadweight loss.
The problem is, for it to work we'd have to get a critical mass of ISPs to implement such a program simultaneously, and be prepared to deal with a serious shitstorm for a year or so. There would have to be enough people doing it that customers couldn't leave in a huff and find another ISP. There'd have to be enough support to help the customers get their computers back online. (But I honestly don't think the ISPs should bear this cost directly - they'd just pass it off to the customers, and if the customers instead bear it directly there will be a lot more pressure put on the vendor of a certain popular but brain-meltingly easy to compromise operating system.) And there would have to be enough ISPs doing it to put some serious pressure on the ISPs who aren't doing it. This could get really nasty, and might result in the implementation of some heavy-handed actions such as an Internet Death Penalty of sorts.
On the other hand, my dream solution would be one where people who respond to spam can be caught and kicked off the internet. Probably just a pipe dream, though.
And I hope it works. I own a PS2, but lately I've been enjoying my friends' Gamecubes a lot more, and my GBA honestly sees a lot more action. Both systems tend to run simpler games, and I've been getting into those a lot more. The only PS2 game I still play frequently is Katamari Damacy, which has just about the most basic gameplay of any recent game.
The thing that Nintendo seems to be figuring out is that fun is an intangible that is only loosely linked to realism, flashiness, or complication. Especially when I can't appreciate any of that flashiness because I am _NOT_ going to buy a better TV just for better games, and even if I did have a higher-res TV, it wouldn't be a very big one and I don't tend to sit close enough to the TV that I think I would really notice the difference.
They also seem to have figured out that having to eat peanut butter and jelly for two months after buying a game system is not fun.
There's a detail in the Linux/Desktop debate for which your analogy is sorely lacking an analogue, and I think it breaks it. It's that the Linux community (oftentimes desperately) wants to become a common desktop operating system.
If, in your hypothetical, folks in France were devoting as much of its mental time to trying to convince Americans to move to France as the Linux community does to trying to get Windows users to switch to Linux, I think the analogy would hold much better. But, of course, it would also become very different, since France would also have to devote a lot of time to changing the very nature of France in order to make it more attractive to Americans if France wants to convince them to move even though they're overall quite comfortable with their current country.
And I think there is a bit of snobbishness to the Linux attitude. The combination of the attitude that general computer users should switch to Linux with the attitude that, if people want to move to Linux, they'll have to learn a whole lot more about computers, strikes me as a great example of geeks being full of themselves. I take the opposite attitude - I'd love if my father could sit down to a computer and have an easy time working it without having to take the time to read a manual or ask questions on a forum or anything like that. Linux can't (and maybe shouldn't) provide that and Windows is more of a hassle than it should be, too, so I told him to buy a Mac.
Judging from the past five years of me bearing much of the cost of my parents' computer shopping decisions, don't even worry about convincing your family to buy a Mac. Start by convincing them to never buy a Dell computer unless - and only if - they are being forced to at gunpoint.
I don't know which is more annoying, that you can subtract 30% from any Dell computer's specs to account for the computron-sucking bundleware they provide, or that you can increase the price of any Dell computer by 50% to account for the fact that you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing the thing and replacing them because they crap out more often.
When it comes to computer shopping, my father is a great example of how stupid humans can be. He's bought four Dell computers in so far this century. Every single time, he has been sorely disappointed and sworn to never buy another Dell computer. Every time he's ready to buy another, he sees the super-low prices that Dell offers and forgets all the previous times that he learned exactly why Dell can afford to be so inexpensive.
So true. The thing that amazes me the most about the linux on the desktop debate is this: It seems that the Linux community (at least the portion of it that I see frequenting forums and slashdot) is only interested in being able to say that Linux is ready for the desktop.
As soon as a linux outsider (read: member of the target market for desktop linux) comes along with criticisms, the response is invariably to discount all those criticisms, usually with comments that boil down to, "Well, I don't care what he said because he's obviously not particularly computer-literate nor is he very clueful about the ever-changing shape of the linux universe."
As long as people continue to carry the implicit assumption that the biggest barrier to Linux being desktop-ready is that not everyone has more than a passing understanding of computers, or that the tastes of the vast majority of computer users aren't as important as the tastes of geeks w/r/t choice and fragmentation, Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
It's not that these are bad attitudes, it's that these are attitudes that are only useful for a server or workstation OS that's aimed at geeks who like and can handle an incredibly tweakable operating environment. They're poison to a project whose primary focus is the general computing market.
Yah. That's why I'm saying, we need to quit worrying about trying to turn Linux into something that's desktop-ready while keeping it as something the geek core would like. To me this goal is quite obviously an attempt at building an OS that is both A and not A.
Much better to start making a desktop OS that can run most GNU/Linux software but is not a traditional Linux, is not guaranteed to behave like a traditional Linux or be able to use all the features that are available to an existing linux, but is much simpler and easier to manage and is actually designed for the desktop.
When's the last time that someone successfully made an OS that makes a good desktop, workstation, and server OS? I'm pretty sure it's never. I'm also pretty sure that isn't simply because nobody ever tried hard enough.
The thing that amuses me most about the linux on the desktop debate is how often people say things like, "The only time a user would ever have to care about this is. . . " because while it's always followed by a good example of when someone would have to care, it is never the only example. I have to wonder how many of the pro-desktop people are actually trying to get people they know using Linux on their desktops. 'Cuz I've had my mom running Linux for a couple years now, and let me say, I know from experience that that is _NOT_ the only case under which a non-skillful user has to care about what CUPS is.
I actually have two computers. One runs OS X, and the other runs FreeBSD. I work plenty on the command line on both.
In the quote of mine that you quoted, I mentioned that Darwin has taken a lot of code from FreeBSD. This does not mean that Darwin is a version of FreeBSD. I'll say it again - everyone uses FreeBSD code. If operating systems were college students, FreeBSD would be the one that has had sex with every single person you know. Twice. I'm also pretty sure that Darwin, like almost every other Unix that's still in use, especially the BSDs, is chock full of bugfixes that came from OpenBSD. Is all that copied code alone enough to argue that every Unix is just a tweaked version of OpenBSD? Of course not.
And I'm personally not wowed by the similarity of FreeBSD and Darwin in the shell. Of course there are similarities; they're both more-or-less 4.4BSD Unixes, and I'm sure that their userland is almost identical. But are they really any more identical than, say, NetBSD and FreeBSD? What about OpenBSD and Darwin? For the most part, I'm equally at home on the terminal of any of them. But I can also think of things I do completely differently on each.
Nor am I particularly wowed by two BSD Unixes being more similar to each other than two different distributions of Linux. Linux is officially the most schizophrenic operating system to ever achieve widespread use. I haven't run it on any of my computers in a while, so I may be a bit off on these numbers, but I remember there being 3 or 4 different ways of getting sound out the speakers, two video interface systems, three different ways you might have to get a wireless card working, two different ways of having the operating system handle/dev, more packaging systems than anyone can count, etc. etc. I know of two different libcs for Linux, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a third. I can't think of a single operating system in the history of computing that's more customizable or gets used for more different tasks. Saying the differences between Darwin and FreeBSD are smaller than the differences among various Linux distributions and using that to imply that they are super intimately related is like saying that the distance from Los Angeles to New York is much smaller than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, so LA and NYC must be really close to each other.
And that BSD family tree is a little short on the details on Darwin's history, what with missing the first decade or so of it and all. Rhapsody didn't just pop out of 4.4Lite, it is also based heavily on OPENSTEP, which was based on NeXTSTEP before it. That stuff does show up on the main UNIX family tree, though.
OS X, back when it was called NEXTSTEP, forked off of BSD 8 years before FreeBSD did, even before 4.4lite came on the scene. You can trace its lineage yourself, if you'd like. Since then, there's been a lot of code borrowing but everyone borrows from FreeBSD and FreeBSD is far from the only OS whose code Darwin has borrowed. Using just that to say that Darwin is based on FreeBSD would make little more sense than using the same fact to claim that GNU/Linux and Windows XP are based on FreeBSD.
But as to your point about BSD in general beating Linux to the desktop with OS X, yeah, you're right. I think Apple showed how it really needs to be done, too. In my experience with trying to teach people to use Linux, the thing that consistently hurts Linux on the desktop is what I'd call its unixyness - stuff like complicated directory hierarchies based on abbreviated names only serves to intimidate the non-geek; even if you tell them they don't need to care about anything outside their home directory, they still know it's there. A lot of Linux's celebrated choices are bad; too. The moment a user ever has to care about QT vs GTK+ and figure out why they are behaving a bit differently, or what the heck CUPS is, or any of that, Linux starts to feel like a border town on the edge of the Wild.
I'm not asking what's to dislike about spatial mode or other defaults of Nautilus. I'm asking why having to go through changing the default settings into something you prefer is such a roadblock?
Click the checkbox to go to browser mode. Click the checkbox to display the address bar. Doesn't that take away the vast majority of these complaints? You seem to be operating under the assumption that a few mouse clicks is this 30-foot stone wall that stands between you and a file manager that behaves more to your liking.
I don't like spatial mode, either. It is obviously something that made a lot more sense back when desktop computers were smaller and is poorly-suited to the kinds of complex directory hierarchies that people use nowadays, especially on UNIX-type machines. That's why I turned it off.
What's so horrible about having to click a checkbox to make Nautilus not be spatial anymore? Or is browser mode also an example of everything that is and ever has been wrong with the computing industry?
Still don't know what I'm talking about, but I think I'm starting to get the idea now.
It seems the optimal solution would be to include several levels of storage for pronunciation information. There could be a system-wide store of this data, which would contain all the defaults - this wouldn't generally be modified, it would just be something that's included with the operating system to get everyone started.
This would be augmented by a second database for each user account. That way, people can augment the pronunciation notes with additions (or override the system default database) without screwing around with everyone else's database.
On top of that, you can store pronunciation notes in the document. It would really be pretty trivial to add - I assume the problem of how to represent this information is a solved problem, something a bit more advanced than saving a string of IPA in Unicode, but similar, so it's really just a matter of adding another tag or two to the ODF format. It's XML, so applications that don't already support the tag should gracefully ignore it; adding the tag wouldn't be disruptive for the most part.
The nice thing about this kind of set-up is that users don't need to install pronunciation markup into the dictionary on their computer any more than you have to store every style sheet for every CSS page you ever visit. It wouldn't be a seprate file, that's the whole point of adding it to the ODF specification. And you don't have to annotate common words or acronyms. Less-common languaes might be best handled by having the user install a language pack, but producing and distributing them shouldn't be too big of an issue; that's the kind of thing that open source really excels at.
Really, now that I've thought about it more carefully, this seems like a total no-brainer to me, and I wonder why it's not a standard thing yet. I'd love to have it; I can think of scads of cases where it would be really useful.
(Disclaimer - I really don't have a clue what I'm talking about here, but I'm going to talk anyway.)
Wouldn't that best be handled with a system-wide database of notes on how to pronounce these things, sort of like the system-wide spellchecking dictionary in OS X (and maybe others, not sure on that one)? Personally, I'd rather have to tell my computer how to pronounce a word once and have it work for everything than have to go through the hassle for every app that I use frequently. I would think that doing it at the document level would be the absolute worst solution. I'm really not interested in having to repeat the pronunciation of SCSI every time I use the acronym in a new document.
What I think we're seeing here is the recording and music industries trying to do everything they can to make electronic distribution look unviable and only popular with pirates. The reason they would want to do this is that the only thing that keeps the big boys of the RIAA and MPAA in existence is that they control the means of production and distribution.
If selling music and movies over the internet becomes standard practise, then nobody needs them anymore. Why would I sign some ridiculous recording contract so some record producer can get fat off my work, oftentimes screwing me in the process, when I can go record the music at a studio, find my own guy to do the production work on my music. Right now, the one reason I would is that I don't have access to equipment for pressing CDs and DVDs. As soon as artists don't need people with CD and DVD pressing equipment, the recording and cinema industries will inevitably be democratized and the RIAA and MPAA fat cats will go the way of the dinosaur. So they will fight electronic distribution tooth and nail even though it is in the best interests of everybody else.
But writing legibly using only dots would also be a horrible PITA for most people. Like filling in the circles for each letter of your name when you fill out the cover sheet to a standardized test, only even slower.
I'd like to see a system where the company that sells a piece of electronics is also responsible for recycling it. For convenience, they could pool resources and contract out to recycling organizations; the main thing I'm interested in is a system that encourages electronics manufacturers to make their products easier (cheaper) to recycle and safely dispose of. Better yet, maybe it would encourage them to make their products easier to repair. Something as simple as making the batteries gadgets like PalmPilots and iPods replaceable would go a long way toward keeping more of them out of the landfills.
They'll design it so that the battery meets the iPod with a single, seamless contact. The iPod will determine whether it's in contact with the positive terminal or the negative terminal based on what side of the contact receives pressure. If both terminals touch the iPod, it will assume that they're both a single positive terminal that's touching it in both places.
Also, the click wheel will be replaced with a "click ball" about the size of the ball bearings used in roller skate wheels.
I can't speak for Visual Studio, WMP, etc., because I don't use them much. Well, I will say for WMP's case that the reason I don't use it much is because 10 seconds of trying to use that god-awful user interface is enough to make my IQ drop.
But as for 2000 and XP being stable (again, haven't used 2003), I think that is only reasonable when you rephrase it as, "2000 and XP are stable in comparison to older versions of Windows." I have a Mac running Tiger and a PC running XP Pro sitting on this desk. Most days, the PC stays turned off; I only use it for a few apps that don't have a decent equivalent that runs on OS X, and the rest of the time I just really don't want to waste my workday fighting with Windows and begging it and pleading it to do simple things like copy a large file without hanging Explorer or eject a USB key painlessly instead of claiming it's in use even though I have quit every application and haven't even used a file on it since about three hours ago.
I'm probably being a bit liberal to extend "stability" to include the general ability to be responsive and stay out of my way, if you limit it to just the BSOD, yeah, Windows is getting pretty decent.
I used to work as a sort of "professional vagrant," sometimes moving to a new town every couple of days. I don't have much experience outside the US, but from what I've seen inside the US, I've seen a similar phenomenon. I've noticed a definite correlation between how car-centric a town is and how overweight its population is. The skinniest cities are the dense urban areas like Chicago where even owning a car can be pretty impractical. Meanwhile, places that are total sprawlsville - Jacksonville, Florida, for example, are what made me understand how it is that the USA can have a 60% obesity rate.
Not to mention diet. . . I'm sure plenty of countries have pretty fat-laden diets, but meat and dairy at every meal? Is everyone here trying to die young, or are they all just absolutely clueless?
Can you give an example of Flash Video where the video is in its on FLV file?
The only places where I have extensive experience with Flash video are YouTube and Google. That's where I have problems with the video getting out of sync. I've even noticed it happen with the odd YouTube video in the 2Ghz iMac G5 I use at work.
Slashdot Mirror
or how can it be delusional when so many people are suffering the same symptoms including pulling weird strands of fiber from their skin?
Let's just say that, despite the incredible rarity of this disease, I'd guess that almost everyone comes down with it has also heard of it.
It's only a bargain if I want a Blu-Ray player.
If I what I'm really looking for is a game console, the added cost for the Blu-Ray player sounds more like several hundred dollars down the toilet.
I'll grant, I've never tried Second Life out, but I get the impression that it's the kind of system where everything hinges on the integrity of the users, even more so than in something like CounterStrike. It seems like the whole point of Second Life is role play, not trying to acquire assets as quickly as possible, so someone with such a strong level-grinding attitude that they're willing to cheat, while they may not do a whole lot of damage to the online world, is exceedingly unlikely to help in fostering the kind of place they want to have.
It's a bit heavy-handed, but not unreasonable, especially given how $#@#% epidemic online cheating is getting.
I see sloppy language like this coming from people who understand the distinction all the time, and it's beginning to bother me. I can't help but wonder if a lot of the resistance to evolution theory comes from people taking the language of evolution proponents too literally and thinking that scientists really do think that modern humans and modern chimpanzees interbred 6 million years ago, or that at some point 6-10 million years ago a group of chimpanzees exactly like modern ones just stopped evolving, and that the rest continued evolving to produce modern humans.
People who understand evolution know what they're talking about when they say "humans and chimps split at X date.)
Another purely pragmatic fear is that this would be nothing but a waste of time and money, and a distraction. This law effectively requires that law enforcement must put a respectable amount of effort into collecting and cataloguing what could be billions of encryption keys. (I couldn't even count the number of keys that I use offhand, not even counting SSL, which I assume they don't care about.) All of these keys have to be associated with their owners and users, what they're being used for, and what data they're being used to encrypt. That could easily grow to be one mess of a database.
A database that would be effectively useless. The only people who are going to provide keys are law-abiding citizens who provide them all and non-abiding citizens who provide all but the keys they don't want the gov't knowing about. Meaning none of the keys in the database will be useful for finding anything the law might need to know. Meanwhile, it's going to provide another distraction if they actually try to enforce it, because they'll have to start hunting down all the folks who are no threat, but don't provide keys because they don't know, don't care, or value their privacy. I'm completely lost as to what they think they can gain by maintaining this. It's not like this database would be particularly useful for, say, mounting a dictionary attack on data that was encrypted with an unknown key by a real shady figure.
I'm sure implementation details can vary how much this is going to pull resources away from real counterterrorism and law enforcement, but I can't see how this can possibly do anything but make counterterrorism and law enforcement more difficult. And I'm sure anybody worth their salt probably realizes this; I can't see why the true motive could be anything but irrational paranoia or a Big Brother attitude. (Of course, those are probably really the same thing.)
The same thing happened at my university. It's true that it was a nightmare to support, and it would be incredibly expensive up-front, but I imagine that in the long run it could be a Very Good Thing. If all ISPs started doing it, it would put a massive amount of pressure on a certain company that shall remain unnamed to make their product truly resistant to malware, which would in turn result in a massive decrease in the amount of money we spend on paying for spam and viruses and dealing with their side effects - essentially a several billiion dollar deadweight loss.
The problem is, for it to work we'd have to get a critical mass of ISPs to implement such a program simultaneously, and be prepared to deal with a serious shitstorm for a year or so. There would have to be enough people doing it that customers couldn't leave in a huff and find another ISP. There'd have to be enough support to help the customers get their computers back online. (But I honestly don't think the ISPs should bear this cost directly - they'd just pass it off to the customers, and if the customers instead bear it directly there will be a lot more pressure put on the vendor of a certain popular but brain-meltingly easy to compromise operating system.) And there would have to be enough ISPs doing it to put some serious pressure on the ISPs who aren't doing it. This could get really nasty, and might result in the implementation of some heavy-handed actions such as an Internet Death Penalty of sorts.
On the other hand, my dream solution would be one where people who respond to spam can be caught and kicked off the internet. Probably just a pipe dream, though.
And I hope it works. I own a PS2, but lately I've been enjoying my friends' Gamecubes a lot more, and my GBA honestly sees a lot more action. Both systems tend to run simpler games, and I've been getting into those a lot more. The only PS2 game I still play frequently is Katamari Damacy, which has just about the most basic gameplay of any recent game.
The thing that Nintendo seems to be figuring out is that fun is an intangible that is only loosely linked to realism, flashiness, or complication. Especially when I can't appreciate any of that flashiness because I am _NOT_ going to buy a better TV just for better games, and even if I did have a higher-res TV, it wouldn't be a very big one and I don't tend to sit close enough to the TV that I think I would really notice the difference.
They also seem to have figured out that having to eat peanut butter and jelly for two months after buying a game system is not fun.
There's a detail in the Linux/Desktop debate for which your analogy is sorely lacking an analogue, and I think it breaks it. It's that the Linux community (oftentimes desperately) wants to become a common desktop operating system.
If, in your hypothetical, folks in France were devoting as much of its mental time to trying to convince Americans to move to France as the Linux community does to trying to get Windows users to switch to Linux, I think the analogy would hold much better. But, of course, it would also become very different, since France would also have to devote a lot of time to changing the very nature of France in order to make it more attractive to Americans if France wants to convince them to move even though they're overall quite comfortable with their current country.
And I think there is a bit of snobbishness to the Linux attitude. The combination of the attitude that general computer users should switch to Linux with the attitude that, if people want to move to Linux, they'll have to learn a whole lot more about computers, strikes me as a great example of geeks being full of themselves. I take the opposite attitude - I'd love if my father could sit down to a computer and have an easy time working it without having to take the time to read a manual or ask questions on a forum or anything like that. Linux can't (and maybe shouldn't) provide that and Windows is more of a hassle than it should be, too, so I told him to buy a Mac.
Judging from the past five years of me bearing much of the cost of my parents' computer shopping decisions, don't even worry about convincing your family to buy a Mac. Start by convincing them to never buy a Dell computer unless - and only if - they are being forced to at gunpoint.
I don't know which is more annoying, that you can subtract 30% from any Dell computer's specs to account for the computron-sucking bundleware they provide, or that you can increase the price of any Dell computer by 50% to account for the fact that you're going to be spending a lot of money fixing the thing and replacing them because they crap out more often.
When it comes to computer shopping, my father is a great example of how stupid humans can be. He's bought four Dell computers in so far this century. Every single time, he has been sorely disappointed and sworn to never buy another Dell computer. Every time he's ready to buy another, he sees the super-low prices that Dell offers and forgets all the previous times that he learned exactly why Dell can afford to be so inexpensive.
So true. The thing that amazes me the most about the linux on the desktop debate is this: It seems that the Linux community (at least the portion of it that I see frequenting forums and slashdot) is only interested in being able to say that Linux is ready for the desktop.
As soon as a linux outsider (read: member of the target market for desktop linux) comes along with criticisms, the response is invariably to discount all those criticisms, usually with comments that boil down to, "Well, I don't care what he said because he's obviously not particularly computer-literate nor is he very clueful about the ever-changing shape of the linux universe."
As long as people continue to carry the implicit assumption that the biggest barrier to Linux being desktop-ready is that not everyone has more than a passing understanding of computers, or that the tastes of the vast majority of computer users aren't as important as the tastes of geeks w/r/t choice and fragmentation, Linux will never be ready for the desktop.
It's not that these are bad attitudes, it's that these are attitudes that are only useful for a server or workstation OS that's aimed at geeks who like and can handle an incredibly tweakable operating environment. They're poison to a project whose primary focus is the general computing market.
Yah. That's why I'm saying, we need to quit worrying about trying to turn Linux into something that's desktop-ready while keeping it as something the geek core would like. To me this goal is quite obviously an attempt at building an OS that is both A and not A.
Much better to start making a desktop OS that can run most GNU/Linux software but is not a traditional Linux, is not guaranteed to behave like a traditional Linux or be able to use all the features that are available to an existing linux, but is much simpler and easier to manage and is actually designed for the desktop.
When's the last time that someone successfully made an OS that makes a good desktop, workstation, and server OS? I'm pretty sure it's never. I'm also pretty sure that isn't simply because nobody ever tried hard enough.
The thing that amuses me most about the linux on the desktop debate is how often people say things like, "The only time a user would ever have to care about this is. . . " because while it's always followed by a good example of when someone would have to care, it is never the only example. I have to wonder how many of the pro-desktop people are actually trying to get people they know using Linux on their desktops. 'Cuz I've had my mom running Linux for a couple years now, and let me say, I know from experience that that is _NOT_ the only case under which a non-skillful user has to care about what CUPS is.
I actually have two computers. One runs OS X, and the other runs FreeBSD. I work plenty on the command line on both.
/dev, more packaging systems than anyone can count, etc. etc. I know of two different libcs for Linux, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a third. I can't think of a single operating system in the history of computing that's more customizable or gets used for more different tasks. Saying the differences between Darwin and FreeBSD are smaller than the differences among various Linux distributions and using that to imply that they are super intimately related is like saying that the distance from Los Angeles to New York is much smaller than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, so LA and NYC must be really close to each other.
In the quote of mine that you quoted, I mentioned that Darwin has taken a lot of code from FreeBSD. This does not mean that Darwin is a version of FreeBSD. I'll say it again - everyone uses FreeBSD code. If operating systems were college students, FreeBSD would be the one that has had sex with every single person you know. Twice. I'm also pretty sure that Darwin, like almost every other Unix that's still in use, especially the BSDs, is chock full of bugfixes that came from OpenBSD. Is all that copied code alone enough to argue that every Unix is just a tweaked version of OpenBSD? Of course not.
And I'm personally not wowed by the similarity of FreeBSD and Darwin in the shell. Of course there are similarities; they're both more-or-less 4.4BSD Unixes, and I'm sure that their userland is almost identical. But are they really any more identical than, say, NetBSD and FreeBSD? What about OpenBSD and Darwin? For the most part, I'm equally at home on the terminal of any of them. But I can also think of things I do completely differently on each.
Nor am I particularly wowed by two BSD Unixes being more similar to each other than two different distributions of Linux. Linux is officially the most schizophrenic operating system to ever achieve widespread use. I haven't run it on any of my computers in a while, so I may be a bit off on these numbers, but I remember there being 3 or 4 different ways of getting sound out the speakers, two video interface systems, three different ways you might have to get a wireless card working, two different ways of having the operating system handle
And that BSD family tree is a little short on the details on Darwin's history, what with missing the first decade or so of it and all. Rhapsody didn't just pop out of 4.4Lite, it is also based heavily on OPENSTEP, which was based on NeXTSTEP before it. That stuff does show up on the main UNIX family tree, though.
Ack. When is this rumor going to die?
OS X, back when it was called NEXTSTEP, forked off of BSD 8 years before FreeBSD did, even before 4.4lite came on the scene. You can trace its lineage yourself, if you'd like. Since then, there's been a lot of code borrowing but everyone borrows from FreeBSD and FreeBSD is far from the only OS whose code Darwin has borrowed. Using just that to say that Darwin is based on FreeBSD would make little more sense than using the same fact to claim that GNU/Linux and Windows XP are based on FreeBSD.
But as to your point about BSD in general beating Linux to the desktop with OS X, yeah, you're right. I think Apple showed how it really needs to be done, too. In my experience with trying to teach people to use Linux, the thing that consistently hurts Linux on the desktop is what I'd call its unixyness - stuff like complicated directory hierarchies based on abbreviated names only serves to intimidate the non-geek; even if you tell them they don't need to care about anything outside their home directory, they still know it's there. A lot of Linux's celebrated choices are bad; too. The moment a user ever has to care about QT vs GTK+ and figure out why they are behaving a bit differently, or what the heck CUPS is, or any of that, Linux starts to feel like a border town on the edge of the Wild.
I'm not asking what's to dislike about spatial mode or other defaults of Nautilus. I'm asking why having to go through changing the default settings into something you prefer is such a roadblock?
Click the checkbox to go to browser mode. Click the checkbox to display the address bar. Doesn't that take away the vast majority of these complaints? You seem to be operating under the assumption that a few mouse clicks is this 30-foot stone wall that stands between you and a file manager that behaves more to your liking.
I don't like spatial mode, either. It is obviously something that made a lot more sense back when desktop computers were smaller and is poorly-suited to the kinds of complex directory hierarchies that people use nowadays, especially on UNIX-type machines. That's why I turned it off.
What's so horrible about having to click a checkbox to make Nautilus not be spatial anymore? Or is browser mode also an example of everything that is and ever has been wrong with the computing industry?
Still don't know what I'm talking about, but I think I'm starting to get the idea now.
It seems the optimal solution would be to include several levels of storage for pronunciation information. There could be a system-wide store of this data, which would contain all the defaults - this wouldn't generally be modified, it would just be something that's included with the operating system to get everyone started.
This would be augmented by a second database for each user account. That way, people can augment the pronunciation notes with additions (or override the system default database) without screwing around with everyone else's database.
On top of that, you can store pronunciation notes in the document. It would really be pretty trivial to add - I assume the problem of how to represent this information is a solved problem, something a bit more advanced than saving a string of IPA in Unicode, but similar, so it's really just a matter of adding another tag or two to the ODF format. It's XML, so applications that don't already support the tag should gracefully ignore it; adding the tag wouldn't be disruptive for the most part.
The nice thing about this kind of set-up is that users don't need to install pronunciation markup into the dictionary on their computer any more than you have to store every style sheet for every CSS page you ever visit. It wouldn't be a seprate file, that's the whole point of adding it to the ODF specification. And you don't have to annotate common words or acronyms. Less-common languaes might be best handled by having the user install a language pack, but producing and distributing them shouldn't be too big of an issue; that's the kind of thing that open source really excels at.
Really, now that I've thought about it more carefully, this seems like a total no-brainer to me, and I wonder why it's not a standard thing yet. I'd love to have it; I can think of scads of cases where it would be really useful.
(Disclaimer - I really don't have a clue what I'm talking about here, but I'm going to talk anyway.)
Wouldn't that best be handled with a system-wide database of notes on how to pronounce these things, sort of like the system-wide spellchecking dictionary in OS X (and maybe others, not sure on that one)? Personally, I'd rather have to tell my computer how to pronounce a word once and have it work for everything than have to go through the hassle for every app that I use frequently. I would think that doing it at the document level would be the absolute worst solution. I'm really not interested in having to repeat the pronunciation of SCSI every time I use the acronym in a new document.
What I think we're seeing here is the recording and music industries trying to do everything they can to make electronic distribution look unviable and only popular with pirates. The reason they would want to do this is that the only thing that keeps the big boys of the RIAA and MPAA in existence is that they control the means of production and distribution.
If selling music and movies over the internet becomes standard practise, then nobody needs them anymore. Why would I sign some ridiculous recording contract so some record producer can get fat off my work, oftentimes screwing me in the process, when I can go record the music at a studio, find my own guy to do the production work on my music. Right now, the one reason I would is that I don't have access to equipment for pressing CDs and DVDs. As soon as artists don't need people with CD and DVD pressing equipment, the recording and cinema industries will inevitably be democratized and the RIAA and MPAA fat cats will go the way of the dinosaur. So they will fight electronic distribution tooth and nail even though it is in the best interests of everybody else.
But writing legibly using only dots would also be a horrible PITA for most people. Like filling in the circles for each letter of your name when you fill out the cover sheet to a standardized test, only even slower.
I'd like to see a system where the company that sells a piece of electronics is also responsible for recycling it. For convenience, they could pool resources and contract out to recycling organizations; the main thing I'm interested in is a system that encourages electronics manufacturers to make their products easier (cheaper) to recycle and safely dispose of. Better yet, maybe it would encourage them to make their products easier to repair. Something as simple as making the batteries gadgets like PalmPilots and iPods replaceable would go a long way toward keeping more of them out of the landfills.
They'll design it so that the battery meets the iPod with a single, seamless contact. The iPod will determine whether it's in contact with the positive terminal or the negative terminal based on what side of the contact receives pressure. If both terminals touch the iPod, it will assume that they're both a single positive terminal that's touching it in both places.
Also, the click wheel will be replaced with a "click ball" about the size of the ball bearings used in roller skate wheels.
I can't speak for Visual Studio, WMP, etc., because I don't use them much. Well, I will say for WMP's case that the reason I don't use it much is because 10 seconds of trying to use that god-awful user interface is enough to make my IQ drop.
But as for 2000 and XP being stable (again, haven't used 2003), I think that is only reasonable when you rephrase it as, "2000 and XP are stable in comparison to older versions of Windows." I have a Mac running Tiger and a PC running XP Pro sitting on this desk. Most days, the PC stays turned off; I only use it for a few apps that don't have a decent equivalent that runs on OS X, and the rest of the time I just really don't want to waste my workday fighting with Windows and begging it and pleading it to do simple things like copy a large file without hanging Explorer or eject a USB key painlessly instead of claiming it's in use even though I have quit every application and haven't even used a file on it since about three hours ago.
I'm probably being a bit liberal to extend "stability" to include the general ability to be responsive and stay out of my way, if you limit it to just the BSOD, yeah, Windows is getting pretty decent.
I used to work as a sort of "professional vagrant," sometimes moving to a new town every couple of days. I don't have much experience outside the US, but from what I've seen inside the US, I've seen a similar phenomenon. I've noticed a definite correlation between how car-centric a town is and how overweight its population is. The skinniest cities are the dense urban areas like Chicago where even owning a car can be pretty impractical. Meanwhile, places that are total sprawlsville - Jacksonville, Florida, for example, are what made me understand how it is that the USA can have a 60% obesity rate.
Not to mention diet. . . I'm sure plenty of countries have pretty fat-laden diets, but meat and dairy at every meal? Is everyone here trying to die young, or are they all just absolutely clueless?
Can you give an example of Flash Video where the video is in its on FLV file?
The only places where I have extensive experience with Flash video are YouTube and Google. That's where I have problems with the video getting out of sync. I've even noticed it happen with the odd YouTube video in the 2Ghz iMac G5 I use at work.