one or two have some small adoption (the altogether not particularly popular OmniWeb and iCab browsers and Webkit)
I'm not sure that you could call being the basis of the world's third most popular, and fastest growing web browser "small adoption", and I'm even less convinced you could say the same about something that is the basis of virtually every smartphone's built in web browser.
Besides Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, Palm and soon RIM (just to name a few) have all jumped onto the webkit bandwagon for their top of the line mobiles. You sell the developers of webkit way short when you dismiss their work. And you have the nerve to accuse others of abusing open source.
There are now hundreds of projects based on webkit that wouldn't have had a hope in hell of embedding an html renderer, parser, or javascript engine without it. Webkit was world-changing - largely because of Apple's work to make it easy to embed in other projects, something that people weren't exactly falling over themselves to do with KHTML.
- Produces results that most people are happy with - Has a rate of uptake that exceeds any previous codec - Produces results that most people are happy with
One big disadvantage of VP8 compared to H264 is that it's very boring. It doesn't offer developers, creators and distributors of video the same excitement of surprise licensing changes that might bankrupt them as H264.
VP8 can't offer the same genuine white-knuckle, edge-of-the-seat experience as rollin' with the MPEG-LA in their Escalade, snorting lines of free licensing, while the MPEG-LA's lawyers drive-by their competitors with baseless patent claims.
I saw the site, and it opened up my eyes. I saw the site. The colors were rotten, I wish that I'd forgotten. I saw the site, and it opened up my eyes. I saw the site.
I agree, if there's one guarantee of success, it's manufacturing in the USA. They could ask Chrysler for advice, or maybe General Motors. After all they are clear price and technology leaders by virtue of manufacturing in God's-own blessed-bastion-of-freedom-and-righteousness.
You had me until this part... does anyone seriously believe this kind of hyperbole? We're talking a change in temperature of a few degrees, the seas aren't going to boil away, the dirt isn't going to catch fire or be submerged under hurricane powered waves.
Putting aside the fact that it would be physically impossible to boil away the oceans, and that mankind would become extinct long before the effects of anthropogenic warming could reach those levels, the most immediate threat to life on Earth from climate change is the same thing that has threatened our existence since the 1950's, that a shortage of resources could trigger global wars that contaminate the entire ecosystem with so much toxic fallout from whatever massive energy weapons are in fashion at the time that the ecosystem is rendered practically sterile.
If you have to stack the deck to make a point why not just turn off the computer and say "Linux doesn't work at all".
I could force Mac OS X into VESA fallback mode, or Windows 7 into GDI mode as well. I can't see any point in continuing to talk to someone so willfully ignorant that they deliberately hobble their computer to prove something to themselves.
If you insist on running crappy old applications on unsupported hardware, the experience is going to continue sucking balls. In other news the sky is blue.
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
As a regular user of Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS X, I'm really stunned by your claims that a modern Linux, or Windows suffers from slow repairs of damaged windows (notwithstanding the system being stuck in some legacy graphics mode) considering that the off-screen buffering inherent in such systems mean that a window can never be "caught with it's pants down", and too busy to repair a damaged window under such a system because damage and redraws is handled during composition by the windowing system. When applications become too unresponsive to update under a compositing system their windows stay frozen, but do not get "erased" by dragging another window over them. Ever.
"Tearing" of Windows during dragging is still a problem for all of these systems if somewhere along the line there's enough of a difference between refresh rates between devices and/or software. Apple have a natural advantage of being able to have control over framerate sync between the OS->driver->card, and often right through to the monitor, Windows has to deal with the problems of disparate video cards, drivers and monitors more often than OS X, and as you point out Linux has to do an even more delicate dance than Windows to get the entire graphics pipeline in agreement about such things. Having said that, all three OSes are trying very hard using mostly similar methods to keep everything at the same refresh rateto prevent flickering and tearing, and nobody's perfect.
I'm really not sure what day you were back in where dragging windows around in Irix didn't result in slow redraws over busy applications, I suspect that whatever it is you're smoking might have some fungus growing on it. Might be time to refresh your stash.
As for the UNIX hater's handbook's chapter about X11, I couldn't find anything in there that actually is still relevant. Kind of like your post really.
Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
well done Anonymous Coward you hit the nail on the head. I own both a PS3 and an Xbox360 (lucky me). I do not live in the USA and US$50 is a lot of my local money just for online content. So I have never paid for Live Gold membership - bad luck for any developers marketing there wares for Xbox360. As for Sony charging the game developers for marketing - better them than the poor end user.
Finally - I have owned a PC for many years and I have never had to pay any internet subscription charges just to play games online - ever heard of Diablo2? (and no I have never played MMORPG like Warcraft 3 as I believe that paying for a game and then having to pay even more just to play it is obscene - no doubt you Americans think it is OK for companies to gouge their customers for as much money as possible). I have also downloaded many demos for the PC - never had to pay a subscription for it. I bet the game developers who market PC games on the net have to pay for download/storage and it hasn't bothered them for years. I already have to pay my local ISP to connect and download from the internet, why should I pay Microsoft just to use play games over the net on my Xbox360?
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has taken the stance that Acid 3 is not a particularly valid test, in that the author of the test was specifically asking the community to find tests which would fail in Firefox, thus making it unfair for Firefox and in his opinion it was a "missed opportunity" to focus on rendering errors which were truly representative of what you might find out there.
I was unable to find a link to his statements in thirty seconds of googling, but that is what I remember were their reasons. So to paraphase, they aren't going to allow any amount of Acid3-fail to prevent them from releasing the next version, because Mozilla's higher-ups think it's a biased test.
Despite that, all the bugs highlighted by Acid3 have been entered into the Firefox bug tracker, and there has been some progress on the Acid3 front, they now score over 90 as opposed to less than 70 with 3.0, so it's not as though they're twiddling their thumbs.
As an aside - I'm not aware of any browser that actually passes Acid3 "cleanly" by displaying the whole lot at 30fps.
Your precisely the reason Ubuntu isn't ready for the general public.
It's very flattering that you think I'm personally attributable for the slow uptake of Linux, but I seriously doubt that my influence spreads that far.
Tried that, I can access the share from Linux but not from windows.
Works for me... maybe your Windows machine had it's firewall turned up to maximum annoyance?
You fail to see that if linux wants to be gpl and doesn't want a stable ABI then it's going to have to adapt, do things like reverse engineer drivers and yes point you in the direction of them instead of pretending they don't exist.
No, what I fail to see is how any of that absolves you of the personal responsibility of buying something that actually works with your system. It's like buying Halo 3 and then whining on the internet that it doesn't work on your PS3 and blaming Sony.
It would have been easy for ubuntu to do this, but it doesn't.
I couldn't agree more that making it unnecessarily hard to get stuff working is pure folly, but I'm left wondering what ancient hand-me-down version of Ubuntu you dusted off that didn't have a GUI for managing restricted drivers like the ones for my Nvidia graphics or your poorly chosen wireless device. It's been my experience that Ubuntu is far more pragmatic about matters of non-"free" software than most other distributions.
and I fail to see why that prevents them doing a iwlist scan to show available access points too.
That's probably because you're delusional... I'm able to see a list of wireless networks by clicking on the network icon in the notification area, able to install restricted drivers without touching a command-line, and able to share files pretty easily with Windows and OS X machines over SMB.
Are you sure you've actually used Ubuntu? Because it sounds an awful lot like you're, you know, just pulling big smelly things out of your ass and then putting them on the internet.
Here's how I got SMB working... I made a folder and called it Public, then right clicked on it and selected sharing options, then I clicked "share this folder", and "allow other people to write to this folder" and finally "Guest access".
Now granted, I'm not using this machine as a corporate file-server, but those options are all I need to be able to create shares that other people on my network can get access to. If I wanted to create a new samba user, I can do it just like in windows, by adding a new user and then restricting the share to only that person... or I can use unix permissions if I want to get more fine grained... I fail to see how it's any harder than Windows in any respect.
Yes, I have the option to tinker "under the hood" but I haven't.
As for the wireless driver, grow up.
How is it Linux's fault that you bought a piece of junk that doesn't have drivers for Linux? By buying poorly supported hardware, you reward the manufacturer for failing to properly support their product and encourage them to save a few dollars by doing the same for their next crappy piece of hardware, where's the incentive to improve things if users are so stupid that they think it's Linux's fault that it doesn't work.
So thanks a lot for making things worse for the rest of us, and then blaming Linux.
My Linksys USB wireless adaptor was detected and configured DHCP instantly in Ubuntu, no setup required at all.
Samba, ftp, scp all work fine after point and click installation in syntaptic without any additional setup.
Windows XP on the other hand has only a handful of included drivers, requires all sorts of pointing and clicking to enable public SMB sharing and is incapable of sharing by ftp or smb limiting it to LAN sharing only.
Every time I want to install an application in Windows I have to visit a different website, download a file in some random compression format, possibly extract it somewhere before attempting to install it, then click "Next" about 20 times in a row, and then search for a menu that is named after the software's author rather than the application I just installed before I can run it.
To top it off *I* then have to keep each individual application up to date or put up with *another* program running in the systray for that purpose...
Etc.
Face it, Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
Just try setting up dual monitors in Mac OS X, No system preferences doesn't count... no particular reason why, it just doesn't count.
You have to set them up using a teletype machine connected to a usb serial converter that doesn't have OS X drivers, and use MDA monitors too, because I said so... and you have to do it using only a mouse because keyboards don't count.
and you have to do it blindfolded because eyes don't count either.
In fact you have to do it with both your hands amputated before you die of blood-loss because, inexplicably hands don't count either.
See how you can engineer any ridiculous crap you want by setting up a stupid scenario, then claiming stuff "doesn't count".
The fact that this "rebuttal" is modded +4 insightful is proof the/. moderation system is broken. Let's try to keep agreement out of the equation please.
Just because his answer was short and coarse doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Yeah, I had a bad powerbook too... they must all be like that without exception, and most Apple owners are just afraid to admit they got conned - like the emperors new clothes.
Oh by the way I have a bridge to sell if you're in the market.
You a little deliberately short on specifics, your comment might be worthwhile if you were able to pinpoint a device that shipped with Linux on it where the creator of that product has dropped support, but is still around. Even so, you're still very vague with what's supported or not.
It seems that, with the gadget crowd, Linux support is always sweet in the beginning as they oogle over the new machine but as soon as something new comes out the old gadget is left to collect dust. Suddenly Ubuntu moves on a version or two and people still running the old gadget are left in no man's land with support issues. The people who really understand Linux are too busy with the new gadget to support the old. It's the long term user who's left holding the bag.
This is a large company (Dell) buying software from another reasonably large company (Canonical) so it's not really fair to talk about devices that maybe never supported Linux in the first place, made by who knows, supported only by geeks.
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening? Because it's been my experience that my hardware works better with each release, and I haven't seen forums bubbling over with ignored support issues with older hardware as you imply.
Will Dell continue to support this as the distro progresses or should the unit come with a sticker warning the user not to upgrade beyond the current version? It's kind of burned my ass the number of times I tried to pull some older gadgets over to Linux only to find that if I use the distro's 2 or 3 year old package I was fine but if I wanted the latest and greatest I was busied with the work of just getting basic functionality going. The upgrade cycle concerns me too much in some cases to give Linux a try if the only support I have is community based.
Not everyone in the world has the weak consumer laws that you're obviously subject to... if Dell release a product and drop support for it within an unreasonably short timeframe, in much of the world they'll be pilloried and made and example of by the law - because many countries don't allow people to drop a product and run unless they're out of business. So no, I'd say there's no chance whatsoever that Dell will not "continue to support" it, unless they want to be bankrupted in court.
At any rate there's far, far less chance that Dell will fail to support an operating system that they can pick up and fix themselves if necessary, than there is that they'll drop support for something where they have no recourse if the manufacturer decides to discontinue support. Like, Ooh... I don't know... Windows, and most of the third party device drivers for it.
I likely will not go "100%" Linux for a long long time. Most of it has to do with working in a Windows shop and, frankly, liking my games. But even if that wasn't an issue I still haven't warmed up to the community support aspect.
Yes, because Microsoft is just bending over backwards to support it's customers when they have problems. It's not like anyone has to google through forums to find solutions for windows problems because Microsoft's support is SOOOO outstanding.
Seriously, what does Microsoft offer in the way of support to a single home user that isn't available for a cheaper price for Ubuntu or another commercially supported distribution? This supposed support sounds like a fallacy to me, pretty much like the rest of this post. It's fine that you like Windows, but there's no need to make up FUD about Linux to justify your standpoint.
Windows seems like a perfectly fine solution for a certain class of user, and to them I say "To each their own, and mind your fucking bullshit when you talk about mine"
To be honest? It's probably true. When you expect something to stink, amazingly enough, it stinks. Well, unless you're an apple user. Everyone knows people who use Apples don't actually poop. They just release a little more smug into the ozone, and when Apple collects enough, they release a new iPod version (now with fluffy bunny pictures, give us more money!)
Amen brother! That's the kind of well-reasoned logical argument I was looking for! You're exactly the kind of real person Microsoft needs in their guerilla grass-roots honest-to-god marketing campaign.
If there's one thing Microsoft have always championed it's being absolutely brutally honest about everything, especially when it comes to campaigns involving real people.
Shut up with your lies! You're prejudicing people against Vista, there are no problems with it at all, and it's all made up fabricated evil lies by Linux and Apple fans!
Consumers would love Vista if filthy communist turtle-neck-and-jeans wearing Appl-inux zealots like you would stop inventing problems and just leave it alone. In fact here's 120 uncorrupted pure souls who are absolutely not actors or employees of PR firms on Microsoft's payroll to prove it...
Slashdot Mirror
one or two have some small adoption (the altogether not particularly popular OmniWeb and iCab browsers and Webkit)
I'm not sure that you could call being the basis of the world's third most popular, and fastest growing web browser "small adoption", and I'm even less convinced you could say the same about something that is the basis of virtually every smartphone's built in web browser.
Besides Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, Palm and soon RIM (just to name a few) have all jumped onto the webkit bandwagon for their top of the line mobiles. You sell the developers of webkit way short when you dismiss their work. And you have the nerve to accuse others of abusing open source.
There are now hundreds of projects based on webkit that wouldn't have had a hope in hell of embedding an html renderer, parser, or javascript engine without it. Webkit was world-changing - largely because of Apple's work to make it easy to embed in other projects, something that people weren't exactly falling over themselves to do with KHTML.
VP8:
- Produces results that most people are happy with
- Has a rate of uptake that exceeds any previous codec
- Produces results that most people are happy with
One big disadvantage of VP8 compared to H264 is that it's very boring. It doesn't offer developers, creators and distributors of video the same excitement of surprise licensing changes that might bankrupt them as H264.
VP8 can't offer the same genuine white-knuckle, edge-of-the-seat experience as rollin' with the MPEG-LA in their Escalade, snorting lines of free licensing, while the MPEG-LA's lawyers drive-by their competitors with baseless patent claims.
Like Ace of Bass??
I saw the site, and it opened up my eyes.
I saw the site.
The colors were rotten, I wish that I'd forgotten.
I saw the site, and it opened up my eyes.
I saw the site.
I agree, if there's one guarantee of success, it's manufacturing in the USA. They could ask Chrysler for advice, or maybe General Motors. After all they are clear price and technology leaders by virtue of manufacturing in God's-own blessed-bastion-of-freedom-and-righteousness.
Cue the sound of CIA shredders destroying all evidence of project MKWALMART.
What the fuck are you talking about? This device is designed by a european telco for people in europe to tether wirelessly using a sim card and wifi.
Why would you think data is more expensive the further you get from the world's greediest bastards? If anything the opposite is true.
Captain Kirk, is that you?
thus keeping our own planet from boiling away
You had me until this part... does anyone seriously believe this kind of hyperbole? We're talking a change in temperature of a few degrees, the seas aren't going to boil away, the dirt isn't going to catch fire or be submerged under hurricane powered waves.
Putting aside the fact that it would be physically impossible to boil away the oceans, and that mankind would become extinct long before the effects of anthropogenic warming could reach those levels, the most immediate threat to life on Earth from climate change is the same thing that has threatened our existence since the 1950's, that a shortage of resources could trigger global wars that contaminate the entire ecosystem with so much toxic fallout from whatever massive energy weapons are in fashion at the time that the ecosystem is rendered practically sterile.
If you have to stack the deck to make a point why not just turn off the computer and say "Linux doesn't work at all".
I could force Mac OS X into VESA fallback mode, or Windows 7 into GDI mode as well. I can't see any point in continuing to talk to someone so willfully ignorant that they deliberately hobble their computer to prove something to themselves.
If you insist on running crappy old applications on unsupported hardware, the experience is going to continue sucking balls. In other news the sky is blue.
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
As a regular user of Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS X, I'm really stunned by your claims that a modern Linux, or Windows suffers from slow repairs of damaged windows (notwithstanding the system being stuck in some legacy graphics mode) considering that the off-screen buffering inherent in such systems mean that a window can never be "caught with it's pants down", and too busy to repair a damaged window under such a system because damage and redraws is handled during composition by the windowing system. When applications become too unresponsive to update under a compositing system their windows stay frozen, but do not get "erased" by dragging another window over them. Ever.
"Tearing" of Windows during dragging is still a problem for all of these systems if somewhere along the line there's enough of a difference between refresh rates between devices and/or software. Apple have a natural advantage of being able to have control over framerate sync between the OS->driver->card, and often right through to the monitor, Windows has to deal with the problems of disparate video cards, drivers and monitors more often than OS X, and as you point out Linux has to do an even more delicate dance than Windows to get the entire graphics pipeline in agreement about such things. Having said that, all three OSes are trying very hard using mostly similar methods to keep everything at the same refresh rateto prevent flickering and tearing, and nobody's perfect.
I'm really not sure what day you were back in where dragging windows around in Irix didn't result in slow redraws over busy applications, I suspect that whatever it is you're smoking might have some fungus growing on it. Might be time to refresh your stash.
As for the UNIX hater's handbook's chapter about X11, I couldn't find anything in there that actually is still relevant. Kind of like your post really.
Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
Now I have a macbook. I guess I'm tarded now.
Yup, and gay too. You can't forget gay.
Gosh I wish I was smart and straight so I could use Windows like the manly men.
well done Anonymous Coward you hit the nail on the head.
I own both a PS3 and an Xbox360 (lucky me). I do not live in the USA and US$50 is a lot of my local money just for online content. So I have never paid for Live Gold membership - bad luck for any developers marketing there wares for Xbox360. As for Sony charging the game developers for marketing - better them than the poor end user.
Finally - I have owned a PC for many years and I have never had to pay any internet subscription charges just to play games online - ever heard of Diablo2? (and no I have never played MMORPG like Warcraft 3 as I believe that paying for a game and then having to pay even more just to play it is obscene - no doubt you Americans think it is OK for companies to gouge their customers for as much money as possible). I have also downloaded many demos for the PC - never had to pay a subscription for it. I bet the game developers who market PC games on the net have to pay for download/storage and it hasn't bothered them for years. I already have to pay my local ISP to connect and download from the internet, why should I pay Microsoft just to use play games over the net on my Xbox360?
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has taken the stance that Acid 3 is not a particularly valid test, in that the author of the test was specifically asking the community to find tests which would fail in Firefox, thus making it unfair for Firefox and in his opinion it was a "missed opportunity" to focus on rendering errors which were truly representative of what you might find out there.
I was unable to find a link to his statements in thirty seconds of googling, but that is what I remember were their reasons. So to paraphase, they aren't going to allow any amount of Acid3-fail to prevent them from releasing the next version, because Mozilla's higher-ups think it's a biased test.
Despite that, all the bugs highlighted by Acid3 have been entered into the Firefox bug tracker, and there has been some progress on the Acid3 front, they now score over 90 as opposed to less than 70 with 3.0, so it's not as though they're twiddling their thumbs.
As an aside - I'm not aware of any browser that actually passes Acid3 "cleanly" by displaying the whole lot at 30fps.
Your precisely the reason Ubuntu isn't ready for the general public.
It's very flattering that you think I'm personally attributable for the slow uptake of Linux, but I seriously doubt that my influence spreads that far.
Tried that, I can access the share from Linux but not from windows.
Works for me... maybe your Windows machine had it's firewall turned up to maximum annoyance?
You fail to see that if linux wants to be gpl and doesn't want a stable ABI then it's going to have to adapt, do things like reverse engineer drivers and yes point you in the direction of them instead of pretending they don't exist.
No, what I fail to see is how any of that absolves you of the personal responsibility of buying something that actually works with your system. It's like buying Halo 3 and then whining on the internet that it doesn't work on your PS3 and blaming Sony.
It would have been easy for ubuntu to do this, but it doesn't.
I couldn't agree more that making it unnecessarily hard to get stuff working is pure folly, but I'm left wondering what ancient hand-me-down version of Ubuntu you dusted off that didn't have a GUI for managing restricted drivers like the ones for my Nvidia graphics or your poorly chosen wireless device. It's been my experience that Ubuntu is far more pragmatic about matters of non-"free" software than most other distributions.
and I fail to see why that prevents them doing a iwlist scan to show available access points too.
That's probably because you're delusional... I'm able to see a list of wireless networks by clicking on the network icon in the notification area, able to install restricted drivers without touching a command-line, and able to share files pretty easily with Windows and OS X machines over SMB.
Are you sure you've actually used Ubuntu? Because it sounds an awful lot like you're, you know, just pulling big smelly things out of your ass and then putting them on the internet.
Here's how I got SMB working... I made a folder and called it Public, then right clicked on it and selected sharing options, then I clicked "share this folder", and "allow other people to write to this folder" and finally "Guest access".
Now granted, I'm not using this machine as a corporate file-server, but those options are all I need to be able to create shares that other people on my network can get access to. If I wanted to create a new samba user, I can do it just like in windows, by adding a new user and then restricting the share to only that person... or I can use unix permissions if I want to get more fine grained... I fail to see how it's any harder than Windows in any respect.
Yes, I have the option to tinker "under the hood" but I haven't.
As for the wireless driver, grow up.
How is it Linux's fault that you bought a piece of junk that doesn't have drivers for Linux? By buying poorly supported hardware, you reward the manufacturer for failing to properly support their product and encourage them to save a few dollars by doing the same for their next crappy piece of hardware, where's the incentive to improve things if users are so stupid that they think it's Linux's fault that it doesn't work.
So thanks a lot for making things worse for the rest of us, and then blaming Linux.
let me see...
My Linksys USB wireless adaptor was detected and configured DHCP instantly in Ubuntu, no setup required at all.
Samba, ftp, scp all work fine after point and click installation in syntaptic without any additional setup.
Windows XP on the other hand has only a handful of included drivers, requires all sorts of pointing and clicking to enable public SMB sharing and is incapable of sharing by ftp or smb limiting it to LAN sharing only.
Every time I want to install an application in Windows I have to visit a different website, download a file in some random compression format, possibly extract it somewhere before attempting to install it, then click "Next" about 20 times in a row, and then search for a menu that is named after the software's author rather than the application I just installed before I can run it.
To top it off *I* then have to keep each individual application up to date or put up with *another* program running in the systray for that purpose...
Etc.
Face it, Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
Just try setting up dual monitors in Mac OS X, No system preferences doesn't count... no particular reason why, it just doesn't count.
You have to set them up using a teletype machine connected to a usb serial converter that doesn't have OS X drivers, and use MDA monitors too, because I said so... and you have to do it using only a mouse because keyboards don't count.
and you have to do it blindfolded because eyes don't count either.
In fact you have to do it with both your hands amputated before you die of blood-loss because, inexplicably hands don't count either.
See how you can engineer any ridiculous crap you want by setting up a stupid scenario, then claiming stuff "doesn't count".
The fact that this "rebuttal" is modded +4 insightful is proof the /. moderation system is broken. Let's try to keep agreement out of the equation please.
Just because his answer was short and coarse doesn't change the fact that it's true.
Try Alt-SysRq-K instead next time.
Yeah, like Bagdad.
Yeah, I had a bad powerbook too... they must all be like that without exception, and most Apple owners are just afraid to admit they got conned - like the emperors new clothes.
Oh by the way I have a bridge to sell if you're in the market.
Ooh ooh... can I join the using Linux since 1997 club too?!
You a little deliberately short on specifics, your comment might be worthwhile if you were able to pinpoint a device that shipped with Linux on it where the creator of that product has dropped support, but is still around. Even so, you're still very vague with what's supported or not.
It seems that, with the gadget crowd, Linux support is always sweet in the beginning as they oogle over the new machine but as soon as something new comes out the old gadget is left to collect dust. Suddenly Ubuntu moves on a version or two and people still running the old gadget are left in no man's land with support issues. The people who really understand Linux are too busy with the new gadget to support the old. It's the long term user who's left holding the bag.
This is a large company (Dell) buying software from another reasonably large company (Canonical) so it's not really fair to talk about devices that maybe never supported Linux in the first place, made by who knows, supported only by geeks.
You talk specifically about Ubuntu dropping support for features from a previous release and then ignoring the users left out in the cold because of the new-shiny. Could you name an example of that actually happening? Because it's been my experience that my hardware works better with each release, and I haven't seen forums bubbling over with ignored support issues with older hardware as you imply.
Will Dell continue to support this as the distro progresses or should the unit come with a sticker warning the user not to upgrade beyond the current version? It's kind of burned my ass the number of times I tried to pull some older gadgets over to Linux only to find that if I use the distro's 2 or 3 year old package I was fine but if I wanted the latest and greatest I was busied with the work of just getting basic functionality going. The upgrade cycle concerns me too much in some cases to give Linux a try if the only support I have is community based.
Not everyone in the world has the weak consumer laws that you're obviously subject to... if Dell release a product and drop support for it within an unreasonably short timeframe, in much of the world they'll be pilloried and made and example of by the law - because many countries don't allow people to drop a product and run unless they're out of business. So no, I'd say there's no chance whatsoever that Dell will not "continue to support" it, unless they want to be bankrupted in court.
At any rate there's far, far less chance that Dell will fail to support an operating system that they can pick up and fix themselves if necessary, than there is that they'll drop support for something where they have no recourse if the manufacturer decides to discontinue support. Like, Ooh... I don't know... Windows, and most of the third party device drivers for it.
I likely will not go "100%" Linux for a long long time. Most of it has to do with working in a Windows shop and, frankly, liking my games. But even if that wasn't an issue I still haven't warmed up to the community support aspect.
Yes, because Microsoft is just bending over backwards to support it's customers when they have problems. It's not like anyone has to google through forums to find solutions for windows problems because Microsoft's support is SOOOO outstanding.
Seriously, what does Microsoft offer in the way of support to a single home user that isn't available for a cheaper price for Ubuntu or another commercially supported distribution? This supposed support sounds like a fallacy to me, pretty much like the rest of this post. It's fine that you like Windows, but there's no need to make up FUD about Linux to justify your standpoint.
Windows seems like a perfectly fine solution for a certain class of user, and to them I say "To each their own, and mind your fucking bullshit when you talk about mine"
To be honest? It's probably true. When you expect something to stink, amazingly enough, it stinks. Well, unless you're an apple user. Everyone knows people who use Apples don't actually poop. They just release a little more smug into the ozone, and when Apple collects enough, they release a new iPod version (now with fluffy bunny pictures, give us more money!)
Amen brother! That's the kind of well-reasoned logical argument I was looking for! You're exactly the kind of real person Microsoft needs in their guerilla grass-roots honest-to-god marketing campaign.
If there's one thing Microsoft have always championed it's being absolutely brutally honest about everything, especially when it comes to campaigns involving real people.
Shut up with your lies! You're prejudicing people against Vista, there are no problems with it at all, and it's all made up fabricated evil lies by Linux and Apple fans!
Consumers would love Vista if filthy communist turtle-neck-and-jeans wearing Appl-inux zealots like you would stop inventing problems and just leave it alone. In fact here's 120 uncorrupted pure souls who are absolutely not actors or employees of PR firms on Microsoft's payroll to prove it...