Back in the day, when only Opera had tabs, I read lots of FF users saying that tabbed browsing was unnatural, idiotic, or just unneded. Now that FF has tabs, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
Amazingly, not all Firefox users think the same way about Firefox's features. You're talking about two different groups of people, perhaps if you weren't so determined to characterise Firefox as some kind of cult of Opera haters who only use Firefox because they're so stupid that they don't know any better you'd be able to make obvious logical jumps like this.
I'd distrust those people too, they're speaking jibberish. Very worrying, like fundamentalist christians who talk in "tongues". Alternatively, maybe I just don't speak spanish. Perhaps you could elaborate from your paranoid delusional viewpoint what exactly they did wrong.
However, I vastty prefer to have technical discussions, and I admit I was wrong about aussie_a motives. You can read the rest of my conversation with him. And leave the stoning to the religious guys, I'm a proud atheist and I listen to arguments.
Except when it comes to web browsers, evidently.
Now back to the article. You can say the autor is the biggest troll ever, but you can't deny the speed stuff. Or the CSS acid test. Or the memory leaks in FF. Even if the autor endorses a IE skin as his prefered browser, with you and I and ten thousand readers knowing that FF is better than anything IE related.
I can certainly argue against both of those points from a personal perspective, one of the main reasons that I use Firefox is because it does a better job than the alternatives of displaying pages the way the author intended. Perhaps it's due to Firefox's popularity that authors specifically make allowances for the breakages in Firefox's rendering engine while ignoring KHTML and Opera users.
To sum up, while Opera might beat Firefox in certain CSS tests, in the ultimate test (using it to visit web pages that exist right now) Firefox has an edge. The speed gains of Opera can soon be negated by having to load up a different browser just to be able to interact with a web page.
I'm not trying to say that Firefox is right for everyone, but it's certainly right for me, and a lot of others, many many more than Opera. Not that that's neccesarily a valid point, when you consider how many people stick with Internet Explorer (in the order of 10 times more than any other browser).
You just can't deny those points, so you went to attack the author of the article. Now who's the troll?
I attacked the author of the article because it was poorly written and biased, and the author is well known for using dirty tricks against his detractors. The fact that you'd quote that article does a lot more harm than good to your cause.
If Opera is not as used as its technical merits suggest (the only important ones to me as I don't care about political agendas as FF users do), is because the huge and ugly advertising banner Opera used to have, and which was removed in response to FF gaining popularity.
Yet you quoted a widely discredited and debunked biased article in an attempt to smear Firefox?
I use Firefox for a variety pragmatic reasons, I can share my bookmarks and RSS feeds between multiple platforms automatically using a Firefox extension, I can trim the garbage from the user interface using XUL tweaks, I'm able to bundle up my changes or extend them to all users, using extensions like greasemonkey I can even manipulate the content of web pages to make them render correctly in Firefox, making it's rendering engine extensible (and fixable) in ways that most other browsers couldn't dream of being able to offer.
I was going to leave it at the comment I made, but I really feel compelled to say a bit more about it.
I saw that "Firefox Myths" site linked at OSnews a while ago, and while the comments about that story there are probably enough to show the almost universally negative reaction from practically everyone who saw it. I'll go over some other things of note about it.
For starters the majority of the factual information on that site is taken out of context, outdated, or misrepresented in some other way, most of the "myths" presented are not actually believed by anyone, or are in fact truths that the author attempts but fails to discredit.
The entire site reeks to high heaven of bias and deception, and many of the sites that are linked to have spoken out against the misuse of their information to misrepresent Firefox.
There's also the fact that the author himself is a well known troll.
At any rate, I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would be so concerned about which browser they use that they would make up a site which dishonestly smears a competing product. Frankly, if this is the sort of tripe that Opera users feel they have to bandy around to feel better about themselves then I'm scared. What next? Stoning heretics to death in the street?
What's really scary is that I'm a Mac user, and we're usually pretty immune to being frightened by fanatical zeal...
Don't worry, it's just Microsoft testing some pre-release exploits ready to boost sales of their ONEcare package.
We all know the problems Microsoft have had with quality control in the past, they just want to be sure they have all the kinks ironed out of their malware so that they can be sure have some Vista exploits to point to when they want to scare users into subscribing to their protection racket.
I won't write about the nice features of Opera (I already did that in the past flamewars, just browse my posts) because FF just has that "religious fanatical user" mindset.
Funny I was just thinking the same thing about the Opera users here after seeing the "fastest, first at everything, most compliant" garbage that so many Opera fans are spouting.
Opera users seem to be the ones blinded by religious fanaticism, or maybe it's just jealous rage at seeing the ineptitude of Opera's management when it comes to making the product accessible, and the public aware of what their product can do for it's users.
You shouldn't blame Firefox for Opera's miserable uptake, Firefox is just being the browser people really want.
Where firefox is better: - cleaner and better standards support. more technologies implemented.
This is simply not true! If one of them has to be the better one in this regard, then it would be Opera.
If HTML compliance were an important metric of anything in 2006, then Opera would have better support, unfortunately for Opera's fan club, it's CSS support (all versions) is still sorely lacking. The worst of any mainstream browser in fact.
What this means in practice is that more pages will display with formatting errors in Opera than IE, Gecko or KHTML powered browsers. But hey, at least it makes the mistakes REALLY FAST!
EX-PE-RICE (pronounced XP rice) is Microsoft's new experiment in creating food. XP rice tastes ok, but is a disconcerting shade of blue, starts to rot as soon as you open it, and is prone to becoming infected with parasites that were thought to be extinct for many years as soon as it's exposed to air.
I think what the GP meant is that gifting these laptops to those who have done a largely thankless task out of the goodness of their hearts is in the same spirit of giving and expecting nothing (more) in return.
I don't see how giving someone something, in recognition of what that person has given to you somehow cheapens what they have done.
Oh the irony of even suggesting that something originally done with no expectation of recompense can be cheapened.
The thing I dislike about traditional X86 architecture is the cruft carried along for so many years, just in case I want to boot PC-DOS 1.0 and run IBM Alley Cat in CGA mode.
In fact, here's a hint to those making X86 hardware and software, I don't want to do that. I don't know of anyone who still needs compatibility even as far back as Windows 3.1, let alone DOS. Really, pretty much nobody needs that kind of backward compatibility since there are free reliable emulators out there that can simulate a DOS environment very effectively.
As a general rule most health-care is open source, because doctors realise that publishing how a procedure is performed benefits everyone, and that the real money in medicine is being able to perform those procedures effectively. The reason you can't remove your child's spleen is because you don't want to try because you might cock it up, so even though the information is out there, you really want someone who can tell one end of a scalpel or clamp from the other.
The flipside of course is pharmaceutical companies, who would rather addict their customers to something that keeps the symptoms of illness at bay temporarily rather than a cure, who fight over patents and intellectual property, who maintain high prices even though people in the developing world are dying because they cannot afford basic medicines, etc etc.
Speaking as a New Zealander myself, sheep jokes are modded funny because there are several sheep for every person in this country, and I have no trouble believing that OSS adoption in NZ is slow, with many managers ruling out anything created by a 'hobbyist'.
Virtually everyone who remembers the bad old days of IT in NZ will have been burned by a DIY programmer who thought he could do the job only to discover that his programming skills aren't as great as first thought.
The real problem in NZ was how slow businesses and learning institutions were at adapting to the changing world (we still are). The industry at a high level is currently full of buffoons who somehow managed to bluff someone into giving them a job and people who were burned by the aforementioned.
Linux has an association with hobbyist cowboys, and education is needed before these people will use anything not made by a large company with certification programs available in NZ.
Fortunately a new generation of people are beginning to get into positions of power, and these people understand open source.
They actually did use Intel's ICC compiler for the benchmarks on the Core Duo, and IBM's XLC compiler on the G5.
As another poster mentioned above, there are no accelerated compilers with Objective C support at the moment, so compiling iLife with an advanced compiler is pretty much out of the question at the moment.
Second, I wonder whether it really would be impossible to spread a Mac worm. Guess we'll see. For what it's worth, I am a Mac owner, so it's not a case of envy here.
It's not impossible, just one more thing to overcome. Local/Remote privilege escalation exploits come along reasonably often in the grand scheme of things. All I was saying is that it would be impossible for a worm to spread automatically like the worst windows worms if the worm needs to ask the user for their password.
There are still a few issues to deal with regarding privilege escalation exploits though;
Security holes that allow privilege escalation are considered high-priority, and are usually patched or mitigated quickly after being discovered for obvious reasons. So a programmer has to strike quickly to take advantage of the window of opportunity offered by the exploit. Especially since most OS X users are up to date with their patches.
So a successful malware author trying to attack any Unix system with a worm that will propagate automatically... has to find a way to enter a system, reliably escalate their own privileges, have their malware install and execute itself, and find other systems to infect. They have to be able to make the software in a short timeframe, and have to release the software in some way that will cause it to start propagating immediately.
A lot of the steps mentioned above just aren't neccessary in Windows, since everyone runs at the highest security level so that they can install software, finding systems to infect is much easier, most Windows users are complacent about security which makes finding vulnerable peers much easier, even before taking numbers into consideration.
I don't think I know anyone with the neccessary skill set to release an OS X virus at the moment, Dashboard seems a potential malware breeding zone though.
There will no doubt be an OS X virus one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to spread like wildfire and bring corporate networks to their knees.:D
To me, the one easy way to hack a mac would be to do a man-in-the-middle or similar upstream, and pretend that you're the Update server. One would replace an actual update with an attack, which would be installed on the system when the user is prompted for the password.
You're not the first person to think of that, and there was an actual OS X issue relating to what you're talking about. They've since covered that angle by cryptographically signing all updates so that a man in the middle attack would fail.
Any system of automatic updates is vulnerable to this method of attack. As I understand, Microsoft also use cryptographic signing as do some Linux distributors.
I wonder about that - not more skilled, I think, but more creative. One would just target the weakest link in the security chain, which would be the user in this case. As above, trick them into giving the admin password. Don't hack the system, hack the user. I'm sure you've seen the studies on how many users will give away their paswords at the drop of a hat.
If malware can't spread automatically without some form of user input it means that a worm like those that have been most devastating in the Wintel world can't happen. When a malware writer not only has to figure out how to replicate, but how to reliably escalate privileges in order to do so, it does increase the difficulty (which in turn reduces the number of people capable) of writing malware.
Yes, but that's little comfort if you DO get hacked. No one's saying that Windows is safer than Mac, just that Macs aren't immune.
Getting "hacked" is different than getting automatically infected with a worm because of a built in service that by default always listens on the internet and that there is no obvious way to disable. There's no chance of that happening on the Mac because there are no services enabled by default, and those included by Apple can all be turned on or off with checkboxes in the same preference dialog.
Who would want to be caught with Apple's last generation of iPod or an older Powerbook? Better take your next paycheck to the Apple Store!
Speaking as a single Powerbook user I don't care, honestly. Apple's styling makes the following difference in my life: No protrusions or right angles on the Powerbook makes it easier to put in my backpack without worrying about the divider between the padded notebook section and the rest of the bag going in between the screen and chassis.
I bought a Powerbook simply because it's a nice laptop which comes with Unix pre-installed. I don't know about the market right now, but certainly at the time I bought my Powerbook it wasn't possible to get a decently portable Unix laptop with power management, modem, wifi, DVD, gigabit etc that actually worked as it was supposed to straight from the store. Particularly not with decent support in New Zealand where I live, so I felt the PowerBook was a very compelling offering. It didn't hurt that it was wrapped in Titanium and had a wide screen for watching DVDs.
I guess I'm not a typical Apple customer, but I am a reasonably typical slashdot reader, so there must be at least a few people here who've bought Apple's laptops without the styling being the prime consideration.
From what I can tell by looking at Microsoft's web site, Vista will include a 'framework' called SUA (Services for Unix Applications) which is basically a Unix subsystem implemented on top of the NT kernel.
While the product has been around for a while in various guises, first as Interix for Windows NT 4 and 2000, then the gratis Microsoft SFU (Services for Unix) for XP, it hasn't been included with a consumer operating system yet. It remains to be seen how much of the Unix layer will actually make it into Vista but it's good news for cross platform compatibility.
Also arriving with Vista will be the ability to make calls to the Win32 (and.Net) APIs for the first time, SFU and it's predecessor Interix have been quite separate from Win32, each effectively running as distinct services on top of NTs microkernel like architecture.
"1. I never said anything about ubuntu. I was talking OSS in general until someone informed me that this thread should be focused on ubuntu. then i stated that i've never tried it because i was unable to install it (not exactly a good sign) but that from what i'd heard it sounded as though it had taken a number of steps that were in the right direction, but like all things it still has room for improvement."
If you'd originally said something this reasonable, I wouldn't have responded so rudely. It was because you jumped in and made an ass of yourself by spouting a whole bunch of ill-informed rubbish.
I assumed that you were referring to Ubuntu since that is the distribution referred to in the summary and the article. It seemed reasonable to assume that, and I think you probably should have been more clear in the beginning.
The fact that you couldn't install Linux doesn't have a lot to do with children in Macedonia using Ubuntu in the classroom. Students generally don't have to install an operating system on their computers.
So while that's a bad sign for your computer aptitude, it doesn't have a lot to do with children in the third world using Ubuntu on the computers at school.
"2. I never 'dismissed' anything. I said that a poor name is a big deal because it makes the system more scary for users who aren't accustomed to linux. If the community intends to make headway into the desktop market then they need to convert people, and that means people who aren't used to linux. The program may be great, but a poor name is not a minor detail. My suggestion was not 'dismiss the packages'. Rather it was 'rename them to more descriptive packages so that people will know what they do without needing to have a geek tell them'."
What I was talking about was that you were being dismissive toward open source software because you had not taken the time to become familiar with the applications as you have done with Windows.
You probably felt displaced, and that having to relearn all that stuff was too hard because it made you feel as though the skills and prowess you posess with Windows systems were not transferrable to Linux.
Feeling devalued when you switch to a new environment is common, and without some kind of motivation it can be a hard slog, it's often easier to just give up than start all over again, learning new ways to install applications and navigate the filesystem.
Fortunately, these children are likely not exposed to Windows or only at the most superficial level so they won't have the same feelings of helplessness that a person accustomed to Windows might feel.
Every platform has confusingly named applications, the world is full of them. Most applications, web sites, and operating systems are confusingly named, obviously-named applications are the exception and not the rule. The methods that can be used to alieviate the problem are the same as on any other platform.
"3. Yes. I'm saying that if you want people to use your program, then you either need a namme that describes it's purpose, or alot of money to TELL people it's purpose. If you just want to create software that gets used by a handfull of people then a mystery name is ok. If you want widespread adoption then people need to know what the program does with minimal research (think average attention span)."
I agree completely, but it doesn't neccesarily need to be done in the name of the application. Making things simple is a job for the people who package the software for distribution, and it's something that's done fairly extensively for the applications included in the base install of Ubuntu. After that the applications are installed by the users themselves from the "Add Applications" program, Synaptic or the command line. Good descriptions of all the software in the base repositories are available so that the packages can be identified easily by novice users and discovered by searching for the purpose of the application, not just the name.
"yeah... tried installing it once and it just hung on the install (from the CD... which they sent me)."
So you've never actually used Ubuntu, yet you're making assumptions about how it works? This was precisely my point in the previous message. What right have you to make a whole lot of baseless assertions about an operating system that you've never even used?
"Aside from the single point about gnome's Start Menu being in the TOP left instead of the bottom left which was honestly quite trivial to my point you managed to be rather rude. congrats."
I think it's very rude to dismiss someone elses product that by your own admission you've never even used. The point I was trying to make was that you don't know what you're talking about, and so therefore should keep your opinions to yourself lest you avoid upsetting people by making a whole bunch of baseless assertions about things which you have no idea about.
You must also have memory problems if you've forgotten that you were trying to say that it was difficult to install packages in Ubuntu (it isn't) that there was no easy update tool as in OS X and Windows (there is), that programs are poorly named (maybe they are, but it's not exclusive to Linux by any means).
"I was quite polite if I do say so myself. My 2cents is that the linux community (the OSS community even) as a whole is going to need to adopt more transparent names for their packages if they have any designs on desktop adoption. I think ubuntu is a step in the right direction, but they aren't there yet."
I'm sorry, but I don't feel it's polite to tell a whole lot of lies about Ubuntu. Now it's a "step in the right direction"? How would you know? You still haven't learned. Stop making assertions about a distribution you haven't used.
"You folks can't handle critisim at ALL can you? Especially since you probably didn't write it. lol"
I can't handle it when I see someone who clearly has no clue criticising something that they've never used for problems it doesn't have.
I'm not sure whether you're trying to say that I didn't write my own reply, or didn't write Ubuntu, either way that wouldn't excuse you from being an uninformed idiot spouting crap about something he doesn't know about.
"and FYI: quicken, powerpoint, and the like can get by with missleading names because they are backed by huge advertising campaigns. The companies have done their best to make the name synonymous with the purpose. Google would have been a poor name too if not for the advertising (though it got some attentiong from being a mystery)."
Oh, so non-obvious names are okay as long as you have a whole lot of money to spend on advertising, but not when you're giving the software away for free?
Believe me, having obvious names has fuck all to do with usability, you manage to remember your friends and family without a massive advertising and without them having to be named "Guy with orange hair and freckles who drinks a lot" and "Old lady who spawned you".
Why you haven't been modded as a troll is beyond me, it's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about and you're just trying to stir up a hornets nest of replies. Anyway, here's some help for those moderating your drivel.
"Linux development is BUILT on providing support. I'm convinced that keeping the whole thing confusing and back-ass-ward is the thing driving the support-based business model. I mean... without delving too deep into the details... let's just look at the names chosen for software.
The current topic is application/package updating... you mentioned 'Synaptic' 'KPackage' 'Adept' and 'apt-get'...
Now... These programs are probably wonderful for what they do. I'm sure that they're useful, secure, lightweight, etc, etc. But all of the engineering in the world can't save a system if the human interface people goto sleep. How would any person (who doesn't already know) know to run 'Adept' to upgrade their software? or 'Synaptic'? or before all of this GUI stuff, 'apt-get'? Especially when anyone switching from Windows or OSX is accustomed to a system that allows them to install programs by double clicking on a 'install' file on their desktop."
Those who use OS X are used to dragging applications into the/Applications directory as a matter of fact, Windows users are used to the Next,Next,Next,Finish method, and Linux users are used to installing applications via a package manager built into their distribution of choice. They are different operating systems with different methods of installing software. No surprises there.
In Ubuntu, the apt front end Synaptic is described in the menu as "Synaptic Package Manager", there's also another (easier) front end to apt get is included, called "Add Applications". I can see how that might be confusing for people who have trouble reading, but it seems pretty obvious to me.
As you so rightly point out, simple, intuitive labling of applications seems to be the accepted route to making things a little easier on the users, and that's (unsurprisingly) the way that Ubuntu has gone.
"I know as well as the next guy that there's a fun 'secret-club' mentality to the OSS crowd. It really seems as though most software names are chosen to be intentionally missleading (or random as hell). Clever names that don't give a clue as to the nature of the program don't enhance the software. They detract from it. There are a few things that could be learned from MS/Apple... (what? most everything else has already been stolen... and re-stolen. There's a reason your KDE/Gnome desktop has an application menu in the bottom-left corner... not all of you... but i'm sure most lol. It's the default afterall.) "
So the gist of your rant is that some Linux programs are badly named because their names don't describe their purpose? Yeah because Oracle, PowerPoint, Visio and Quicken are really obvious names that describe exactly what you're getting right?
You're acting like a buffoon, you can't expect to migrate to another operating system and instantly know the name of every application you need, programs aren't named "File Manager" and "Word Processor" because you'd run out of names pretty damn quick. Any operating system requires you to learn about it before you can use it effectively, and one of the things you need to learn is what applications do what, and which of the 10 zillion applications out there that do the same thing fits best with your workflow. You can't expect all of them to be called the same thing, but expecting them to be clearly labelled in the Applications menu isn't unreasonable. Nor, however is it uncommon, especially on Ubuntu.
One more thing... Ubuntu (like most other GNOME based distros) puts the Applications menu in the top left by default, not the bottom left. Perhaps you might want to try actually using Ubuntu before you criticize it with complaints that just don't apply.
"Apple -> System Update Microsoft -> Automatic Update Open Source Community
I went from a 1Ghz powerbook to the 1.5Ghz version with 5200rpm HD and a far better video card, and barely noticed any increase in performance at all.
If I'd paid money to upgrade I would have been tempted to take it back and ask for my money back. It's depressing that a 50% increase in CPU speed and a significant increase in L2 Cache and HD speed don't translate to much of a percieved speed increase.
It really seems like the powerbook architecture hit a wall some time ago and Apple haven't been able to overcome it in at least two upgrades.
A word of warning to anyone thinking of upgrading their powerbook: if you have an aluminium powerbook don't bother until there are P-M based models available... unless of course you're doing it for bigger screens or some of the other wizbang doo-dads on the new models, but don't expect a performance upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, when only Opera had tabs, I read lots of FF users saying that tabbed browsing was unnatural, idiotic, or just unneded. Now that FF has tabs, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
Amazingly, not all Firefox users think the same way about Firefox's features. You're talking about two different groups of people, perhaps if you weren't so determined to characterise Firefox as some kind of cult of Opera haters who only use Firefox because they're so stupid that they don't know any better you'd be able to make obvious logical jumps like this.
This is another of those pearls (beware, link in spanish): http://www.cristalab.com/v3/foros/viewtopic.php?t= 18185, with time I have learned to distrust the technical arguments of lots of FF users.
I'd distrust those people too, they're speaking jibberish. Very worrying, like fundamentalist christians who talk in "tongues". Alternatively, maybe I just don't speak spanish. Perhaps you could elaborate from your paranoid delusional viewpoint what exactly they did wrong.
However, I vastty prefer to have technical discussions, and I admit I was wrong about aussie_a motives. You can read the rest of my conversation with him. And leave the stoning to the religious guys, I'm a proud atheist and I listen to arguments.
Except when it comes to web browsers, evidently.
Now back to the article. You can say the autor is the biggest troll ever, but you can't deny the speed stuff. Or the CSS acid test. Or the memory leaks in FF. Even if the autor endorses a IE skin as his prefered browser, with you and I and ten thousand readers knowing that FF is better than anything IE related.
I can certainly argue against both of those points from a personal perspective, one of the main reasons that I use Firefox is because it does a better job than the alternatives of displaying pages the way the author intended. Perhaps it's due to Firefox's popularity that authors specifically make allowances for the breakages in Firefox's rendering engine while ignoring KHTML and Opera users.
To sum up, while Opera might beat Firefox in certain CSS tests, in the ultimate test (using it to visit web pages that exist right now) Firefox has an edge. The speed gains of Opera can soon be negated by having to load up a different browser just to be able to interact with a web page.
I'm not trying to say that Firefox is right for everyone, but it's certainly right for me, and a lot of others, many many more than Opera. Not that that's neccesarily a valid point, when you consider how many people stick with Internet Explorer (in the order of 10 times more than any other browser).
You just can't deny those points, so you went to attack the author of the article. Now who's the troll?
I attacked the author of the article because it was poorly written and biased, and the author is well known for using dirty tricks against his detractors. The fact that you'd quote that article does a lot more harm than good to your cause.
If Opera is not as used as its technical merits suggest (the only important ones to me as I don't care about political agendas as FF users do), is because the huge and ugly advertising banner Opera used to have, and which was removed in response to FF gaining popularity.
Yet you quoted a widely discredited and debunked biased article in an attempt to smear Firefox?
I use Firefox for a variety pragmatic reasons, I can share my bookmarks and RSS feeds between multiple platforms automatically using a Firefox extension, I can trim the garbage from the user interface using XUL tweaks, I'm able to bundle up my changes or extend them to all users, using extensions like greasemonkey I can even manipulate the content of web pages to make them render correctly in Firefox, making it's rendering engine extensible (and fixable) in ways that most other browsers couldn't dream of being able to offer.
I was going to leave it at the comment I made, but I really feel compelled to say a bit more about it.
I saw that "Firefox Myths" site linked at OSnews a while ago, and while the comments about that story there are probably enough to show the almost universally negative reaction from practically everyone who saw it. I'll go over some other things of note about it.
For starters the majority of the factual information on that site is taken out of context, outdated, or misrepresented in some other way, most of the "myths" presented are not actually believed by anyone, or are in fact truths that the author attempts but fails to discredit.
The entire site reeks to high heaven of bias and deception, and many of the sites that are linked to have spoken out against the misuse of their information to misrepresent Firefox.
There's also the fact that the author himself is a well known troll.
At any rate, I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would be so concerned about which browser they use that they would make up a site which dishonestly smears a competing product. Frankly, if this is the sort of tripe that Opera users feel they have to bandy around to feel better about themselves then I'm scared. What next? Stoning heretics to death in the street?
What's really scary is that I'm a Mac user, and we're usually pretty immune to being frightened by fanatical zeal...
Did you create that troll site or are you just endorsing it?
Don't worry, it's just Microsoft testing some pre-release exploits ready to boost sales of their ONEcare package.
We all know the problems Microsoft have had with quality control in the past, they just want to be sure they have all the kinks ironed out of their malware so that they can be sure have some Vista exploits to point to when they want to scare users into subscribing to their protection racket.
I won't write about the nice features of Opera (I already did that in the past flamewars, just browse my posts) because FF just has that "religious fanatical user" mindset.
Funny I was just thinking the same thing about the Opera users here after seeing the "fastest, first at everything, most compliant" garbage that so many Opera fans are spouting.
Opera users seem to be the ones blinded by religious fanaticism, or maybe it's just jealous rage at seeing the ineptitude of Opera's management when it comes to making the product accessible, and the public aware of what their product can do for it's users.
You shouldn't blame Firefox for Opera's miserable uptake, Firefox is just being the browser people really want.
Where firefox is better: - cleaner and better standards support. more technologies implemented.
This is simply not true! If one of them has to be the better one in this regard, then it would be Opera.
If HTML compliance were an important metric of anything in 2006, then Opera would have better support, unfortunately for Opera's fan club, it's CSS support (all versions) is still sorely lacking. The worst of any mainstream browser in fact.
What this means in practice is that more pages will display with formatting errors in Opera than IE, Gecko or KHTML powered browsers. But hey, at least it makes the mistakes REALLY FAST!
EX-PE-RICE (pronounced XP rice) is Microsoft's new experiment in creating food. XP rice tastes ok, but is a disconcerting shade of blue, starts to rot as soon as you open it, and is prone to becoming infected with parasites that were thought to be extinct for many years as soon as it's exposed to air.
I think what the GP meant is that gifting these laptops to those who have done a largely thankless task out of the goodness of their hearts is in the same spirit of giving and expecting nothing (more) in return.
I don't see how giving someone something, in recognition of what that person has given to you somehow cheapens what they have done.
Oh the irony of even suggesting that something originally done with no expectation of recompense can be cheapened.
Surely any stainless steel car would do?
The thing I dislike about traditional X86 architecture is the cruft carried along for so many years, just in case I want to boot PC-DOS 1.0 and run IBM Alley Cat in CGA mode.
In fact, here's a hint to those making X86 hardware and software, I don't want to do that. I don't know of anyone who still needs compatibility even as far back as Windows 3.1, let alone DOS. Really, pretty much nobody needs that kind of backward compatibility since there are free reliable emulators out there that can simulate a DOS environment very effectively.
As a general rule most health-care is open source, because doctors realise that publishing how a procedure is performed benefits everyone, and that the real money in medicine is being able to perform those procedures effectively. The reason you can't remove your child's spleen is because you don't want to try because you might cock it up, so even though the information is out there, you really want someone who can tell one end of a scalpel or clamp from the other.
The flipside of course is pharmaceutical companies, who would rather addict their customers to something that keeps the symptoms of illness at bay temporarily rather than a cure, who fight over patents and intellectual property, who maintain high prices even though people in the developing world are dying because they cannot afford basic medicines, etc etc.
There are a few parallels really aren't there?
Speaking as a New Zealander myself, sheep jokes are modded funny because there are several sheep for every person in this country, and I have no trouble believing that OSS adoption in NZ is slow, with many managers ruling out anything created by a 'hobbyist'.
Virtually everyone who remembers the bad old days of IT in NZ will have been burned by a DIY programmer who thought he could do the job only to discover that his programming skills aren't as great as first thought.
The real problem in NZ was how slow businesses and learning institutions were at adapting to the changing world (we still are). The industry at a high level is currently full of buffoons who somehow managed to bluff someone into giving them a job and people who were burned by the aforementioned.
Linux has an association with hobbyist cowboys, and education is needed before these people will use anything not made by a large company with certification programs available in NZ.
Fortunately a new generation of people are beginning to get into positions of power, and these people understand open source.
They actually did use Intel's ICC compiler for the benchmarks on the Core Duo, and IBM's XLC compiler on the G5.
As another poster mentioned above, there are no accelerated compilers with Objective C support at the moment, so compiling iLife with an advanced compiler is pretty much out of the question at the moment.
You have to admit that "twice as amazing" sounds better than "half as fast when running most existing software".
Second, I wonder whether it really would be impossible to spread a Mac worm. Guess we'll see. For what it's worth, I am a Mac owner, so it's not a case of envy here.
:D
It's not impossible, just one more thing to overcome. Local/Remote privilege escalation exploits come along reasonably often in the grand scheme of things. All I was saying is that it would be impossible for a worm to spread automatically like the worst windows worms if the worm needs to ask the user for their password.
There are still a few issues to deal with regarding privilege escalation exploits though;
Security holes that allow privilege escalation are considered high-priority, and are usually patched or mitigated quickly after being discovered for obvious reasons. So a programmer has to strike quickly to take advantage of the window of opportunity offered by the exploit. Especially since most OS X users are up to date with their patches.
So a successful malware author trying to attack any Unix system with a worm that will propagate automatically... has to find a way to enter a system, reliably escalate their own privileges, have their malware install and execute itself, and find other systems to infect. They have to be able to make the software in a short timeframe, and have to release the software in some way that will cause it to start propagating immediately.
A lot of the steps mentioned above just aren't neccessary in Windows, since everyone runs at the highest security level so that they can install software, finding systems to infect is much easier, most Windows users are complacent about security which makes finding vulnerable peers much easier, even before taking numbers into consideration.
I don't think I know anyone with the neccessary skill set to release an OS X virus at the moment, Dashboard seems a potential malware breeding zone though.
There will no doubt be an OS X virus one day, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to spread like wildfire and bring corporate networks to their knees.
To me, the one easy way to hack a mac would be to do a man-in-the-middle or similar upstream, and pretend that you're the Update server. One would replace an actual update with an attack, which would be installed on the system when the user is prompted for the password.
You're not the first person to think of that, and there was an actual OS X issue relating to what you're talking about. They've since covered that angle by cryptographically signing all updates so that a man in the middle attack would fail.
Any system of automatic updates is vulnerable to this method of attack. As I understand, Microsoft also use cryptographic signing as do some Linux distributors.
I wonder about that - not more skilled, I think, but more creative. One would just target the weakest link in the security chain, which would be the user in this case. As above, trick them into giving the admin password. Don't hack the system, hack the user. I'm sure you've seen the studies on how many users will give away their paswords at the drop of a hat.
If malware can't spread automatically without some form of user input it means that a worm like those that have been most devastating in the Wintel world can't happen. When a malware writer not only has to figure out how to replicate, but how to reliably escalate privileges in order to do so, it does increase the difficulty (which in turn reduces the number of people capable) of writing malware.
Yes, but that's little comfort if you DO get hacked. No one's saying that Windows is safer than Mac, just that Macs aren't immune.
Getting "hacked" is different than getting automatically infected with a worm because of a built in service that by default always listens on the internet and that there is no obvious way to disable. There's no chance of that happening on the Mac because there are no services enabled by default, and those included by Apple can all be turned on or off with checkboxes in the same preference dialog.
Who would want to be caught with Apple's last generation of iPod or an older Powerbook? Better take your next paycheck to the Apple Store!
Speaking as a single Powerbook user I don't care, honestly. Apple's styling makes the following difference in my life: No protrusions or right angles on the Powerbook makes it easier to put in my backpack without worrying about the divider between the padded notebook section and the rest of the bag going in between the screen and chassis.
I bought a Powerbook simply because it's a nice laptop which comes with Unix pre-installed. I don't know about the market right now, but certainly at the time I bought my Powerbook it wasn't possible to get a decently portable Unix laptop with power management, modem, wifi, DVD, gigabit etc that actually worked as it was supposed to straight from the store. Particularly not with decent support in New Zealand where I live, so I felt the PowerBook was a very compelling offering. It didn't hurt that it was wrapped in Titanium and had a wide screen for watching DVDs.
I guess I'm not a typical Apple customer, but I am a reasonably typical slashdot reader, so there must be at least a few people here who've bought Apple's laptops without the styling being the prime consideration.
From what I can tell by looking at Microsoft's web site, Vista will include a 'framework' called SUA (Services for Unix Applications) which is basically a Unix subsystem implemented on top of the NT kernel.
.Net) APIs for the first time, SFU and it's predecessor Interix have been quite separate from Win32, each effectively running as distinct services on top of NTs microkernel like architecture.
While the product has been around for a while in various guises, first as Interix for Windows NT 4 and 2000, then the gratis Microsoft SFU (Services for Unix) for XP, it hasn't been included with a consumer operating system yet. It remains to be seen how much of the Unix layer will actually make it into Vista but it's good news for cross platform compatibility.
Also arriving with Vista will be the ability to make calls to the Win32 (and
Go recompile your kernel, you douche. I'm going to go outside where the three-dimensional people are and talk to some chicks.
Your mother and sister don't count.
"Actually, testers have been given something kinda like that. It's called Windows Server Core, and it boots up with just a console window open"...
:)
I wonder if it includes Interix/SFU/SUA (or whatever MS are calling it these days). That'd make quite an interesting Unix system.
"1. I never said anything about ubuntu. I was talking OSS in general until someone informed me that this thread should be focused on ubuntu. then i stated that i've never tried it because i was unable to install it (not exactly a good sign) but that from what i'd heard it sounded as though it had taken a number of steps that were in the right direction, but like all things it still has room for improvement."
If you'd originally said something this reasonable, I wouldn't have responded so rudely. It was because you jumped in and made an ass of yourself by spouting a whole bunch of ill-informed rubbish.
I assumed that you were referring to Ubuntu since that is the distribution referred to in the summary and the article. It seemed reasonable to assume that, and I think you probably should have been more clear in the beginning.
The fact that you couldn't install Linux doesn't have a lot to do with children in Macedonia using Ubuntu in the classroom. Students generally don't have to install an operating system on their computers.
So while that's a bad sign for your computer aptitude, it doesn't have a lot to do with children in the third world using Ubuntu on the computers at school.
"2. I never 'dismissed' anything. I said that a poor name is a big deal because it makes the system more scary for users who aren't accustomed to linux. If the community intends to make headway into the desktop market then they need to convert people, and that means people who aren't used to linux. The program may be great, but a poor name is not a minor detail. My suggestion was not 'dismiss the packages'. Rather it was 'rename them to more descriptive packages so that people will know what they do without needing to have a geek tell them'."
What I was talking about was that you were being dismissive toward open source software because you had not taken the time to become familiar with the applications as you have done with Windows.
You probably felt displaced, and that having to relearn all that stuff was too hard because it made you feel as though the skills and prowess you posess with Windows systems were not transferrable to Linux.
Feeling devalued when you switch to a new environment is common, and without some kind of motivation it can be a hard slog, it's often easier to just give up than start all over again, learning new ways to install applications and navigate the filesystem.
Fortunately, these children are likely not exposed to Windows or only at the most superficial level so they won't have the same feelings of helplessness that a person accustomed to Windows might feel.
Every platform has confusingly named applications, the world is full of them. Most applications, web sites, and operating systems are confusingly named, obviously-named applications are the exception and not the rule. The methods that can be used to alieviate the problem are the same as on any other platform.
"3. Yes. I'm saying that if you want people to use your program, then you either need a namme that describes it's purpose, or alot of money to TELL people it's purpose. If you just want to create software that gets used by a handfull of people then a mystery name is ok. If you want widespread adoption then people need to know what the program does with minimal research (think average attention span)."
I agree completely, but it doesn't neccesarily need to be done in the name of the application. Making things simple is a job for the people who package the software for distribution, and it's something that's done fairly extensively for the applications included in the base install of Ubuntu. After that the applications are installed by the users themselves from the "Add Applications" program, Synaptic or the command line. Good descriptions of all the software in the base repositories are available so that the packages can be identified easily by novice users and discovered by searching for the purpose of the application, not just the name.
"Finally,
"yeah... tried installing it once and it just hung on the install (from the CD... which they sent me)."
So you've never actually used Ubuntu, yet you're making assumptions about how it works? This was precisely my point in the previous message. What right have you to make a whole lot of baseless assertions about an operating system that you've never even used?
"Aside from the single point about gnome's Start Menu being in the TOP left instead of the bottom left which was honestly quite trivial to my point you managed to be rather rude. congrats."
I think it's very rude to dismiss someone elses product that by your own admission you've never even used. The point I was trying to make was that you don't know what you're talking about, and so therefore should keep your opinions to yourself lest you avoid upsetting people by making a whole bunch of baseless assertions about things which you have no idea about.
You must also have memory problems if you've forgotten that you were trying to say that it was difficult to install packages in Ubuntu (it isn't) that there was no easy update tool as in OS X and Windows (there is), that programs are poorly named (maybe they are, but it's not exclusive to Linux by any means).
"I was quite polite if I do say so myself. My 2cents is that the linux community (the OSS community even) as a whole is going to need to adopt more transparent names for their packages if they have any designs on desktop adoption. I think ubuntu is a step in the right direction, but they aren't there yet."
I'm sorry, but I don't feel it's polite to tell a whole lot of lies about Ubuntu. Now it's a "step in the right direction"? How would you know? You still haven't learned. Stop making assertions about a distribution you haven't used.
"You folks can't handle critisim at ALL can you? Especially since you probably didn't write it. lol"
I can't handle it when I see someone who clearly has no clue criticising something that they've never used for problems it doesn't have.
I'm not sure whether you're trying to say that I didn't write my own reply, or didn't write Ubuntu, either way that wouldn't excuse you from being an uninformed idiot spouting crap about something he doesn't know about.
"and FYI: quicken, powerpoint, and the like can get by with missleading names because they are backed by huge advertising campaigns. The companies have done their best to make the name synonymous with the purpose. Google would have been a poor name too if not for the advertising (though it got some attentiong from being a mystery)."
Oh, so non-obvious names are okay as long as you have a whole lot of money to spend on advertising, but not when you're giving the software away for free?
Believe me, having obvious names has fuck all to do with usability, you manage to remember your friends and family without a massive advertising and without them having to be named "Guy with orange hair and freckles who drinks a lot" and "Old lady who spawned you".
"You married in a penguin suit???! :-)"
Yeah some of these Linux geeks are pretty dedicated.
Why you haven't been modded as a troll is beyond me, it's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about and you're just trying to stir up a hornets nest of replies. Anyway, here's some help for those moderating your drivel.
/Applications directory as a matter of fact, Windows users are used to the Next,Next,Next,Finish method, and Linux users are used to installing applications via a package manager built into their distribution of choice. They are different operating systems with different methods of installing software. No surprises there.
"Linux development is BUILT on providing support. I'm convinced that keeping the whole thing confusing and back-ass-ward is the thing driving the support-based business model. I mean... without delving too deep into the details... let's just look at the names chosen for software.
The current topic is application/package updating... you mentioned 'Synaptic' 'KPackage' 'Adept' and 'apt-get'...
Now... These programs are probably wonderful for what they do. I'm sure that they're useful, secure, lightweight, etc, etc. But all of the engineering in the world can't save a system if the human interface people goto sleep. How would any person (who doesn't already know) know to run 'Adept' to upgrade their software? or 'Synaptic'? or before all of this GUI stuff, 'apt-get'? Especially when anyone switching from Windows or OSX is accustomed to a system that allows them to install programs by double clicking on a 'install' file on their desktop."
Those who use OS X are used to dragging applications into the
In Ubuntu, the apt front end Synaptic is described in the menu as "Synaptic Package Manager", there's also another (easier) front end to apt get is included, called "Add Applications". I can see how that might be confusing for people who have trouble reading, but it seems pretty obvious to me.
As you so rightly point out, simple, intuitive labling of applications seems to be the accepted route to making things a little easier on the users, and that's (unsurprisingly) the way that Ubuntu has gone.
"I know as well as the next guy that there's a fun 'secret-club' mentality to the OSS crowd. It really seems as though most software names are chosen to be intentionally missleading (or random as hell). Clever names that don't give a clue as to the nature of the program don't enhance the software. They detract from it. There are a few things that could be learned from MS/Apple... (what? most everything else has already been stolen... and re-stolen. There's a reason your KDE/Gnome desktop has an application menu in the bottom-left corner... not all of you... but i'm sure most lol. It's the default afterall.)
"
So the gist of your rant is that some Linux programs are badly named because their names don't describe their purpose? Yeah because Oracle, PowerPoint, Visio and Quicken are really obvious names that describe exactly what you're getting right?
You're acting like a buffoon, you can't expect to migrate to another operating system and instantly know the name of every application you need, programs aren't named "File Manager" and "Word Processor" because you'd run out of names pretty damn quick. Any operating system requires you to learn about it before you can use it effectively, and one of the things you need to learn is what applications do what, and which of the 10 zillion applications out there that do the same thing fits best with your workflow. You can't expect all of them to be called the same thing, but expecting them to be clearly labelled in the Applications menu isn't unreasonable. Nor, however is it uncommon, especially on Ubuntu.
One more thing... Ubuntu (like most other GNOME based distros) puts the Applications menu in the top left by default, not the bottom left. Perhaps you might want to try actually using Ubuntu before you criticize it with complaints that just don't apply.
"Apple -> System Update
Microsoft -> Automatic Update
Open Source Community
I went from a 1Ghz powerbook to the 1.5Ghz version with 5200rpm HD and a far better video card, and barely noticed any increase in performance at all.
If I'd paid money to upgrade I would have been tempted to take it back and ask for my money back. It's depressing that a 50% increase in CPU speed and a significant increase in L2 Cache and HD speed don't translate to much of a percieved speed increase.
It really seems like the powerbook architecture hit a wall some time ago and Apple haven't been able to overcome it in at least two upgrades.
A word of warning to anyone thinking of upgrading their powerbook: if you have an aluminium powerbook don't bother until there are P-M based models available... unless of course you're doing it for bigger screens or some of the other wizbang doo-dads on the new models, but don't expect a performance upgrade.