More importantly, that these videos are probably mostly "preaching to the choir" wankery.
People who are paranoid about vaccinations will go around to watch videos that support their premise and strengthen their delusion. These people, much like the religious, are unlikely to change their opinion on the face of empirical evidence, because they "just know" something is wrong.
In short, those views are probably split between 1) People who think these vaccinations are fantastic and want to laugh at the Luddite morons, and 2) People who think these vaccinations are the greatest evil, and want to hear their opinion echoed back to them to confirm it.
If you're a GNOME user try epiphany ('epiphany-browser' in Debian and Ubuntu's repositories.) It's still Gecko, but I've generally had better luck with it performance wise compared to Firefox.
No, Microsoft will just agree to license (if they haven't already,) so they look like a "good citizen," and then bash RHAT/NOVL for not paying up, and start saying they are refusing to play by the rules, are poor citizens, etc.
Um, it's only fairly recently-ish we've had sub-6ms LCDs... it's funny you mention 8 ms because 8 ms is widely considered the "acceptable" gaming threshold, at least in my research when I was looking at buying an LCD a year ago or so. (Note: I held off until a couple months back, and my current display is 2 ms latency.) Not to mention, the panels on older laptop computers had significantly higher latency, and they were quite usable for basic office tasks.
No, but naked PCs may get legitimate nonOEM-screwed-up Windows installed on them. Lots of people are waking up to the fact Windows is such a miserable platform not because it inherently is one, but because the OEMs that distribute it preload it with a metric ton of crapware and drivers which run their own little applet etc.
I'm by no means a Microsoft-flag-waving fanboy, but it really angers me that Microsoft gets the short end of the stick because the companies that distribute their software do such a poor job with it.
Slightly OT, but...
Under the Bell monopoly, customers were prohibited from connecting any non-Bell equipment to their telephone lines. Telephones were attached to the service with screw terminals, not plug-ins, and a phone technician came out to attach it. Emphasis mine. Gee, this sounds an AWFUL lot like cellular service as it stands. When will THAT be fixed?
What real harm a national ID can do. I'm not trying to troll, I've just never really "gotten" why a single centralized ID is more dangerous than a large number of different IDs. Would anyone care to explain? Politely and collectedly without resorting to words like "sheeple?"
Oddly, I feel less compelled to make choices with open source software, but I feel they are there when I need them.
Usually there are one or two mature and active software projects. The KDE/GNOME divide is a perfect example of this. XFCE exists, sure, but it's not considered heavily as a default DE for a corporate environment. On KDE, if you want a collection-based music player, you have Amarok. On GNOME, you have Rhythmbox. Not much thinking involved. On Windows, I am forced to choose between Windows Media Player, Winamp (with collection enabled,) iTunes, and many others I'm sure I'm missing. I'm at a loss for other "application types" for which this is true at the moment. For any given application niche on Windows, there are a number of often-equal-seeming alternatives.
In any case, I feel after a default Ubuntu install, I have 90% of what I need there for me already. Apple, if I'm not mistaken, provides a similar experience. You have a small set of choices, and they work well together, and "feel" integrated. At the same time, I retain flexibility; I use mpd as my music player despite Rhythmbox being available and sufficient, I use irssi+bitlbee despite Gaim being available and quite nice.
In short, I make choices because I want to, not because I have to. There's a great suite of default applications provided as part of the GNOME project (and included by the ubuntu-desktop package,) and I only need look forward if I want to go a little beyond "being comfortable."
20 minutes to install Ubuntu, maybe 30 minutes to dupe all my home directory stuff over, and 20 minutes to install packages from a honking apt-get line. Though that last bit doesn't count, I can still continue to work while that's going on.
Yes. An installer needn't always run as admin. In fact, many installers cope quite fine with running as nonadmin on WinXP. I understand Vista detects an installer... but the fact it fairly directly forces them to execute it as admin when that may be unnecessary as irritating. The granularity they'd need to do it "right" would probably be difficult to implement, but nonetheless, it is still a flaw.
Compatibility with DX9/DX10 aren't significant performance hits, nor is compatibility with Office. This is just a matter of the cogs not meshing, not the inferiority/superiority of the cog. Also, why the hell should I upgrade hardware again? Just because I can buy something cheap doesn't justify buying it.
For lack of a better word, you're an idiot. Not everyone is a gamer. I'm primarily a coder, I game with my friends as an occasional social diversion. As an aside, Ubuntu Linux with Beryl and beagle and basically all the functionality Vista provides runs fine on that hardware. So please get off your "I'm a spoiled rich kid and can afford a new rig every 6 months" high horse, or your "I am in the workforce, have a good job and have nothing better to do with my spare time and money than play video games" high horse, whichever demographic you happen to fit.
The reason I'm on a PCI card is because my AGP slot blew, and chewed two (nice) cards before I figured out what was wrong. The only solution would probably be recapping the motherboard (There's visible damage to one of the capacitors near the AGP slow, I assume it's a failure with power regulation,) but as that would risk further damage, and I can't afford to purchase a new motherboard+proc+RAM entirely. So guess what dipstick, I'm stuck with it. I'm sick of the "Your hardware is old, upgrade" flag, it's getting very annoying. Not everyone can pour money into making sure their system is the latest and greatest.
2) I *rarely* get a UAC prompt. If I do, it's pretty much for admin-only things anyway (which is the correct way to handle elevating privelages) like installing software or using the control panel. Lest you forget you also must be root to install packages with Yum or Apt. There is no prompt for using the calender or other BS like getting UAC prompts willy-nilly
The problem is people always have been used to running as admin or equiv ANYWAY. So a sudden difference bothers them. Also it fairly blindly assumes that you need admin for any installer, which is not true.
3) It's not slow
It is compared to WinXP on similar hardware.
4) Games work fine. I have an ATI x1300 and it plays the games fine
Vista sucks for gaming if you have better things to do than buy a highend system. I've had no real pressing reason to upgrade my desktop, particularly in the "gaming" direction. But even fairly recent games run playably in WinXP on my aging desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB PC133 RAM, and a GeForce FX5200 128MB PCI. On Vista this was decidedly not the case, Empire Earth 2 ran pitifully, whereas I could actually play and enjoy it on WinXP.
I agree there's a huge FUD machine pounding on Vista, but a lot of it is the same kind of Linux FUD I see spread... isolated, very real gripes by a small but noisy population blown out of proportion into generalities. It happens with introducing any new tech, this is hardly shocking.
Oddly, Sony treated me quite kindly when my video card was having problems. It may have been because the tech support rep I had been forwarded to was a fellow Linux user, and understood that the problems I was having and the diags I had performed pointed very firmly to a hardware problem, not a software problem.
A license monoculture isn't frightening, though I agree the implications of a software monoculture are frightening. But it is important to realize that a software monoculture will not happen. A tyranny of the FSF crowd (whom I support and adore) would not choke off competitors like Microsoft and Apple. Moreover, there is very little in terms of a software monoculture internally of the free software movement. Not only do various distributions have different kernel revisions offered as "stable", but the entire software stack on top of it is of differing versions. This is a double-edged sword, making it difficult for vendors to support, but simultaneously does not run the major security risks implied by a monoculture.
I have to say I partially disagree with you on the point that the GNU Compiler Collection's monoculture is harmful. What deep architectural changes can be made to compilers of ancient languages (this includes C) that couldn't be integrated incrementally into GCC? The only thing a monoculture really harms is paradigm shifts. You CAN'T drastically change how C is compiled and ran. You CAN write a new language spec (like C#) and write a new compiler for it (Mono) and watch it gain success if it does indeed have positive attributes. Last time I checked, GCC's ubiquity is not the major obstacle in the advancement of new concepts in language and compiler design.
It should be noted, I know absolutely nothing about language and compiler design. But if someone knowledgeable on the topic could point out a clear, succinct example of an improvement that could be made to such things as C or Fortran compilation only with a completely new compiler, please do so, I would gladly listen.
My primary problems with the Windows operating system isn't the operating system itself; it is the immense amount of crap that is packaged by default that slows startup, causes instability, etc. A fresh install of Windows XP, by and far, performs well even on legacy hardware. But an OEM install on the same machine most likely crawls.
"5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.
Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities."
While I won't go as far as to say Gentoo has the BEST documentation out there, it has some pretty good stuff. gentoo-wiki.com, despite me being a Ubuntu user, often acts as a very good source for generalized howtos, and seems to be generally more up to date than the aging TLDP. Give Gentoo credit here, at bare minimum, but with the disclaimer that to USE the documentation (no pun intended) you needn't use Gentoo.
"2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install"
Gentoo allows you to not link in certain libraries, the common complaint I hear being GNOME. A lot of GTK+ applications on Debian-based distros and the like require GNOME libraries to run needlessly, whereas on Gentoo you can just USE="-gnome" and not have that requirement, and still benefit from a majority of the functionality.
I'm a diehard Debian and/or Ubuntu user, but there is no need to counterflame Gentoo users. Instead, acknowledge the points you can objectively agree with.
FUD. Gconf is just XML. Editing it by hand with vim/emacs/nano is fairly trivial, and Xforwarding gconf-editor is possible if you can't get that bit figured out.
I kinda agree it's a transgression against the general UNIX conventions of storing things in simple text files, but other than that, it's hardly bad. Also, I've never had problems copying gconf information to a new user, and DEFINITELY not to a new system.
I think that is exactly the point. If one were to implement one's own store solutions, you would be forced to include advertising costs, design your website so it could be easily indexed... eBay cuts out these problems, by allowing a company to use an already existing framework for enhancing customer awareness.
Reading all you old farts who started with C64's and TRS-80's and the like. I started computing on a 286 PC clone running DOS, mainly playing Flight Simulator and the like. I started programming on my grandfather's Apple IIcx and Powerbook 150 in QuickBASIC, and I started shell/batch scripting on the Pentium-class Windows 95 system I received later.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, that these videos are probably mostly "preaching to the choir" wankery.
People who are paranoid about vaccinations will go around to watch videos that support their premise and strengthen their delusion. These people, much like the religious, are unlikely to change their opinion on the face of empirical evidence, because they "just know" something is wrong.
In short, those views are probably split between 1) People who think these vaccinations are fantastic and want to laugh at the Luddite morons, and 2) People who think these vaccinations are the greatest evil, and want to hear their opinion echoed back to them to confirm it.
If you're a GNOME user try epiphany ('epiphany-browser' in Debian and Ubuntu's repositories.) It's still Gecko, but I've generally had better luck with it performance wise compared to Firefox.
No, Microsoft will just agree to license (if they haven't already,) so they look like a "good citizen," and then bash RHAT/NOVL for not paying up, and start saying they are refusing to play by the rules, are poor citizens, etc.
Ssshhh, next thing you know they'll ban Linux for being a "surveillance circumvention tool."
Um, it's only fairly recently-ish we've had sub-6ms LCDs... it's funny you mention 8 ms because 8 ms is widely considered the "acceptable" gaming threshold, at least in my research when I was looking at buying an LCD a year ago or so. (Note: I held off until a couple months back, and my current display is 2 ms latency.) Not to mention, the panels on older laptop computers had significantly higher latency, and they were quite usable for basic office tasks.
No, but naked PCs may get legitimate nonOEM-screwed-up Windows installed on them. Lots of people are waking up to the fact Windows is such a miserable platform not because it inherently is one, but because the OEMs that distribute it preload it with a metric ton of crapware and drivers which run their own little applet etc.
I'm by no means a Microsoft-flag-waving fanboy, but it really angers me that Microsoft gets the short end of the stick because the companies that distribute their software do such a poor job with it.
Gee, this sounds an AWFUL lot like cellular service as it stands. When will THAT be fixed?
... linux could do th- oh wait.
What real harm a national ID can do. I'm not trying to troll, I've just never really "gotten" why a single centralized ID is more dangerous than a large number of different IDs. Would anyone care to explain? Politely and collectedly without resorting to words like "sheeple?"
Bluetooth signal triangulation?
The GNOME guys have a nice frontend for both sudo AND su. The Ubuntu folks enable the sudo frontend (gksudo) by default.
The only FANCY part it is lacking is that it'd most likely be trivial to spoof and capture the user's password. Oops.
Oddly, I feel less compelled to make choices with open source software, but I feel they are there when I need them. Usually there are one or two mature and active software projects. The KDE/GNOME divide is a perfect example of this. XFCE exists, sure, but it's not considered heavily as a default DE for a corporate environment. On KDE, if you want a collection-based music player, you have Amarok. On GNOME, you have Rhythmbox. Not much thinking involved. On Windows, I am forced to choose between Windows Media Player, Winamp (with collection enabled,) iTunes, and many others I'm sure I'm missing. I'm at a loss for other "application types" for which this is true at the moment. For any given application niche on Windows, there are a number of often-equal-seeming alternatives. In any case, I feel after a default Ubuntu install, I have 90% of what I need there for me already. Apple, if I'm not mistaken, provides a similar experience. You have a small set of choices, and they work well together, and "feel" integrated. At the same time, I retain flexibility; I use mpd as my music player despite Rhythmbox being available and sufficient, I use irssi+bitlbee despite Gaim being available and quite nice. In short, I make choices because I want to, not because I have to. There's a great suite of default applications provided as part of the GNOME project (and included by the ubuntu-desktop package,) and I only need look forward if I want to go a little beyond "being comfortable."
20 minutes to install Ubuntu, maybe 30 minutes to dupe all my home directory stuff over, and 20 minutes to install packages from a honking apt-get line. Though that last bit doesn't count, I can still continue to work while that's going on.
Yes. An installer needn't always run as admin. In fact, many installers cope quite fine with running as nonadmin on WinXP. I understand Vista detects an installer... but the fact it fairly directly forces them to execute it as admin when that may be unnecessary as irritating. The granularity they'd need to do it "right" would probably be difficult to implement, but nonetheless, it is still a flaw.
Compatibility with DX9/DX10 aren't significant performance hits, nor is compatibility with Office. This is just a matter of the cogs not meshing, not the inferiority/superiority of the cog. Also, why the hell should I upgrade hardware again? Just because I can buy something cheap doesn't justify buying it.
For lack of a better word, you're an idiot. Not everyone is a gamer. I'm primarily a coder, I game with my friends as an occasional social diversion. As an aside, Ubuntu Linux with Beryl and beagle and basically all the functionality Vista provides runs fine on that hardware. So please get off your "I'm a spoiled rich kid and can afford a new rig every 6 months" high horse, or your "I am in the workforce, have a good job and have nothing better to do with my spare time and money than play video games" high horse, whichever demographic you happen to fit.
The reason I'm on a PCI card is because my AGP slot blew, and chewed two (nice) cards before I figured out what was wrong. The only solution would probably be recapping the motherboard (There's visible damage to one of the capacitors near the AGP slow, I assume it's a failure with power regulation,) but as that would risk further damage, and I can't afford to purchase a new motherboard+proc+RAM entirely. So guess what dipstick, I'm stuck with it. I'm sick of the "Your hardware is old, upgrade" flag, it's getting very annoying. Not everyone can pour money into making sure their system is the latest and greatest.
The problem is people always have been used to running as admin or equiv ANYWAY. So a sudden difference bothers them. Also it fairly blindly assumes that you need admin for any installer, which is not true.
It is compared to WinXP on similar hardware.
Vista sucks for gaming if you have better things to do than buy a highend system. I've had no real pressing reason to upgrade my desktop, particularly in the "gaming" direction. But even fairly recent games run playably in WinXP on my aging desktop with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB PC133 RAM, and a GeForce FX5200 128MB PCI. On Vista this was decidedly not the case, Empire Earth 2 ran pitifully, whereas I could actually play and enjoy it on WinXP.
I agree there's a huge FUD machine pounding on Vista, but a lot of it is the same kind of Linux FUD I see spread... isolated, very real gripes by a small but noisy population blown out of proportion into generalities. It happens with introducing any new tech, this is hardly shocking.
Oddly, Sony treated me quite kindly when my video card was having problems. It may have been because the tech support rep I had been forwarded to was a fellow Linux user, and understood that the problems I was having and the diags I had performed pointed very firmly to a hardware problem, not a software problem.
A license monoculture isn't frightening, though I agree the implications of a software monoculture are frightening. But it is important to realize that a software monoculture will not happen. A tyranny of the FSF crowd (whom I support and adore) would not choke off competitors like Microsoft and Apple. Moreover, there is very little in terms of a software monoculture internally of the free software movement. Not only do various distributions have different kernel revisions offered as "stable", but the entire software stack on top of it is of differing versions. This is a double-edged sword, making it difficult for vendors to support, but simultaneously does not run the major security risks implied by a monoculture.
I have to say I partially disagree with you on the point that the GNU Compiler Collection's monoculture is harmful. What deep architectural changes can be made to compilers of ancient languages (this includes C) that couldn't be integrated incrementally into GCC? The only thing a monoculture really harms is paradigm shifts. You CAN'T drastically change how C is compiled and ran. You CAN write a new language spec (like C#) and write a new compiler for it (Mono) and watch it gain success if it does indeed have positive attributes. Last time I checked, GCC's ubiquity is not the major obstacle in the advancement of new concepts in language and compiler design.
It should be noted, I know absolutely nothing about language and compiler design. But if someone knowledgeable on the topic could point out a clear, succinct example of an improvement that could be made to such things as C or Fortran compilation only with a completely new compiler, please do so, I would gladly listen.
My primary problems with the Windows operating system isn't the operating system itself; it is the immense amount of crap that is packaged by default that slows startup, causes instability, etc. A fresh install of Windows XP, by and far, performs well even on legacy hardware. But an OEM install on the same machine most likely crawls.
"5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems. Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities." While I won't go as far as to say Gentoo has the BEST documentation out there, it has some pretty good stuff. gentoo-wiki.com, despite me being a Ubuntu user, often acts as a very good source for generalized howtos, and seems to be generally more up to date than the aging TLDP. Give Gentoo credit here, at bare minimum, but with the disclaimer that to USE the documentation (no pun intended) you needn't use Gentoo. "2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation. Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install" Gentoo allows you to not link in certain libraries, the common complaint I hear being GNOME. A lot of GTK+ applications on Debian-based distros and the like require GNOME libraries to run needlessly, whereas on Gentoo you can just USE="-gnome" and not have that requirement, and still benefit from a majority of the functionality. I'm a diehard Debian and/or Ubuntu user, but there is no need to counterflame Gentoo users. Instead, acknowledge the points you can objectively agree with.
FUD. Gconf is just XML. Editing it by hand with vim/emacs/nano is fairly trivial, and Xforwarding gconf-editor is possible if you can't get that bit figured out. I kinda agree it's a transgression against the general UNIX conventions of storing things in simple text files, but other than that, it's hardly bad. Also, I've never had problems copying gconf information to a new user, and DEFINITELY not to a new system.
I think that is exactly the point.
If one were to implement one's own store solutions, you would be forced to include advertising costs, design your website so it could be easily indexed... eBay cuts out these problems, by allowing a company to use an already existing framework for enhancing customer awareness.
You forgot to mention the deflector dish.
Reading all you old farts who started with C64's and TRS-80's and the like. I started computing on a 286 PC clone running DOS, mainly playing Flight Simulator and the like. I started programming on my grandfather's Apple IIcx and Powerbook 150 in QuickBASIC, and I started shell/batch scripting on the Pentium-class Windows 95 system I received later.