I did the same thing and I couldn't find a decent media player alternative. Despite that pain in the ass DRM, WMP is the best I've used because it catagorizes everything and is easy to use. This make a huge difference when you have thousands of mp3s and even when you catagorize every album into subdirectories. The best I could find for linux were clones of wmp that looked and worked like the one from windows 3.1 and about as usable.
Again, the only drawback is the drm and all that does is slow the adoption of wma's because mp3s sound just as good to me.
One good media player would do a lot to convert those regular people into using linux than most open source people think.
I'm not having your CD problem at all. I'm using the latest Nero 6."
Does anyone else see the irony/hypocracy in this with regards to the article? When windows breaks and we have to upgrade to fix it, we get annoyed. When smaller programs need to be fixed by future versions we just accept it.
I have a laptop with a 15 inch screen running at 1600 X 1200. When I got it I had to get out a microscope and adjust windows settings and IE (don't even start with that shit, i don't want to hear it) settings to get the fonts to a readable size. But when i go to some web site that use CSS to keep the space between each line of characters i get pissed off. When the browser adjusts the font size but not the space between all the words are on top of each other. This results in a page I can't read, or I shrink the font down and I can barely read it.
I like the fonts slightly large so I don't have to stare at the screen and I can sit back and relax while enjoying the internet. And no, I'm not an old person by any means, i just don't like to squint.
"Please download Mozilla because it is open and if you use Internet Explorer you are stupid and contributing to the end of the world."
Yeah, that'll work. Great marketting strategy. Why does every article have to have a comment thrown in like this. These people make the open source community sound like the taliban ranting about america.
You're missing the point. What I was trying to relate is that when Americans or American companies invest time and money into open source software such as linux and foreign countries such as China develop software based on linux, and do not pay America a dime for it, then the American economy is hurt. If instead China paid money for the product (software) that American companies made then the economy would not suffer, but grow.
And really, any version of linux that China would make is not going to be revolutionary, but just a tweaked out version of one an American company has made. The first thing and usually the thing consumers think is important is the GUI. And don't just about all GUI's originate from the work American companies such as Apple and Microsoft have delveloped. It's hard to deny that Gnome and KDE are entirely original but really are sort of clones of microsoft which is a clone of apple which way back when was a clone of xerox.
And there's no need for a tea party in china seeing how they pirate so much of our software. When you read about these asian countries selling pirated software on the streets by the thousands, think of it as it really is, stealing from America.
Some may see this is complete irony, but I don't see piracy bad if done domestically, but once other countries do it, then it hurts us as a whole. If you're not American and are getting pissed off at what I have to say, then that's fine with me because you would do the same thing if you could.
While this may be good for China, think how it affects America. Instead of buying from Microsoft, they instead use open source software to help create their own government software. Microsoft loses money, the GDP goes down, and the American economy is hurt.
When Americans create open source software and other Americans and American businesses use it, it can improve the software industry because it opens up competition and hinders one company from controlling everything. But when Americans write open source software and countries like China use it instead of buying from America, it's bad for Americans in the long run. There's nothing wrong with open source software, as long as other countries don't use it.
Before you say, well if I don't have to pay for an operating system then it's money in my pocket; wouldn't you rather have a job that wasn't lost to open source clones of the software you worked hard to create?
No. Recompile your kernel. Read a couple slashdot articles. Write a threatening letter to microsoft. Play tux racer for a couple of minuets. Recompile your kernel again.
I have a 80 gig hd in an external firewire encloser. I partitioned it using partition magic (one of the greatest tools created) in FAT32 specifically so win xp and linux could read and write to it easily and so that I could plug it into pretty much any other computer and get it working with little pain. I use it for storing gigs upon gigs on mp3's and divx files and linux rpms.
My question is why is this really so bad? For my purposes and the original poster's purposes what real world benefits would either one of us see if we use a more modern and efficient file system. I'm sure there are lots of reasons dealing with speed and file permissions. I'm the only one using it so I don't care about permissions. But really? Is any other file system that requires tweaking on each OS going to be worth it when playing a movie or song? And how many people have have files over 4 gb on their home machine anyway? Maybe these are considerations for the database, I don't have much experience in that so I may be wrong.
I'm not trying to seem that I know the answer to this and I'm trying to give this guy an answer. I'm really just asking why is FAT32 so bad for these specific purposes?
First I lock the doors and unplug the phones so no one will bother me.
Once I get comfortable I pull out my mouse cleaning toolkit that contains cleansers, brushes, scrapers, and discombobulaters that I've acquired over the years for this specific task. I typically spend about an hour sanitizing and boiling these tools before I begin operation: clean the mouse. Thanks to optical mice, I have cut this procedure down by about 3 hours, although I still reserve about 9 hours to do this properly.
With all the tools cleaned and laid out in alphabetical order, I dismantle the mouse using very precise screwdrivers. I place each part I disassemble into custom built trays to keep everything in order.
Each piece is carefully scrubbed, about 45 minutes spent on each tray. When it is clean to the naked eye, I load all the trays in my car and drive to a lab nearby and have them examined under an electron microscope. Once they pass inspection, I bring them back to my house and in my dust free work room, I carefully reassemble the mouse.
After a couple hours and a few thousand dollars in cleaning fluids, brushes, and lab fees, I have a near factory fresh mouse.
Regretfully, I haven't been able to do this in a little while because I'm in the middle cleaning my car and this is taking a little longer than I expected.
Let me just clarify a little bit and then I'll be done. One person downloads a program off a p2p network, burns several cd's, installs on severals computers, and before you know it, a dozen people are getting the expensive software for free. I didn't mean to imply that it was downloaded every single time. I know, not a big deal, I just wanted to clarify it.
And as for the business end of things, that's the point I was trying to make. A couple hundred dollars on each system doesn't compare to an extra linux guy's salary at a decently sized company. I may be wrong because I admit I do lack specific knowledge of this, but I am taking an educated guess. But from my own limited experiences, setting up one machine that resembles windows (because come on, that's what we're really comparing these to when we're dealing with secretaries and number crunchers) takes a lot of time until you can get it to the point where everyting necessary works as it's expected. And in that respect, the cost of deploying it is more expensive than windows. I know that this topic has been discusses ad nausium and I don't want to start a flame war, but you it's hard to deny that for small to medium companies, it's cheaper to "deal" with windows than pay for "free" linux.
I won't end this without a solution to both cases, and that's for the linux developers to continue their work to make linux easier to install, set up, and use. But I know that they are already aware of that and working on that and I comend them.
The ability of ms programmers should be commended. Like clockwork they ensure people must update their software every week and upgrade it every couple of years.
This business strategy of having your customers depend on you to prevent these pathetic hacks works well for them. What other company in these times has $50 billion in cash?
The only thing that can help or even fix this is competition. We all know that's not going to be from apple anymore, so maybe linux.
You're exactly right. What the some people of the free software community hates to think about is that sometimes people will pay for the ease to get their software to install with 3 clicks and use it with 2 clicks (one double click really). Having software open is great, but a lot of it's just the same as windows freeware. Just because software is open and free, doesn't mean people give two shits when it won't work on the first try.
So here's where the problem begins. Should people make free open software on their own time and do it for the good of the community, or should companies sell closed software that works better?
I think what a lot of people don't consider is that with p2p, all software becomes free whether it's legal or not. That is a totally different issue and lets not get all worked up over it, but a good amount of the software that home desktop users have on their windows boxes is pirated, so the free linux idea doesn't mean much. However, in a business situation this is very different and I think that's where linux should be focused for now.
The linux apps are supposed to be just as easy to use and capable as windows apps. But the problem i think most people face is getting to the point where they can double click the icon and it will load and work properly. In a business setting where you have an IT department doing the work of configuring it, I'm sure most people will have no problem adjusting. However, this takes a decent amount of work and knowhow to set these fuckers up. While windows may be buggy, faulty, unstable, and watched over by big brother, at least it's a cinch to install applications on it.
That is not meant to be a slam on linux and a praise on windows, but it's a major roadblock that prevents a lot of windows users from having the balls to make an attempt to switch.
I'm already thinking about the flames that will surely ensure from this post. But seriously, get a windows box and install a program and do the same for linux while keeping in mind that most people don't want to learn, because they shouldn't have to, how to simply put the icon on their desktop or menu. It may sound trivial to experience computer users, but it's not to regular windows users who just want to get something done.
Alright I will. And all the problems that I do have I will be able to fix because the drivers will exists. However, like you said, that will only be because the hardware vendors wrote them. It would be nice if they wrote them for linux as good as they did for windows. But with so many distros and kernels out there it must make them hard to do so. My complaint wasn't with linux, but how using linux is still harder than windows, specifically xp for that matter.
I agree with you completely. There are so many applications out there for Linux. However, it drives me nuts that I have to spend up to an hour with google and other rpm databases to find all the dependencies. I installed Gaim on windows and linux at the same time. Though the windows version was a larger download (but I have cable so I don't give a shit about another meg or so) it worked imediatly. The linux counterpart required a lot longer to set up.
I understand the idea of having lots of small components to keep the system more efficient and maybe this really is a problem with developers and not linux itself, but can't they at least provide links or include the dependencies in the rpm. A lot of the dependencies I have to hunt down are small files and including them would save a lot of time.
Have you installed Windows XP? That is one of the few operating systems I've "installed" and once it's finished working, you're finished. No tweaking is nessesary. By that I mean you usually do not have to install drivers or set up other things that the average user would have trouble with and not want to deal with.
Older versions weren't this refined, but I think that Windows XP is more refined for desktop usability than most linux users would want to admit.
I have a Dell laptop with windows xp. With the exception of it crashing or freezing up occasionally, it works fine. I'll clarify that: It installs and detects and sets up all the hardware. When I need to type a document and PRINT it I have no trouble. I can use my scanner and digital camera with no problem. When I installed my firewire hard drive, it was a matter of hooking up the cable. When I need working software, I can download it or buy it and NO TWEAKING IS NESSESARY!
Since every slashdotter repeatedly regurgitates how good linux is in every discussion, I decided to try it out (once again). I downloaded Suse 8.2 and ran the installer. I did repartition my hard drive in Windows using partition magic because I knew ahead of time that the linux fdisks are a pain in the ass. It took weeks just to get the nvidia drivers working and the firewire in mounted in "sort of" read/write mode for a normal user.
It is stupid that the end user has to edit configuration files to get this stuff to work. I can't find drivers for my printer, so I have no idea how to get that working. And I can't just write a driver for it as many people will immediately respond because I don't have a degree in Computer Science!
Now I see linux as a free os and all I wanted to do was try it out. The fact that it is stable and open doesn't mean a whole lot to me, and the average user, when I can't get some stupid piece of hardware or software working that any idiot could do on windows. Trying to get software working usually means finding some cheap feeling clone of real software and hoping they have a suse rpm for it. Then I have to use the package program and I have to manually set up an icon on the desktop. This is no big deal for me at all, but how many normal people could do this, or even think of doing this. They'd just expect the installer to do it.
I'm not pissed off at the people develping linux because I didn't pay anything for it and they have no responsibility to me to make me a free os, but will every slashdotter PLEASE consider the fact that linux is not ready for the average person who expects to do everything they can in windows in linux. It drives me nuts when I read posts to the effect that people are idiots if they can't use linux. I feel like an old lady shouting at her vcr when I say "You need to have a degree to use this," but it's true! I don't know how to compile source code to use a program, and I don't want to spend the time to learn it. Computers have become so popular with normal people because the average person can just figure it out because it has been designed to be easy to use.
I'm frustrated that the linux community doesn't do much to help this. Most replies to a question of a frustrated user to get something to work are met with either arrogance of their knowledge of linux or "read the man pages." These were made for programmers and engineers, not for regular people. Linux has the ability to be a really good and complete operating system, but it's not there now and it is going to take real companies putting money into it, not garage geeks, to get it on the average users desktop. I've used dos and windows all my life and using linux is like pulling teeth.
In case anyone is thinking of what their flame will be, remember that these problems are my experience. Others might not have the same problems, but I did!
I have this printer and its great. Near perfect photos with the right paper, and they're borderless. And the tanks last for a long time, haven't replaced mine yet. The only thing, is I can't get it to work in Suse 8.2. If anyone knows, let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
I did the same thing and I couldn't find a decent media player alternative. Despite that pain in the ass DRM, WMP is the best I've used because it catagorizes everything and is easy to use. This make a huge difference when you have thousands of mp3s and even when you catagorize every album into subdirectories. The best I could find for linux were clones of wmp that looked and worked like the one from windows 3.1 and about as usable.
Again, the only drawback is the drm and all that does is slow the adoption of wma's because mp3s sound just as good to me.
One good media player would do a lot to convert those regular people into using linux than most open source people think.
I'm not having your CD problem at all. I'm using the latest Nero 6."
Does anyone else see the irony/hypocracy in this with regards to the article? When windows breaks and we have to upgrade to fix it, we get annoyed. When smaller programs need to be fixed by future versions we just accept it.
I have a laptop with a 15 inch screen running at 1600 X 1200. When I got it I had to get out a microscope and adjust windows settings and IE (don't even start with that shit, i don't want to hear it) settings to get the fonts to a readable size. But when i go to some web site that use CSS to keep the space between each line of characters i get pissed off. When the browser adjusts the font size but not the space between all the words are on top of each other. This results in a page I can't read, or I shrink the font down and I can barely read it.
I like the fonts slightly large so I don't have to stare at the screen and I can sit back and relax while enjoying the internet. And no, I'm not an old person by any means, i just don't like to squint.
"Please download Mozilla because it is open and if you use Internet Explorer you are stupid and contributing to the end of the world." Yeah, that'll work. Great marketting strategy. Why does every article have to have a comment thrown in like this. These people make the open source community sound like the taliban ranting about america.
You're missing the point. What I was trying to relate is that when Americans or American companies invest time and money into open source software such as linux and foreign countries such as China develop software based on linux, and do not pay America a dime for it, then the American economy is hurt. If instead China paid money for the product (software) that American companies made then the economy would not suffer, but grow.
And really, any version of linux that China would make is not going to be revolutionary, but just a tweaked out version of one an American company has made. The first thing and usually the thing consumers think is important is the GUI. And don't just about all GUI's originate from the work American companies such as Apple and Microsoft have delveloped. It's hard to deny that Gnome and KDE are entirely original but really are sort of clones of microsoft which is a clone of apple which way back when was a clone of xerox.
And there's no need for a tea party in china seeing how they pirate so much of our software. When you read about these asian countries selling pirated software on the streets by the thousands, think of it as it really is, stealing from America.
Some may see this is complete irony, but I don't see piracy bad if done domestically, but once other countries do it, then it hurts us as a whole. If you're not American and are getting pissed off at what I have to say, then that's fine with me because you would do the same thing if you could.
While this may be good for China, think how it affects America. Instead of buying from Microsoft, they instead use open source software to help create their own government software. Microsoft loses money, the GDP goes down, and the American economy is hurt.
When Americans create open source software and other Americans and American businesses use it, it can improve the software industry because it opens up competition and hinders one company from controlling everything. But when Americans write open source software and countries like China use it instead of buying from America, it's bad for Americans in the long run. There's nothing wrong with open source software, as long as other countries don't use it.
Before you say, well if I don't have to pay for an operating system then it's money in my pocket; wouldn't you rather have a job that wasn't lost to open source clones of the software you worked hard to create?
No. Recompile your kernel. Read a couple slashdot articles. Write a threatening letter to microsoft. Play tux racer for a couple of minuets. Recompile your kernel again.
This seems more likely around here.
I have a 80 gig hd in an external firewire encloser. I partitioned it using partition magic (one of the greatest tools created) in FAT32 specifically so win xp and linux could read and write to it easily and so that I could plug it into pretty much any other computer and get it working with little pain. I use it for storing gigs upon gigs on mp3's and divx files and linux rpms.
My question is why is this really so bad? For my purposes and the original poster's purposes what real world benefits would either one of us see if we use a more modern and efficient file system. I'm sure there are lots of reasons dealing with speed and file permissions. I'm the only one using it so I don't care about permissions. But really? Is any other file system that requires tweaking on each OS going to be worth it when playing a movie or song? And how many people have have files over 4 gb on their home machine anyway? Maybe these are considerations for the database, I don't have much experience in that so I may be wrong.
I'm not trying to seem that I know the answer to this and I'm trying to give this guy an answer. I'm really just asking why is FAT32 so bad for these specific purposes?
First I lock the doors and unplug the phones so no one will bother me.
Once I get comfortable I pull out my mouse cleaning toolkit that contains cleansers, brushes, scrapers, and discombobulaters that I've acquired over the years for this specific task. I typically spend about an hour sanitizing and boiling these tools before I begin operation: clean the mouse. Thanks to optical mice, I have cut this procedure down by about 3 hours, although I still reserve about 9 hours to do this properly.
With all the tools cleaned and laid out in alphabetical order, I dismantle the mouse using very precise screwdrivers. I place each part I disassemble into custom built trays to keep everything in order.
Each piece is carefully scrubbed, about 45 minutes spent on each tray. When it is clean to the naked eye, I load all the trays in my car and drive to a lab nearby and have them examined under an electron microscope. Once they pass inspection, I bring them back to my house and in my dust free work room, I carefully reassemble the mouse.
After a couple hours and a few thousand dollars in cleaning fluids, brushes, and lab fees, I have a near factory fresh mouse.
Regretfully, I haven't been able to do this in a little while because I'm in the middle cleaning my car and this is taking a little longer than I expected.
Let me just clarify a little bit and then I'll be done. One person downloads a program off a p2p network, burns several cd's, installs on severals computers, and before you know it, a dozen people are getting the expensive software for free. I didn't mean to imply that it was downloaded every single time. I know, not a big deal, I just wanted to clarify it.
And as for the business end of things, that's the point I was trying to make. A couple hundred dollars on each system doesn't compare to an extra linux guy's salary at a decently sized company. I may be wrong because I admit I do lack specific knowledge of this, but I am taking an educated guess. But from my own limited experiences, setting up one machine that resembles windows (because come on, that's what we're really comparing these to when we're dealing with secretaries and number crunchers) takes a lot of time until you can get it to the point where everyting necessary works as it's expected. And in that respect, the cost of deploying it is more expensive than windows. I know that this topic has been discusses ad nausium and I don't want to start a flame war, but you it's hard to deny that for small to medium companies, it's cheaper to "deal" with windows than pay for "free" linux.
I won't end this without a solution to both cases, and that's for the linux developers to continue their work to make linux easier to install, set up, and use. But I know that they are already aware of that and working on that and I comend them.
Now why the hell didn't I think of that. Honestly though, if you didn't read a manual or man page or read me, how would you ever hear of that?
The ability of ms programmers should be commended. Like clockwork they ensure people must update their software every week and upgrade it every couple of years.
This business strategy of having your customers depend on you to prevent these pathetic hacks works well for them. What other company in these times has $50 billion in cash?
The only thing that can help or even fix this is competition. We all know that's not going to be from apple anymore, so maybe linux.
You're exactly right. What the some people of the free software community hates to think about is that sometimes people will pay for the ease to get their software to install with 3 clicks and use it with 2 clicks (one double click really). Having software open is great, but a lot of it's just the same as windows freeware. Just because software is open and free, doesn't mean people give two shits when it won't work on the first try.
So here's where the problem begins. Should people make free open software on their own time and do it for the good of the community, or should companies sell closed software that works better?
I think what a lot of people don't consider is that with p2p, all software becomes free whether it's legal or not. That is a totally different issue and lets not get all worked up over it, but a good amount of the software that home desktop users have on their windows boxes is pirated, so the free linux idea doesn't mean much. However, in a business situation this is very different and I think that's where linux should be focused for now.
The linux apps are supposed to be just as easy to use and capable as windows apps. But the problem i think most people face is getting to the point where they can double click the icon and it will load and work properly. In a business setting where you have an IT department doing the work of configuring it, I'm sure most people will have no problem adjusting. However, this takes a decent amount of work and knowhow to set these fuckers up. While windows may be buggy, faulty, unstable, and watched over by big brother, at least it's a cinch to install applications on it.
That is not meant to be a slam on linux and a praise on windows, but it's a major roadblock that prevents a lot of windows users from having the balls to make an attempt to switch.
I'm already thinking about the flames that will surely ensure from this post. But seriously, get a windows box and install a program and do the same for linux while keeping in mind that most people don't want to learn, because they shouldn't have to, how to simply put the icon on their desktop or menu. It may sound trivial to experience computer users, but it's not to regular windows users who just want to get something done.
Alright I will. And all the problems that I do have I will be able to fix because the drivers will exists. However, like you said, that will only be because the hardware vendors wrote them. It would be nice if they wrote them for linux as good as they did for windows. But with so many distros and kernels out there it must make them hard to do so. My complaint wasn't with linux, but how using linux is still harder than windows, specifically xp for that matter.
I agree with you completely. There are so many applications out there for Linux. However, it drives me nuts that I have to spend up to an hour with google and other rpm databases to find all the dependencies. I installed Gaim on windows and linux at the same time. Though the windows version was a larger download (but I have cable so I don't give a shit about another meg or so) it worked imediatly. The linux counterpart required a lot longer to set up. I understand the idea of having lots of small components to keep the system more efficient and maybe this really is a problem with developers and not linux itself, but can't they at least provide links or include the dependencies in the rpm. A lot of the dependencies I have to hunt down are small files and including them would save a lot of time.
Have you installed Windows XP? That is one of the few operating systems I've "installed" and once it's finished working, you're finished. No tweaking is nessesary. By that I mean you usually do not have to install drivers or set up other things that the average user would have trouble with and not want to deal with.
Older versions weren't this refined, but I think that Windows XP is more refined for desktop usability than most linux users would want to admit.
No because no one is championing windows as the best operating system that everyone should use
I have a Dell laptop with windows xp. With the exception of it crashing or freezing up occasionally, it works fine. I'll clarify that: It installs and detects and sets up all the hardware. When I need to type a document and PRINT it I have no trouble. I can use my scanner and digital camera with no problem. When I installed my firewire hard drive, it was a matter of hooking up the cable. When I need working software, I can download it or buy it and NO TWEAKING IS NESSESARY! Since every slashdotter repeatedly regurgitates how good linux is in every discussion, I decided to try it out (once again). I downloaded Suse 8.2 and ran the installer. I did repartition my hard drive in Windows using partition magic because I knew ahead of time that the linux fdisks are a pain in the ass. It took weeks just to get the nvidia drivers working and the firewire in mounted in "sort of" read/write mode for a normal user. It is stupid that the end user has to edit configuration files to get this stuff to work. I can't find drivers for my printer, so I have no idea how to get that working. And I can't just write a driver for it as many people will immediately respond because I don't have a degree in Computer Science! Now I see linux as a free os and all I wanted to do was try it out. The fact that it is stable and open doesn't mean a whole lot to me, and the average user, when I can't get some stupid piece of hardware or software working that any idiot could do on windows. Trying to get software working usually means finding some cheap feeling clone of real software and hoping they have a suse rpm for it. Then I have to use the package program and I have to manually set up an icon on the desktop. This is no big deal for me at all, but how many normal people could do this, or even think of doing this. They'd just expect the installer to do it. I'm not pissed off at the people develping linux because I didn't pay anything for it and they have no responsibility to me to make me a free os, but will every slashdotter PLEASE consider the fact that linux is not ready for the average person who expects to do everything they can in windows in linux. It drives me nuts when I read posts to the effect that people are idiots if they can't use linux. I feel like an old lady shouting at her vcr when I say "You need to have a degree to use this," but it's true! I don't know how to compile source code to use a program, and I don't want to spend the time to learn it. Computers have become so popular with normal people because the average person can just figure it out because it has been designed to be easy to use. I'm frustrated that the linux community doesn't do much to help this. Most replies to a question of a frustrated user to get something to work are met with either arrogance of their knowledge of linux or "read the man pages." These were made for programmers and engineers, not for regular people. Linux has the ability to be a really good and complete operating system, but it's not there now and it is going to take real companies putting money into it, not garage geeks, to get it on the average users desktop. I've used dos and windows all my life and using linux is like pulling teeth. In case anyone is thinking of what their flame will be, remember that these problems are my experience. Others might not have the same problems, but I did!
I have this printer and its great. Near perfect photos with the right paper, and they're borderless. And the tanks last for a long time, haven't replaced mine yet. The only thing, is I can't get it to work in Suse 8.2. If anyone knows, let me know.