Linux users tend to know more about their system than Windows users - because prior to Ubuntu they really needed to know their system. Superior knowledge (or any kind of superiority) quickly bears arrogance. (In the distant past (ten years ago) PC gamers tended to be the same, but nowadays even dedicated gamers can get by without knowing what an interrupt does or how to optimize the driver loading sequence by hand.)
Mac users have a reputation of constantly reminding everyone else that their OS is so much more polished and that it looks so much better since OS X came out - well, until recently that was true, which gave them a feeling of superiority; arrogance followed.
Similarly, *nix users might regard Windows users as slow since they rely on an OS that tries to walk you through everything, even if you don't want it. And it's so much less secure. And the crashes. And they stick to the GUI. And omg liek i r h4xx0r|ng u. Most of their predjudices against the OS (not the users) are based in current and/or past truth. Again, the superiority of their platform (in the areas they don't conveniently ignore, like commercial application support) bears arrogance.
Win users can do it as well. "Yeah. I'll switch to Linux when they get games. I think the Duke Nukem Forever sequel should be out by then." We just don't see them doing it as often because, well, dunno. Might have something to do with the fact that the *nix crowd has a higher geek percentage and that whole social stuff is goddamn hard, you know.
Also, many Linux users are shitting on Windows for the same reason as many Windows users are shitting on Windows: They don't like it. Windows does have some rather nasty sides and some people really hate it because they've come to know them. Of course, that can apply to any OS; Windows just has more exposure - and the helpfulness of recent versions tends to annoy people who don't need or want it.
And, of course, Win users aren't smart enough to turn off Counterstrike and have a regular conversation anyway. They can't even tell a decent shell from a petrol company, ferchrissake! And their OS is so much uglier than what my iBook runs...
And why does almost no one use them? (Apart from the data/resource forks.) Is it because moving to other file systems is problematic?
That's a pretty good reason. By the way, other FSes support it (eg. ext2/3 extended attributes) and there are a number of nifty things that require them (Beagle and POSIX ACLs, for example).
One example of alternate streams: Since Tiger, OS X enables you to set a spotlight comment, which is searched by Spotlight (and if you use the shell interface you can specifically search them). I use them to tag certain files - the file gets a comment like "FSTAGS work c++" and I then let Spotlight look for files whose comment contains the strings "FSTAGS *", "* work*" and "* c++*".
I let a shell script construct the search command for me, so I just have to enter findtag work c++ and all relevant files are returned. If I want to exclude a tag I prefix that parameter with "!" or ":" (to avoid bash going nuts over that exclamation mark).
Finder supports that as well (you can construct "intelligent folders" that match any kind of metadata, from "file name" to "tracker used to create this sound file"; of course Spotlight comments are in the list), but unfortunately there is no way of excluding tags - you have "contains", but not "doesn't contain" - so sometimes you still need to stick to the shell. Maybe they'll fix that in Leopard.
This comes on the heel of the news about Creative ditching the Audigy brand in favor of the new "SIDmeister" series, which will be based around the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device, offering stunning three-voice 16-bit 2.0 surround sound*.
Creative is confident to bring the first 100,000 units to market in fall 2007. "We have already managed to find 80 SIDs," a spokesperson said, "and we're pretty sure we can get the other 99,920 ones in the next couple months."
* Sound will appear to come from everywhere if listener is wearing headphones.
Mutually exclusive. You get either new features or open source drivers. Many of the more interesting features newer GPUs offer are covered by patents etc., which require Intel to license the stuff. The license agreements will most probably contain clauses that prohibit the disclosure of implementation details; for example because the licence comes with example code and Intel probably doesn't want to go to great lengths to be able to prove in court that their implementation is not derivative of the example code - thus their entire system becomes tainted and they can't release the driver code or specs to the OSS crowd. That's why ATI and NVidia drivers are closed-source, too.
So either you get something akin to Intel's current integrated GPUs or something with a closed driver. A powerful OSS-friendly card is very highly improbable.
Don't misunderstand me, chummers - Dikote is cool - but who in their right mind would put it on their mobile? What do they expect from that, a phone with +1 ballistic armor?
No, wait, they want to use the phone as a blunt weapon, so they raise the power level by one. Nokia: For when you really need to do (STR-1)L stun damage. I'll wait for the Motorola CHNSW.
We clearly need our own lame superhero comics to edumaculate people about things like privacy and fair use rights.
I can see it already: Private Privacy is a WWII war hero who fights for peace and freedom... of information.
The Commando Line is a group of elite soldiers who defeat their foes by piping vital information through grep and sed.
The Backup Referee protects not only fair play but also fair use.
And of course... The Linux Foundation is our alternative to the various Justice Leagues etc. Staffed with heroes like Stall Man and Commander Taco this secret organization fights the evils of closed source and, er, operating systems that aren't Linux. Also, unlike a certain other foundation, they don't put David Hasselhoff into a Cylon car.
If they let Steve Ballmer sing a song about copying and show it to little children the children will grow up so utterly scared of him that they will never copy even legitimate files, ever.
You open your home directory. That's what home directories are for - everything that belongs to you sits in your home directory. (Note: This does not apply in the Windows world where most people scatter their files all over the place).
If you would open your home directory and get a list of all files in all folders in it you'd end up with a list with a couple thousand entries, which would be pretty much useless. Getting a regular directory listing and browing from there makes more sense. Also, if you need a certain file and don't know where it is you can use the OS's search feature, which usually works quite fast (and, in the case of at least Spotlight, supports file tagging).
File labels are a really nifty thing, but what you asked for is much easier done by just putting files in the user's home directory, where they're supposed to go - which all *nices enforce anyway.
Fook - seemingly I'm a hacker now. Oh no, MS sent me a link to download the f'in ISO. Poor Walt, he seems so excited at his first l33t glimpse. Please, nobody tell him Vista wasn't a bit secret, he's clearly dreaming of his Pulitzer here.
"Few hackers have had access" can also be read as "out of the hacker population, few had access" rather than "few people who all are hackers had access". TFA is mentioning that Vista hasn't received much attention from hackers yet, nothing more. (Of course I think that the opposite is the case, but the notion that only hackers have run Vista yet is clearly one not found in TFA.)
You mean, it would be harder for them to release their product and make it work. That's not remotely the same thing, oh ye of many apologies. My hardware does the same thing their hardware does, and in fact, my laptop has the same chipset their laptop does (but a far superior graphics system in terms of logistics with other operating systems, since it's not made by ATI.)
Yup, it would be harder. Yup, it would be cool if OS X ran on should-be-compatible hardware. I wasn't saying that thewir way is better in any way, just that it's their way. Apple has decided to sell a platform and not the components, which makes them a system vendor. If I wanted to apologize for them I'd list a number of reasons why that's soo much better, but I think the pros and cons pretty much balance each other out, depending on which product line you're looking at.
Apple and Microsoft have copied back and forth from one another liberally over the years. This is just something a fanboy would say to justify buying into vendor lock-in.
Excuse me? I did nothing to say that Windows or OS X is superior to, say, Linux. I merely pointed out that nobody is excited about Vista's remaining features because other OSes had them first. The features aren't new anymore which is why nobody gets excited. It doesn't matter who had them first, but they're old.
If Microsoft comes up with something that grabs people's attentions like Spotlight does and Apple implements it a year later people are going to yawn over Apple's implementation. You can't excite people with stale features.
1.) Apple is not a hardware vendor but a system vendor. They sell the "Mac experience" - their product wouldn't work without the special hardware (because not having to care about every mainboard chipset under the sun is what allows the "it just works" magic) and it wouldn't work without the special software, either. They sell the whole package, not some part of it.
2.) The fact why Tiger was cool for having Spotlight and Windows isn't is because Spotlight was new and cool (mainly for being new). Windows has the same feature two years later - no wonder nobody gets excited about it anymore. If you want to impress the crowd you have to innovate, not copy. Copying wins you sympathies because you have reached the bar others have set, but if you want to stand out you have to come upwith new, cool stuff that nobody has had before.
Windows has reached impressive-feature parity with Tiger, but that doesn't impress anyone - and in fact people have expected Windows to be much better, so Microsoft doesn't reach their own bar, thus people are disappointed anyway.
Actually, that's a pretty cool idea for a SciFi race: They temporarily colonize solar systems on their multi-million year quest to explore the galaxy, not realizing that - since they haven't had real contact with the homeworld they're sending the data back to for millennia - their homeworld has gone through several rather violent wars and there's nobody who cares about the data they send back anymore, effectively turning their ten thousands of moving colonies into one enormous fool's errand.
Science Fiction has numerous instances of "how do we tell them that $DRAMATIC_TRUTH", but $DRAMATIC_TRUTH = "since N thousand years their entire way of life has been a complete waste of time" would be somewhat refreshing.
m. A spaceship powered by the weird mathematics encountered in Italian restaurents.
n. The former Mars moon Phobos, turned into a giant ship complete with three artificial intel########<Spurious Interrupt - Breach Disabled> <Further Access Denied>
Maybe LASER stands for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rockets". An exploding warhead certainly ought to make the surrounding area a bit brighter...
And BILD, which still is Europe's biggest tabloid and which, inexplicably, still enjoys great popularity (and thus power), despite having been (and still being) the most scummy collection of drivel Germany has to offer for the last couple decades.
BILD says something -> millions of idiots believe it -> politicians sharing BILD's viewpoint are suddenly very popular
Don't forget, BILD's slogan is "BILD dir deine Meinung". (For the non-German-speaking readers: It roughly translates to "Form your opinion", with the word for "form" ("bild'") being replaced by the tabloid's name, thus one could interpret it as "BILD your opinion".)
Slight correction: One Killerspiel, many Killerspiele. The s-suffix indicates the plural.
On an unrelated note, I'll try to raise public awareness of Gewaltliteratur ("violence literature"), which is a term I've invented for any kind of book in which someone kills any being without immediately being followed by a note by the author detailing that what that character did is wrong and that killing is bad. Such violent hate speech-filled books needs to be banned, all of them. Yes, including the Bible and all newspaper articles about executions.
Hey, if we ban video games containing death why allow literature containing it?
Video games are the new Rock'n'Roll/horror movies/Heavy Metal. They are declared the cause for everything that might be wrong with today's youth and in twenty years today's gameing youth will agree that 4D sens-o-vision is the source of all evil...
People love easy solutions to complex problems and they will always seek someone to blame their problems on, whether it's video games corrupting the youth or $MINORITY destroying the economy. By declaring video games to be the main cause of students running amok we can save ourselves the time we'd otherwise waste trying to find the real causes which might be inconvenient and/or unflattering.
I'd follow a different approach. Only allow the child to see movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Akira etc. and limit the allowed games to a similar selection. Bedtime stories should be bad fanfics, especially ones with excessive sex and/or violence (the stranger the fetish the better). Once it gets older (around 14 or so), cue hard porn, tentacle hentai and flash games found on 4chan.
That should ensure the child is so dysfunctional no predator will ever want to get close to it. It should also ensure that it will never ever reproduce, which is a good thing - after all, we don't want people with minds that broken raising kids, do we?
I hear they're already working on an Extended Energy Specification, though. I don't know the details, but it involves something about switching the gun into a "virtual 8 MJ mode" while really the gun is in some kind of "protected" mode, which gives every slug its own "virtual energy space" and ensures that no slug uses another slug's energy. I won't go into how they want to separate a coilgun's coils into separate "rings" with different "privileges". It's really quite confusing.
"helpful" activex popup ads:
Yuor compooter may be infectad with eh rootkit! Instal Pwn0r T0olbar now 2 protekt your system from teh threts!
Damn. I've been googling for hours now - do you have an idea where I can get the Linux or OS X version of Pwn0r T0olbar or maybe the source? I want to be protekted from teh threts too!
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Linux users tend to know more about their system than Windows users - because prior to Ubuntu they really needed to know their system. Superior knowledge (or any kind of superiority) quickly bears arrogance. (In the distant past (ten years ago) PC gamers tended to be the same, but nowadays even dedicated gamers can get by without knowing what an interrupt does or how to optimize the driver loading sequence by hand.)
Mac users have a reputation of constantly reminding everyone else that their OS is so much more polished and that it looks so much better since OS X came out - well, until recently that was true, which gave them a feeling of superiority; arrogance followed.
Similarly, *nix users might regard Windows users as slow since they rely on an OS that tries to walk you through everything, even if you don't want it. And it's so much less secure. And the crashes. And they stick to the GUI. And omg liek i r h4xx0r|ng u. Most of their predjudices against the OS (not the users) are based in current and/or past truth. Again, the superiority of their platform (in the areas they don't conveniently ignore, like commercial application support) bears arrogance.
Win users can do it as well. "Yeah. I'll switch to Linux when they get games. I think the Duke Nukem Forever sequel should be out by then." We just don't see them doing it as often because, well, dunno. Might have something to do with the fact that the *nix crowd has a higher geek percentage and that whole social stuff is goddamn hard, you know.
Also, many Linux users are shitting on Windows for the same reason as many Windows users are shitting on Windows: They don't like it. Windows does have some rather nasty sides and some people really hate it because they've come to know them. Of course, that can apply to any OS; Windows just has more exposure - and the helpfulness of recent versions tends to annoy people who don't need or want it.
And, of course, Win users aren't smart enough to turn off Counterstrike and have a regular conversation anyway. They can't even tell a decent shell from a petrol company, ferchrissake! And their OS is so much uglier than what my iBook runs...
And why does almost no one use them? (Apart from the data/resource forks.) Is it because moving to other file systems is problematic?
That's a pretty good reason. By the way, other FSes support it (eg. ext2/3 extended attributes) and there are a number of nifty things that require them (Beagle and POSIX ACLs, for example).
One example of alternate streams: Since Tiger, OS X enables you to set a spotlight comment, which is searched by Spotlight (and if you use the shell interface you can specifically search them). I use them to tag certain files - the file gets a comment like "FSTAGS work c++" and I then let Spotlight look for files whose comment contains the strings "FSTAGS *", "* work*" and "* c++*".
I let a shell script construct the search command for me, so I just have to enter findtag work c++ and all relevant files are returned. If I want to exclude a tag I prefix that parameter with "!" or ":" (to avoid bash going nuts over that exclamation mark).
Finder supports that as well (you can construct "intelligent folders" that match any kind of metadata, from "file name" to "tracker used to create this sound file"; of course Spotlight comments are in the list), but unfortunately there is no way of excluding tags - you have "contains", but not "doesn't contain" - so sometimes you still need to stick to the shell. Maybe they'll fix that in Leopard.
But a lawyer will be eaten alive, so it won't be all bad.
This comes on the heel of the news about Creative ditching the Audigy brand in favor of the new "SIDmeister" series, which will be based around the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device, offering stunning three-voice 16-bit 2.0 surround sound*.
Creative is confident to bring the first 100,000 units to market in fall 2007. "We have already managed to find 80 SIDs," a spokesperson said, "and we're pretty sure we can get the other 99,920 ones in the next couple months."
* Sound will appear to come from everywhere if listener is wearing headphones.
Mutually exclusive. You get either new features or open source drivers. Many of the more interesting features newer GPUs offer are covered by patents etc., which require Intel to license the stuff. The license agreements will most probably contain clauses that prohibit the disclosure of implementation details; for example because the licence comes with example code and Intel probably doesn't want to go to great lengths to be able to prove in court that their implementation is not derivative of the example code - thus their entire system becomes tainted and they can't release the driver code or specs to the OSS crowd. That's why ATI and NVidia drivers are closed-source, too.
So either you get something akin to Intel's current integrated GPUs or something with a closed driver. A powerful OSS-friendly card is very highly improbable.
Don't misunderstand me, chummers - Dikote is cool - but who in their right mind would put it on their mobile? What do they expect from that, a phone with +1 ballistic armor?
No, wait, they want to use the phone as a blunt weapon, so they raise the power level by one. Nokia: For when you really need to do (STR-1)L stun damage. I'll wait for the Motorola CHNSW.
Wasn't that traditionally IBM's role?
We clearly need our own lame superhero comics to edumaculate people about things like privacy and fair use rights.
I can see it already: Private Privacy is a WWII war hero who fights for peace and freedom... of information.
The Commando Line is a group of elite soldiers who defeat their foes by piping vital information through grep and sed.
The Backup Referee protects not only fair play but also fair use.
And of course... The Linux Foundation is our alternative to the various Justice Leagues etc. Staffed with heroes like Stall Man and Commander Taco this secret organization fights the evils of closed source and, er, operating systems that aren't Linux. Also, unlike a certain other foundation, they don't put David Hasselhoff into a Cylon car.
If they let Steve Ballmer sing a song about copying and show it to little children the children will grow up so utterly scared of him that they will never copy even legitimate files, ever.
Microsoft is the Empire. Apple is the Rebels. We are the Ewoks.
You open your home directory. That's what home directories are for - everything that belongs to you sits in your home directory. (Note: This does not apply in the Windows world where most people scatter their files all over the place).
If you would open your home directory and get a list of all files in all folders in it you'd end up with a list with a couple thousand entries, which would be pretty much useless. Getting a regular directory listing and browing from there makes more sense. Also, if you need a certain file and don't know where it is you can use the OS's search feature, which usually works quite fast (and, in the case of at least Spotlight, supports file tagging).
File labels are a really nifty thing, but what you asked for is much easier done by just putting files in the user's home directory, where they're supposed to go - which all *nices enforce anyway.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Fook - seemingly I'm a hacker now. Oh no, MS sent me a link to download the f'in ISO. Poor Walt, he seems so excited at his first l33t glimpse. Please, nobody tell him Vista wasn't a bit secret, he's clearly dreaming of his Pulitzer here.
"Few hackers have had access" can also be read as "out of the hacker population, few had access" rather than "few people who all are hackers had access". TFA is mentioning that Vista hasn't received much attention from hackers yet, nothing more. (Of course I think that the opposite is the case, but the notion that only hackers have run Vista yet is clearly one not found in TFA.)
You mean, it would be harder for them to release their product and make it work. That's not remotely the same thing, oh ye of many apologies. My hardware does the same thing their hardware does, and in fact, my laptop has the same chipset their laptop does (but a far superior graphics system in terms of logistics with other operating systems, since it's not made by ATI.)
Yup, it would be harder. Yup, it would be cool if OS X ran on should-be-compatible hardware. I wasn't saying that thewir way is better in any way, just that it's their way. Apple has decided to sell a platform and not the components, which makes them a system vendor. If I wanted to apologize for them I'd list a number of reasons why that's soo much better, but I think the pros and cons pretty much balance each other out, depending on which product line you're looking at.
Apple and Microsoft have copied back and forth from one another liberally over the years. This is just something a fanboy would say to justify buying into vendor lock-in.
Excuse me? I did nothing to say that Windows or OS X is superior to, say, Linux. I merely pointed out that nobody is excited about Vista's remaining features because other OSes had them first. The features aren't new anymore which is why nobody gets excited. It doesn't matter who had them first, but they're old.
If Microsoft comes up with something that grabs people's attentions like Spotlight does and Apple implements it a year later people are going to yawn over Apple's implementation. You can't excite people with stale features.
1.) Apple is not a hardware vendor but a system vendor. They sell the "Mac experience" - their product wouldn't work without the special hardware (because not having to care about every mainboard chipset under the sun is what allows the "it just works" magic) and it wouldn't work without the special software, either. They sell the whole package, not some part of it.
2.) The fact why Tiger was cool for having Spotlight and Windows isn't is because Spotlight was new and cool (mainly for being new). Windows has the same feature two years later - no wonder nobody gets excited about it anymore. If you want to impress the crowd you have to innovate, not copy. Copying wins you sympathies because you have reached the bar others have set, but if you want to stand out you have to come upwith new, cool stuff that nobody has had before.
Windows has reached impressive-feature parity with Tiger, but that doesn't impress anyone - and in fact people have expected Windows to be much better, so Microsoft doesn't reach their own bar, thus people are disappointed anyway.
Actually, there is a solution that does away with stupid users. RMS should like it; its name is an anagram of "GNU".
Actually, that's a pretty cool idea for a SciFi race: They temporarily colonize solar systems on their multi-million year quest to explore the galaxy, not realizing that - since they haven't had real contact with the homeworld they're sending the data back to for millennia - their homeworld has gone through several rather violent wars and there's nobody who cares about the data they send back anymore, effectively turning their ten thousands of moving colonies into one enormous fool's errand.
Science Fiction has numerous instances of "how do we tell them that $DRAMATIC_TRUTH", but $DRAMATIC_TRUTH = "since N thousand years their entire way of life has been a complete waste of time" would be somewhat refreshing.
m. A spaceship powered by the weird mathematics encountered in Italian restaurents.
n. The former Mars moon Phobos, turned into a giant ship complete with three artificial intel########<Spurious Interrupt - Breach Disabled> <Further Access Denied>
Maybe LASER stands for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rockets". An exploding warhead certainly ought to make the surrounding area a bit brighter...
And BILD, which still is Europe's biggest tabloid and which, inexplicably, still enjoys great popularity (and thus power), despite having been (and still being) the most scummy collection of drivel Germany has to offer for the last couple decades.
BILD says something -> millions of idiots believe it -> politicians sharing BILD's viewpoint are suddenly very popular
Don't forget, BILD's slogan is "BILD dir deine Meinung". (For the non-German-speaking readers: It roughly translates to "Form your opinion", with the word for "form" ("bild'") being replaced by the tabloid's name, thus one could interpret it as "BILD your opinion".)
Slight correction: One Killerspiel, many Killerspiele. The s-suffix indicates the plural.
On an unrelated note, I'll try to raise public awareness of Gewaltliteratur ("violence literature"), which is a term I've invented for any kind of book in which someone kills any being without immediately being followed by a note by the author detailing that what that character did is wrong and that killing is bad. Such violent hate speech-filled books needs to be banned, all of them. Yes, including the Bible and all newspaper articles about executions.
Hey, if we ban video games containing death why allow literature containing it?
Video games are the new Rock'n'Roll/horror movies/Heavy Metal. They are declared the cause for everything that might be wrong with today's youth and in twenty years today's gameing youth will agree that 4D sens-o-vision is the source of all evil...
People love easy solutions to complex problems and they will always seek someone to blame their problems on, whether it's video games corrupting the youth or $MINORITY destroying the economy. By declaring video games to be the main cause of students running amok we can save ourselves the time we'd otherwise waste trying to find the real causes which might be inconvenient and/or unflattering.
I'd follow a different approach. Only allow the child to see movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, Akira etc. and limit the allowed games to a similar selection. Bedtime stories should be bad fanfics, especially ones with excessive sex and/or violence (the stranger the fetish the better). Once it gets older (around 14 or so), cue hard porn, tentacle hentai and flash games found on 4chan.
That should ensure the child is so dysfunctional no predator will ever want to get close to it. It should also ensure that it will never ever reproduce, which is a good thing - after all, we don't want people with minds that broken raising kids, do we?
I hear they're already working on an Extended Energy Specification, though. I don't know the details, but it involves something about switching the gun into a "virtual 8 MJ mode" while really the gun is in some kind of "protected" mode, which gives every slug its own "virtual energy space" and ensures that no slug uses another slug's energy. I won't go into how they want to separate a coilgun's coils into separate "rings" with different "privileges". It's really quite confusing.
John Carmack still has Armadillo Aerospace. Expect orbital BFGs by 2009.
"helpful" activex popup ads:
Yuor compooter may be infectad with eh rootkit! Instal Pwn0r T0olbar now 2 protekt your system from teh threts!
Damn. I've been googling for hours now - do you have an idea where I can get the Linux or OS X version of Pwn0r T0olbar or maybe the source? I want to be protekted from teh threts too!