Depends. Some people love the Photoshop UI and some (including me) think that a series of non-interactive command line tools would be much easier for the average user. I much prefer the GIMP over Photoshhop precisely because the GIMP has a well-organized, understandable UI while I still haven't found out how to apply a filter in Photoshop. Either Photoshop is completely intuitive to you or it doesn't work at all.
For me the Paint Shop Pro series (sans everything since version 8, when they turned the program into a Photoshop clone, complete with confusing UI) has a better UI than both Photoshop and the GIMP, but then again I have used PSP since version 4. After seeing the Gimpshop thingy I'd very much love to see a version of the GIMP that looks and feels like Paint Shop Pro 7. Yes, I know I could ttry to do it myself, but I couldn't implement a decent UI if my life depended on it.
Another advantage of IRC roleplaying (see one of my earlier posts for more on this topic): Using the scripting functionality inherent in most IRC clients you can easily roll 256d743 without having to worry about how to even get that stuff.
Exotic creative stuff generally fits well with the programer crowd. I know someone who works wonders with a castrated version of Ruby (he doesn't have any choice on the castrated part) and who is currently starting a project to build a roleplaying framework around a world he has designed. I have a number of dead writing projects that I hope to one day recover - after I've finished building my own language. Maybe it's because writing code is a creative process as well... Creative coding geeks just are the artsy guys of the Next Generation (TM). They do stuff out of the desire to be creative and to build something. Coding is just another art form - and like any other art form it's best (but pays worst) when you just do stuff out of the desire to do it instead of the desire to not get fired.
Now, I would really like to get back into RPGs, but I can't because I know the only people I would find who would want to play are people I would rather not play with. I wonder how many people are put off getting into roleplaying games - which are basically just like cool board games but with continuity - because they don't want to spend their time with frighteningly nerdy people. This is especially true of women, who have to beat those horny nerds off with a stick.
All hail the Internet, the Great Liberator. It solves all of your problems. No, really, it works in this case. I'm participating in an IRC-based roleplaying group (mostly The Dark Eye, as that's the preferred system around Germany, but we are thinking about trying IRC-based Shadowrun). The members are spread all across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Getting a group together IRL would be extremely hard for me as I happen to live in a small town and most people I regularly meet couldn't tell a D20 from WD40. IRC happens to work remarkably well; the pace is very slow (usually about five times as slow as normal), but that way people have more time to think about their lines, which results in some pretty good dialouge. And you get a complete log of the sessions, to boot. The log, of course, allows you to accomodate for missing players by simply starting a second adventure with alternative characters - once you are able to switch back to the primary adventure you just read the last part of the log and everyone's right back in the action.
Just don't lt one adventure spread out too much. What you can finish in one or two months IRL can easily take a year on IRC and some people just don't have the endurance to do the same story for that long.
Also, if you happen to have access to a large community, you can try to make a user map and get people interested in starting a roleplaying group to register with it. Once enough dots appear you have a fairly good chance of finding some people who might start a group with you. If it doesn't work you can still go away. The only problem is that this approach works much better for non-English communities than it does for English ones (as the users are less likely to be spread out over the entire planet).
I wouldn't make laws based on that ratio. Unfortunately, the lawmakers seem to do - and not only in the USA. I see the legal situation everwhere going into a direction where a crime is not defined by what hurts the community but by what lowers corporate income. Then again, I am something of an anti-corporative lobbyist, so my perception might be a bit skewed.
Note that I didn't call the ratio a valid reason for legislation. Because it isn't.
Note that not locking up people for petty crimes does not equal abolishing jails. The grandparent does not argue that jails are bad, he argues that jails should focus on locking up dangerous offenders like the rapist you mentioned istead of wasting resources on someone who has been caught stealing gum three times. Or, in other words:
Scientists Discover Color That Is Neither Black Nor White
Todey, Joseph Sixpack from the National Institute For Research Into Things That Are Black And White (NIFRITTABAW) announced that the controversial Multi-Hue Theory has been proven correct as the laboratory has been able to synthesize a new color that lies between black and white, dubbed "gray".
"It has long been accepted fact that it's either all or nothing and that an assumed 'in between' does not exist," so Sixpack, "but our discovery might indicate that indeed, things might not always be clearly separated."
News of the discovery have been received with delight by controversial pseudo-scientific groups like the proponents of the Dawn Theory, which states that there is something between night and day when it's neither completely bright nor completely dark.
There' one flaw in that argument: If $DRUG was legal, people wouldn't need to give their money to some shady dealer who in turn gives his money to a drug syndicate. The FDA would make sure that there are certain standards it has to meet and the legal system would make sure that the huge corporations owning the market (if $DRUG === "marijuana" that would most probably be the tobacco companies) would stay mostly clean. Shady people would make less money because they couldn't compete with the mass production that the big corporations would do - and the prices associated with it. Especially if production and/or sale are coupled to strong regulation.
Yes, most drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) are detrimental to one's time/revenue ratio, which is a reason to legislate against them. But "if people buy this stuff the money goes to bad people" is not, because the money only goes to bad people because no one else can sell the stuff.
Why poison DNS servers? We'll just use our own. I can very much imagine the DNS network being replaced by multiple regional, separate DNSes. This won't be good for the Internet, but it's not like there's anything to keep it from happening.
No, Congress makes the laws for the entire world. You see, laws are America's #1 export good. This is also the reason for the EU's progressively worsening legal situation. *g*
Get lots of TVs and monitors. Lots of them. Have them display static, random flickering colors, maybe a few wireframe 3D objects (for that 1980ish feeling). xscreensaver has some modes that are just perfect, for example some of BSOD's modes. Repeatedly compiling something that generates lots of text output might also be a good idea - having three or four monitors next to each other, each one scrolling through lots of technical-looking text (dmesg via Phosphor is great for this) should create a nice effect. Even nicer if you configure your terminal to use #00ff00 green text. Hang lots of tubes, wires etc. from the ceiling, making it look like everything was wired together in a haphazard way. Some loose cables dangling around (but obviously not connected to anything) add to the effect. The light comes from fluorescent lamps hanging between the wires.
That should create a nice cyberpunkish effect for everyone who loves the genre.
Why don't sell the naming rights to tropical storms? They already sold the some monkey to goldenpalace.com - why not a hurricane? Just imagine the possibilities: A pump manufacturer could call a hurricane "And Once It's Over, XYZ Pumps Will Help Pump Out Your Basement". Countless possibilites, I tell ya.
Especially if someone a the EFF decides to buy a nasty hurricane and hve it called "Software Patents" or something... "We're reporting live from Podunk, Texas, where fifty people were killed by Software Patents".
You see, that's just His way of saying: "Stop bothering me with your mindless drivel, you nimrods!" I mean, if a few million people would call me every day for some reason (with many of them just repeating some latin poetry that I have alreay heard a few billion times) I'd cerainly be a bit pissy.
As seen in Contemporary Park, coming soon to a theater near you.
Dr. Alan Grant: Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a rat egg. The rats are breeding. -- Dr. Alan Grant: The world is changing so fast, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look. Rats and man... two species separated by five minutes of evolution, have suddenly been thrown into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea of what to expect?
-- Dr. Alan Grant: Try to imagine yourself in the Neogene Period. You get your first look at this "eight inch hampster" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a mouse, lightly, sniffing all the time. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like a badger's, he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not the rat. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two rats you didn't even know were there. Because the rat's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this... a three-millimeter claw, like a razor, on the the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no. He slashes at you here... or here... or maybe across the ankle, spilling the content of your capillaries. The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know... try to show a little respect.
-- Dr. Alan Grant: [holding a newly-hatched rodent in his hands] What species is this? Henry Wu: It's uh, a field mouse. Dr. Alan Grant: [in disbelief] You bred mice?
PHP is great for throwing stuff together. I use it as a shell scripting language and apart from the time it takes the interpreter to load it's very nice. I probably could do my stuff in Perl or Ruby, but PHP comes with enough syntactic sugar that I can quickly put sogether something when I need it.
I don't care about graphics anymore. When I see a game with nice graphics it only takes a few minutes until some smoke cloud appears (from an explosion or whatever), gets in contact with a surface and clips halfway through it and it's obvious that it's just a bitmap floating through the air. That completely destroys the illusion for me - which IMO makes the game look worse than what we had ten years ago. I don't want ultra-pretty graphics most of the time, I want consistency. Eiother make the whole game look perfect or make it look like Quake 3. If the graphics are not consistent they are ugly - F.E.A.R. is a good example. As soon as I saw a preview I knew that the game looked like ass. Because it tried to build an illusion that was easily destroyed by a smoke puff clipping therough the floor.
I'm still waiting for the day when all 3D games will use volumetric fog for every single smoke puff etc. Maybe then they will look as good as they did in 1994. Unfortunately it will take years to get this far; until then I'll happily stay three generations behind and play the few games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics.
In fact there already are games using the Q3A engine. In know of an X-Com clone, for example. Digging around on SF should turn up more projects using the engine.
Beos: The device can easily display data for several solar systems at once. Unfortunately, at that time no one needed that functionality.
"Zeta": The device got its name from the fact that it appears to be a Beos device with the letter Zeta and the words "new and improved" painted on the case. For some reason a Teutonic mail-order merchant seemed to be the only distributor.
Netbsd: The strange spelling is seen as proof that this device was originally developed in eastern Europe. Known to work with any kind of cog imaginable. There are several scriptures in which a certain Netcraftos confirms that "Netbsd is dying".
Ostenos: Experts are still arguing whether this device should be called "Ostenos" or "Osexos". But everyone agrees that it's really pretty.
Mesdos: While somewhat clunky, many of the older Greek scriptures confirm that it was, in fact, much superior to the Windos offering of the time, which is often described as "just a pretty shell". They also explain in great detail how one can modify the starting configuration of the cogwheels in order to get as much as possible from than the first 640 rotations of the main cog (also known as conventional rotations).
Windos 3.1: An addon to Mesdos. Mainly acts as a pretty shell that makes the box slower for some reason. Comes with a pupular card game that can only be used in conjunction with the machine, further lowering productivity.
Windos 95: Got its name from the fact that there was a 95% chance of the device breaking when used due to the fact that everything was made from small glass windows. Known to leak blue ink from time to time.
Windos NT: Based on technology sto-- innovated from Stonehenge, this mechanism is known to be rock solid but incompatible with many common celestial bodies of its time.
Windos ME: The less known about this one the better.
Because Linus Torvalds is blackmailing the hardware manufacturers.;)
No, actually it's true - third party stuff is third party stuff. You can't expect a distro to come with this preinstalled, especially when (like Captive) they use copyrighted material. You are free to download the NTFS drivers but they are not free to distribute them.
indows smooth an intuitive? Not for me. Note that "intuitive" just means "works like I expect it to". If you have learned to use computers with Windows, you find the Windows interface intuitive, because that's what you expect a computer to be like. I have learned to use computers with MS-DOS, where (from a gamer's perspective) Windows was a largely unnecessary graphical shell that just wasted precious memory. I find that using text mode to interact with the filesystem is more intuitive and inviting than using some graphical representation that only allows a few operations. Someone who has grown up without a command line would think that it's weird to do anything system-related with the keyboard.
Another example: I appreciate the way Linux handles settings - global settings reside in text files in/etc while local settings reside in text files in ~/.appname. That makes settings easily portable and easy to maintain. Windows, OTOH, has settings thrown all over the place with most apps storing their stuff somewhere in the registry where it's hard to locate. It was confusing when I migrated from MS-DOS to Win95 and it's still irritating. But someone who has grown up tweaking HKCU and HKLM will probably be confused by the fact that Linux apps don't store their settings in one common place.
The only operating system that really does work intuitively (for someone who's used to work with other OSes) is OS X. Every other OS has it's own little weirdnesses that ultimetely make it hard to use until you have properly learned it. (Note: OS X has those too, but most of the time the interface easily beats everything else without even trying.)
Linux has a relatively clean design and a powerful text shell that allows someone with a text-mode background to work with the file system much more effectively than an icon wrangler could. The downside is that someone who isn't used to do work without the mouse will be confused. Also, it's extremely tweakable, which can be both an upside and a downside.
Windows is the most common OS, so most people are somewhat familiar with it. But it tends to develop strange behavior after a while and tweaking it is horribly complicated and clunky. Also, installing software is much more complicated than doing so on OS X or a modern Linux distro.
OS X has the best interface out of the three - it looks extremely good, is easy to learn and almost always does exactly what you expect it to. Also, installing software is literally as easy as double-clicking a file and dragging an icon. However, it's not as tweakable as Linux.
Every OS has it's own design philosophy and every OS was designed to be intuitive - just for differend people. Linux was designed to be intuitive for people who don't necessarily need a graphical shell. Windows was designed to be intuitive for people who don't want to care about how their system works. OS X was designed to be intuitive for both text mode geeks and graphical mode users (it inherited geek intuitivity when it became a Unix). But most importantly, every OS is designed to be intuitive for it's users. When someone who has used an OS for a long time looks a another one it's bound to be unintuitive, especially if the second OS is based on a different philosophy than "yours" and you have never seen any OS besides "yours" before.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends. Some people love the Photoshop UI and some (including me) think that a series of non-interactive command line tools would be much easier for the average user. I much prefer the GIMP over Photoshhop precisely because the GIMP has a well-organized, understandable UI while I still haven't found out how to apply a filter in Photoshop. Either Photoshop is completely intuitive to you or it doesn't work at all.
For me the Paint Shop Pro series (sans everything since version 8, when they turned the program into a Photoshop clone, complete with confusing UI) has a better UI than both Photoshop and the GIMP, but then again I have used PSP since version 4. After seeing the Gimpshop thingy I'd very much love to see a version of the GIMP that looks and feels like Paint Shop Pro 7. Yes, I know I could ttry to do it myself, but I couldn't implement a decent UI if my life depended on it.
Another advantage of IRC roleplaying (see one of my earlier posts for more on this topic): Using the scripting functionality inherent in most IRC clients you can easily roll 256d743 without having to worry about how to even get that stuff.
Exotic creative stuff generally fits well with the programer crowd. I know someone who works wonders with a castrated version of Ruby (he doesn't have any choice on the castrated part) and who is currently starting a project to build a roleplaying framework around a world he has designed. I have a number of dead writing projects that I hope to one day recover - after I've finished building my own language. Maybe it's because writing code is a creative process as well... Creative coding geeks just are the artsy guys of the Next Generation (TM). They do stuff out of the desire to be creative and to build something. Coding is just another art form - and like any other art form it's best (but pays worst) when you just do stuff out of the desire to do it instead of the desire to not get fired.
Now, I would really like to get back into RPGs, but I can't because I know the only people I would find who would want to play are people I would rather not play with. I wonder how many people are put off getting into roleplaying games - which are basically just like cool board games but with continuity - because they don't want to spend their time with frighteningly nerdy people. This is especially true of women, who have to beat those horny nerds off with a stick.
All hail the Internet, the Great Liberator. It solves all of your problems. No, really, it works in this case. I'm participating in an IRC-based roleplaying group (mostly The Dark Eye, as that's the preferred system around Germany, but we are thinking about trying IRC-based Shadowrun). The members are spread all across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Getting a group together IRL would be extremely hard for me as I happen to live in a small town and most people I regularly meet couldn't tell a D20 from WD40. IRC happens to work remarkably well; the pace is very slow (usually about five times as slow as normal), but that way people have more time to think about their lines, which results in some pretty good dialouge. And you get a complete log of the sessions, to boot. The log, of course, allows you to accomodate for missing players by simply starting a second adventure with alternative characters - once you are able to switch back to the primary adventure you just read the last part of the log and everyone's right back in the action.
Just don't lt one adventure spread out too much. What you can finish in one or two months IRL can easily take a year on IRC and some people just don't have the endurance to do the same story for that long.
Also, if you happen to have access to a large community, you can try to make a user map and get people interested in starting a roleplaying group to register with it. Once enough dots appear you have a fairly good chance of finding some people who might start a group with you. If it doesn't work you can still go away. The only problem is that this approach works much better for non-English communities than it does for English ones (as the users are less likely to be spread out over the entire planet).
I wouldn't make laws based on that ratio. Unfortunately, the lawmakers seem to do - and not only in the USA. I see the legal situation everwhere going into a direction where a crime is not defined by what hurts the community but by what lowers corporate income. Then again, I am something of an anti-corporative lobbyist, so my perception might be a bit skewed.
Note that I didn't call the ratio a valid reason for legislation. Because it isn't.
You stick with your fancy report extraction language and I'll stay right here with the rest of the SCUMM.
Of course, if it's set up properly...
/root/ # modprobe dwim
Note that not locking up people for petty crimes does not equal abolishing jails. The grandparent does not argue that jails are bad, he argues that jails should focus on locking up dangerous offenders like the rapist you mentioned istead of wasting resources on someone who has been caught stealing gum three times. Or, in other words:
Scientists Discover Color That Is Neither Black Nor White
Todey, Joseph Sixpack from the National Institute For Research Into Things That Are Black And White (NIFRITTABAW) announced that the controversial Multi-Hue Theory has been proven correct as the laboratory has been able to synthesize a new color that lies between black and white, dubbed "gray".
"It has long been accepted fact that it's either all or nothing and that an assumed 'in between' does not exist," so Sixpack, "but our discovery might indicate that indeed, things might not always be clearly separated."
News of the discovery have been received with delight by controversial pseudo-scientific groups like the proponents of the Dawn Theory, which states that there is something between night and day when it's neither completely bright nor completely dark.
Why, the American legal system certainly does a good job deterring me from ever moving there...
There' one flaw in that argument: If $DRUG was legal, people wouldn't need to give their money to some shady dealer who in turn gives his money to a drug syndicate. The FDA would make sure that there are certain standards it has to meet and the legal system would make sure that the huge corporations owning the market (if $DRUG === "marijuana" that would most probably be the tobacco companies) would stay mostly clean. Shady people would make less money because they couldn't compete with the mass production that the big corporations would do - and the prices associated with it. Especially if production and/or sale are coupled to strong regulation.
Yes, most drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) are detrimental to one's time/revenue ratio, which is a reason to legislate against them. But "if people buy this stuff the money goes to bad people" is not, because the money only goes to bad people because no one else can sell the stuff.
Why poison DNS servers? We'll just use our own. I can very much imagine the DNS network being replaced by multiple regional, separate DNSes. This won't be good for the Internet, but it's not like there's anything to keep it from happening.
No, Congress makes the laws for the entire world. You see, laws are America's #1 export good. This is also the reason for the EU's progressively worsening legal situation. *g*
How about reviving the style of cyberpunk movies?
Get lots of TVs and monitors. Lots of them. Have them display static, random flickering colors, maybe a few wireframe 3D objects (for that 1980ish feeling). xscreensaver has some modes that are just perfect, for example some of BSOD's modes. Repeatedly compiling something that generates lots of text output might also be a good idea - having three or four monitors next to each other, each one scrolling through lots of technical-looking text (dmesg via Phosphor is great for this) should create a nice effect. Even nicer if you configure your terminal to use #00ff00 green text. Hang lots of tubes, wires etc. from the ceiling, making it look like everything was wired together in a haphazard way. Some loose cables dangling around (but obviously not connected to anything) add to the effect. The light comes from fluorescent lamps hanging between the wires.
That should create a nice cyberpunkish effect for everyone who loves the genre.
Why don't sell the naming rights to tropical storms? They already sold the some monkey to goldenpalace.com - why not a hurricane? Just imagine the possibilities: A pump manufacturer could call a hurricane "And Once It's Over, XYZ Pumps Will Help Pump Out Your Basement". Countless possibilites, I tell ya.
Especially if someone a the EFF decides to buy a nasty hurricane and hve it called "Software Patents" or something... "We're reporting live from Podunk, Texas, where fifty people were killed by Software Patents".
You see, that's just His way of saying: "Stop bothering me with your mindless drivel, you nimrods!" I mean, if a few million people would call me every day for some reason (with many of them just repeating some latin poetry that I have alreay heard a few billion times) I'd cerainly be a bit pissy.
Dump enough toxic waste in the ocean to kill off any swimming rats. Problem solved.
As seen in Contemporary Park, coming soon to a theater near you.
Dr. Alan Grant: Oh my God. Do you know what this is? This is a rat egg. The rats are breeding.
--
Dr. Alan Grant: The world is changing so fast, and we're all running to catch up. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but look. Rats and man... two species separated by five minutes of evolution, have suddenly been thrown into the mix together. How can we possibly have the slightest idea of what to expect?
--
Dr. Alan Grant: Try to imagine yourself in the Neogene Period. You get your first look at this "eight inch hampster" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a mouse, lightly, sniffing all the time. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like a badger's, he'll lose you if you don't move. But no, not the rat. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side, from the other two rats you didn't even know were there. Because the rat's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this... a three-millimeter claw, like a razor, on the the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no. He slashes at you here... or here... or maybe across the ankle, spilling the content of your capillaries. The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know... try to show a little respect.
--
Dr. Alan Grant: [holding a newly-hatched rodent in his hands] What species is this?
Henry Wu: It's uh, a field mouse.
Dr. Alan Grant: [in disbelief] You bred mice?
what I want to know is, who is "rogue Bank" and are they the same one I bank with
Well, after that Hack, Rogue Bank's CEO Frank ADOM resigned. The bank went belly-up and was bought out by Angbank, a subsidiary of Moria Holding.
PHP is great for throwing stuff together. I use it as a shell scripting language and apart from the time it takes the interpreter to load it's very nice. I probably could do my stuff in Perl or Ruby, but PHP comes with enough syntactic sugar that I can quickly put sogether something when I need it.
I don't care about graphics anymore. When I see a game with nice graphics it only takes a few minutes until some smoke cloud appears (from an explosion or whatever), gets in contact with a surface and clips halfway through it and it's obvious that it's just a bitmap floating through the air. That completely destroys the illusion for me - which IMO makes the game look worse than what we had ten years ago. I don't want ultra-pretty graphics most of the time, I want consistency. Eiother make the whole game look perfect or make it look like Quake 3. If the graphics are not consistent they are ugly - F.E.A.R. is a good example. As soon as I saw a preview I knew that the game looked like ass. Because it tried to build an illusion that was easily destroyed by a smoke puff clipping therough the floor.
I'm still waiting for the day when all 3D games will use volumetric fog for every single smoke puff etc. Maybe then they will look as good as they did in 1994. Unfortunately it will take years to get this far; until then I'll happily stay three generations behind and play the few games that focus on gameplay instead of graphics.
In fact there already are games using the Q3A engine. In know of an X-Com clone, for example. Digging around on SF should turn up more projects using the engine.
Let's not forget about the lesser-known models:
Beos: The device can easily display data for several solar systems at once. Unfortunately, at that time no one needed that functionality.
"Zeta": The device got its name from the fact that it appears to be a Beos device with the letter Zeta and the words "new and improved" painted on the case. For some reason a Teutonic mail-order merchant seemed to be the only distributor.
Netbsd: The strange spelling is seen as proof that this device was originally developed in eastern Europe. Known to work with any kind of cog imaginable. There are several scriptures in which a certain Netcraftos confirms that "Netbsd is dying".
Ostenos: Experts are still arguing whether this device should be called "Ostenos" or "Osexos". But everyone agrees that it's really pretty.
Mesdos: While somewhat clunky, many of the older Greek scriptures confirm that it was, in fact, much superior to the Windos offering of the time, which is often described as "just a pretty shell". They also explain in great detail how one can modify the starting configuration of the cogwheels in order to get as much as possible from than the first 640 rotations of the main cog (also known as conventional rotations).
Windos 3.1: An addon to Mesdos. Mainly acts as a pretty shell that makes the box slower for some reason. Comes with a pupular card game that can only be used in conjunction with the machine, further lowering productivity.
Windos 95: Got its name from the fact that there was a 95% chance of the device breaking when used due to the fact that everything was made from small glass windows. Known to leak blue ink from time to time.
Windos NT: Based on technology sto-- innovated from Stonehenge, this mechanism is known to be rock solid but incompatible with many common celestial bodies of its time.
Windos ME: The less known about this one the better.
I highly doubt that it was produced in the year 87BCE. That's still 553,977 years in the future!
Because Linus Torvalds is blackmailing the hardware manufacturers. ;)
No, actually it's true - third party stuff is third party stuff. You can't expect a distro to come with this preinstalled, especially when (like Captive) they use copyrighted material. You are free to download the NTFS drivers but they are not free to distribute them.
indows smooth an intuitive? Not for me. Note that "intuitive" just means "works like I expect it to". If you have learned to use computers with Windows, you find the Windows interface intuitive, because that's what you expect a computer to be like. I have learned to use computers with MS-DOS, where (from a gamer's perspective) Windows was a largely unnecessary graphical shell that just wasted precious memory. I find that using text mode to interact with the filesystem is more intuitive and inviting than using some graphical representation that only allows a few operations. Someone who has grown up without a command line would think that it's weird to do anything system-related with the keyboard. /etc while local settings reside in text files in ~/.appname. That makes settings easily portable and easy to maintain. Windows, OTOH, has settings thrown all over the place with most apps storing their stuff somewhere in the registry where it's hard to locate. It was confusing when I migrated from MS-DOS to Win95 and it's still irritating. But someone who has grown up tweaking HKCU and HKLM will probably be confused by the fact that Linux apps don't store their settings in one common place.
Another example: I appreciate the way Linux handles settings - global settings reside in text files in
The only operating system that really does work intuitively (for someone who's used to work with other OSes) is OS X. Every other OS has it's own little weirdnesses that ultimetely make it hard to use until you have properly learned it. (Note: OS X has those too, but most of the time the interface easily beats everything else without even trying.)
Linux has a relatively clean design and a powerful text shell that allows someone with a text-mode background to work with the file system much more effectively than an icon wrangler could. The downside is that someone who isn't used to do work without the mouse will be confused. Also, it's extremely tweakable, which can be both an upside and a downside.
Windows is the most common OS, so most people are somewhat familiar with it. But it tends to develop strange behavior after a while and tweaking it is horribly complicated and clunky. Also, installing software is much more complicated than doing so on OS X or a modern Linux distro.
OS X has the best interface out of the three - it looks extremely good, is easy to learn and almost always does exactly what you expect it to. Also, installing software is literally as easy as double-clicking a file and dragging an icon. However, it's not as tweakable as Linux.
Every OS has it's own design philosophy and every OS was designed to be intuitive - just for differend people. Linux was designed to be intuitive for people who don't necessarily need a graphical shell. Windows was designed to be intuitive for people who don't want to care about how their system works. OS X was designed to be intuitive for both text mode geeks and graphical mode users (it inherited geek intuitivity when it became a Unix). But most importantly, every OS is designed to be intuitive for it's users. When someone who has used an OS for a long time looks a another one it's bound to be unintuitive, especially if the second OS is based on a different philosophy than "yours" and you have never seen any OS besides "yours" before.