Okay, people are going to think I'm being funny or a jerk or something, but I'm completely serious and here it goes:
I recently worked for a campus in Indiana where I was in charge of 8 computer labs. We found that Windows XP's (and possibly other versions) Master Browser service is totally hosed. Totally. Especially if machines are on separate subnets (although this is minimized if you use a Windows based PDC).
They thought I was crazy when I came up with the solution, but we went from machines hardly ever seeing each other, to always working.
The solution is to go to every single Windows XP client and disable the Master Browser service. Then get an old cranky machine out of a closet (we used 90mhz Pentium Pros) and install some version of linux or BSD that will install with the amount of RAM you have. You will need one machine per subnet. Set them all up with Samba and tell them to be Master Browsers (but not domain masters). Point them all to the PDC, or if there isn't one, make one a PDC.
You must have a PDC for Windows networking across subnets. Some people have occasional luck without, occasional being the key word.
The only time we had trouble, was when someone would get into a network closet (someone that shouldn't have, but that is a long story), and physically unplugged the power to a Samba machine to plug in some random idiotic device for 10 minutes, then forgot to plug the Samba machine back in.
I'm no linux zealot, far from it, but I do use linux. And trust me, with XP if you want windows networking to work, you need a non-windows machine to do Master Browsing.
Bungie had over a decade of experience and quite a reputation as a game developer before Microsoft even considered buying them. So that example doesn't really fit in with your reasoning. Actually it works against it.
As a matter of fact Bungie was bought specifically for the Halo franchise. What made the Halo franchise so alluring was Bungie's previous track record along with the tech demos they had been showing off. Microsoft bought them to make Halo an Xbox exclusive at launch.
The boxes are in different colors - it's just hard to see.
That one example could have worked, except both people interacting are basically doing the exact same thing with their own box. As such we have no idea if the system really works, or if it has errors and is passing one person's input to the wrong box as the result to a casual observer would be the same. Now if one person was changing the box shape only, while the other person moved theirs only, and the shot showed their hands doing those actions and the boxes reacting, then you have a great example.
But with both making the boxes twitch in what seems like a spastic motion, it doesn't get the point across.
One of the killer apps is allowing a passenger to operate a vehicle navigation system while the car is moving. (Typically, the system is locked out to prevent use by the driver.) The system really only knows which seat the touch is coming from, so it's not particularly Orwellian...
Of course I don't expect the system to perform magic, and the concept of only allowing the passenger to control is an ideal use of the technology. My complaint is that with the demo video you can't really tell that it is truly working in that fashion.
Perhaps in addition to what I stated above about the boxes, another example could show two users interacting with the system, then launch a new app and have one user not able to do anything. I didn't see this in the current video, and it would show it off pretty well. It would be especially important to see the person interacting and then locked out during different 'modes' or applications during a single session.
Wow, that movie doesn't really show how the user detection works at all really. The section with the two different boxes was supposed to I guess, but since both users just made the boxes jiggle around it wasn't effective.
Definitely we can see that multiple input works, but that has been shown within the last year or two already, so that is nothing new.
You would think that if the major new feature is this user detection, they would have used different colors for the different users, or found some other method to really show off that it doing one thing for one user (resizing/moving windows for instance), while doing something else for the other user (scrolling through a window, selecting options in a different window, etc.).
And what was with the staged beverage spill. For a technology demo that was pretty weird.
I did find it ironic that the entire demo was done in XP, but they used Apple's website as their demo material.
I have tried to move a number of my family, friends, and clients to this.
We always create the first account with the name "Install Software" and password protect it. That way other family members, children, etc. can't get in there and cause problems.
I always try to make them do everything they would normally do while I am there to assist with creating the limited accounts, password protecting any that need it, and setting up software. Invariably within a day or two I get a phone call/visit due to some random software not working right.
In one case a bank had some special software you had to use to do online banking which not only had to be installed via the admin account, but would only run there as well.
While working for a University managing labs I ran across a lot of software that freaked out if you didn't have admin privileges. Discreet products are notoriously bad about this. 3dStudioMax pops up a ton of error messages if you run it as a non-admin, but it mostly works just fine. Combustion randomly fails when you access different modules. Our solution in this case was Drive Shield which locks the drive and makes you think you can make changes. Those changes are lost at reboot though.
For normal people most things can be done fine. But there will be some software they will run across (and every person will find at least one) that requires that Admin access. Whether it is banking software, printer software, games, etc.
The way around this is to attempt to train the users how to properly utilize their one admin account. Make sure they know not to use it unless absolutely necessary, and then only use it for what is needed and get out of there! This requires a paradigm shift for most casual windows users and some will be able to adapt and others won't.
That is unfortunate but the truth. Personally I would choose a person or two you are called upon to clean up often, and try to do the switch with them. With luck you will have few problems, and if you do have some hopefully they will teach you how to more effectively train users to play on Windows safely.
This is one thing I enjoy about using the Mac. Even an administrator account doesn't have full blown privileges all the time, and must authenticate for many tasks. And since with OS X they threw out a lot of backwards compatibility most developers write software that can deal with non-admin users. I have found very few software packages that require an admin account, and those tend to be weird edge cases that most normal people would never run anyway. How many normal people need NFS mounts? I'm talking normal people here.
Even software installs are often painless with many companies doing a drag and drop application. Non-admin users can put it on their desktop or in their home folder and it runs normally. Admin users can drop it into the system wide applications folder for all users. Slick. Two different users want different versions of Moneydance? User two can download it and put it on their desktop and launch that one instead of the/Applications/ version.
Of course I don't see windows getting anywhere near that user friendly in this context anytime soon. And really that is sad as it makes keeping your machine clean way easier.
But back to my windows friends. Two people I set up as above where very non-technical people. And both, while feeling really confused at first, within a week or two seemed to be running pretty smoothly.
First off, one has to find the information of which command to enter in the command line. Hopefully this will include the instructions of what to copy/paste into that document. The thing is, looking at that document, to a normal person it would be daunting to have to copy paste into it.
Yes, you and I have no issue with it, but we are talking about people here, not geeks.
Secondly, when I did that exact thing, those packages still did not appear in Synaptic.
FYI:
Install Firefox, download and doubleclick, any moron can do that.
Install Spybot S&D, double click, any moron can do that.
The only time I have been in the registry is to do hard core stuff, usually when doing sysadmin for large systems. I'm talking folder redirection, etc. For the most part home users machines never require that, unless they have done something very, very wrong. Usually that involves someone telling them to edit the registry, and they actually try to do it, then of course they hose the whole thing up.
Installing flash for Firefox under windows involves clicking a button. You are comparing clicking a single button to editing a system file and running synaptic and doing a search. Wow, I mean, wow.
Please bear in mind that I don't intent to flame you either.
While I agree for most people installing these drivers is easier under Windows, that is not because the install procedure is easier or faster, but simply because they are accostumed to doing things this way.
While this may be true for you, it is not true for most people. I spend more time in Linux than in Windows, and I typically find that getting this stuff installed and configured properly in Windows is easier and smoother.
Of course the end result in Linux tends to be better for me, but it takes quite a bit more work, work that average users will not want to have to deal with.
I do have to say, I have yet to find any distro that configures my monitor properly on any system I have tried. It always involves me either having to play around in the X conf files, or if I have something like YaST/Sax available, basically lying about my configuration until I find a combo that works better.
What a lot of/.ers don't seem to get, based on comments already posted, is that we are talking about average users.
Linux will not work for average users until a way is found to include some basic features that ship with both Windows and Mac OS X. Flash plug-ins for the browsers is one of those things. Many distro's include this if you buy their retail, or Pro versions, but most average users are either going to download the fully free versions, or get them from someone they know to try out.
Even if Flash and other multimedia components where auto installed as an update process, much like Nvidia drivers are with Suse and some others, that would be much better.
Recently I installed Ubuntu 5.10 to see what was up with it. In order to get Flash installed I had to use command line utilities*. When your average user gets to this, they will give up. Some might take the time to figure it out, but let's be honest, very few of them are going to keep going when they run into that with the next piece of software, and even less are going to learn the system better and become truly comfortable with it.
Many comments are already complaining about the fact that people like this are either stupid or lazy. People, this is the 21st friggen' century. We have had GUI based computing for a long time now. There is no reason to have to jump through command line hoops to install what is considered a basic necessity on the web, especially by average users.
I can already hear the clicking on moderators sending my into the troll or flamebait abyss. Go ahead, that doesn't change basic facts.
I myself have no problem doing this, but there are people that I work with / am friends with / are related to that I would really like to get off of Windows as they always are having problems. I can't recommend Linux until I know they will be calling me with real problems, not "how do I play this movie," or "why can't I see this web page?"
From what I have seen, especially in the past day or so, is that a lot of this comes from linux zealotry involving licensing. Just look at the recent Koraraa debacle. The maintainer isn't being asked to pull a live cd by either Linus, or ATI/Nvidia, but some random linux user concerned about 'the open source ideal.' That is one great way to keep this stuff out of people's hands.
I know many people that enjoy linux don't necessarily want it to take over. And that is fine, but referring to people that don't want to jump through hoops that this day and age should not be necessary as lazy/stupid just makes the people making those comments look bad.
* - Ubuntu doesn't ship with flash. And if you go to the Macromedia site linked to by any flash using page, the linux page seems to either be missing or incorrectly linked. The solution is to edit a file containing the repositories, then updating (its been a while and I don't use Ubuntu, apt I think?), and then attempting to get it to install. This is akin to asking your average Joe to fire up regedit, make changes, then fire up the dos prompt and run a few commands. Silly, absolutely silly.
Pace Anti-Piracy was using this type of technology before then. Sounds like this could be invalidated by contact with the right people. For those that don't know, PaceAP supplies the registration and protection code for most Pro Audio applications. I first ran across their stuff in 1994/1995.
But there is another side to this. I work in the Performing Arts (mostly Theatre). When we are hashing out ideas, it is very important to be able to grab a sheet of paper and sketch out your ideas so that everyone involved can get an idea what you are talking about. Often when an artist/designer speaks of their visual ideas it does not adequately impart the information for those listening, especially if those listening may not be artists/designers themselves.
Many people forget that art is not necessarily a single person adventure. Especially for designers, who often have clients that they are doing very specific works for. Being able to quickly and accurately show them what you are talking about is vital to their career.
If students are coming out of Universities without these skills, and they are going into these industries, then it is the Universities fault for either:
Not adequately preparing the student for the real world (by not teaching fundamentals before getting into the more advanced computer integration)
Or graduating a student even though their fundamentals are weak (this is the worst of the two)
I know many here at/. will disagree with this, but it is not always convenient or fast to mock something up on a computer. Especially if you are at a client's office in a meeting room...
Sounds like a latency issue. Maybe 27 ms is the fastest it is capable of recording.
Have a USB mouse/keyboard? USB has latency to it, which is why many higher end audio interfaces either shy away from using it, or have 'zero latency' monitoring features (basically analog passthroughs for real time recording). I don't remember the specific amount, but it is more than 10 ms just for data to pass through the USB bus itself IIR. That on top of any latency in your host environment.
As for Ambilight - just what is the point of that feature? It makes your wall glow? I've seen the adverts for it and it just screams gimmick.
IIR, the whole point of this is that there have been studies which show that when one lights the wall behind a projection screen or TV, especially in a darkened room, it is supposed to lead to less eyestrain and headaches.
Of course you are correct that just setting a light behind the TV is not terribly difficult, however some people do like to have nice clean rooms without a lot of cables and or extra equipment floating around, thus their tendancy to buy one of these TVs.
Just FYI, supposedly both BD and HD-DVD support 1080p video storage. All HDMI specs can support it, but if the TV manufacturer decided not to put in a powerful enough processor for the bandwidth they may not support it.
Also not many people realize this, but 720p actually has more pixel information than 1080i due to having 60 frames per second at a full 720 lines, where 1080i has 60 frames per second at 540 lines alternating the even and odd lines (yes I know that should be obvious since it is interlaced), this means you only achieve the 1080 line resolution 30 times per second. This is one reason some broadcasters like 1080i, the numbers are larger for the marketing guys, and it requires less overall bandwidth.
I think both sides of that fence suffer from a misunderstanding of how much a difference it can make depending on your screen size and how close you are to the screen. Likely most people with a smaller screen or sitting farther back will notice little or no difference. But if you get a 60" screen and only sit 8' away from it the difference will be huge.
Those putting down others probably don't realize that those others either don't have a large enough screen for the difference to be apparent enough to warrant, or sit back away from the screen far enough that they don't notice. Of course things like eyesight/correction could have an impact as well.
Those who say they don't see a difference also probably have not sat closer to a big honkin' screen, or may have poor eyesight and couldn't tell anyway.
It is unfortunate to see people being offensive to each other, especially since both sides are overlooking what may be going on.
You are absolutely correct! That IE version is so much more cluttered, and slow! My, now my entire life has changed for the better since I can see less on the screen, and take little breaks while the screen redraws...
Interesting, has your company modified it somehow? I'm not super familiar with Exchange, so I don't know how modifiable, or 'skin-able' if you will, it is.
I do know that the University I work for uses Exchange, and Safari from my Mac works just fine. I see it almost exactly how I see it from Firefox.
And trust me, at this backwards little campus, there is not a lot of concern for non-MS situations, so I know they didn't do any modifying to make 3rd party browsers work, at least not on purpose.
Actually it was a true 1080i or 720p TV (it was CRT so it could do either scan rate), and in reference to the other reply, ours was a Quadro series, which according to the driver update should have worked as well as any other (it was at a University in a department that did 3d modeling work).
I can't speak for your ATi experience, but about a year ago I helped someone attempt to setup a machine with a pretty modern Nvidia card hook up to an HDTV for a display in a gallery. We had the latest drivers, and he even downloaded extra software to tweak timings.
We eventually just gave up and used an LCD monitor. We couldn't get any reasonable timings to work, either the resolution was way too low, or the text was too blurry to read. It was a nightmare. We spent several hours on it. Painful.
In that picture, the program being run is an existing tabletPC program called "ArtRage [ambientdesign.com]." It's actually a really cool app, which takes full advantage of the pressure sensitivity feature of the tablet digitizer.
Actually it is Alias Sketchbook Pro. It appears that this "ArtRage" has a very similar interface to Sketchbook though.
Sketchbook Pro is amazing. It is the only computer based drawing/sketching program that my wife will use (she is a Costume Designer and does a lot of renderings). The interface is really intuitive for artists when one is using a tablet.
Also, more channels wouldn't give a reciever any more reason to clip. Each channel is a seperate amp. What matters in regards to clipping is the amount of power going in to a single channel. If it's more than the channel can handle, you clip, if not, you don't. What's happening on the other channels isn't relivant.
Actually cheap receivers have very cheap and limited power supplies. The more channels you drive the less power that is available to all of them. As such if you hit a loud passage with sound in more than one or two channels there will not be enough available power and the volume at which clipping occurs drops. If there is a current supply of 2A, and two channels each require.7A at the peak level you will not clip. If suddenly that same receiver needs to supply.7A to 5 channels you exceed the 2A supply and you will peak, on all channels, not just the 3 that didn't have high output before.
However, it's not going to make your reciever clip or anything, unless you've got a seriously screwed up reciever.
The real issue is that most receivers are seriously screwed up due to cost concerns in manufacturing. Any receiver bought outside of a hifi store, or from an online only hifi manufacturer are going to have inflated specs. Many receiver specs show the power rating for only one channel driven. Some show it for two channels driven. Very few companies show the honest rating of how much power is available per channel with all channels driven (Harman Kardon, Rotel, etc.) and those tend to cost more than your average Kenwood or RCA that most consumers see at your Best Buy type of store, and let's face it, modern consumers no longer understand the difference between price and value. Just because it is cheaper doesn't make it a better value, often the opposite is true.
He's also wrong that there's no reason to want more speakers just because there's no seperate encoding for them. If that were the case, why the hell do theatres have more than 5 speakers? Well, because the sound would suck. You have people all spread out, you need surround speakers all along the walls to get a good, diffuse surround field that's pleasant for all of them.
This is very insightful if your viewing area in your home is the size of a theatre. You do realize that in most cinemas that the speakers all along the walls all carry the exact same signal? As you said it is so that the sound field is diffuse for a large audience. This has absolutely no bearing on most home systems. 2 surrounds can easily provide this sound field, especially if the consumer has the skill, or the interest to learn, to set them up properly.
Most non-tech people i know already have to make an effort to place two stereo speakers correctly in their livingroom,
placing six or eight is often too much trouble.
This is funny as I was actually discussing this last week with a composer friend of mine. We were discussing the merits of creating albums in 5.1. He brought up the point that there are so many configuration options and issues for a typical consumer setting up a 5.1 system that it seemed like a lot of expense and work to go to for almost no one to hear what we intended.
Then I pointed out the number of rooms that I had seen in people's homes or apartments with a stereo only system with one speaker sitting on a bookshelf, and the other sitting under an end table or some other bizarre location. Stereo imaging be damned! So many people think that more speakers are better without the knowledge or experience of proper imaging. Most music listeners these days don't listen to music as such as just create soundtracks to their lives.
My ultimate point was that just like any other time when an album is created the goal should be the highest quality possible for what the composer/artist desires. No matter what format it is released in you can be guaranteed that only a small portion of your audience is really going to listen to it in the first place, and only a small group of those will have their systems configured properly.
DVI and HDMI can be converted back and forth very easily. It is a dongle basically.
But not all HDMI and DVI TV's incorporate HDCP, which is the copy protection system.
So even people with HD TVs with HDMI will not be able to use these new formats at full resolution unless they have a relatively new set that has HDCP, and it is compatible with whatever HDMI spec (did you know there are different specs? 1.1, 1.3?) and the HDCP spec used by the new systems.
Imagine buying a HDTV this summer, then for Christmas getting a BR player that doesn't work full quality because your set doesn't have HDMI 1.3 and whatever current version of HDCP...
This is a huge issue, and even the early adopters are getting fidgety about it. While some people may switch out their whole systems, at this point it will be a minority by far. Even on the high end hi-fi and videophile forums there is a lot of discussion of people not being happy about this.
Eventually we may run into a situation where the hardware manufacturers stop caving into the producers demands if we have a situation where even the typical early adopters will not bite.
Interestingly, I say match pocket as that is my understanding of why it is there in the first place (for miners to keep their matches dry). I also add watch pocket as the few times through life I used a watch, I typically had a pocket watch and used that pocket for it.
I never keep change in there, for the past few years it has been my miniature flashlight pocket, and now it is my flashlight/iPod pocket. One more little item that needs a place to live and I'll need to search out jeans with little pockets on both sides!;)
While I agree with what you say about how Apple probably sees the market value of the Shuffle, I think it is really unfortunate.
I actually wish there were a 2 or 4G shuffle as that would be perfect for my wife. My wife hates gadgets and computers. To the point she calls me from work when she wants to attach emails or upload files to the university's Blackboard system.
She needs a memory stick as she does design work, and occasionally will do it digitally with a tablet (after we found the right software/tablet combination that it feels as little like dealing with a computer as possible). These files can be quite big, and when she is working on a production she will often have a couple dozen or so at a time.
She doesn't listen to much music, but she does enjoy books on tape/cd. The Shuffle really works well as she can move her renderings back and forth between work and home, and keep a few books on it for when she is exercising, etc. This allows her to have one really small device that is amazingly easy to use to do both tasks, so she doesn't have to carry two things (in that case she wouldn't have any music player), and she doesn't really have to deal with the technology involved at all.
The form factor is one of the reasons this works so well. Since the Shuffle is just a USB flash drive with an audio jack and a few buttons she doesn't have to deal with adapter cables like the Nano, or it being big and bulky (making her feel 'dorky').
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I recently worked for a campus in Indiana where I was in charge of 8 computer labs. We found that Windows XP's (and possibly other versions) Master Browser service is totally hosed. Totally. Especially if machines are on separate subnets (although this is minimized if you use a Windows based PDC).
They thought I was crazy when I came up with the solution, but we went from machines hardly ever seeing each other, to always working.
The solution is to go to every single Windows XP client and disable the Master Browser service. Then get an old cranky machine out of a closet (we used 90mhz Pentium Pros) and install some version of linux or BSD that will install with the amount of RAM you have. You will need one machine per subnet. Set them all up with Samba and tell them to be Master Browsers (but not domain masters). Point them all to the PDC, or if there isn't one, make one a PDC.
You must have a PDC for Windows networking across subnets. Some people have occasional luck without, occasional being the key word.
The only time we had trouble, was when someone would get into a network closet (someone that shouldn't have, but that is a long story), and physically unplugged the power to a Samba machine to plug in some random idiotic device for 10 minutes, then forgot to plug the Samba machine back in.
I'm no linux zealot, far from it, but I do use linux. And trust me, with XP if you want windows networking to work, you need a non-windows machine to do Master Browsing.
As a matter of fact Bungie was bought specifically for the Halo franchise. What made the Halo franchise so alluring was Bungie's previous track record along with the tech demos they had been showing off. Microsoft bought them to make Halo an Xbox exclusive at launch.
But with both making the boxes twitch in what seems like a spastic motion, it doesn't get the point across.
Of course I don't expect the system to perform magic, and the concept of only allowing the passenger to control is an ideal use of the technology. My complaint is that with the demo video you can't really tell that it is truly working in that fashion.Perhaps in addition to what I stated above about the boxes, another example could show two users interacting with the system, then launch a new app and have one user not able to do anything. I didn't see this in the current video, and it would show it off pretty well. It would be especially important to see the person interacting and then locked out during different 'modes' or applications during a single session.
Definitely we can see that multiple input works, but that has been shown within the last year or two already, so that is nothing new.
You would think that if the major new feature is this user detection, they would have used different colors for the different users, or found some other method to really show off that it doing one thing for one user (resizing/moving windows for instance), while doing something else for the other user (scrolling through a window, selecting options in a different window, etc.).
And what was with the staged beverage spill. For a technology demo that was pretty weird.
I did find it ironic that the entire demo was done in XP, but they used Apple's website as their demo material.
We always create the first account with the name "Install Software" and password protect it. That way other family members, children, etc. can't get in there and cause problems.
I always try to make them do everything they would normally do while I am there to assist with creating the limited accounts, password protecting any that need it, and setting up software. Invariably within a day or two I get a phone call/visit due to some random software not working right.
In one case a bank had some special software you had to use to do online banking which not only had to be installed via the admin account, but would only run there as well.
While working for a University managing labs I ran across a lot of software that freaked out if you didn't have admin privileges. Discreet products are notoriously bad about this. 3dStudioMax pops up a ton of error messages if you run it as a non-admin, but it mostly works just fine. Combustion randomly fails when you access different modules. Our solution in this case was Drive Shield which locks the drive and makes you think you can make changes. Those changes are lost at reboot though.
For normal people most things can be done fine. But there will be some software they will run across (and every person will find at least one) that requires that Admin access. Whether it is banking software, printer software, games, etc.
The way around this is to attempt to train the users how to properly utilize their one admin account. Make sure they know not to use it unless absolutely necessary, and then only use it for what is needed and get out of there! This requires a paradigm shift for most casual windows users and some will be able to adapt and others won't.
That is unfortunate but the truth. Personally I would choose a person or two you are called upon to clean up often, and try to do the switch with them. With luck you will have few problems, and if you do have some hopefully they will teach you how to more effectively train users to play on Windows safely.
This is one thing I enjoy about using the Mac. Even an administrator account doesn't have full blown privileges all the time, and must authenticate for many tasks. And since with OS X they threw out a lot of backwards compatibility most developers write software that can deal with non-admin users. I have found very few software packages that require an admin account, and those tend to be weird edge cases that most normal people would never run anyway. How many normal people need NFS mounts? I'm talking normal people here.
Even software installs are often painless with many companies doing a drag and drop application. Non-admin users can put it on their desktop or in their home folder and it runs normally. Admin users can drop it into the system wide applications folder for all users. Slick. Two different users want different versions of Moneydance? User two can download it and put it on their desktop and launch that one instead of the /Applications/ version.
Of course I don't see windows getting anywhere near that user friendly in this context anytime soon. And really that is sad as it makes keeping your machine clean way easier.
But back to my windows friends. Two people I set up as above where very non-technical people. And both, while feeling really confused at first, within a week or two seemed to be running pretty smoothly.
As a matter of fact, a bit over a year ago I wrote up a quick and dirty article about limited accounts and other ways to be safe in Windows. It probably won't help you, but some have found it useful.
Yes, you and I have no issue with it, but we are talking about people here, not geeks.
Secondly, when I did that exact thing, those packages still did not appear in Synaptic.
FYI:
Install Firefox, download and doubleclick, any moron can do that.
Install Spybot S&D, double click, any moron can do that.
The only time I have been in the registry is to do hard core stuff, usually when doing sysadmin for large systems. I'm talking folder redirection, etc. For the most part home users machines never require that, unless they have done something very, very wrong. Usually that involves someone telling them to edit the registry, and they actually try to do it, then of course they hose the whole thing up.
Installing flash for Firefox under windows involves clicking a button. You are comparing clicking a single button to editing a system file and running synaptic and doing a search. Wow, I mean, wow.
I could go on, but I really don't need to.
Of course the end result in Linux tends to be better for me, but it takes quite a bit more work, work that average users will not want to have to deal with.
I do have to say, I have yet to find any distro that configures my monitor properly on any system I have tried. It always involves me either having to play around in the X conf files, or if I have something like YaST/Sax available, basically lying about my configuration until I find a combo that works better.
Linux will not work for average users until a way is found to include some basic features that ship with both Windows and Mac OS X. Flash plug-ins for the browsers is one of those things. Many distro's include this if you buy their retail, or Pro versions, but most average users are either going to download the fully free versions, or get them from someone they know to try out.
Even if Flash and other multimedia components where auto installed as an update process, much like Nvidia drivers are with Suse and some others, that would be much better.
Recently I installed Ubuntu 5.10 to see what was up with it. In order to get Flash installed I had to use command line utilities*. When your average user gets to this, they will give up. Some might take the time to figure it out, but let's be honest, very few of them are going to keep going when they run into that with the next piece of software, and even less are going to learn the system better and become truly comfortable with it.
Many comments are already complaining about the fact that people like this are either stupid or lazy. People, this is the 21st friggen' century. We have had GUI based computing for a long time now. There is no reason to have to jump through command line hoops to install what is considered a basic necessity on the web, especially by average users.
I can already hear the clicking on moderators sending my into the troll or flamebait abyss. Go ahead, that doesn't change basic facts.
I myself have no problem doing this, but there are people that I work with / am friends with / are related to that I would really like to get off of Windows as they always are having problems. I can't recommend Linux until I know they will be calling me with real problems, not "how do I play this movie," or "why can't I see this web page?"
From what I have seen, especially in the past day or so, is that a lot of this comes from linux zealotry involving licensing. Just look at the recent Koraraa debacle. The maintainer isn't being asked to pull a live cd by either Linus, or ATI/Nvidia, but some random linux user concerned about 'the open source ideal.' That is one great way to keep this stuff out of people's hands.
I know many people that enjoy linux don't necessarily want it to take over. And that is fine, but referring to people that don't want to jump through hoops that this day and age should not be necessary as lazy/stupid just makes the people making those comments look bad.
* - Ubuntu doesn't ship with flash. And if you go to the Macromedia site linked to by any flash using page, the linux page seems to either be missing or incorrectly linked. The solution is to edit a file containing the repositories, then updating (its been a while and I don't use Ubuntu, apt I think?), and then attempting to get it to install. This is akin to asking your average Joe to fire up regedit, make changes, then fire up the dos prompt and run a few commands. Silly, absolutely silly.
Pace Anti-Piracy was using this type of technology before then. Sounds like this could be invalidated by contact with the right people. For those that don't know, PaceAP supplies the registration and protection code for most Pro Audio applications. I first ran across their stuff in 1994/1995.
But there is another side to this. I work in the Performing Arts (mostly Theatre). When we are hashing out ideas, it is very important to be able to grab a sheet of paper and sketch out your ideas so that everyone involved can get an idea what you are talking about. Often when an artist/designer speaks of their visual ideas it does not adequately impart the information for those listening, especially if those listening may not be artists/designers themselves.
Many people forget that art is not necessarily a single person adventure. Especially for designers, who often have clients that they are doing very specific works for. Being able to quickly and accurately show them what you are talking about is vital to their career.
If students are coming out of Universities without these skills, and they are going into these industries, then it is the Universities fault for either:
- Not adequately preparing the student for the real world (by not teaching fundamentals before getting into the more advanced computer integration)
- Or graduating a student even though their fundamentals are weak (this is the worst of the two)
I know many here atAs strange as it feels looking at this, it still is better looking than the IT color scheme... ;)
Sounds like a latency issue. Maybe 27 ms is the fastest it is capable of recording.
Have a USB mouse/keyboard? USB has latency to it, which is why many higher end audio interfaces either shy away from using it, or have 'zero latency' monitoring features (basically analog passthroughs for real time recording). I don't remember the specific amount, but it is more than 10 ms just for data to pass through the USB bus itself IIR. That on top of any latency in your host environment.
Of course you are correct that just setting a light behind the TV is not terribly difficult, however some people do like to have nice clean rooms without a lot of cables and or extra equipment floating around, thus their tendancy to buy one of these TVs.
Also not many people realize this, but 720p actually has more pixel information than 1080i due to having 60 frames per second at a full 720 lines, where 1080i has 60 frames per second at 540 lines alternating the even and odd lines (yes I know that should be obvious since it is interlaced), this means you only achieve the 1080 line resolution 30 times per second. This is one reason some broadcasters like 1080i, the numbers are larger for the marketing guys, and it requires less overall bandwidth.
Those putting down others probably don't realize that those others either don't have a large enough screen for the difference to be apparent enough to warrant, or sit back away from the screen far enough that they don't notice. Of course things like eyesight/correction could have an impact as well.
Those who say they don't see a difference also probably have not sat closer to a big honkin' screen, or may have poor eyesight and couldn't tell anyway.
It is unfortunate to see people being offensive to each other, especially since both sides are overlooking what may be going on.
You are absolutely correct! That IE version is so much more cluttered, and slow! My, now my entire life has changed for the better since I can see less on the screen, and take little breaks while the screen redraws...
I do know that the University I work for uses Exchange, and Safari from my Mac works just fine. I see it almost exactly how I see it from Firefox.
And trust me, at this backwards little campus, there is not a lot of concern for non-MS situations, so I know they didn't do any modifying to make 3rd party browsers work, at least not on purpose.
Actually it was a true 1080i or 720p TV (it was CRT so it could do either scan rate), and in reference to the other reply, ours was a Quadro series, which according to the driver update should have worked as well as any other (it was at a University in a department that did 3d modeling work).
We eventually just gave up and used an LCD monitor. We couldn't get any reasonable timings to work, either the resolution was way too low, or the text was too blurry to read. It was a nightmare. We spent several hours on it. Painful.
Sketchbook Pro is amazing. It is the only computer based drawing/sketching program that my wife will use (she is a Costume Designer and does a lot of renderings). The interface is really intuitive for artists when one is using a tablet.
Then I pointed out the number of rooms that I had seen in people's homes or apartments with a stereo only system with one speaker sitting on a bookshelf, and the other sitting under an end table or some other bizarre location. Stereo imaging be damned! So many people think that more speakers are better without the knowledge or experience of proper imaging. Most music listeners these days don't listen to music as such as just create soundtracks to their lives.
My ultimate point was that just like any other time when an album is created the goal should be the highest quality possible for what the composer/artist desires. No matter what format it is released in you can be guaranteed that only a small portion of your audience is really going to listen to it in the first place, and only a small group of those will have their systems configured properly.
But not all HDMI and DVI TV's incorporate HDCP, which is the copy protection system.
So even people with HD TVs with HDMI will not be able to use these new formats at full resolution unless they have a relatively new set that has HDCP, and it is compatible with whatever HDMI spec (did you know there are different specs? 1.1, 1.3?) and the HDCP spec used by the new systems.
Imagine buying a HDTV this summer, then for Christmas getting a BR player that doesn't work full quality because your set doesn't have HDMI 1.3 and whatever current version of HDCP...
This is a huge issue, and even the early adopters are getting fidgety about it. While some people may switch out their whole systems, at this point it will be a minority by far. Even on the high end hi-fi and videophile forums there is a lot of discussion of people not being happy about this.
Eventually we may run into a situation where the hardware manufacturers stop caving into the producers demands if we have a situation where even the typical early adopters will not bite.
Interestingly, I say match pocket as that is my understanding of why it is there in the first place (for miners to keep their matches dry). I also add watch pocket as the few times through life I used a watch, I typically had a pocket watch and used that pocket for it.
I never keep change in there, for the past few years it has been my miniature flashlight pocket, and now it is my flashlight/iPod pocket. One more little item that needs a place to live and I'll need to search out jeans with little pockets on both sides!
While I agree with what you say about how Apple probably sees the market value of the Shuffle, I think it is really unfortunate.
I actually wish there were a 2 or 4G shuffle as that would be perfect for my wife. My wife hates gadgets and computers. To the point she calls me from work when she wants to attach emails or upload files to the university's Blackboard system.
She needs a memory stick as she does design work, and occasionally will do it digitally with a tablet (after we found the right software/tablet combination that it feels as little like dealing with a computer as possible). These files can be quite big, and when she is working on a production she will often have a couple dozen or so at a time.
She doesn't listen to much music, but she does enjoy books on tape/cd. The Shuffle really works well as she can move her renderings back and forth between work and home, and keep a few books on it for when she is exercising, etc. This allows her to have one really small device that is amazingly easy to use to do both tasks, so she doesn't have to carry two things (in that case she wouldn't have any music player), and she doesn't really have to deal with the technology involved at all.
The form factor is one of the reasons this works so well. Since the Shuffle is just a USB flash drive with an audio jack and a few buttons she doesn't have to deal with adapter cables like the Nano, or it being big and bulky (making her feel 'dorky').