You mean Mandriva with the badly broken power management that makes it impossible to use on my laptop, which happily runs all other major Linux distros? Mandriva/Mandrake has been crap for a while. The last decent version was 10.1.
Hardly. I used to waste more time trying to keep my Windows box alive and kicking than I ever did with Linux. Since I moved to Linux, I accomplish far more real work than I ever did on Windows.
Actually, it's more in the neighbourhood of 11, 000, 000 colours. Which still makes 24 and 32 bit colour over-kill, but explains why there is a noticeable difference in quality / colour when viewing a 24-bit image on a 16-bit colour display.
"But try running it on a laptop or with wireless or consumer electronic devices - stuff that new users NEED to work correctly. That's where it fails big time."
Not really. I've been running it on my laptop since Warty, and it works just fine. I never had a reason to use wireless until the Breezy release and guess what? It works just fine.
And I would hardly say they pushed eye candy. If that were the case, the Desktop Effects option would be turned on by default. What they did push was a number of usability improvements, such as making it easier for the end user to install the various multimedia codecs they may need among other things. I was also pleasantly surprised to to find out that if you try to open a document of a type for which you don't have an appropriate application, Ubuntu notifies you and recommends an application to install.
"Never mind the fact that some of the components you ordered are OEM, meaning they have no warranty"
Well, this is just not true. I only build from OEM parts and have for more than 10 years. They have always included a warranty from the manufacturer.
Scoble says "I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way."
Sorry, but ClearType is not something I consider life-improving. A cure for diabetes is life-improving.
You shouldn't be so quick to judge. I've had plenty of Windows apps that refuse to run and in some cases refuse to even install on newer versions of Windows. After blowing the money on Windows 2000, I found that 8 critical applications in my recording studio would either A) not install, B) not execute, or C) die shortly after executing. All 8 apps worked fine on Windows 98. They also ran fine when I tested the later on XP, but Windows 2000 was a wash out. We also go through this dance at my day job every time we upgrade to a new version of Windows. When you get older software to run on newer versions of Windows, it seems to be more by luck than by design.
The sed utility is an editor that allows you to make changes with in a file without actually opening the file in a more traditional editor like vi, emacs or gedit. What the mystery command does is to read through the file/etc/apt/sources.list and change each instance of dapper to edgy. Essentially it's converting the dapper verion of sources.list to an edgy version so apt-get, aptitude and synaptic will read from the edgy repositories instead of the dapper repos.
So long as your system doesn't have to many oddities installed from outside to Ubuntu repositories, this method should work fine. If you've added a lot of stuff that doesn't appear in the repositories (i.e., compiled from source, convert from RPM via alien), you may end up with a broken system.
I generally do fresh installs after making an image of my current set up and a separate backup of/home. The image is for quick reversion to my original setup if needed. The backup of/home is in case things go horribly, tragically wrong. I use a lot of custom apps that tend to interfer with the dist-upgrade process.
It seems to work just fine for me on IE7 RC1 except that the pages render incorrectly when they first load. For example, lines of text over-write other lines. As far as expanding and collapsing comments go, though, it works just fine.
An open source application may not be more featureful than a proprietary equivalent but you can often find ways to get one application to communicate with others that do have the features you need in ways that are much more powerful and flexible than in a single closed source application. This adds a level of complexity, but the end result usually justifies the extra effort. And one you work out ways to interelate applications in this way once, it gets much easier to do in the future.
I switched my home studio from Windows to Linux about 18 months ago and, although there was a fairly nasty learning curve transitioning to a different set of applications, I wouldn't go back now if you paid me. The extra flexibility has made my production environment much more productive. I still occasionally miss a favourite plugin or VST instrument, but I really haven't found any that were essential that could be replaced by an open source alternative.
Not really a fair assessment. He replied with correct information to inaccuracies in the previous post. How does telling the truth make someone a zealot?
I went the other way. I started out with an iPod and thought it was crap. The sound quality was poor compared to Creative's players and comparing price vs features, the iPod was a losing proposition. In general, I like Apple products but I seriously doubt that I'll ever go down the iPod path again.
Yup. Just the same way they have to accept the health risks from breathing the crap that belches out of every car and truck on the road. Maybe vehicles should be prohibited from use in public places as well. And if you don't think the two scenarios equate, I have a few asthmatic friends who'll be happy to tell you different.
Not necessarily. That would depend on the type of open source licence used. Every licence (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc) has it's own set of rules as to how a chunk of open source code affects others chunks it may be included with. While one licence might require all derivative works being distributed to include the source code of the derivative, others are quite happy to let you use the code in proprietary projects, provided that appropriate recognition is given to the writer(s) of the open source bit.
The IE7 you refer to is not the next Microsoft browser. It's a compatibility patch written in javascript to attempt to make IE versions 5 and above standards compliant. The guy that's writing it doesn't even appear to work for MS, so they certainly don't deserve credit for it. Yes, it's open source; no, it's not an opensource project from Microsoft.
You might be surprised. In junior high school geography here in Canada, we studied all 50 US states and state capitals as well as the 13 continental European countries and their capitals as well as the UK and South Amearican nations. It wasn't an option; we were required to learn something about other countries.
If you don't intend to design for the quirks, languages, etc. of other countries, then don't market your product there. I think the UK would be pretty upset if a US auto manufacturer marketed a car over there that wouldn't drive on the left side of the road! And McDonald's would have serious issues with folks in India if they started selling hamburgers instead of vegetarian burgers they sell there now.
By not taking into account the differences between countries, Microsoft is sending a very broad message that they really don't know their market - something any first year business student can tell you is just plain dumb.
Been there...after hours of searching found a total of 3 artists that I like. Lots of messages telling me that the artist I was looking for couldn't be found though.
I'll stick to buying CDs. At least the local stores can order in the stuff I want when the online music stores don't have it. And I can rip them myself in a non-DRM hindered format. I like that.
Nope. But I refuse to allow myself to be a sheep and believe a performer is worth my time just because the rest of the herd buys the stuff. Most folks who listen to stuff like Britney Spears are narrow-minded herd animals who never get beyond what get played on whatever the "cool" local radio station shoves at them. It's not that I "refuse to allow" myself to like her music; I just can't find anything about it to like. It's mindless pap and is designed to sell to people who don't like to think too much about their music. Sorry to burst your bubble but the folks in the industry who make the marketing decisions will tell you the same thing.
I spend almost 80% of my music budget buying from artists I've never hear/heard of before. I've discovered a lot of very cool and wonderful music this way.
But success is not necessarily a measure of talent or vice versa. The two can be mutually exclusive.
If you're a fan, fine...enjoy the "music". But accept the fact that some folks are a little more demanding in what it take to satisfy the musical tastes. Some of us like to hear artists with a genuinely fresh, original style, for example, rather than yet another corporately packaged bimbette with nothing new to offer.
The number of albums she sells is not a measure of talent; it is a measure of the quantity of people numb enough to buy the hype. I'd rather vigoursly floss my more sensitive bits with barbed wire than listen to her.
"while WinFS is a huge gamble, will increase costs dramatically (both licensing and maintenance), and will also arrive no earlier than 2006, without actually being based on proven tech at all. If their history is anything to go by, it will be 2010 or so before WinFS is usable."
MS has already announced that WinFS is being withdrawn from Longhorn along with several other technologies, all of which have now been pushed back to the following Windows release("Blackcomb"). This was a result of basically two factors. First, there were too many difficulties in hitting the target dates unless some items were dropped. Second, too many third-party developers were at best apathetic over the concept of supporting some of the features, most notably Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" platform.
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You mean Mandriva with the badly broken power management that makes it impossible to use on my laptop, which happily runs all other major Linux distros? Mandriva/Mandrake has been crap for a while. The last decent version was 10.1.
No, Ubuntu is what you get when you start with Debian and make it installable and usable by ordinary people.
Hardly. I used to waste more time trying to keep my Windows box alive and kicking than I ever did with Linux. Since I moved to Linux, I accomplish far more real work than I ever did on Windows.
Actually, it's more in the neighbourhood of 11, 000, 000 colours. Which still makes 24 and 32 bit colour over-kill, but explains why there is a noticeable difference in quality / colour when viewing a 24-bit image on a 16-bit colour display.
"But try running it on a laptop or with wireless or consumer electronic devices - stuff that new users NEED to work correctly. That's where it fails big time." Not really. I've been running it on my laptop since Warty, and it works just fine. I never had a reason to use wireless until the Breezy release and guess what? It works just fine. And I would hardly say they pushed eye candy. If that were the case, the Desktop Effects option would be turned on by default. What they did push was a number of usability improvements, such as making it easier for the end user to install the various multimedia codecs they may need among other things. I was also pleasantly surprised to to find out that if you try to open a document of a type for which you don't have an appropriate application, Ubuntu notifies you and recommends an application to install.
"Never mind the fact that some of the components you ordered are OEM, meaning they have no warranty" Well, this is just not true. I only build from OEM parts and have for more than 10 years. They have always included a warranty from the manufacturer.
Scoble says "I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way." Sorry, but ClearType is not something I consider life-improving. A cure for diabetes is life-improving.
You shouldn't be so quick to judge. I've had plenty of Windows apps that refuse to run and in some cases refuse to even install on newer versions of Windows. After blowing the money on Windows 2000, I found that 8 critical applications in my recording studio would either A) not install, B) not execute, or C) die shortly after executing. All 8 apps worked fine on Windows 98. They also ran fine when I tested the later on XP, but Windows 2000 was a wash out. We also go through this dance at my day job every time we upgrade to a new version of Windows. When you get older software to run on newer versions of Windows, it seems to be more by luck than by design.
The sed utility is an editor that allows you to make changes with in a file without actually opening the file in a more traditional editor like vi, emacs or gedit. What the mystery command does is to read through the file /etc/apt/sources.list and change each instance of dapper to edgy. Essentially it's converting the dapper verion of sources.list to an edgy version so apt-get, aptitude and synaptic will read from the edgy repositories instead of the dapper repos.
So long as your system doesn't have to many oddities installed from outside to Ubuntu repositories, this method should work fine. If you've added a lot of stuff that doesn't appear in the repositories (i.e., compiled from source, convert from RPM via alien), you may end up with a broken system.
I generally do fresh installs after making an image of my current set up and a separate backup of /home. The image is for quick reversion to my original setup if needed. The backup of /home is in case things go horribly, tragically wrong. I use a lot of custom apps that tend to interfer with the dist-upgrade process.
It seems to work just fine for me on IE7 RC1 except that the pages render incorrectly when they first load. For example, lines of text over-write other lines. As far as expanding and collapsing comments go, though, it works just fine.
Looks like the Gnome system monitor.
An open source application may not be more featureful than a proprietary equivalent but you can often find ways to get one application to communicate with others that do have the features you need in ways that are much more powerful and flexible than in a single closed source application. This adds a level of complexity, but the end result usually justifies the extra effort. And one you work out ways to interelate applications in this way once, it gets much easier to do in the future.
I switched my home studio from Windows to Linux about 18 months ago and, although there was a fairly nasty learning curve transitioning to a different set of applications, I wouldn't go back now if you paid me. The extra flexibility has made my production environment much more productive. I still occasionally miss a favourite plugin or VST instrument, but I really haven't found any that were essential that could be replaced by an open source alternative.
Not really a fair assessment. He replied with correct information to inaccuracies in the previous post. How does telling the truth make someone a zealot?
I went the other way. I started out with an iPod and thought it was crap. The sound quality was poor compared to Creative's players and comparing price vs features, the iPod was a losing proposition. In general, I like Apple products but I seriously doubt that I'll ever go down the iPod path again.
Not according to their website.
Spybot S & D is Windows only. It's still a great tool though.
Yup. Just the same way they have to accept the health risks from breathing the crap that belches out of every car and truck on the road. Maybe vehicles should be prohibited from use in public places as well. And if you don't think the two scenarios equate, I have a few asthmatic friends who'll be happy to tell you different.
Not necessarily. That would depend on the type of open source licence used. Every licence (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc) has it's own set of rules as to how a chunk of open source code affects others chunks it may be included with. While one licence might require all derivative works being distributed to include the source code of the derivative, others are quite happy to let you use the code in proprietary projects, provided that appropriate recognition is given to the writer(s) of the open source bit.
The IE7 you refer to is not the next Microsoft browser. It's a compatibility patch written in javascript to attempt to make IE versions 5 and above standards compliant. The guy that's writing it doesn't even appear to work for MS, so they certainly don't deserve credit for it. Yes, it's open source; no, it's not an opensource project from Microsoft.
You might be surprised. In junior high school geography here in Canada, we studied all 50 US states and state capitals as well as the 13 continental European countries and their capitals as well as the UK and South Amearican nations. It wasn't an option; we were required to learn something about other countries.
If you don't intend to design for the quirks, languages, etc. of other countries, then don't market your product there. I think the UK would be pretty upset if a US auto manufacturer marketed a car over there that wouldn't drive on the left side of the road! And McDonald's would have serious issues with folks in India if they started selling hamburgers instead of vegetarian burgers they sell there now.
By not taking into account the differences between countries, Microsoft is sending a very broad message that they really don't know their market - something any first year business student can tell you is just plain dumb.
Been there...after hours of searching found a total of 3 artists that I like. Lots of messages telling me that the artist I was looking for couldn't be found though.
I'll stick to buying CDs. At least the local stores can order in the stuff I want when the online music stores don't have it. And I can rip them myself in a non-DRM hindered format. I like that.
Nope. But I refuse to allow myself to be a sheep and believe a performer is worth my time just because the rest of the herd buys the stuff. Most folks who listen to stuff like Britney Spears are narrow-minded herd animals who never get beyond what get played on whatever the "cool" local radio station shoves at them. It's not that I "refuse to allow" myself to like her music; I just can't find anything about it to like. It's mindless pap and is designed to sell to people who don't like to think too much about their music. Sorry to burst your bubble but the folks in the industry who make the marketing decisions will tell you the same thing.
I spend almost 80% of my music budget buying from artists I've never hear/heard of before. I've discovered a lot of very cool and wonderful music this way.
But success is not necessarily a measure of talent or vice versa. The two can be mutually exclusive.
If you're a fan, fine...enjoy the "music". But accept the fact that some folks are a little more demanding in what it take to satisfy the musical tastes. Some of us like to hear artists with a genuinely fresh, original style, for example, rather than yet another corporately packaged bimbette with nothing new to offer.
The number of albums she sells is not a measure of talent; it is a measure of the quantity of people numb enough to buy the hype. I'd rather vigoursly floss my more sensitive bits with barbed wire than listen to her.
"while WinFS is a huge gamble, will increase costs dramatically (both licensing and maintenance), and will also arrive no earlier than 2006, without actually being based on proven tech at all. If their history is anything to go by, it will be 2010 or so before WinFS is usable."
MS has already announced that WinFS is being withdrawn from Longhorn along with several other technologies, all of which have now been pushed back to the following Windows release("Blackcomb"). This was a result of basically two factors. First, there were too many difficulties in hitting the target dates unless some items were dropped. Second, too many third-party developers were at best apathetic over the concept of supporting some of the features, most notably Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" platform.