Well, let's see, I know 100% that Outlook in no way requires Word. It only would if you set Outlook to use Word as the email editor... but then that's an option you choose, and it's only available if Word is installed at all.
If I'm wrong about the VS "data aware" controls, tell me exactly to which controls you're refering.
Finally, I've had plenty of media players other than WMP that I had set as default, and I never had XP or so far Vista randomly "reset" them. So you're either making it up, or maybe there's something else going on, like group policy making the change.
It proves they don't have any sort of generalized computing knowledge.
That's just plain wrong. If all you have is a certificate, it may be true, but if you're a Windows shop, why do you care if your admin can use bash? Likewise, why do you care if your linux admin knows anything about Windows if you're a Linux shop?
I know Windows. I know Debian-based Linux systems. I've never actually even used a BSD, much less admin'd one, but I could figure out the subtleties because I have generalized knowledge rather than rote memorization used to study for a cert exam.
You could figure it out because BSD is Yet Another Unix Clone. And while some shops may require knowledge of both systems, some don't, and only require platform specific knowledge. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with focusing on one technology.
Your premise is wrong.. or are you implying that degrees are also useless pieces of paper? What about me, I have a degree, experience and certifications. You'd rule me out because I got certified?
Sorry, what does the MCSE program have to do with a UNIX shell? I can say the same thing about RH certified people; they're stupid because they don't know Powershell. Does that make sense?
There's a difference though; the bank already has the information it's presenting to you in their systems. My comment was geared toward storing that information with some third party that doesn't have an interest in even having it correct.
Someone else pointed out that people put nude pics up. People do that. Is it a majority? I don't think so, we just hear about it alot because it makes a good headline.
Depends on what you mean by 'usability'. End users should never have to go further than the forums or IRC. Administrators should never have to go further than the man pages. Developers should be looking at either API documentation or source, and preferably both. All of the above are addressed in a good program, and most of the *major* projects do so. You've already said that you're not really a fan of the major avenue of assistance in Linux, which is the community forums and IRC, and I guess if that's how you feel about it that's the way it is, but I don't think that without community assistance you're comparing apples to apples in terms of support.
Well, I guess that's where our limits differ. I think end users shouldn't need to leave the application at all. Ideally, they can sit down and figure it out because the UI is intuitive. At worse, they should have to look at the help file or other assistence the program offers. Admins should have the same for their configuration tools. Developers shouldn't need to go to the source, but given how curious we are it can be helpful if they can, although I've been doing fine so far.
I'm not sure if there's a particular piece of software than you're referring to here, but most man pages seem exhaustively complete to me, especially on major projects./shrug.
There was some DVD burning software, some BT clients, GNUCash springs to mind again. Even some things in the WM were lacking; some features of KDE were very well documented, other's had nothing.
As for not having heard of it without my help, well- yeah. That's why the community exists. That's what I mean by living documentation. If you ask somebody a question- and we're easy to find- we'll answer if we can, and know where to look if we can't.
Again this is part of our differing views. The community doesn't always have answers, or I have to wait (I did the forum thing, never IRC). These things require time though, which I have limited amounts of to spend on various tasks. As to finding software.. where does one go to ask which software will fill a certain need?
Hmmm. I'm afraid I don't agree with you here- I tend to believe that competition in a market segment tends to improve the quality of the competitors and increase the power of the consumer- but I guess to each their own.
It can increase the power of the consumer, if the consumer can invest time into evaluating. I tend to allot more time to evaluating something based on its cost to me.. in the case of OSS (or any software, really) if I can't sit down and in a few minutes start doing what I need or want to, I move on. On the OSS side, there were too many things to "move on to" so it became frustrating.
It's a scripting language in the same sense as lisp is- interpreted, quick to write, blurs the line between data and code- but it's pretty common for a lot of general purpose programming anymore. A lot of the syntax is pretty much C++ sans punctuation, which I find handy, but I figured since you mentioned both.NET and Java that I would mention Python since the three major implementations of Python are C,.NET CLR, and Java.
Hmm, didn't know Java had a Python implementation. Pretty cool. I heard IronPython is pretty impressive actually.
We do have different views, but I don't see that as a problem. Do I think that GUIs are inherently less powerful than CLIs are? Absolutely, and any sys admin worth their shell scripts knows the same thing. Does that mean they do not have a place? Absolutely not, since any UI designer worth his pixels knows that most users are terrified of the terminal. Again, I think we're going in circles on this man pages issue, and I'm not going to spend much more time addressing it, but I think that they're usually perfectly fine as reference material and as a supplement to online help, and I think we can agree to disagree on that.
That sucks. I've had a few mods "follow" me seemingly from story to story. It gets kinda suspicious when five comments over five stories are moddel as Troll or Flamebait.
Maybe if you became a subscriber/. would help figure out what's wrong. As for something I didn't like, I'm sure that's true, but not really a reason to hate anyone.:-)
How nice, a defenseless animal annoys you and you'd like to kill it. I hope you remember that if you have kids and someone complains how annoying they are.
Siamese have a bad rap, just because they can be loud. We have two in our house, and they are the friendlist most loyal cats. They love being around us and love human attention.
Well, not to mention that true web "applications" suck ass. Why would I run a browser that opens a file on my computer which loads an application in a VM sandbox... why? What's the point? And talk about lock-in.. why would I want my personal data on some else's server, only able to retrieve it at thier whim? It's not like we even have reliable internet connections.
This whole "desktop will be irrlevent" is stupid. We were there, did that, it sucked on a LAN, I can't see how it wouldn't suck more on the internet.
I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.
I agree with that, I just don't think that "well, I like site abc.com and it requires SL, so I have to choose Windows." I doubt most really know what SL or Flash is, just that it's "required."
Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.
Well, those companies are still vendors. Are all JVMs, Java compilers and Linux distributions 100% compatable though? I'm willing to bet the answer is, as I've said, "not quite." So the fact that the software costs nothing doesn't mean switching is free, hense there's still the aspect of lock-in.
No, I've used Windows extensively. First, my high school days aren't all that far behind me, and XP was already out. Second, as part of my business- many legacy business apps cannot be ported without monumental effort, and so it is frequently the case that we set up a Windows box with a Linux passthrough.
Heh. I get the impression you're a bit younger than me. I graduated college from a five year program before XP came out (only by months though). I've been using computers since MS-DOS 3.1 was the latest version.
As for Windows supercomputing, I wish them great good luck but don't see it happening, as the UNIX world's tools for HPC etc are just incredible. It would take a LONG time and a lot of money to come up with a comparable feature set.
I wouldn't underestimate MS. Many now defuct companies did.
Its all there, it just happens to be in either the man files or the ultimate documentation. Once you learn how to use a command's basic invocation (from irc or wherever), then check the man pages for reference documentation, and you're generally fine. Again, all of this is anecdotal- my experience is x, yours is y, ergo, we run around in circles, but like I say, between talking directly with the developers, reading the man pages, and, if you're really masochistic, perusing the source code, you'll figure it out. In the end, there's really nothing in Linux that's totally opaque, which is, once again, a major advantage for those willing to take advantage of it.
This is mostly what I've been saying. I know I could eventually get what I need, but in today's computers and GUI applications, if I need to go as far as going to the source, the application has failed from a usability standpoint. That's my issue, and it's likely an issue for many others.
As far as security is concerned, we probably don't want to get into that flamewar, but there are a lot of things you can do to a system that simply can't be undone. If your customer database gets cracked, its game over. If someone installs a malicious utility, its game over. God forbid they be able to insert a kernel module. The assumption that box security is more important that infrastructure or data security is one of the major problems with home use security models, and really highlights a major difference in approach between Windows and Linux. It doesn't help that much of security research is very convoluted stuff, and that many elements of a security strategy cannot be considered in isolation. So, I can't really agree that every insecure option should be just as easily available as any given security-neutral option, any more than I think that every option available on the CLI needs to be available in the GUI.
I'm not trying to get into a flamewar either; I never said box security was more important that network security. I said that the options, which may be dangerous, are still accessable and that adequate warnings and explainations are given. Right there, in the dialog to set the option (or by pressing F1). I found that in Linux, I would find the option, but the various settings of that option aren't adequately explained where you set the option. You need to go digging. Again, it's a usablity failure.
Set up/home the way you want it, both on the server and on the desktop. Then set up a cron job to rsync it every X interval (turns out its 30 minutes to 2 hours for Group Policy Objects). There is a convenient GUI tool called Unison that does this for you. As for figuring out what files to sync, just do a server->client sync of anything in/home that starts with., and everything in/etc. Then do a client->server sync of everything else in/home if you want to share those files. Since rsync uses SSH as a carrier protocol, it is quite secure. Again, all of this can be done in Unison, although I am personally more comfortable working with rsync itself.
No, I'm not presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. I'm conjecturing that if Microsoft wants to abuse their monopoly, they might make SL work in Windows only, and then people would buy Windows specifically to view some SL only sites.
I disagree. People get Windows, for the most part, as part of their computer purchase. I don't think whehter to not they can view SL sites enter into it, anymore than IE only sites do. People aren't avoiding Linux because they can't view some sites. People by and large don't know what Linux is, don't know people using it and don't care. Those that do care enough to look at both aren't basing it on one point of focus, they'll look at the larger picture.
I agree that switching a site from IE-only to working in other browsers is expensive. Any time you need to switch from one technology to another, it's very expensive and risky. That's why businesses continue buying Windows machines instead of switching to Linux. Switching to Linux would mean having to run a browser other than IE, an office suite other than Office, an email client other than Outlook, etc. Making each of these switches has interoperability problems, because of the proprietary extensions in IE, and the proprietary nature of Office and the Outlook/Exchange protocol. It's called vendor lock-in, and it makes MS tons of bucks. If MS products used and adhered closely to standards, they wouldn't have the lock-in that they do now. Silverlight is yet another proprietary technology that can be used to induce yet more lock-in.
I can say the same for Java / Linux; moving my Linux based shop to all Windows is expensive as well. Am I locked into Java / Linux because it's expensive?
I've been following this exchange, and I have to say that based on the description of the incident, you are right that the other posters parents were taking too long to pass and thus obstructing the flow of traffic unnecessarily, and thus being jerks. I know you don't like the reviled UbuntuDupe's support, but there you have it.
Why, did we have some sort of negative exchange before? I don't recall.. I don't hold grudges either,/. simply isn't worth it. I almost didn't read this post, because ACs get an automatic -1 and I don't view posts below 0 typically.
Here's my reasoning, and it seems it would have led to a more fruitful discussion if you focused more on it when presenting your case:
Heh. Maybe. I kinda doubt it though, although I appreciate the suggestion. The OP already stated he's a better driver than most everyone else.. of course, anyone can type anything they want, true or not. I think he really thinks he is though, and he expects me to believe it, even though there's no real qualifications to distinqish good drivers from bad, except maybe the number of accidents they are at fault for.
Let's say the parents had acted properly: they passed, and while getting past the slow truck, they put their turn signal on to indicate they'd be coming back to the right. (I don't think they did, which is part of the problem.) Most fast drivers, even very aggressive ones, upon seeing that, are going to figure that the driver will soon move over and just wait it out. The fact that they felt comfortable enough with the separation AND were tired with waiting it out, suggests the parents were taking way too long to pass and not giving any reliable indication that they'd be moving over soon.
I suspect this is what happened as well, although the OP I believe said his parents signaled. Even if we give the OP the benfit of the doubt, and they did, I suspect they are also arrogant (those traits seem to be taught from parent to child) and thus thought they'd "play" with the stupid, impatient other drivers.. only it didn't work out that way. Or maybe it was really they didn't know how much clearence to give with that particular trailer.
I am also very pissed in general about left-lane campers. I've resorted to passing them on the right at first opportunity, and then getting in front of them and slowing down so other drivers can pass. It gives them a taste of their own medicine. But, just to show you how clueless these people are, the last time I tried that, the driver started flashing his headlights to pass! Sorry dude, you missed your opportunity the first time around! I responded by aggressively pointing to the right.
Ya, I definately hear you. I try not to play games though... hitting brakes randomly or cutting people off. I just would rather not have an accident, and getting away from the problem is enough for me. Seems to be more of a VT thing, but I've actually had people try to keep me from passing, even though we are the only two cars in that section of highway... they see me overtaking, and speed up. Worse, if they do get ahead because I'm not interested in bothering so I move in back of them on the right, they end up slowing down again. I have my cruise control on, so my speed is constant. Yt when I try to pass, they get pissy for some reason. Unreal.. at that point I usually speed off, because my car does typically have more pickup than most others.
FWIW...
Well, I appricate the support. Don't post anon. next time though, I don't mark people as foe, it's not worth it.. besides, the next time around I may end up having a very good conversation with someone I previously "fought" with.
You're presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. That's just absurd.
Businesses are unlikely to switch no matter what; we still have some Win98 machines. They are working, why replace them? The fact that IE only intranet sites still exist seem to prove this as well, but your assertation that such sites are STILL making MS money is absurd as well. If the business wanted to switch (an expensive proposition), switching the site becomes an option as well.
You have interesting answers, I notice for one you explain what developers would do, and the other you try to explain what you think users would do. What the users do however is irrelevent.
If MS stopped making SL for FF, wouldn't DEVELOPERS also abandon SL, since it doesn't work for more than 20% of their visitors?
What OS the user is on is irrelevent, what matters is developer support.
If you own 10 other properties, and you ARE free to enter those at any time, and you post signs saying, how does someone know your 11th property you aren't free to legally enter, if there's no sign at that particular property, and your other signs say "open to all?"
Given human history, I'd say that's exteremly likely to happen.. which is pretty much why the US government was setup the way it was. It's too bad we strayed so far from that line of thinking.
Well, you can argue Flash has a monopoly now for more interactive sites. What if they stop making a plugin for FF?
As far as Silverlight goes, the Moonlight project is GPLed so someone could continue to make the plugin for Linux, and they can reverse engineer further changes to Silverlight.
Keep in mind, they aren't embracing anything here, they're making a new competiting standard. For your EEE thing to work, shouldn't they be building something compatable with Flash, then when their implementation becomes the most common on, extend it?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, let's see, I know 100% that Outlook in no way requires Word. It only would if you set Outlook to use Word as the email editor... but then that's an option you choose, and it's only available if Word is installed at all.
If I'm wrong about the VS "data aware" controls, tell me exactly to which controls you're refering.
Finally, I've had plenty of media players other than WMP that I had set as default, and I never had XP or so far Vista randomly "reset" them. So you're either making it up, or maybe there's something else going on, like group policy making the change.
It proves they don't have any sort of generalized computing knowledge.
That's just plain wrong. If all you have is a certificate, it may be true, but if you're a Windows shop, why do you care if your admin can use bash? Likewise, why do you care if your linux admin knows anything about Windows if you're a Linux shop?
I know Windows. I know Debian-based Linux systems. I've never actually even used a BSD, much less admin'd one, but I could figure out the subtleties because I have generalized knowledge rather than rote memorization used to study for a cert exam.
You could figure it out because BSD is Yet Another Unix Clone. And while some shops may require knowledge of both systems, some don't, and only require platform specific knowledge. There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with focusing on one technology.
Microsoft Outlook needs (and loads) MS Word.
No, it doesn't.
MS Visual Studio requires MS Office for some of the data aware components to work at all.
You mean the components that are designed to get data from MS Office? The horror!
Windows Media player often "reactivates" all on its lonesome
Funny, it's never done that for me.
Your premise is wrong.. or are you implying that degrees are also useless pieces of paper? What about me, I have a degree, experience and certifications. You'd rule me out because I got certified?
Sorry, what does the MCSE program have to do with a UNIX shell? I can say the same thing about RH certified people; they're stupid because they don't know Powershell. Does that make sense?
There's a difference though; the bank already has the information it's presenting to you in their systems. My comment was geared toward storing that information with some third party that doesn't have an interest in even having it correct.
Someone else pointed out that people put nude pics up. People do that. Is it a majority? I don't think so, we just hear about it alot because it makes a good headline.
Depends on what you mean by 'usability'. End users should never have to go further than the forums or IRC. Administrators should never have to go further than the man pages. Developers should be looking at either API documentation or source, and preferably both. All of the above are addressed in a good program, and most of the *major* projects do so. You've already said that you're not really a fan of the major avenue of assistance in Linux, which is the community forums and IRC, and I guess if that's how you feel about it that's the way it is, but I don't think that without community assistance you're comparing apples to apples in terms of support.
/shrug.
.NET and Java that I would mention Python since the three major implementations of Python are C, .NET CLR, and Java.
Well, I guess that's where our limits differ. I think end users shouldn't need to leave the application at all. Ideally, they can sit down and figure it out because the UI is intuitive. At worse, they should have to look at the help file or other assistence the program offers. Admins should have the same for their configuration tools. Developers shouldn't need to go to the source, but given how curious we are it can be helpful if they can, although I've been doing fine so far.
I'm not sure if there's a particular piece of software than you're referring to here, but most man pages seem exhaustively complete to me, especially on major projects.
There was some DVD burning software, some BT clients, GNUCash springs to mind again. Even some things in the WM were lacking; some features of KDE were very well documented, other's had nothing.
As for not having heard of it without my help, well- yeah. That's why the community exists. That's what I mean by living documentation. If you ask somebody a question- and we're easy to find- we'll answer if we can, and know where to look if we can't.
Again this is part of our differing views. The community doesn't always have answers, or I have to wait (I did the forum thing, never IRC). These things require time though, which I have limited amounts of to spend on various tasks. As to finding software.. where does one go to ask which software will fill a certain need?
Hmmm. I'm afraid I don't agree with you here- I tend to believe that competition in a market segment tends to improve the quality of the competitors and increase the power of the consumer- but I guess to each their own.
It can increase the power of the consumer, if the consumer can invest time into evaluating. I tend to allot more time to evaluating something based on its cost to me.. in the case of OSS (or any software, really) if I can't sit down and in a few minutes start doing what I need or want to, I move on. On the OSS side, there were too many things to "move on to" so it became frustrating.
It's a scripting language in the same sense as lisp is- interpreted, quick to write, blurs the line between data and code- but it's pretty common for a lot of general purpose programming anymore. A lot of the syntax is pretty much C++ sans punctuation, which I find handy, but I figured since you mentioned both
Hmm, didn't know Java had a Python implementation. Pretty cool. I heard IronPython is pretty impressive actually.
We do have different views, but I don't see that as a problem. Do I think that GUIs are inherently less powerful than CLIs are? Absolutely, and any sys admin worth their shell scripts knows the same thing. Does that mean they do not have a place? Absolutely not, since any UI designer worth his pixels knows that most users are terrified of the terminal. Again, I think we're going in circles on this man pages issue, and I'm not going to spend much more time addressing it, but I think that they're usually perfectly fine as reference material and as a supplement to online help, and I think we can agree to disagree on that.
I agree that CLIs can be more powerful. I th
That sucks. I've had a few mods "follow" me seemingly from story to story. It gets kinda suspicious when five comments over five stories are moddel as Troll or Flamebait.
/. would help figure out what's wrong. As for something I didn't like, I'm sure that's true, but not really a reason to hate anyone. :-)
Maybe if you became a subscriber
Good luck getting things fixed.
Huh? Investors are pretty clueless people, and pretty much all companies are "maiking up shit as they go along" to keep investors around.
How nice, a defenseless animal annoys you and you'd like to kill it. I hope you remember that if you have kids and someone complains how annoying they are.
Siamese have a bad rap, just because they can be loud. We have two in our house, and they are the friendlist most loyal cats. They love being around us and love human attention.
Do you really think the average user feels comfortable storing, say, bank information online?
Well, unfortunately I don't live in NC and so I can't. Yet this dummy could affect the whole nation.
Well, not to mention that true web "applications" suck ass. Why would I run a browser that opens a file on my computer which loads an application in a VM sandbox... why? What's the point? And talk about lock-in.. why would I want my personal data on some else's server, only able to retrieve it at thier whim? It's not like we even have reliable internet connections.
This whole "desktop will be irrlevent" is stupid. We were there, did that, it sucked on a LAN, I can't see how it wouldn't suck more on the internet.
I see what you're saying. Yes, most people do not decide to buy Windows, but simply buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows. But many people do specifically buy Windows computers as opposed to a computer with Linux. MS makes money off those people.
I agree with that, I just don't think that "well, I like site abc.com and it requires SL, so I have to choose Windows." I doubt most really know what SL or Flash is, just that it's "required."
Of course, but you can get Java compilers, JVMs, and Linux distributions from multiple vendors for free. You must pay Microsoft if you want to run Windows, IE, Office, Outlook, Exchange, ASP, etc. That's why it's called vendor lock-in, because those products are available from only one vendor.
Well, those companies are still vendors. Are all JVMs, Java compilers and Linux distributions 100% compatable though? I'm willing to bet the answer is, as I've said, "not quite." So the fact that the software costs nothing doesn't mean switching is free, hense there's still the aspect of lock-in.
No, I've used Windows extensively. First, my high school days aren't all that far behind me, and XP was already out. Second, as part of my business- many legacy business apps cannot be ported without monumental effort, and so it is frequently the case that we set up a Windows box with a Linux passthrough.
/home the way you want it, both on the server and on the desktop. Then set up a cron job to rsync it every X interval (turns out its 30 minutes to 2 hours for Group Policy Objects). There is a convenient GUI tool called Unison that does this for you. As for figuring out what files to sync, just do a server->client sync of anything in /home that starts with ., and everything in /etc. Then do a client->server sync of everything else in /home if you want to share those files. Since rsync uses SSH as a carrier protocol, it is quite secure. Again, all of this can be done in Unison, although I am personally more comfortable working with rsync itself.
Heh. I get the impression you're a bit younger than me. I graduated college from a five year program before XP came out (only by months though). I've been using computers since MS-DOS 3.1 was the latest version.
As for Windows supercomputing, I wish them great good luck but don't see it happening, as the UNIX world's tools for HPC etc are just incredible. It would take a LONG time and a lot of money to come up with a comparable feature set.
I wouldn't underestimate MS. Many now defuct companies did.
Its all there, it just happens to be in either the man files or the ultimate documentation. Once you learn how to use a command's basic invocation (from irc or wherever), then check the man pages for reference documentation, and you're generally fine. Again, all of this is anecdotal- my experience is x, yours is y, ergo, we run around in circles, but like I say, between talking directly with the developers, reading the man pages, and, if you're really masochistic, perusing the source code, you'll figure it out. In the end, there's really nothing in Linux that's totally opaque, which is, once again, a major advantage for those willing to take advantage of it.
This is mostly what I've been saying. I know I could eventually get what I need, but in today's computers and GUI applications, if I need to go as far as going to the source, the application has failed from a usability standpoint. That's my issue, and it's likely an issue for many others.
As far as security is concerned, we probably don't want to get into that flamewar, but there are a lot of things you can do to a system that simply can't be undone. If your customer database gets cracked, its game over. If someone installs a malicious utility, its game over. God forbid they be able to insert a kernel module. The assumption that box security is more important that infrastructure or data security is one of the major problems with home use security models, and really highlights a major difference in approach between Windows and Linux. It doesn't help that much of security research is very convoluted stuff, and that many elements of a security strategy cannot be considered in isolation. So, I can't really agree that every insecure option should be just as easily available as any given security-neutral option, any more than I think that every option available on the CLI needs to be available in the GUI.
I'm not trying to get into a flamewar either; I never said box security was more important that network security. I said that the options, which may be dangerous, are still accessable and that adequate warnings and explainations are given. Right there, in the dialog to set the option (or by pressing F1). I found that in Linux, I would find the option, but the various settings of that option aren't adequately explained where you set the option. You need to go digging. Again, it's a usablity failure.
Set up
Again, quite a lot
No, I'm not presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. I'm conjecturing that if Microsoft wants to abuse their monopoly, they might make SL work in Windows only, and then people would buy Windows specifically to view some SL only sites.
I disagree. People get Windows, for the most part, as part of their computer purchase. I don't think whehter to not they can view SL sites enter into it, anymore than IE only sites do. People aren't avoiding Linux because they can't view some sites. People by and large don't know what Linux is, don't know people using it and don't care. Those that do care enough to look at both aren't basing it on one point of focus, they'll look at the larger picture.
I agree that switching a site from IE-only to working in other browsers is expensive. Any time you need to switch from one technology to another, it's very expensive and risky. That's why businesses continue buying Windows machines instead of switching to Linux. Switching to Linux would mean having to run a browser other than IE, an office suite other than Office, an email client other than Outlook, etc. Making each of these switches has interoperability problems, because of the proprietary extensions in IE, and the proprietary nature of Office and the Outlook/Exchange protocol. It's called vendor lock-in, and it makes MS tons of bucks. If MS products used and adhered closely to standards, they wouldn't have the lock-in that they do now. Silverlight is yet another proprietary technology that can be used to induce yet more lock-in.
I can say the same for Java / Linux; moving my Linux based shop to all Windows is expensive as well. Am I locked into Java / Linux because it's expensive?
I've been following this exchange, and I have to say that based on the description of the incident, you are right that the other posters parents were taking too long to pass and thus obstructing the flow of traffic unnecessarily, and thus being jerks. I know you don't like the reviled UbuntuDupe's support, but there you have it.
/. simply isn't worth it. I almost didn't read this post, because ACs get an automatic -1 and I don't view posts below 0 typically.
Why, did we have some sort of negative exchange before? I don't recall.. I don't hold grudges either,
Here's my reasoning, and it seems it would have led to a more fruitful discussion if you focused more on it when presenting your case:
Heh. Maybe. I kinda doubt it though, although I appreciate the suggestion. The OP already stated he's a better driver than most everyone else.. of course, anyone can type anything they want, true or not. I think he really thinks he is though, and he expects me to believe it, even though there's no real qualifications to distinqish good drivers from bad, except maybe the number of accidents they are at fault for.
Let's say the parents had acted properly: they passed, and while getting past the slow truck, they put their turn signal on to indicate they'd be coming back to the right. (I don't think they did, which is part of the problem.) Most fast drivers, even very aggressive ones, upon seeing that, are going to figure that the driver will soon move over and just wait it out. The fact that they felt comfortable enough with the separation AND were tired with waiting it out, suggests the parents were taking way too long to pass and not giving any reliable indication that they'd be moving over soon.
I suspect this is what happened as well, although the OP I believe said his parents signaled. Even if we give the OP the benfit of the doubt, and they did, I suspect they are also arrogant (those traits seem to be taught from parent to child) and thus thought they'd "play" with the stupid, impatient other drivers.. only it didn't work out that way. Or maybe it was really they didn't know how much clearence to give with that particular trailer.
I am also very pissed in general about left-lane campers. I've resorted to passing them on the right at first opportunity, and then getting in front of them and slowing down so other drivers can pass. It gives them a taste of their own medicine. But, just to show you how clueless these people are, the last time I tried that, the driver started flashing his headlights to pass! Sorry dude, you missed your opportunity the first time around! I responded by aggressively pointing to the right.
Ya, I definately hear you. I try not to play games though... hitting brakes randomly or cutting people off. I just would rather not have an accident, and getting away from the problem is enough for me. Seems to be more of a VT thing, but I've actually had people try to keep me from passing, even though we are the only two cars in that section of highway... they see me overtaking, and speed up. Worse, if they do get ahead because I'm not interested in bothering so I move in back of them on the right, they end up slowing down again. I have my cruise control on, so my speed is constant. Yt when I try to pass, they get pissy for some reason. Unreal.. at that point I usually speed off, because my car does typically have more pickup than most others.
FWIW...
Well, I appricate the support. Don't post anon. next time though, I don't mark people as foe, it's not worth it.. besides, the next time around I may end up having a very good conversation with someone I previously "fought" with.
Take care.
You're presupposing that people are out buying Windows specifically to view some SL only sites. That's just absurd.
Businesses are unlikely to switch no matter what; we still have some Win98 machines. They are working, why replace them? The fact that IE only intranet sites still exist seem to prove this as well, but your assertation that such sites are STILL making MS money is absurd as well. If the business wanted to switch (an expensive proposition), switching the site becomes an option as well.
You have interesting answers, I notice for one you explain what developers would do, and the other you try to explain what you think users would do. What the users do however is irrelevent.
If MS stopped making SL for FF, wouldn't DEVELOPERS also abandon SL, since it doesn't work for more than 20% of their visitors?
What OS the user is on is irrelevent, what matters is developer support.
If you own 10 other properties, and you ARE free to enter those at any time, and you post signs saying, how does someone know your 11th property you aren't free to legally enter, if there's no sign at that particular property, and your other signs say "open to all?"
Given human history, I'd say that's exteremly likely to happen.. which is pretty much why the US government was setup the way it was. It's too bad we strayed so far from that line of thinking.
Well, you can argue Flash has a monopoly now for more interactive sites. What if they stop making a plugin for FF?
As far as Silverlight goes, the Moonlight project is GPLed so someone could continue to make the plugin for Linux, and they can reverse engineer further changes to Silverlight.
Keep in mind, they aren't embracing anything here, they're making a new competiting standard. For your EEE thing to work, shouldn't they be building something compatable with Flash, then when their implementation becomes the most common on, extend it?
Ok, so what is you point?
There's no injury when someone has power over you?