This is Microsoft releasing their own documents. Are you going to argue that Microsoft is the government?
Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM
on
A Look at GNOME 2.14
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· Score: 1
Also, with Xine, VLC, and mplayer, it is impossible to play DVDs legally.
My understanding is that the jury's still out on that one. The legal gray area is the reason why you need to install libdvdcss separately - no distribution wants to officially include it in American editions until the legal ramifications are worked out. But I don't think it's illegal to install it on your own, and every distro has an easy way to install it available (PLF, for instance).
Besides, you can't play DVDs with Windows out-of-the-box, either. You have to install either Microsoft's add-on, or a third-party DVD player such as WinDVD. This doesn't appear to have slowed Windows sales...;)
Maybe if Linux becomes popular enough, adware and spyware might target it as well. Crapware authors write their spyware/adware/trojans, etc. for the largest possible audience because they are trying to either make money or gain notoriety, neither of which motive makes it sensible to target a niche product like Linux or Mac OS, which combined account for something like less than 10% of the total personal computer desktop market, and that's being generous.
Same old, same old. I see this FUD all the time, and it never fails to amuse. You know those crapware authors you're talking about? If they wanted the largest possible audience, they would write viruses and malware that spread from Windows desktops to Apache and Sendmail servers running on *NIX, and vice-versa.
As I recall, one such a beast did exist (although it didn't spread very far because most *NIX servers were patched against it within minutes). The concept is extremely sound for malware authors. Why don't such things pop up more often? Because writing viruses for *NIX is hard, while writing them for Windows is easy. It's that simple.
If anything, Microsoft is being responsible by making their product affordable and consumer-friendly, which is hard to say of most other computer security suites.
You must be doing something aggravating to the OS then. I've used XP basically since it came out, and post SP1, the only BSODs I have seen have been due to a) serious hardware failure (on a Dell laptop), b) Spyware and c) me pulling a PCI card out while it was still on.
I think you're discounting just what a serious issue spyware and adware are on Windows. For a computer literate individual (like most Slashdot readers), Windows is easy to maintain; you won't see BSODs on your machine because you know how to take care of it, you know not to click "Yes" on everything you see while online, and you know what maintenance to do on a regular basis to keep your machine free of worms, trojans, spyware, adware, and other malicious programs.
But that doesn't describe typical Windows users, and we all know that. Proper care and maintenance of their machines isn't something they're even aware of, except as a mysterious voodoo that their "computer guys" have to do from time to time.
There are two people in my life who use computers regularly, and know nothing about them: My wife and my mother. Neither are computer literate, and both need my help whenever something happens that they don't understand. But only one of them, my mother, needs regular assistance with crashes and misbehavior, and it's because she uses Windows. My wife's laptop has literally never crashed, and the only maintenance I perform on it is the occasional OS upgrade. It's configured to install security updates automatically, and this has never affected her ability to work in the slightest. And she doesn't need to know about cleaning up spyware and adware, because she's never had any.
Until adware and spyware is no longer an issue on Windows, the BSOD will not be a thing of the past. Your personal experience with Windows - as a computer-literate Slashdot reader - will differ a great deal from the personal experience of a typical user.
I'm not a console gamer myself, but I do play games on the PC, and I try to keep up with the games market in case I find a console I do want. What is it about the XBox 360 that your friends don't like?
The look and feel of the desktop are extremely important. They aren't the only factor a user should take into account, but to discount them completely is a mistake.
If the default desktop is an eyesore, keeps its menus and options in strange places, and has a lot of confusing buttons that don't explain what they do or what they're for, it doesn't matter how powerful the environment is.
Let me say it again: It doesn't matter how powerful the environment is.
Because most users will balk at the environment I've just described. Heck, *I'd* balk at it. I want a usable and intuitive interface as much as the next user. I would no more use this desktop than I would drive a car with strange and cryptic controls, no matter how powerful and efficient the engine is.
Actually, on Linux my mother or uncle wouldn't have needed to write the script, because for almost anything you could possibly want Linux to do, someone has already done it (I guess I'm an example of that "someone" now). Besides, what I wanted to do was fairly esoteric, and it's doubtful anyone but a geek like me would want to do it.
What do mother and uncle want to do with their computers? They want to surf the web, read their email, and write stuff. Maybe play a game of solitaire and listen to some music. That's about it. And for those uses, Linux is very ready. It's ready enough that my wife uses it, my mother uses it, and I install it regularly for friends and family. And you know what? They love it.
As for the actual "fixing" - that's limited to an even smaller group of coders.
I'm not a developer, but I've used Linux exclusively for a few years now. About a year and a half ago I got a multimedia keyboard and wanted to make the keys do different things depending on which application was open. At the time, khotkeys and lineak weren't very good at that, so I wrote a script that did the job for me. I didn't have to be a guru or get deeply involved in code-hacking to fix a perceived weakness in the OS.
That, I believe, is the main strength of Linux. You don't actually have to be a developer to make the OS do what you want it to do.
If I go to Blockbuster or my local video rental store, the movie I'm renting eventually goes back to the store, where they can rent it to the next guy for another few bucks. They stop renting that particular disc when it gets scratched or broken, but otherwise, it's a continuous revenue stream.
If video stores started sending home these self-destructing discs, they could only rent them once. Then they'd have to buy new copies from the manufacturer. Why would they choose to do this? The answer is, simply, they wouldn't.
Most Linux users don't run as root. Most distributions specifically steer users away from that if they try to, anyways. KDE on most distros, for instance, will give you a big scary red screen with no icons and a prompt to log out if you log into it as root. Besides, running as root doesn't provide any benefit other than avoiding the root password when doing system administration... and what user is going to spend most of their time doing that?
Browsing the web, changing your desktop look and feel, checking for email, playing games, and chatting are the activities most users want to perform, and you don't need to be root for any of them.
Most banks offer their own bill paying system for their customers. Instead of setting up Cingular's automated online payments, you could consult your bank and find out if their system would work with Cingular.
Oddly, I use Cingular myself, and have no problem using Firefox on Linux to manage my bills, but perhaps my experience isn't universal.
I've been using the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta for a while, and it's gotten a lot better at opening MS Office files. If you install the MS fonts, it's hard to even see a difference in most files. I regularly use it on MS Office files people send me, and it hasn't failed yet. The beta is just about perfect. But there are some problems still, admittedly.
Converting.odt documents to.rtf usually works, but there are some distinct formatting problems that have given me grief. I regularly generate files in manuscript format (in other words, double spaced, 1-inch margins, Courier-style monospace font, with headers in a "Author / Title / Page" format). If the document includes a single-spaced introduction at the top of the first page, then converting it to.rtf seems to drop all other text.
That's a serious bug. Of course, converting to MS.doc format works fine.
This is a well-thought-out, aggressive (but not unduly so) evisceration of religious fanaticism of any stripe, and specifically goes after American fundamentalists.
So how come none of the otherwise prolific posters here who disagree with this line of reasoning have responded to it?
OSX is polished and has a singular top-down vision from Jobs and his unholy cult.
I have to admit, that made me laugh. I've never met a nicer, friendlier, and more easy-going "unholy cult" than a group of your typical Mac users.
There's no scattershot design by committee of blind idiots which is but ONE of the things hobbling Linux.
Oh, you mean the fact that it's open source is hobbling Linux? Interesting, interesting... So you're bashing on Linux because it's...well...Linux. Might as well bash on BSD for being BSD, too. They are what they are. Do you by any chance think a zebra is hobbled by being a zebra, and not a bison?
The biggest obstacle to Linux is that it is ruled, dominated, infested and infected with a "difficult is beautiful and better than easy or correct" mindset. There is active resistance to any sort of architectural framework promulgation beyond the kernel and even that is challenged by people second-guessing Linus. Never mind that easy to use GUI design is eschewed by Linux writers who seem to be inherently unable to grasp that what is easy for a techie geek is NOT the thing that the common end-users need or want.
Have you even considered the notion that GUI is more a matter of taste than anything else? I use KDE just about exclusively. When I have to use Windows, I find it clunky and inelegant. When I have to use OSX, I find that it hides too much from me. These days, the major GUIs aren't that different in power, only in feel. I find KDE remarkably intuitive and easy to use, and only go to the command line when I want to program in VI or something like that.
The arrogany egocentric attitude of introvert geeks still rules: it should work the way I say and not the way those n00b lusers say. Microsoft doesn't work that way and look where they are today. Look where Linux is by comparison. EASE, not FREE or OPEN should be the buzzword of Linux.
Look where Linux is today? You mean, Microsoft's top competitor in the marketplace? A fast-advancing computing powerhouse that's steadily eating Microsoft's lunch?
What did you expect in a discussion centering on AOL? The spelling and punctuation associated with AOL in all its forms is inherently terrible. In fact, to even discuss language skills in the presence of an AOL discussion is to create a proverbial "blak holl" of spelling suckage.
Sorry, but you lost (or loosed) this one before it began.
Mod parent up, folks. The poster makes some very good points, is factually correct on things like the PCs with Mandrake preinstalled, and this generally looks like a good post. This isn't flamebait, and doesn't deserve to be treated as such.
I suppose I could do that. But when the primary components that fail are your entire USB core and all networking components, it gets really difficult to go through all the hassle to download the correct patch, apply it, reconfigure the kernel, compile it, install it, and pray that you didn't screw something up.
It was simpler just to install Mandriva, which I already knew worked fine with all my hardware out of the box. And it it did.
Depends. Are you using a graphics card with at least VESA compatibility? Are you using a soundcard that ALSA supports? Are they on the hardware compatibility list? Have you checked to see if there are manufacturer's drivers for them, and whether or not they've made it into MD Linux?
Will it take 2 weeks and constant forum trolling to find solutions to my problems?
Wouldn't that really depend on the type and severity of these theoretical problems?
Will I have all of the creature-features I'm used to in Windows?
No. It's a different OS. It will have different creature-features.
I'm still partially on the Linux bandwagon, but my last series of experiences left me a little less excited.
I just installed MD2005 with KDE 3.4 on a laptop this Saturday. I had exactly one problem: The WiFi wouldn't work. A quick upgrade to ndiswrapper, and now it works perfectly. Took maybe half an hour of googling when I felt like it, and boom! Problem solved.
Will you have the same experience? Possibly, if you're careful to research your options. That's something Windows admittedly has over Linux right now: It ships already installed and configured, so you don't have to do anything yourself.
I don't think apt and urpmi are really very different. If you type apt-get , it downloads from preconfigured sources the package and anything it depends on. If you type urpmi , the same thing happens. I've yet to see any real usage-level difference between the two.
YaST, on the other hand, seems to have the ability to download and apply *patches* to RPMs, and that's pretty cool. If only SuSE worked on my main computer...sigh...
The default file system for MD2005 is ext3. I just installed it on a new laptop, and accepted the defaults for file system configuration, and the root is definitely ext3.
Furthermore, the options for ReiserFS and ext3 have been there at least since 10.0, and I'm pretty sure ext3 has been available since 9.1.
I am paying money for the games I play. I am not paying money to be advertised at during my escapist time.
I will not need patches to remove advertisements from my games, because I will not buy games with embedded advertising. I always arrive ten minutes late to the movie theater for the same reason: I am already paying for the experience, not paying to waste my time being yelled at because I haven't bought enough crap.
And might I suggest that gamers everywhere do likewise? Don't support this shit with your dollars. Make this fail. You watch TV and get advertised at, you drive down the street and get advertised at, you read magazines and get advertised at, you go to the movies and get advertised at, you open your email and get advertised at... Enough, already!
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This is Microsoft releasing their own documents. Are you going to argue that Microsoft is the government?
Besides, you can't play DVDs with Windows out-of-the-box, either. You have to install either Microsoft's add-on, or a third-party DVD player such as WinDVD. This doesn't appear to have slowed Windows sales... ;)
Maybe if Linux becomes popular enough, adware and spyware might target it as well. Crapware authors write their spyware/adware/trojans, etc. for the largest possible audience because they are trying to either make money or gain notoriety, neither of which motive makes it sensible to target a niche product like Linux or Mac OS, which combined account for something like less than 10% of the total personal computer desktop market, and that's being generous.
Same old, same old. I see this FUD all the time, and it never fails to amuse. You know those crapware authors you're talking about? If they wanted the largest possible audience, they would write viruses and malware that spread from Windows desktops to Apache and Sendmail servers running on *NIX, and vice-versa.
As I recall, one such a beast did exist (although it didn't spread very far because most *NIX servers were patched against it within minutes). The concept is extremely sound for malware authors. Why don't such things pop up more often? Because writing viruses for *NIX is hard, while writing them for Windows is easy. It's that simple. If anything, Microsoft is being responsible by making their product affordable and consumer-friendly, which is hard to say of most other computer security suites.
Jennifer Love Hewitt?
Juicy Lumpy Hamburgers?
Just Limp Humphrey?
But it's icky!
But that doesn't describe typical Windows users, and we all know that. Proper care and maintenance of their machines isn't something they're even aware of, except as a mysterious voodoo that their "computer guys" have to do from time to time.
There are two people in my life who use computers regularly, and know nothing about them: My wife and my mother. Neither are computer literate, and both need my help whenever something happens that they don't understand. But only one of them, my mother, needs regular assistance with crashes and misbehavior, and it's because she uses Windows. My wife's laptop has literally never crashed, and the only maintenance I perform on it is the occasional OS upgrade. It's configured to install security updates automatically, and this has never affected her ability to work in the slightest. And she doesn't need to know about cleaning up spyware and adware, because she's never had any.
Until adware and spyware is no longer an issue on Windows, the BSOD will not be a thing of the past. Your personal experience with Windows - as a computer-literate Slashdot reader - will differ a great deal from the personal experience of a typical user.
I'm not a console gamer myself, but I do play games on the PC, and I try to keep up with the games market in case I find a console I do want. What is it about the XBox 360 that your friends don't like?
The look and feel of the desktop are extremely important. They aren't the only factor a user should take into account, but to discount them completely is a mistake.
If the default desktop is an eyesore, keeps its menus and options in strange places, and has a lot of confusing buttons that don't explain what they do or what they're for, it doesn't matter how powerful the environment is.
Let me say it again: It doesn't matter how powerful the environment is.
Because most users will balk at the environment I've just described. Heck, *I'd* balk at it. I want a usable and intuitive interface as much as the next user. I would no more use this desktop than I would drive a car with strange and cryptic controls, no matter how powerful and efficient the engine is.
Actually, on Linux my mother or uncle wouldn't have needed to write the script, because for almost anything you could possibly want Linux to do, someone has already done it (I guess I'm an example of that "someone" now). Besides, what I wanted to do was fairly esoteric, and it's doubtful anyone but a geek like me would want to do it.
What do mother and uncle want to do with their computers? They want to surf the web, read their email, and write stuff. Maybe play a game of solitaire and listen to some music. That's about it. And for those uses, Linux is very ready. It's ready enough that my wife uses it, my mother uses it, and I install it regularly for friends and family. And you know what? They love it.
I'm not a developer, but I've used Linux exclusively for a few years now. About a year and a half ago I got a multimedia keyboard and wanted to make the keys do different things depending on which application was open. At the time, khotkeys and lineak weren't very good at that, so I wrote a script that did the job for me. I didn't have to be a guru or get deeply involved in code-hacking to fix a perceived weakness in the OS.
That, I believe, is the main strength of Linux. You don't actually have to be a developer to make the OS do what you want it to do.
If I go to Blockbuster or my local video rental store, the movie I'm renting eventually goes back to the store, where they can rent it to the next guy for another few bucks. They stop renting that particular disc when it gets scratched or broken, but otherwise, it's a continuous revenue stream.
If video stores started sending home these self-destructing discs, they could only rent them once. Then they'd have to buy new copies from the manufacturer. Why would they choose to do this? The answer is, simply, they wouldn't.
Most Linux users don't run as root. Most distributions specifically steer users away from that if they try to, anyways. KDE on most distros, for instance, will give you a big scary red screen with no icons and a prompt to log out if you log into it as root. Besides, running as root doesn't provide any benefit other than avoiding the root password when doing system administration... and what user is going to spend most of their time doing that?
Browsing the web, changing your desktop look and feel, checking for email, playing games, and chatting are the activities most users want to perform, and you don't need to be root for any of them.
Most banks offer their own bill paying system for their customers. Instead of setting up Cingular's automated online payments, you could consult your bank and find out if their system would work with Cingular.
Oddly, I use Cingular myself, and have no problem using Firefox on Linux to manage my bills, but perhaps my experience isn't universal.
I've been using the OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta for a while, and it's gotten a lot better at opening MS Office files. If you install the MS fonts, it's hard to even see a difference in most files. I regularly use it on MS Office files people send me, and it hasn't failed yet. The beta is just about perfect. But there are some problems still, admittedly.
.odt documents to .rtf usually works, but there are some distinct formatting problems that have given me grief. I regularly generate files in manuscript format (in other words, double spaced, 1-inch margins, Courier-style monospace font, with headers in a "Author / Title / Page" format). If the document includes a single-spaced introduction at the top of the first page, then converting it to .rtf seems to drop all other text.
.doc format works fine.
Converting
That's a serious bug. Of course, converting to MS
This is a well-thought-out, aggressive (but not unduly so) evisceration of religious fanaticism of any stripe, and specifically goes after American fundamentalists.
So how come none of the otherwise prolific posters here who disagree with this line of reasoning have responded to it?
Only in the UK. If you're in the united states, the rule's pretty simple: Punctuation stays inside the quotes.
Like this: "So," he said to the random guy on the internet, "where did you learn to punctuate?"
If you're in the UK, it's a lot more complex, but it's been simplified state-side.
What did you expect in a discussion centering on AOL? The spelling and punctuation associated with AOL in all its forms is inherently terrible. In fact, to even discuss language skills in the presence of an AOL discussion is to create a proverbial "blak holl" of spelling suckage.
Sorry, but you lost (or loosed) this one before it began.
Mod parent up, folks. The poster makes some very good points, is factually correct on things like the PCs with Mandrake preinstalled, and this generally looks like a good post. This isn't flamebait, and doesn't deserve to be treated as such.
I suppose I could do that. But when the primary components that fail are your entire USB core and all networking components, it gets really difficult to go through all the hassle to download the correct patch, apply it, reconfigure the kernel, compile it, install it, and pray that you didn't screw something up.
It was simpler just to install Mandriva, which I already knew worked fine with all my hardware out of the box. And it it did.
Wouldn't that really depend on the type and severity of these theoretical problems?
No. It's a different OS. It will have different creature-features.
I just installed MD2005 with KDE 3.4 on a laptop this Saturday. I had exactly one problem: The WiFi wouldn't work. A quick upgrade to ndiswrapper, and now it works perfectly. Took maybe half an hour of googling when I felt like it, and boom! Problem solved.
Will you have the same experience? Possibly, if you're careful to research your options. That's something Windows admittedly has over Linux right now: It ships already installed and configured, so you don't have to do anything yourself.
I don't think apt and urpmi are really very different. If you type apt-get , it downloads from preconfigured sources the package and anything it depends on. If you type urpmi , the same thing happens. I've yet to see any real usage-level difference between the two. YaST, on the other hand, seems to have the ability to download and apply *patches* to RPMs, and that's pretty cool. If only SuSE worked on my main computer...sigh...
The default file system for MD2005 is ext3. I just installed it on a new laptop, and accepted the defaults for file system configuration, and the root is definitely ext3.
Furthermore, the options for ReiserFS and ext3 have been there at least since 10.0, and I'm pretty sure ext3 has been available since 9.1.
Well, no, not really... But damn it, I don't want game execs to see that!
I am paying money for the games I play. I am not paying money to be advertised at during my escapist time.
I will not need patches to remove advertisements from my games, because I will not buy games with embedded advertising. I always arrive ten minutes late to the movie theater for the same reason: I am already paying for the experience, not paying to waste my time being yelled at because I haven't bought enough crap.
And might I suggest that gamers everywhere do likewise? Don't support this shit with your dollars. Make this fail. You watch TV and get advertised at, you drive down the street and get advertised at, you read magazines and get advertised at, you go to the movies and get advertised at, you open your email and get advertised at... Enough, already!