Perhaps Microsoft could work on the basics for their VM cloud services?
I don't know, like maybe... One click snapshot images?
Simple VM backup management?
Instead right now on Azure, they're requiring people to learn and write hundreds of lines in PowerShell scripts to do it. There aren't even working practical examples of how to do this on Azure RM and their own support doesn't know how to write the scripts themselves. The performance is surprisingly poor at the lowest system configurations, particularly because similar configurations else where are more performant. It's a travesty.
If this was a provider sitting on it's own, without the Microsoft name, nobody would use it. The API is terrible, the web interface is terrible, the PowerShell cmdlets are terrible.
You would be hard pressed to find anyone that would use this over other providers. The slightly cheaper pricing to other providers like Amazon in certain circumstances just isn't worth all the loss of functionality, ease of use and time for Azure's VM offerings.
If I have to take the time to purchase a USB drive
I don't even have to purchase a USB drive, I guess I made the right decisions in my life.
locate a store
If your Mac performs that badly that you can't locate one in less than a minute, you probably don't want the OS update. Glad I made the right decisions in my life when I chose my Mac.
travel there
It's a short walk for me, I'm really glad I made all the right decisions in my life.
wait for them to load the OS onto the drive then it's no longer free.
You could also just take your mac there and them update it for you, but that takes longer.
LOL. No thanks.
Yeah, I'm sorry. You just made poor life choices in every possible way; you can't be helped.
Realistically they should return 0.0 0.0, a nice point in the ocean.
They shouldn't do 0,0,0 when they know the IP is in the US, as they are now.
Realistically, the front end developers should have relied on the resolution field that said in those instances that it was only resolvable to 'country' instead of just showing the user specific long, lat coordinates that were provided in other database columns.
To be fair, these are people who are running a database company but don't understand the basic concept of NULL values.
To be fair, the MaxMind database has a field where this particular circumstance is and says the resolution is 'country' and whomever decided to implement the front end that reads this database decided to only depend on the lat, lon values. A NULL value in theory could be relevant if they didn't know the location, but they know the location is the USA.
And now their "fix" is to change the defaults to a more obvious wrong location.
Without changing the database format they're using and not extending it, what do you propose again?
Sigh.
That's my feeling when people don't even do the tiniest bit of research and make technical proposals based off assumptions.
I live in the UK and not even on the mainland and I have two Internet connections at home. VDSL2 connection from BT with 100mbit (30GBP), FTTH from Virgin with 200mbit (31.98GBP) and a mobile plan with 4g with unlimited data and unlimited tethering from Three (30GBP). No limits, no weird caps, no weird throttles, no mis-advertised speeds. While it might be true I have promotional rates, I always get promotional rates every year when I call in to renew my contracts.
So, just a note. I am platform agnostic, I run pretty much all major operating systems and I use them extensively.
This is helped by the fact that it's easy to package into a single easy-to-install OSX package that will work on all Macs. It's very versatile.
I don't know what your experience has been on this... However, I have been porting software to OS X for years and maintaining software. Now while, the concept of dragging and dropping a folder that is actually an application maybe easy, it does not magically mean the application will "work on all Macs". I've had the horrible experience of working with OpenGL on OS X, with it's messy core profiles, enforced legacy OpenGL 2.1. I've had the hell of dealing with framework versions that break things between different versions and I've had the hell of having to maintain my own libapr because Apple can't make it work sanely between different versions of OS X. But don't take my word for it, the fact that many developers have to make different builds for different versions of OS X should be telling you things just aren't that portable.
Mac OSX is very user-friendly, and is Unix. It's also sufficiently popular* that lots of vendors make Mac versions of their software.
I've found hardware support to be lacking a lot on OS X actually, for example, the amount of USB dongles I have for Bluetooth, wi-fi, SDR, USB serial adapters, USB capture cards and even a camera that does not work on OS X compared to Linux and Windows on the same hardware is pretty huge. I've found OS X to be somewhat, lacking when compared to desktop environments like KDE, where I can trivially enter a URL and protocol in practically any application and it supports accessing it through said protocol instead of requiring me to get some specialized file retrieval program. Then, having the expectation that my software won't break horribly between minor versions is something I just simply don't have on OS X, over the years I've had to switch between several different terminal applications, been forced to modify and recompile many applications because they stop working for a wide variety of reasons.
I wouldn't say a lot of vendors make OS X versions of their software though, a lot of OS X software vendors is/just/ for OS X from my own observation. However there are certain large software houses that do multi-platform too.
Relatively few vendors make Linux versions of their software, and there's more than one standard package manager for Linux.
But only one per distro and the major distros are LSB compliant, so there isn't any sort of excuse that you can't make a single package that works across all major desktop distros and if it's opensource, typically package maintainers will take your software and package it for you to be included as part of the distribution.
For most personal purposes, Mac OSX is better than Linux
I think that's subjective. If you just need a webbrowser, any office suite etc. I don't see how OS X really does any better. If you need specialist tools like Adobe Photoshop, sure, it's better suited to running that, as is Windows. For the most part, desktop environments like KDE have mastered plug and play, go (plug in a device, pops up a question as to what you want to do), in some respects, better than OS X and Windows has now. Hardware compatibility is now reaching a point where Linux ends up supporting a lot of hardware better than Windows and OS X despite the hardware having been originally made for one of those operating systems.
People who buy Macs tend to be the sort of people who spend extra to get a nicer computer
To be frank, my real world experience has heard many reasons why people have chosen a mac, but your reason is the first time I've heard it. Other ones I've heard include: - They only know how to use a Mac - The
Photo editing, photoshop (two different things), web browsing, spreadsheet, word processing presentations, movie editing, dvd creation, calendar (that works with my phone), etc. I don't want to think about this stuff, it's important but tangential to my work.
Yeah, application specific support like 'Photoshop' seems unlikely. Even with alternatives like Krita, it can't compete at being Photoshop, because it isn't Photoshop. Most of what you've mentioned is provided as out of the box experiences for quite a few years on a bunch of desktop distros.
Programming
Programming in bash seems a bit, old. On OS X, even I use xcode (or Eclipse, which handles OS X shortcuts poorly), on Linux, kdevelop or Eclipse.
I make high-end web applications in vertical markets, so I have a full dev environment on my Mac.
At my workplace, we've got IDE integration (including full debugging) with clean virtualized servers in the cloud in real time, so all development, testing, production essentially happens on identical environments with proper integration environments spun up with a few differences, the idea of having complete local dev for web applications/sites is a bit weird to me.
Apple's not trying to "take over the desktop"
I don't think there is a unified goal to "take over the desktop" on Linux either. But certainly there is an interest to improve it, I think.
There's no room for another Apple, because they're at the top 10%
When the task is to beat the next contender at usage first, I don't think it's being approached from viewing it if they're the 'top' or the 'bottom'.
And I contend that's easier to do if you can support Windows executables natively, because that's what's keeping people on Windows.
Honestly, with the big push to cloud providers and services, I don't think windows executables are going to be as big of a thing in the next ten years and considering how Lindows didn't really make much of a foot print despite all the marketing, I have high doubts that executable support is really going to be that 'killer feature'.
I kinda suspect that if Linux becomes a major desktop contender, it will be because of cloud services making the local desktop mostly irrelevant and cost cutting exercises by OEMs (not unlike with the EeePCs some years ago), which isn't really a great way to 'win' the desktop in my opinion.
Anyway, thanks for confirming my suspicions, I highly doubt that Linux will really be a real contender, at least for the next ten years without specific software suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office and Autodesk suites.
There are a large number of us power users who use Mac OS X because 1) it just works for stuff that I don't care about (like, 99% of what I do)
Which is...?
2) if I need to do something "heavier" I can drop to bash and do it because it's a Unix machine.
Such as...?
It's also nice to be able to hook my camera up and have my pictures load without figuring out which piece of software is good for that
Not an issue on major Linux desktop distros? Major DE handle that properly, this coming from the guy that uses a Nikon D3300, Sony Xperia Z5 etc.
Another essential part of Linux that's just going to have to happen is really simple and full Windows API compatibility
But OS X doesn't, so what is it about OS X that's acceptable that isn't on Linux exactly?
Yeah, but Apple doesn't do that with Macs! Okay, but they're also content with 10% of the desktop market. It's the top 10%, which is a nice place to be.
Linux isn't at 10% for desktops yet supposedly, so it seems silly to set pie in the sky goals.
It takes a Microsoft to make a GUI that makes what you used to know how to do obsolete.
As a platform agnostic user, I didn't really feel that in Windows Vista, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and then Windows 7 and Windows 10 felt like they were reverting to older UIs.
Seamless web browsing including media. Seamless email, contacts and calendaring. Gaming. The good stuff. Movies. USB gadgets that just work without discovering that required software is windows only.
Pretty much most of this already is a thing on Linux. But, the problem really stems from application specific support from what I've observed. People want to play a specific game, use a specific brand of applications (Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop) etc.
Darknets are cool, but any real security person knows that they are a solution to a different class of problem.
Indeed. If your problem is obtaining privacy and anonymity online use Freenet. If your problem obtaining a false sense of privacy and anomymity online, use Tor.
As such, many security minded people are now considering Cloudflare harmful.
Of course, any decent security person knows that using a darknet solution like the Freenet project is the way to go at the end of the day, nor Tor or other solutions to access regular website services.
Perhaps CloudFlare could eliminate CAPTCHAs for simple GETs, except when the malicious access issue is DoS, or a Risky Cookie is found in the HTTP request.
I do believe it's not presented for any statically cached content.
And then they can run HTTP trackers over Bittorent, oh wait!
or other protocol like Disruption Tolerant Networking or Named Data Networking where we add caches to all the nodes
You do realize that Cloud Flare does a lot of this, right?
The existence of cloudflare and other colocation providers are another example of the shift in the ultimate direction of reingineering.
I suspect that Cloud Flare will one of the leaders in such re-engineering actually..
If the generic caches were distributed across the middle of the network, then you solve the problem.
You've not seen a modern BGP setup of an ISP, have you?
Storage is cheap.
Try finding decent VPS providers with large amounts of storage for cheap. Hell, try finding online storage solutions that go into petabytes that are cheap... Because that's what the demand is.
Once we have DTN and/or NDN then Tor and Cloudflare will be irrelevant.
Your assuming that Cloudflare will look the same as it does today when that happens.
The content producers don't need to know what content you requested from the (mesh) network.
The problem here is that these sort of things break down where end2end encryption is involved and we are seeing a massive shift towards that with HTTPS becoming a lot more prominent. The days of when providers were happy to leave even small things unencrypted is no longer a thing.
Everyone is getting hooked on tracking users, but they forget how radio, TV, and newspapers got by without tracking end users for centuries.
While it's entirely possible static content maybe requested from cached resources, there is no reason why dynamic requests won't go through first before requesting static content. You're not really thinking any of this through, are you?
I'm sorry a moderator feels that this is a flame bait, but, seriously. I'm pretty certain I've seen a very similar message posted back in 2008. Is this now an Internet meme I haven't familiarized myself with?
You mean the social awkwardness associated with being discovered carrying a gun? I have two simpler and cheaper solutions.
I don't know, buying a gun that looks like a mobile phone seems like a simple solution to me.
Not carrying a gun at all. While this is my personal preference
I'm not invested in carrying guns personally.
If this becomes a thing, I do wonder how long it is until we start hearing people gunned down by police for pulling out their mobile phone and the excuse to shoot them was because they thought the phone was a transforming gun.
Slashdot Mirror
My Nikon SLR camera produces mov files for videos, but fortunately they're playable by pretty much everything, so it's not really a big issue.
Windows 7 and higher have had full native .mov support, so I don't think it's even necessary on Windows for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps Microsoft could work on the basics for their VM cloud services?
I don't know, like maybe... One click snapshot images?
Simple VM backup management?
Instead right now on Azure, they're requiring people to learn and write hundreds of lines in PowerShell scripts to do it. There aren't even working practical examples of how to do this on Azure RM and their own support doesn't know how to write the scripts themselves. The performance is surprisingly poor at the lowest system configurations, particularly because similar configurations else where are more performant. It's a travesty.
If this was a provider sitting on it's own, without the Microsoft name, nobody would use it. The API is terrible, the web interface is terrible, the PowerShell cmdlets are terrible.
You would be hard pressed to find anyone that would use this over other providers. The slightly cheaper pricing to other providers like Amazon in certain circumstances just isn't worth all the loss of functionality, ease of use and time for Azure's VM offerings.
Apple's iTunes.
I don't even have to purchase a USB drive, I guess I made the right decisions in my life.
If your Mac performs that badly that you can't locate one in less than a minute, you probably don't want the OS update. Glad I made the right decisions in my life when I chose my Mac.
It's a short walk for me, I'm really glad I made all the right decisions in my life.
You could also just take your mac there and them update it for you, but that takes longer.
Yeah, I'm sorry. You just made poor life choices in every possible way; you can't be helped.
Go to your local Apple store and get them to preload a copy on your USB drive.
When I try to run direct x 10 benchmarks on Windows 7, they typically crash. This is not an improvement.
You lied to me.
You stole my line! Only I'm allowed to tell APK he has a cool story!
APK, you said you were leaving Slashdot, what happened? What brought about your return?
IE6 saved a decade of developer efforts. Clearly we should go back.
In case you need emergency services. If you get a mobile, you don't even need a mobile plan/sim card for that.
What is the lat, lon to the nearest police department to the "United States" ?
They shouldn't do 0,0,0 when they know the IP is in the US, as they are now.
Realistically, the front end developers should have relied on the resolution field that said in those instances that it was only resolvable to 'country' instead of just showing the user specific long, lat coordinates that were provided in other database columns.
To be fair, the MaxMind database has a field where this particular circumstance is and says the resolution is 'country' and whomever decided to implement the front end that reads this database decided to only depend on the lat, lon values. A NULL value in theory could be relevant if they didn't know the location, but they know the location is the USA.
Without changing the database format they're using and not extending it, what do you propose again?
That's my feeling when people don't even do the tiniest bit of research and make technical proposals based off assumptions.
I live in the UK and not even on the mainland and I have two Internet connections at home. VDSL2 connection from BT with 100mbit (30GBP), FTTH from Virgin with 200mbit (31.98GBP) and a mobile plan with 4g with unlimited data and unlimited tethering from Three (30GBP). No limits, no weird caps, no weird throttles, no mis-advertised speeds. While it might be true I have promotional rates, I always get promotional rates every year when I call in to renew my contracts.
So, just a note. I am platform agnostic, I run pretty much all major operating systems and I use them extensively.
I don't know what your experience has been on this... However, I have been porting software to OS X for years and maintaining software. Now while, the concept of dragging and dropping a folder that is actually an application maybe easy, it does not magically mean the application will "work on all Macs". I've had the horrible experience of working with OpenGL on OS X, with it's messy core profiles, enforced legacy OpenGL 2.1. I've had the hell of dealing with framework versions that break things between different versions and I've had the hell of having to maintain my own libapr because Apple can't make it work sanely between different versions of OS X. But don't take my word for it, the fact that many developers have to make different builds for different versions of OS X should be telling you things just aren't that portable.
I've found hardware support to be lacking a lot on OS X actually, for example, the amount of USB dongles I have for Bluetooth, wi-fi, SDR, USB serial adapters, USB capture cards and even a camera that does not work on OS X compared to Linux and Windows on the same hardware is pretty huge. I've found OS X to be somewhat, lacking when compared to desktop environments like KDE, where I can trivially enter a URL and protocol in practically any application and it supports accessing it through said protocol instead of requiring me to get some specialized file retrieval program. Then, having the expectation that my software won't break horribly between minor versions is something I just simply don't have on OS X, over the years I've had to switch between several different terminal applications, been forced to modify and recompile many applications because they stop working for a wide variety of reasons.
I wouldn't say a lot of vendors make OS X versions of their software though, a lot of OS X software vendors is /just/ for OS X from my own observation. However there are certain large software houses that do multi-platform too.
But only one per distro and the major distros are LSB compliant, so there isn't any sort of excuse that you can't make a single package that works across all major desktop distros and if it's opensource, typically package maintainers will take your software and package it for you to be included as part of the distribution.
I think that's subjective. If you just need a webbrowser, any office suite etc. I don't see how OS X really does any better. If you need specialist tools like Adobe Photoshop, sure, it's better suited to running that, as is Windows. For the most part, desktop environments like KDE have mastered plug and play, go (plug in a device, pops up a question as to what you want to do), in some respects, better than OS X and Windows has now. Hardware compatibility is now reaching a point where Linux ends up supporting a lot of hardware better than Windows and OS X despite the hardware having been originally made for one of those operating systems.
To be frank, my real world experience has heard many reasons why people have chosen a mac, but your reason is the first time I've heard it. Other ones I've heard include:
- They only know how to use a Mac
- The
Yeah, application specific support like 'Photoshop' seems unlikely. Even with alternatives like Krita, it can't compete at being Photoshop, because it isn't Photoshop. Most of what you've mentioned is provided as out of the box experiences for quite a few years on a bunch of desktop distros.
Programming in bash seems a bit, old. On OS X, even I use xcode (or Eclipse, which handles OS X shortcuts poorly), on Linux, kdevelop or Eclipse.
At my workplace, we've got IDE integration (including full debugging) with clean virtualized servers in the cloud in real time, so all development, testing, production essentially happens on identical environments with proper integration environments spun up with a few differences, the idea of having complete local dev for web applications/sites is a bit weird to me.
I don't think there is a unified goal to "take over the desktop" on Linux either. But certainly there is an interest to improve it, I think.
When the task is to beat the next contender at usage first, I don't think it's being approached from viewing it if they're the 'top' or the 'bottom'.
Honestly, with the big push to cloud providers and services, I don't think windows executables are going to be as big of a thing in the next ten years and considering how Lindows didn't really make much of a foot print despite all the marketing, I have high doubts that executable support is really going to be that 'killer feature'.
I kinda suspect that if Linux becomes a major desktop contender, it will be because of cloud services making the local desktop mostly irrelevant and cost cutting exercises by OEMs (not unlike with the EeePCs some years ago), which isn't really a great way to 'win' the desktop in my opinion.
Anyway, thanks for confirming my suspicions, I highly doubt that Linux will really be a real contender, at least for the next ten years without specific software suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office and Autodesk suites.
Which is...?
Such as...?
Not an issue on major Linux desktop distros? Major DE handle that properly, this coming from the guy that uses a Nikon D3300, Sony Xperia Z5 etc.
But OS X doesn't, so what is it about OS X that's acceptable that isn't on Linux exactly?
Linux isn't at 10% for desktops yet supposedly, so it seems silly to set pie in the sky goals.
As a platform agnostic user, I didn't really feel that in Windows Vista, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 and then Windows 7 and Windows 10 felt like they were reverting to older UIs.
Pretty much most of this already is a thing on Linux. But, the problem really stems from application specific support from what I've observed. People want to play a specific game, use a specific brand of applications (Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop) etc.
Indeed. If your problem is obtaining privacy and anonymity online use Freenet. If your problem obtaining a false sense of privacy and anomymity online, use Tor.
Of course, any decent security person knows that using a darknet solution like the Freenet project is the way to go at the end of the day, nor Tor or other solutions to access regular website services.
I do believe it's not presented for any statically cached content.
And then they can run HTTP trackers over Bittorent, oh wait!
You do realize that Cloud Flare does a lot of this, right?
I suspect that Cloud Flare will one of the leaders in such re-engineering actually..
You've not seen a modern BGP setup of an ISP, have you?
Try finding decent VPS providers with large amounts of storage for cheap. Hell, try finding online storage solutions that go into petabytes that are cheap... Because that's what the demand is.
Your assuming that Cloudflare will look the same as it does today when that happens.
The problem here is that these sort of things break down where end2end encryption is involved and we are seeing a massive shift towards that with HTTPS becoming a lot more prominent. The days of when providers were happy to leave even small things unencrypted is no longer a thing.
While it's entirely possible static content maybe requested from cached resources, there is no reason why dynamic requests won't go through first before requesting static content. You're not really thinking any of this through, are you?
I'm sorry a moderator feels that this is a flame bait, but, seriously. I'm pretty certain I've seen a very similar message posted back in 2008. Is this now an Internet meme I haven't familiarized myself with?
I don't know, buying a gun that looks like a mobile phone seems like a simple solution to me.
I'm not invested in carrying guns personally.
If this becomes a thing, I do wonder how long it is until we start hearing people gunned down by police for pulling out their mobile phone and the excuse to shoot them was because they thought the phone was a transforming gun.