Please extend some tolerance to these people - they're clearly making a credible effort to emulate the commercial software sector by communicating in marketing bullspeak (which is especially difficult for native speakers of Ancient Geek) - so the occasional misunderstanding is inevitable.
E.g. when the TFA says:
Many of the official release announcements posted on kde.org contained the following text: "The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want."
What they are trying to say is "KDE 4.0 doesn't have all the user features in it yet - we're only releasing it so that developers can start working with the new libraries - users should stick with 3.5 for a while yet".
However, due to their inexperience with the subtleties of Bullspeak they've inadvertently used the "future speculative masturbatory" tense (by conjoining the word "innovation" with hyperbolic capitalization of "Free Desktop") thus indicating that the entire paragraph is intended to be glossed over and treated as a general endorsement - so its unsurprising that people have gone ahead and used 4.0 in user-facing systems.
The KDE developers should be praised for their attempt to attain synergy with the wider enterprise by leveraging the didactic techniques of content-neutral intercourse, and the community should exhibit greater empathy when this initiative leads to non-positive communication outcomes.
Did you understand that? Not even Microsoft has any product which implements the standard.
You seem to have the quaint notion that any debate by a government department of contractor over whether.docx is an ISO standard will be based on accurate information and rational argument by open-minded people who understand the technical issues.
Welcome to our planet, stranger!
The reality is that the ISO has handed Microsoft advocates a massive FUD weapon. Before, ODF was ISO certified,.doc wasn't. End of story. Now, the salesman can tell your pointy-haired boss (who's genes tell him that nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft anyway) that MS's ISO-certified OOXML format will leverage support for legacy documents without the potential loss of fidelity* associated with ODF without telling an actionable lie.
(* 'cos half of OOXML seems to boil down to "render this blob exactly like Office 97, right down to the leap-year bugs" - and MS are really going to pull out all the stops to ensure that their ODF implementation is absolutely rock-solid, right?)
Harrumph. Any more of this nonsense and Prices Slashed will come for you!
Actually, Pratchett has a much better potshot at religion in Small Gods, with less vitriol than Pullman and arguably better insight (people end up believing in the human institutions of religion instead of the gods they are supposed to represent - and those institutions can be far nastier than the gods!)
The Bromeliad is probably better for kids, though.
IIRC, the first book of that series made it pretty clear that the human lensmen were being created/bred by the aliens.
Yes, but the "first" and "second" books were written as cash-^H^H^H^H^H prequels. The main story arc from the original SF mags is 3,4,5,6. What's less explicable is why all the books start with a prologue which pretty much spoilers the whole story...
Definitely. The language is too complex for most. It's also highly Christian. As in, the protagonist is a Christian fighting the forces of Satan with the aid of angels.
Nothing wrong with reading CS Lewis provided you go on to read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials for balance (protagonist fighting the forces of God and the church with the aid of witches and fallen angels...)
PS: Beware - do not place His Dark Materials on the shelf next to Narnia or the Space trilogy - they will annihilate each other in a burst of dark matter.
"We're going to standardise on [insert favorite desktop application platform/framework] for all our desktop application develompent unless there's a strong technical argument for using something else" might be sensible.
"We're going to standardise on [insert favorite DBMS] for all our server-based SQL database work unless there's a pressing need to use something else" = fine.
"We're going to standardise on a single combination of development tools, language, and framework for absolutely everything" = we're not sure what a "framework" is but the salesman was very persuasive and had a nicer suit than our senior software engineer - so we're going to spend a shitload of money despite the objections from our developers and then go into denial about any problems. Update your resume now.
Next, people complain about Linux usability? apt-get install mplayer k3b, etc? It is not harder, just different. In fact, having all of the software most people need in one place makes Linux easier for most people in many ways
Its no good Linux being "not harder" than Windows - to win market share on a non-level playing field it has to be dramatically easier. Windows has its monopoly position, so it doesn't have to compete on equal terms.
Linux distros are getting better all the time (e.g. by trying to be helpful when you open an MP3 instead of leaving you to figure out that you need to enable the unclean repository and apt-get install install gstreamer-extensions or whatever).
One problem with Linux is "vertical learning curve" syndrome - the "friendly" tools are great when they work but have an extremely limited domain (because techies don't use them) and in some cases will "break" configs that they don't understand. Step outside that domain and you are deep into config files. Couple of examples:
EEE PC: the nice friendly "Wireless Networks" tool doesn't understand about encryption keys. You can set up wireless networks and save keys using the full-blown "Networking" tool, but if anybody tries to use "Wireless Networks" it deletes them. Simply sloppy.
EEE PC again: Nice luser-friendly add/remove/update tool, but mine just told me I needed to do an "apt-get -f" on my package database. No problem for me, but this would befuddle a non-techie - it knew what had to be done, why didn't it friggin' do it!?
Gnome: (may be fixed) similar to the EEE issue - set a fixed IP address for your ethernet and, every time you start up Gnome, the friendly network chooser widget (which only understands DHCP) would helpfully unset it. Found the answer somewhere deep on a Gnome bulletin board: its not a bug because it says on a post-it on the developer's fridge that the widget didn't support fixed IP addresses and any moron should be able to telepathically intuit that "sudo apt-get uninstall network-manager" would get rid of it (despite there being no obvious way to even know the name of the widget). Duh. "If you don't understand/support it don't change it" should be SOP for this type of tool.
there are curently 4 formats which are fairly easy to install on a ubuntu/debian system.deb (double click)
scripted binary tarball (extract (GUI) then run./install (CLI))
unscripted binary tarball (extract and move to/opt, then install menus (all GUI, but you need a clue).rpm (run alien (CLI, for now), click on deb)
If your on an RPM based system then i assume you can just double click an rpm and run unalien on a deb.
So that's 4 different ways of doing it on just one "family" of distros, 2 of which require a CLI and one "a clue" as you put it.
QED.
(Will now go and see if FF3 is in the repo for Hardy Heron, yet).
PS: don't get me wrong, I like Linux - I wouldn't run a webserver on anything else and it runs my home EMAIL system and my MythTV PVR and the desktop distros have made impressive progress, but to really compete they need to kick sand in the face of Mac and Windows to dispel the meme that "linux is for techies".
From the article:
"When you install Firefox 3, which is as simple as downloading and extracting the tarball someplace like/opt and running the./firefox script"
This is slightly off topic, and maybe I've been using a mac too long, but this sounds anything but an easy install. Surely installing something as basic as a web browser has been simplified by now.
You'd think so, wouldn't you. To challenge the MS monopoly, you have to appeal to masses of users who don't know the difference between hard disk capacity and RAM and, in serious cases, can only copy a file by opening it in office and doing "save as".
Sadly, a lot of techie types are solipsists who can't comprehend the idea that something which is obvious and trivial to them may be unfamiliar and baffling to others, which is something that has really crippled Linux.
Before I get flamed: most modern Linux distros are linked to a substantial and well-maintained online repository of packages that have been correctly compiled and configured, and it is usually point-and-click easy to add/remove/upgrade these applications: in the fullness of time, Firefox 3 will probably be available through this route in the fullness of time. What's lacking is a single, consistent way of running/installing other packages - either through Windows-style installers or a Mac-style.app directory (for self-contained applications). Well, there is, and its called the source tarball - trouble is, that's not for everyone.
That explains it - just put an atomic vector plotter in the tea, hook it up to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain and feed in the probability of this being a load of hogwash and - tadah! the infinite improbability drive!
You just need to send a small city's population on a big ship, travel for 5 years to the nearest solar system
Small problem - you need a solar system with habitable planets which you can get to in 5 years... Nearest stars (AFAIK not yet known to have planets) are over 4 light years away - so that's an average speed of 0.8c. Tricky - even without FTL you're still gonna need that unobtainium-powered wehaven'tthoughtofityet engine.
Of course, at that speed you have to ask "5 years for who?".
Plus, if your civilization can build spaceships that can sustain large crews for years in interstellar space, it would be a hell of a lot easier to build space habitats that could sustain large populations in your own solar system, with raw materials all around and a star for energy. There's no real motive for moving on to the next star until the Oort cloud is all shopping malls and hotel chains.
Even if panspermia was a viable idea, it would only say something about where life arose. It doesn't answer the question of how life arose.
Well, it would offer a solution to the Fermi Paradox, i.e. if even one civilization set out to colonize the galaxy they could do so in a surprisingly few millions of years - so where are they?
Answer: Aaahh-chooh!!! There's Waldo!
Unless someone finds an end-run around Relativity, interstellar travel is going to be slow, so the main motive behind colonization would be to spread your genome - and if you want self-replicating machines, why re-invent the wheel? (See Titan by Stephen Baxter).
Of course, the converse is that the Fermi Paradox arises from the false assumption that advanced civilizations would behave like "bacteria with spaceships" and "go exponential" (Greg Egan, Diaspora).
PS: its fun and stimulating to speculate about such things provided you don't get them confused with scientific truth. Hence I cite SF novels rather than papers in Nature!
What we need is a GUI revolution. The iPhone offers one, with its multitouch innovations. As does Nintendo's Wii, with its unconventional new controllers.
The success of the Wii owes much to Nintendo's brave (but wise) decision to persue a completely new customer base and leave the adolescent male (of all ages) market to MS and Sony.
The problem with the established PC/Mac market is that a big chunk of it have established skills and don't want (or don't think they want) a radical new GUI - they want a better way of running MS Office.
Its also worth wondering why the original Apple (after Xerox) GUI caught on. Now, I'm not going to dismiss all the psychology about desktop metaphors, but the big obvious factor that seems to get overlooked is simply this:
Before MacOS and Win3.1, if you wanted to (say) quit an application, it might be:q! or Ctrl-X-C or Ctrl-K-Q or Esc-X or/Q or/X or/E or QUIT or EXIT or BYE or. ESC and 9 from the menu or... Every fricking program was different. The IP wars of the time were not over software patents, they were over "look and feel" copyright of the basic menu structures.
After MacOS/Win3.1 it was File -> Exit. Ditto for Open, Save, Print... and the resulting dialogue boxes were all common, too. Instead of having to RTFM simply to find out how to open a file, everything worked the same way. It didn't matter if it was logically inconsistent to have "Exit" on the "File" menu you only had to find out once!
One problem now is we've drifted back to the application-specific GUI, as everybody invents their own system of dockable palettes, customizable tool bars, drawers, panes and other guff...
It is rumored that 10.6 is going to be the end of PPC support. I suppose it's time, although there are some PPC machines that are less than 4 years old.
Well, the oldest G5 machines are now 3 years old. By the time:
10.6 actually has to be released (6 months?)
The majority of Mac owners get round to upgrading (12 months?)
New versions of major apps start requiring 10.6 (most don't require 10.5 yet! - another year?)
Software houses drop critical updates for old packages (??).
...those machines are going to be just about ready for retirement. However, (3) would probably happen anyway because developers will get sick of testing everything on PPC machines - and the Word 5.1 club aren't exactly a lucrative source of income...
The cost of a product isn't just its marginal cost of production. You also have to cover the costs of design.
There are other factors which make software different from "tangible" products, though:
If you spend years designing the proverbial better mousetrap, that will only cost you money if you're a paid mousetrap designer. At the end of this, you end up with a prototype: you still have to put it into production, and will probably have to commit to a substantial production run before you can get a distribution deal - that's the bit that costs phone numbers and will have you selling your soul to investors, and that's the bit that will ruin you if someone copies and undercuts your product.
Software may take years to design, but once that is done, the product is "finished". For a few hundred bucks you have website and a PayPal link to sell it on line... Even before the internet, the cost of bulk copying was negligible. This is why Open Source is viable. I suspect it is also why we have (or have had) huge software companies with stacks of cash: they launched out of garages without selling their soul to investors. Unfortunately, now, they've accrued a huge corporate infrastructure which needs to be kept in the manner to which it is accustomed - hence the "every pirate copy is lost revenue" ethos replacing the reality of the early days when every paid for copy was almost pure gross profit.
Really? With xrandr, it's trivial to get multiple monitors working.
Well, if users have to work out that they need to find a tool called "xrandr" in otder to make their second monitor work properly then I'm afraid I rest my case.
Also, does it do dual head properly (i.e. the way Mac OS has done it since the middle ages with a primary screen and a secondary screen).
I can just set up a simple script
And that textbook example of vi syndrome*, ladies and gentlemen, is why Linux has yet to make it big on the desktop...
(* the tendency to prioritize cool, advanced features over basic usability for non-techies).
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
How about letting me plug in two monitors (possibly with different resolutions) and - with the click of a few checkboxes - configuring them as a primary display and a secondary display so that I can drag windows between them, but new windows and dialogues are sized to fit & centered on the primary display?
Yes, I know X can support multiple monitors (but so far I've always ended up editing xorg,conf to make it happen) - but the options seem to be (a) mirroring, (b) one big desktop so new windows and dialogues straddle both screens or (c) two totally separate desktops which don't let you drag windows across.
Now, a respectable fraction of the users in the building where I work are using multiple monitors. I don't think many of them are trying to let two users share a PC...
Also, although the network transparency of X is brilliant if you're using something minimal like xfce, try using it with Gnome or KDE some day (it sort of works, but to get anything seamless looking you have to use xnest, and the eye candy slows things down so much that you might as well use VNC).
Finally - the "look how crap Windows is" argument is irrelevant: Windows has a dominant market/brainshare position and MS have a giant pile of gold to tide them over any downturn: they can afford to be crap. Linux still has to win friends and influence people.
I know this doesn't affect your point, but a pencil balancing on its end would be an example of an unstable, not metastable equilibrium.
I intended to include "(the flat end, not the point!)" but forgot. Although, if you do manage to balance a pencil on its point without it getting knocked over by the next air molecule then either there's enough of a flat on the end to make it metastable or you are living in Mechanics 101 universe (so be careful on that frictionless floor!)
(basically, most of the stuff Gore or Stern recommend).
Trouble is, it seems like a lot of people do feel lucky or, possibly, don't care because they think the world was created in 4004BC and the Rapture is coming anyday soon. Gore and co. do help to promote the opposing view but they do say some dumb things (the whole ice core data chart furore seemed to stem from Gore's over-egging of the pudding rather than anything claimed by scientists).
The problem with tax-based solutions is that the usual point of tax is to extract the maximum milk with the minimum moo - whereas for a proper eco-tax the moo is the thing... so they end up as the status quo + some handy extra tax revenue. There's not going to be a nice stroke-of-a-pen solution to this - it will need multiple approaches.
Of course, even if global warming is a fallacy, oil is still a finite resource being used at an accelerating rate, Nuclear is completely safe until something goes wrong, and Mr Fusion still needs one or two little details sorting out - so cutting back a bit might be a good idea.
>More CO2 => increased temperatures => more greenery => more CO2 absorption => decreased temperatures?
Exactly. Amazing how it all balances out.
Yes folks, we're here because the biosphere is in a state of equilibrium, with any change tending to produce a compensating effect.
Thing about equilibria is that some of them are stable - no matter how far you push them they'll roll back - wile others are metastable - push them a bit too far and crash. Think of a pencil balanced on end...
The biosphere may have weathered past storms (although some of them were bad news for many species) but its never dealt with a dominant species with sophisticated tools intent on digging up and burning every last bit of carbon they can winkle out of the crust.
Now, maybe the biosphere is stable enough to cope - maybe it isn't, but what with all this confusion and irrational debate, we don't really know, so the question is: do we feel lucky?
In 1981, when I took it, the age 16 maths exam included simple calculus, matrices and the beginnings of set and group theory (plus, you still had to be able to long division and all that).
In 2008, those are all gone - and even the quadratic equation question is split up into two handy steps for you: (1) factorise this equation (2) now solve it.
To be fair, the matrices, set and group theory were presented as silly things that you had to learn to do to pass the exam - that much hasn't changed.
Of course, back then only about 10% of UK the population went to Uni and you could get into a half decent one with 3 Bs and Cs in the age 18 exams.
Now, 40%+ of the population go to Uni and yet more and more places are insisting on straight As. Clearly there has been an unprecedented surge in human evolution! The signs are plain at any UK university: kids with strange integral-sign birthmarks, men shooting laser beams from their eyes, girls with white streaks in their hair and a predilection for yellow spandex watched over by aging professors with English accents everywhere... Er, no - not really. Apart from the professors with English accents of course (there may be a logical explanation for that).
Just a few technical details to sort out, first:-)
...and, of course, if your antimatter-powered airship crashes, the phrase "Oh, the Humanity!" is going to be even more applicable. Maybe without the "the".
Slashdot Mirror
Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4.
Revealed at last - the common ancestry of all roadies and sound engineers...
Please extend some tolerance to these people - they're clearly making a credible effort to emulate the commercial software sector by communicating in marketing bullspeak (which is especially difficult for native speakers of Ancient Geek) - so the occasional misunderstanding is inevitable.
E.g. when the TFA says:
Many of the official release announcements posted on kde.org contained the following text: "The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want."
What they are trying to say is "KDE 4.0 doesn't have all the user features in it yet - we're only releasing it so that developers can start working with the new libraries - users should stick with 3.5 for a while yet".
However, due to their inexperience with the subtleties of Bullspeak they've inadvertently used the "future speculative masturbatory" tense (by conjoining the word "innovation" with hyperbolic capitalization of "Free Desktop") thus indicating that the entire paragraph is intended to be glossed over and treated as a general endorsement - so its unsurprising that people have gone ahead and used 4.0 in user-facing systems.
The KDE developers should be praised for their attempt to attain synergy with the wider enterprise by leveraging the didactic techniques of content-neutral intercourse, and the community should exhibit greater empathy when this initiative leads to non-positive communication outcomes.
Did you understand that? Not even Microsoft has any product which implements the standard.
You seem to have the quaint notion that any debate by a government department of contractor over whether .docx is an ISO standard will be based on accurate information and rational argument by open-minded people who understand the technical issues.
Welcome to our planet, stranger!
The reality is that the ISO has handed Microsoft advocates a massive FUD weapon. Before, ODF was ISO certified, .doc wasn't. End of story. Now, the salesman can tell your pointy-haired boss (who's genes tell him that nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft anyway) that MS's ISO-certified OOXML format will leverage support for legacy documents without the potential loss of fidelity* associated with ODF without telling an actionable lie.
(* 'cos half of OOXML seems to boil down to "render this blob exactly like Office 97, right down to the leap-year bugs" - and MS are really going to pull out all the stops to ensure that their ODF implementation is absolutely rock-solid, right?)
Narnia : Pullman : Bromeliad :: thesis : antithesis : synthesis
Peter
Harrumph. Any more of this nonsense and Prices Slashed will come for you!
Actually, Pratchett has a much better potshot at religion in Small Gods, with less vitriol than Pullman and arguably better insight (people end up believing in the human institutions of religion instead of the gods they are supposed to represent - and those institutions can be far nastier than the gods!)
The Bromeliad is probably better for kids, though.
IIRC, the first book of that series made it pretty clear that the human lensmen were being created/bred by the aliens.
Yes, but the "first" and "second" books were written as cash-^H^H^H^H^H prequels. The main story arc from the original SF mags is 3,4,5,6. What's less explicable is why all the books start with a prologue which pretty much spoilers the whole story...
Definitely. The language is too complex for most. It's also highly Christian. As in, the protagonist is a Christian fighting the forces of Satan with the aid of angels.
Nothing wrong with reading CS Lewis provided you go on to read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials for balance (protagonist fighting the forces of God and the church with the aid of witches and fallen angels...)
PS: Beware - do not place His Dark Materials on the shelf next to Narnia or the Space trilogy - they will annihilate each other in a burst of dark matter.
"We're going to standardise on [insert favorite desktop application platform/framework] for all our desktop application develompent unless there's a strong technical argument for using something else" might be sensible.
"We're going to standardise on [insert favorite DBMS] for all our server-based SQL database work unless there's a pressing need to use something else" = fine.
"We're going to standardise on a single combination of development tools, language, and framework for absolutely everything" = we're not sure what a "framework" is but the salesman was very persuasive and had a nicer suit than our senior software engineer - so we're going to spend a shitload of money despite the objections from our developers and then go into denial about any problems. Update your resume now.
Here's another quote: "You cannot improve that which you cannot measure."
And another: "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"
A corrolary would be that the only way you can measure is to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.
Unfortunately, some manager types would solve that by banning oranges and bananas.
Its no good Linux being "not harder" than Windows - to win market share on a non-level playing field it has to be dramatically easier. Windows has its monopoly position, so it doesn't have to compete on equal terms.
Linux distros are getting better all the time (e.g. by trying to be helpful when you open an MP3 instead of leaving you to figure out that you need to enable the unclean repository and apt-get install install gstreamer-extensions or whatever).
One problem with Linux is "vertical learning curve" syndrome - the "friendly" tools are great when they work but have an extremely limited domain (because techies don't use them) and in some cases will "break" configs that they don't understand. Step outside that domain and you are deep into config files. Couple of examples:
It is...
If your on an RPM based system then i assume you can just double click an rpm and run unalien on a deb.
So that's 4 different ways of doing it on just one "family" of distros, 2 of which require a CLI and one "a clue" as you put it.
QED.
(Will now go and see if FF3 is in the repo for Hardy Heron, yet).
PS: don't get me wrong, I like Linux - I wouldn't run a webserver on anything else and it runs my home EMAIL system and my MythTV PVR and the desktop distros have made impressive progress, but to really compete they need to kick sand in the face of Mac and Windows to dispel the meme that "linux is for techies".
From the article: "When you install Firefox 3, which is as simple as downloading and extracting the tarball someplace like /opt and running the ./firefox script"
This is slightly off topic, and maybe I've been using a mac too long, but this sounds anything but an easy install. Surely installing something as basic as a web browser has been simplified by now.
You'd think so, wouldn't you. To challenge the MS monopoly, you have to appeal to masses of users who don't know the difference between hard disk capacity and RAM and, in serious cases, can only copy a file by opening it in office and doing "save as".
Sadly, a lot of techie types are solipsists who can't comprehend the idea that something which is obvious and trivial to them may be unfamiliar and baffling to others, which is something that has really crippled Linux.
Before I get flamed: most modern Linux distros are linked to a substantial and well-maintained online repository of packages that have been correctly compiled and configured, and it is usually point-and-click easy to add/remove/upgrade these applications: in the fullness of time, Firefox 3 will probably be available through this route in the fullness of time. What's lacking is a single, consistent way of running/installing other packages - either through Windows-style installers or a Mac-style .app directory (for self-contained applications). Well, there is, and its called the source tarball - trouble is, that's not for everyone.
That explains it - just put an atomic vector plotter in the tea, hook it up to the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain and feed in the probability of this being a load of hogwash and - tadah! the infinite improbability drive!
Small problem - you need a solar system with habitable planets which you can get to in 5 years... Nearest stars (AFAIK not yet known to have planets) are over 4 light years away - so that's an average speed of 0.8c. Tricky - even without FTL you're still gonna need that unobtainium-powered wehaven'tthoughtofityet engine.
Of course, at that speed you have to ask "5 years for who?".
Plus, if your civilization can build spaceships that can sustain large crews for years in interstellar space, it would be a hell of a lot easier to build space habitats that could sustain large populations in your own solar system, with raw materials all around and a star for energy. There's no real motive for moving on to the next star until the Oort cloud is all shopping malls and hotel chains.
Well, it would offer a solution to the Fermi Paradox, i.e. if even one civilization set out to colonize the galaxy they could do so in a surprisingly few millions of years - so where are they?
Answer: Aaahh-chooh!!! There's Waldo!
Unless someone finds an end-run around Relativity, interstellar travel is going to be slow, so the main motive behind colonization would be to spread your genome - and if you want self-replicating machines, why re-invent the wheel? (See Titan by Stephen Baxter).
Of course, the converse is that the Fermi Paradox arises from the false assumption that advanced civilizations would behave like "bacteria with spaceships" and "go exponential" (Greg Egan, Diaspora).
PS: its fun and stimulating to speculate about such things provided you don't get them confused with scientific truth. Hence I cite SF novels rather than papers in Nature!
The success of the Wii owes much to Nintendo's brave (but wise) decision to persue a completely new customer base and leave the adolescent male (of all ages) market to MS and Sony.
The problem with the established PC/Mac market is that a big chunk of it have established skills and don't want (or don't think they want) a radical new GUI - they want a better way of running MS Office.
Its also worth wondering why the original Apple (after Xerox) GUI caught on. Now, I'm not going to dismiss all the psychology about desktop metaphors, but the big obvious factor that seems to get overlooked is simply this:
Before MacOS and Win3.1, if you wanted to (say) quit an application, it might be :q! or Ctrl-X-C or Ctrl-K-Q or Esc-X or /Q or /X or /E or QUIT or EXIT or BYE or. ESC and 9 from the menu or... Every fricking program was different. The IP wars of the time were not over software patents, they were over "look and feel" copyright of the basic menu structures.
After MacOS/Win3.1 it was File -> Exit. Ditto for Open, Save, Print... and the resulting dialogue boxes were all common, too. Instead of having to RTFM simply to find out how to open a file, everything worked the same way. It didn't matter if it was logically inconsistent to have "Exit" on the "File" menu you only had to find out once!
One problem now is we've drifted back to the application-specific GUI, as everybody invents their own system of dockable palettes, customizable tool bars, drawers, panes and other guff...
Well, the oldest G5 machines are now 3 years old. By the time:
...those machines are going to be just about ready for retirement. However, (3) would probably happen anyway because developers will get sick of testing everything on PPC machines - and the Word 5.1 club aren't exactly a lucrative source of income...
There are other factors which make software different from "tangible" products, though:
If you spend years designing the proverbial better mousetrap, that will only cost you money if you're a paid mousetrap designer. At the end of this, you end up with a prototype: you still have to put it into production, and will probably have to commit to a substantial production run before you can get a distribution deal - that's the bit that costs phone numbers and will have you selling your soul to investors, and that's the bit that will ruin you if someone copies and undercuts your product.
Software may take years to design, but once that is done, the product is "finished". For a few hundred bucks you have website and a PayPal link to sell it on line... Even before the internet, the cost of bulk copying was negligible. This is why Open Source is viable. I suspect it is also why we have (or have had) huge software companies with stacks of cash: they launched out of garages without selling their soul to investors. Unfortunately, now, they've accrued a huge corporate infrastructure which needs to be kept in the manner to which it is accustomed - hence the "every pirate copy is lost revenue" ethos replacing the reality of the early days when every paid for copy was almost pure gross profit.
Well, if users have to work out that they need to find a tool called "xrandr" in otder to make their second monitor work properly then I'm afraid I rest my case.
Also, does it do dual head properly (i.e. the way Mac OS has done it since the middle ages with a primary screen and a secondary screen).
I can just set up a simple scriptAnd that textbook example of vi syndrome*, ladies and gentlemen, is why Linux has yet to make it big on the desktop...
(* the tendency to prioritize cool, advanced features over basic usability for non-techies).
How about letting me plug in two monitors (possibly with different resolutions) and - with the click of a few checkboxes - configuring them as a primary display and a secondary display so that I can drag windows between them, but new windows and dialogues are sized to fit & centered on the primary display?
Yes, I know X can support multiple monitors (but so far I've always ended up editing xorg,conf to make it happen) - but the options seem to be (a) mirroring, (b) one big desktop so new windows and dialogues straddle both screens or (c) two totally separate desktops which don't let you drag windows across.
Now, a respectable fraction of the users in the building where I work are using multiple monitors. I don't think many of them are trying to let two users share a PC...
Also, although the network transparency of X is brilliant if you're using something minimal like xfce, try using it with Gnome or KDE some day (it sort of works, but to get anything seamless looking you have to use xnest, and the eye candy slows things down so much that you might as well use VNC).
Finally - the "look how crap Windows is" argument is irrelevant: Windows has a dominant market/brainshare position and MS have a giant pile of gold to tide them over any downturn: they can afford to be crap. Linux still has to win friends and influence people.
I intended to include "(the flat end, not the point!)" but forgot. Although, if you do manage to balance a pencil on its point without it getting knocked over by the next air molecule then either there's enough of a flat on the end to make it metastable or you are living in Mechanics 101 universe (so be careful on that frictionless floor!)
(basically, most of the stuff Gore or Stern recommend).Trouble is, it seems like a lot of people do feel lucky or, possibly, don't care because they think the world was created in 4004BC and the Rapture is coming anyday soon. Gore and co. do help to promote the opposing view but they do say some dumb things (the whole ice core data chart furore seemed to stem from Gore's over-egging of the pudding rather than anything claimed by scientists).
The problem with tax-based solutions is that the usual point of tax is to extract the maximum milk with the minimum moo - whereas for a proper eco-tax the moo is the thing... so they end up as the status quo + some handy extra tax revenue. There's not going to be a nice stroke-of-a-pen solution to this - it will need multiple approaches.
Of course, even if global warming is a fallacy, oil is still a finite resource being used at an accelerating rate, Nuclear is completely safe until something goes wrong, and Mr Fusion still needs one or two little details sorting out - so cutting back a bit might be a good idea.
Exactly. Amazing how it all balances out.
Yes folks, we're here because the biosphere is in a state of equilibrium, with any change tending to produce a compensating effect.
Thing about equilibria is that some of them are stable - no matter how far you push them they'll roll back - wile others are metastable - push them a bit too far and crash. Think of a pencil balanced on end...
The biosphere may have weathered past storms (although some of them were bad news for many species) but its never dealt with a dominant species with sophisticated tools intent on digging up and burning every last bit of carbon they can winkle out of the crust.
Now, maybe the biosphere is stable enough to cope - maybe it isn't, but what with all this confusion and irrational debate, we don't really know, so the question is: do we feel lucky?
Well, do yah?
If people say "math" they're probably from the USA.
If people say "maths" they're probably from the UK.
If they appear to like Math/maths and are not posting as "anonymous coward" then they're probably not from either.
In 1981, when I took it, the age 16 maths exam included simple calculus, matrices and the beginnings of set and group theory (plus, you still had to be able to long division and all that).
In 2008, those are all gone - and even the quadratic equation question is split up into two handy steps for you: (1) factorise this equation (2) now solve it.
To be fair, the matrices, set and group theory were presented as silly things that you had to learn to do to pass the exam - that much hasn't changed.
Of course, back then only about 10% of UK the population went to Uni and you could get into a half decent one with 3 Bs and Cs in the age 18 exams.
Now, 40%+ of the population go to Uni and yet more and more places are insisting on straight As. Clearly there has been an unprecedented surge in human evolution! The signs are plain at any UK university: kids with strange integral-sign birthmarks, men shooting laser beams from their eyes, girls with white streaks in their hair and a predilection for yellow spandex watched over by aging professors with English accents everywhere... Er, no - not really. Apart from the professors with English accents of course (there may be a logical explanation for that).
Just a few technical details to sort out, first :-)
...and, of course, if your antimatter-powered airship crashes, the phrase "Oh, the Humanity!" is going to be even more applicable. Maybe without the "the".