>>On the other hand, despite improvements Linux faces real obstacles. It can still be a nightmare for home users to install and, unless bought as part of a commercial package such as Sun's, it does not come with a help-desk. Worse, there are still too few applications. Fewer than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux. Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing. In theory these programs could all be written but, without a huge increase in users, code-writers will not bother.
First of all, linux is EASIER to install than windows. Newbie friendly distributions boast things like installs in 3 steps. That whole "difficult to install" argument is bullshit. If most Windows users had to install windows themselves and partion their hard drives, we'd hear arguments of windows being hard to install. This will become a non-issue when More OEM's offer sub 500 dollar pc's with linux on them.
>unless bought as part of a commercial package such as Sun's, it does not come with a help-desk.
Ok, and how is that any different than windows? If you buy an OEM copy of windows or a bootleg copy, you're not going to get any official support. So how is downloading an iso off of linuxiso and not getting official/phone support any different? If you want support, you buy the official product from someone like SuSe or redhat.
>Worse, there are still too few applications. Fewer than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux.
That is a moot point. The only reason is because linux doesn't have enough market share. As the market share increases so do the number of applications. The two will slowly rise together. People don't complain Solaris has a limited number of applications, so why do they complain about Linux?
>Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing.
BS. Check freshmeat.
Many of the arguments made against linux on the desktop are 5 year old stereotypes. It's like some of these stories aren't even researched. There was a recent study done that took a group of people whom had never used computers before. One group was assigned to learn how to use Windows and another group Linux. The findings were they both had a very similiar experience. Most of these articles make the argument "Linux isn't good because I'm not used to it and I don't know it". They complain about the things windows has and it doesn't have. But as a linux user, I look at all the things Linux has that Windows doesn't.
I don't know if anyone else remembers what Futurama was replaced with. Oliver Beane. One of the shittiest shows ever. People joke about Fox executives being a bunch of monkeys that have no clue about programming, but it's really true. Every single truly good show Fox gets it cancels. What is it replaced with? Midgets, people injuring themselves, TV bloopers, weddings, police chases, reality shows, absolute shit. The ratings may be high for those shows, but they are only high because they are extreme. Once people become censatized they must become more extreme. It's an arms race. Just look at the wedding shows of 3 years ago compared to todays. There's nothing about these shows that have lasting value or anything that's fundamentally entertaining about them.
Zoidberg, now he's entertaining. The rubber band is on the other claw now!!
There are actually about 5 other known port knocking implementations. And it's such an easy thing to do, I'm sure many others have written their own private implemenations.
RPM was really only meant to be used for installations. It somehow evolved into people distributing rpms and that's how we got into rpm hell. Really though, pretty much everything else is better than rpm. Debian's rules make sure you're not going to get impossible to find dependencies. Portage, well... portage kicks ass. It would be nice if Suse, Red Hat, or Mandrake got rid of rpm and adopted a portage like system. Autopackage will be nice once it reaches stable. Autoconf is even better than rpm. At least with autoconf it actually checks gcc -lstuff as opposed to the central database that gets broken the second you install a package from source.
I saw a study awhile back that confirms what you say. They studied those on flat rate utilities (such as dorms, house certain house rentals, certain apartments, etc.) and those whom pay by usage (i.e. home owners). The results were people who have to pay for it by usage typically used as much as 30% less than those on fixed rate plans.
Many people lose sight of what it's really about. Safety. The faster you go, the less time you have to react, the more generally unsafe you are.
But I agree, I CAN NOT FOR A FUCKING SECOND stand cops who are unsafe drivers just because they know they aren't going to get ticketed. In Florida, (my hometown to be exact) the cops here are fucking terrible. They abuse their lights and sirens like no other. They'll turn 'em on just to run red lights, then turn 'em back off once they are across the intersection. They will drive in the left lane to turn into shopping centers because they don't want to make a u-turn at the light. They tail gate you like no other, and the second you speed up it's ticket time. Their speeding is appauling. I've seen cops weave lanes like maniacs, just to turn into the Wendy's drive thru.
If that really becomes a problem all they'd have to do is put a camera at the light. If you run it and you are speeding, your insane ticket will stop you from ever doing that again.
I totally agree here. This is a great policy. If implemented properly, this will piss off enough speeders to slow down near the intersection (where many accidents happen). The worst speeders are going to have radar detectors anyway so trying to ticket them has become a less than perfect endeavour. What you can't forget in all this is SPEEDING KILLS. I remember when I lived near downtown Jacksonville all the business types with their midlife crisis cars weaving in and out of traffic going 20 over the limit because their being late for something was more important than everyone else's safety.
For the average workplace, most employees are not using XP. It's just too expensive to upgrade. Espically since a good deal of jobs need nothing more than 98 or 2000. And upgrading to XP means many of those pentium 2 200mhz boxen chugging along fine with Windows98 will need new hardware. But it really just comes down to cost. Upgrading a thousand boxes at an insane cost just for pretty cartoony icons? It's simply not worth the cost.
That's not the point. MS has tried to lead the public to believe that there's never been an instince of exploit code before their patch. And obviously if there's exploit code out there, something already "really bad" has happened. This comes after the witty worm spread before ISS had patches for their products.
On a related note, MS pretty much NEVER releases advisory's on their own will before a patch. There almost always has to be a 3rd party that has said they are going to go public, or there have to be exploits or information in the wild. With that information, I wonder if this exploit is related to the windows source leak. The source leak had a lot of IE code, and if there are exploits in the wild before MS could even send out an advisory. That would lead me to the possiblity that the windows source leak could be the source of this one.
I fail to see how saying people with thick accents are hard to understand qualifies as flamebait. It's been scientifically proven that it's difficult to understand people with accents different from you are difficult to understand. Southern people (such as myself) can understand southerners with thick accents just fine, but try and get them to understand a thick new york accent and they are going to have difficulty.
That's a great point. Just because p2p is on the rise and cd sales are down DOESN'T mean p2p caused it. Maybe consumers are getting smarter. Maybe people are fed up with greedy execs. Maybe I want to be able to have the quality of a Coltrane box set every time! I mean, the same argument could be made as to why VHS sales are down. Just because they correlate doesn't mean one caused the other.
I used to work at an American call center awhile back. We were in combination with an Indian call center. I'd get irate customers almost in tears because they just spent an hour on the phone with someone they could barely understand and I'm the first American they could speak to all night. Nothing against Indians, but you can not have people with thick accents working phones. It's bad enough when a southern company's customers have to call the mid-west to try and communicate, it's 10x worse when the person isn't a native english speaker. I've had my share of frustrations lately too. It takes twice as long to get information out of someone you can't understand.
I think the solution should be a stab at microsoft. Maybe, "Bill Gates has no penis". Obviously they would have to create a cartoonish character that has the name bill gates, and that would be the particular bill gates in question. So there would be no confusion.
These reports are so dumb. In high school, I remember learning that averages don't give a good representation, because extremes will skew the numbers. The median is a better representation. Funny how some people don't seem to remember that. By Forrester's methods of research, they could come to the conslusion that the average american has one testicle (statisticly true btw).
heh, reading a lot of these, no one seems to care that real is on the downfall. Let's see, a bloated, ad/spy ware filled piece of software, who's native format really only works for voice steams, who's company has focused on everything but their core business, and who tries to trick customers into thinking there isn't a free version of their software. Gee, who wouldn't love them!
As much as I hate MS, windows media player and the related format are much superior to real. Anyway, I think I'll stick to mplayer!
ok, you want to play the analogy game... Say I want to buy a car, the manufactors of car "A" murdered a bunch of people to make the car, the manufactors of car "B" didn't murder a bunch of people, but car "B" isn't as good. By your logic of "I don't care how hard the engineers worked or how smart they are, only what the software can or can't do", buying a car a bunch of people were killed in the making of would be perfectly ok...
That's exactly why using analogies in debate is so idiotic. You twist the analogy to suit your needs and lose all of the original context.
One of the big problems with Linux's hardware support isn't really the fault of the OS. There are really only a handful of hardware manufactors writing linux drivers for their products. So most device drivers are written by kernel hackers, not the OEM. They are really doing a fantastic job with what they have to work with. OEM's have faught kicking and screaming to either release drivers or open hardware specs to help developers. If Microsoft had the level of co-operation Linux gets, they would be in the same situtation (or worse). Microsoft doesn't write the bulk of drivers for devices that work with windows. I hardly think you can blame Linux for OEM's not co-operating.
If this is such a problem, why has there been such little effort to actually fix it. There have been reactionary measures (patches, anti-virus), and overkill security that's years away (security at the hardware level). A HUGE chunk of viruses could be wiped out if
a) no more html email. Period. There's no reason for it other than making email look pretty. I've never run into a situtation where an informational email couldn't live without html.
b) No more attachments. Email isn't a file transfer protocol. There are many many many other safe ways to send files. Email was never meant to send binary attachments anyway. The RFC doesn't allow it. To comply, a dirty hack was created in which binary data is turned into plain text. But it's obvious email wasn't meant to be used in that fashion.
c) no more IE. No other piece of software has enabled so many viruses, adware, spyware, and shitware. IE is the malware enabler. I don't care if you use Opera, Mozilla, whatever, because pretty much everything is better than IE.
d) quit blaming the damn users. MS has designed an operating system to be used by the simpliest people on earth. Those whom have absolutly no computer experience at all. How can you blame them then when they open viruses? If you are going to design an operating system to be used by the masses, then you must implement security measures as if the user is clueless, because usually they are. Because you can open a virus without a warning, yet you can't modify your "Windows" directory without a myriad of warnings, makes me wonder how high a priority security really is to MS.
The idea of open source is a great one, but I swear, those with the loudest mouths about it usually aren't even contributors (developers, doc writers, etc.), they are people with way too much damn time on their hands. They are the equivalent of the mainstream press's talking heads. They really don't add any technical prospective, just a bunch of heated debate based on weak facts. I think these people are some of the biggest reasons open source has been relativly slow to acceptance. Because a select crowd of loud mouths make the whole community look like a bunch of zealots.
People want it both ways. They want a product to have a bunch of useless features that add little to the product, and they want that product to be extremely easy to use. If you want to improve usability a great deal instantly, reduce the complexity of GUI interfaces. When you've got so much clutter of useless options, it becomes inefficent to do anything (obviously this applies to all software). Why should it take me just as long to do simple things as it does complex ones. Their solutions? Clutter up the interface even more with commonly used functions at the forefront. That's one of the big reasons I still prefer commandline programs. They are so simple. I want to run nmap on a host? nmap hostname. boom, done. In comparasion, using nmapfe, it takes me generally 3-4 times as long just to do simple scans. If you want to make programs more usable, make it easy to do the easy things, and make it possible to do the difficult ones.
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>>On the other hand, despite improvements Linux faces real obstacles. It can still be a nightmare for home users to install and, unless bought as part of a commercial package such as Sun's, it does not come with a help-desk. Worse, there are still too few applications. Fewer than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux. Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing. In theory these programs could all be written but, without a huge increase in users, code-writers will not bother.
First of all, linux is EASIER to install than windows. Newbie friendly distributions boast things like installs in 3 steps. That whole "difficult to install" argument is bullshit. If most Windows users had to install windows themselves and partion their hard drives, we'd hear arguments of windows being hard to install. This will become a non-issue when More OEM's offer sub 500 dollar pc's with linux on them.
>unless bought as part of a commercial package such as Sun's, it does not come with a help-desk.
Ok, and how is that any different than windows? If you buy an OEM copy of windows or a bootleg copy, you're not going to get any official support. So how is downloading an iso off of linuxiso and not getting official/phone support any different? If you want support, you buy the official product from someone like SuSe or redhat.
>Worse, there are still too few applications. Fewer than 1% of all computer games, for instance, work on Linux.
That is a moot point. The only reason is because linux doesn't have enough market share. As the market share increases so do the number of applications. The two will slowly rise together. People don't complain Solaris has a limited number of applications, so why do they complain about Linux?
>Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing.
BS. Check freshmeat.
Many of the arguments made against linux on the desktop are 5 year old stereotypes. It's like some of these stories aren't even researched. There was a recent study done that took a group of people whom had never used computers before. One group was assigned to learn how to use Windows and another group Linux. The findings were they both had a very similiar experience. Most of these articles make the argument "Linux isn't good because I'm not used to it and I don't know it". They complain about the things windows has and it doesn't have. But as a linux user, I look at all the things Linux has that Windows doesn't.
You're telling me you didn't laugh at let's fighting love? and butters getting a throwing star in his eye? or "you got served"?
I don't know if anyone else remembers what Futurama was replaced with. Oliver Beane. One of the shittiest shows ever. People joke about Fox executives being a bunch of monkeys that have no clue about programming, but it's really true. Every single truly good show Fox gets it cancels. What is it replaced with? Midgets, people injuring themselves, TV bloopers, weddings, police chases, reality shows, absolute shit. The ratings may be high for those shows, but they are only high because they are extreme. Once people become censatized they must become more extreme. It's an arms race. Just look at the wedding shows of 3 years ago compared to todays. There's nothing about these shows that have lasting value or anything that's fundamentally entertaining about them.
Zoidberg, now he's entertaining. The rubber band is on the other claw now!!
There are actually about 5 other known port knocking implementations. And it's such an easy thing to do, I'm sure many others have written their own private implemenations.
RPM was really only meant to be used for installations. It somehow evolved into people distributing rpms and that's how we got into rpm hell. Really though, pretty much everything else is better than rpm. Debian's rules make sure you're not going to get impossible to find dependencies. Portage, well... portage kicks ass. It would be nice if Suse, Red Hat, or Mandrake got rid of rpm and adopted a portage like system. Autopackage will be nice once it reaches stable. Autoconf is even better than rpm. At least with autoconf it actually checks gcc -lstuff as opposed to the central database that gets broken the second you install a package from source.
3rd monitary payout from them in a pretty short period of time. Makes me wonder if they think they can just pay everyone off (has worked so far).
I saw a study awhile back that confirms what you say. They studied those on flat rate utilities (such as dorms, house certain house rentals, certain apartments, etc.) and those whom pay by usage (i.e. home owners). The results were people who have to pay for it by usage typically used as much as 30% less than those on fixed rate plans.
Many people lose sight of what it's really about. Safety. The faster you go, the less time you have to react, the more generally unsafe you are.
But I agree, I CAN NOT FOR A FUCKING SECOND stand cops who are unsafe drivers just because they know they aren't going to get ticketed. In Florida, (my hometown to be exact) the cops here are fucking terrible. They abuse their lights and sirens like no other. They'll turn 'em on just to run red lights, then turn 'em back off once they are across the intersection. They will drive in the left lane to turn into shopping centers because they don't want to make a u-turn at the light. They tail gate you like no other, and the second you speed up it's ticket time. Their speeding is appauling. I've seen cops weave lanes like maniacs, just to turn into the Wendy's drive thru.
If that really becomes a problem all they'd have to do is put a camera at the light. If you run it and you are speeding, your insane ticket will stop you from ever doing that again.
I totally agree here. This is a great policy. If implemented properly, this will piss off enough speeders to slow down near the intersection (where many accidents happen). The worst speeders are going to have radar detectors anyway so trying to ticket them has become a less than perfect endeavour. What you can't forget in all this is SPEEDING KILLS. I remember when I lived near downtown Jacksonville all the business types with their midlife crisis cars weaving in and out of traffic going 20 over the limit because their being late for something was more important than everyone else's safety.
For the average workplace, most employees are not using XP. It's just too expensive to upgrade. Espically since a good deal of jobs need nothing more than 98 or 2000. And upgrading to XP means many of those pentium 2 200mhz boxen chugging along fine with Windows98 will need new hardware. But it really just comes down to cost. Upgrading a thousand boxes at an insane cost just for pretty cartoony icons? It's simply not worth the cost.
That's not the point. MS has tried to lead the public to believe that there's never been an instince of exploit code before their patch. And obviously if there's exploit code out there, something already "really bad" has happened. This comes after the witty worm spread before ISS had patches for their products.
On a related note, MS pretty much NEVER releases advisory's on their own will before a patch. There almost always has to be a 3rd party that has said they are going to go public, or there have to be exploits or information in the wild. With that information, I wonder if this exploit is related to the windows source leak. The source leak had a lot of IE code, and if there are exploits in the wild before MS could even send out an advisory. That would lead me to the possiblity that the windows source leak could be the source of this one.
I fail to see how saying people with thick accents are hard to understand qualifies as flamebait. It's been scientifically proven that it's difficult to understand people with accents different from you are difficult to understand. Southern people (such as myself) can understand southerners with thick accents just fine, but try and get them to understand a thick new york accent and they are going to have difficulty.
That's a great point. Just because p2p is on the rise and cd sales are down DOESN'T mean p2p caused it. Maybe consumers are getting smarter. Maybe people are fed up with greedy execs. Maybe I want to be able to have the quality of a Coltrane box set every time! I mean, the same argument could be made as to why VHS sales are down. Just because they correlate doesn't mean one caused the other.
I used to work at an American call center awhile back. We were in combination with an Indian call center. I'd get irate customers almost in tears because they just spent an hour on the phone with someone they could barely understand and I'm the first American they could speak to all night. Nothing against Indians, but you can not have people with thick accents working phones. It's bad enough when a southern company's customers have to call the mid-west to try and communicate, it's 10x worse when the person isn't a native english speaker. I've had my share of frustrations lately too. It takes twice as long to get information out of someone you can't understand.
I think the solution should be a stab at microsoft. Maybe, "Bill Gates has no penis". Obviously they would have to create a cartoonish character that has the name bill gates, and that would be the particular bill gates in question. So there would be no confusion.
These reports are so dumb. In high school, I remember learning that averages don't give a good representation, because extremes will skew the numbers. The median is a better representation. Funny how some people don't seem to remember that. By Forrester's methods of research, they could come to the conslusion that the average american has one testicle (statisticly true btw).
heh, reading a lot of these, no one seems to care that real is on the downfall. Let's see, a bloated, ad/spy ware filled piece of software, who's native format really only works for voice steams, who's company has focused on everything but their core business, and who tries to trick customers into thinking there isn't a free version of their software. Gee, who wouldn't love them!
As much as I hate MS, windows media player and the related format are much superior to real. Anyway, I think I'll stick to mplayer!
ok, you want to play the analogy game... Say I want to buy a car, the manufactors of car "A" murdered a bunch of people to make the car, the manufactors of car "B" didn't murder a bunch of people, but car "B" isn't as good. By your logic of "I don't care how hard the engineers worked or how smart they are, only what the software can or can't do", buying a car a bunch of people were killed in the making of would be perfectly ok...
That's exactly why using analogies in debate is so idiotic. You twist the analogy to suit your needs and lose all of the original context.
>A lot of software, particularly on PCs, was designed in the days before networks.
hrmm... Windows comes to mind
One of the big problems with Linux's hardware support isn't really the fault of the OS. There are really only a handful of hardware manufactors writing linux drivers for their products. So most device drivers are written by kernel hackers, not the OEM. They are really doing a fantastic job with what they have to work with. OEM's have faught kicking and screaming to either release drivers or open hardware specs to help developers. If Microsoft had the level of co-operation Linux gets, they would be in the same situtation (or worse). Microsoft doesn't write the bulk of drivers for devices that work with windows. I hardly think you can blame Linux for OEM's not co-operating.
You actually do take a considerable performence hit running AV software.
If this is such a problem, why has there been such little effort to actually fix it. There have been reactionary measures (patches, anti-virus), and overkill security that's years away (security at the hardware level). A HUGE chunk of viruses could be wiped out if
a) no more html email. Period. There's no reason for it other than making email look pretty. I've never run into a situtation where an informational email couldn't live without html.
b) No more attachments. Email isn't a file transfer protocol. There are many many many other safe ways to send files. Email was never meant to send binary attachments anyway. The RFC doesn't allow it. To comply, a dirty hack was created in which binary data is turned into plain text. But it's obvious email wasn't meant to be used in that fashion.
c) no more IE. No other piece of software has enabled so many viruses, adware, spyware, and shitware. IE is the malware enabler. I don't care if you use Opera, Mozilla, whatever, because pretty much everything is better than IE.
d) quit blaming the damn users. MS has designed an operating system to be used by the simpliest people on earth. Those whom have absolutly no computer experience at all. How can you blame them then when they open viruses? If you are going to design an operating system to be used by the masses, then you must implement security measures as if the user is clueless, because usually they are. Because you can open a virus without a warning, yet you can't modify your "Windows" directory without a myriad of warnings, makes me wonder how high a priority security really is to MS.
The idea of open source is a great one, but I swear, those with the loudest mouths about it usually aren't even contributors (developers, doc writers, etc.), they are people with way too much damn time on their hands. They are the equivalent of the mainstream press's talking heads. They really don't add any technical prospective, just a bunch of heated debate based on weak facts. I think these people are some of the biggest reasons open source has been relativly slow to acceptance. Because a select crowd of loud mouths make the whole community look like a bunch of zealots.
People want it both ways. They want a product to have a bunch of useless features that add little to the product, and they want that product to be extremely easy to use. If you want to improve usability a great deal instantly, reduce the complexity of GUI interfaces. When you've got so much clutter of useless options, it becomes inefficent to do anything (obviously this applies to all software). Why should it take me just as long to do simple things as it does complex ones. Their solutions? Clutter up the interface even more with commonly used functions at the forefront. That's one of the big reasons I still prefer commandline programs. They are so simple. I want to run nmap on a host? nmap hostname. boom, done. In comparasion, using nmapfe, it takes me generally 3-4 times as long just to do simple scans. If you want to make programs more usable, make it easy to do the easy things, and make it possible to do the difficult ones.