I've tried AmaroK, and prefer JuK because it does everything I want it to do and doesn't have bells and whistles that I don't need. I've dealt with far too many zealots pushing their favourite widget-polisher; it's great that you like amarok, but don't try to convert me.
Um, Bioware isn't in Vancouver, they're in Edmonton. Which, incidentally, is known for its grade A Alberta beef, generally considered superiour to corn-fed texas beef.:P
That is the 64 dollar question, right there. Dell apparently agrees; they sell it, but they certainly aren't confident enough in it to link to those linux systems from their front page. So, techies are confident with it; Dell and non-techies aren't. Perhaps it has something to do with all the FUD; maybe once the SCO case is finally over, Dell will open up. Or maybe it has to do with duration; the windows brand has been out there as "good" since win3.1, over 10 years of desktop usage, and MS uses that inertia to their advantage. Apple relied heavily on existing branding, both their own and that of BSD, to make sure OSX was trusted.
Linux has no such thing though; even as far as Unices go, it's a relative newcomer. What I said about linux being ready is true, but hasn't been for long. It might just take a few years of people hearing "linux does that" before the brand is established enough to be trusted.
You're right that the CLI is where you go if you really want to get something done, but that's just because the CLI is more powerful than any GUI could ever be. "A picture is worth 1000 words, but it is rarely the thousand you want". But your average user doesn't need nor want that extra power, and are intimidated by it even though they can do everything they need in the existing GUI apps. How can we fix this? It's the extra complexity that is scary, so perhaps we just need to improve things further so that the CLI is needed even less?
It doesn't matter what version of linux you run, if it has a package manager, you can find the right package and the right executable. I can install a new version of a program just by knowing its name; tell me how Windows provides anything even remotely that easy. Running a linux distro without a good package manager? You can download the same source code as everyone else and create the "Right" executable yourself.
"something as simple as a CPU temp monitoring app, turned out to be a nightmare."
Hmm. "apt-get install ksensors ktemperature". Or do it through Adept if you want a GUI; search for "temperature", click on the package you want (it shows the descriptions), click on "install", click on "commit changes". Again, far, far simpler than installing things in windows.
"Ease of use, ease of finding apps, ease of installing said apps."
If I can find and install the apps you are complaining about in less time than it took to write this comment, I think you are spreading FUD.
"MPlayer, for example: An app for watching movies, is command-line. "
You're right, mplayer sucks. Now how about Totem, VLC, Kaffeine, or Xine, all of which I have installed and all of which have nicer GUIs than Windows Media Player? This is not 1998; Linux *has* easy-to-use applications. Easier than the windows equivalents, in many cases. Examples:
K3B: CD/DVD burning, easier and more user-friendly than Nero JuK: music collection player/manager, on the same level as iTunes, and *far* better than WMP. Adept: package manager. windows equivalent: the "add/remove programs" dialog box, which is stone age. Konserve: easy, simple backup tool. Windows equivalent: none?
A couple of other things: removable USB drives work wonderfully in linux (ubuntu, at least); to remove such a think I right click and choose "safely remove". The equivalent action in winXP takes at least 4 clicks through a bizarre and confusing popup that shows USB hubs. CD/DVD drives are treated just as easily in linux.
While my list is KDE-heavy and ubuntu-heavy, that is because I use KDE/Kubuntu. a Gnome user could likely list even more apps that are just as easy to use (Totem, for one).
"Most non-tech users don't even know Windows has a command line. "
Indeed, I can do everything from my GUI desktop in linux as well. Again, this isn't 1998; the linux command line is still present and is still invaluable, but in 2006, Linux *is* ready for the desktop.
Why not add a separate moderation system for stories? it could be as simple as being able to mark each story as a dupe or an advertisement, or a troll. It wouldn't even have to do anything; just give people the chance to register their disgust without posting an entire comment. People are obviously trying to get this across, and giving them some other way to do it should help reduce the number of redundant "dupe!" comments.
Personally, I think slashdot's moderation system works quite well; there will be abuse and off-topic discussion no matter what you do. Thanks for all your hard work!
Yes, you *can* do such things using the windows XP installer. But they are painful and non-inuitive. Why should I have to hit 'r' during any OS install? What is this, vi?
For what it's worth, I installed a copy of XP on an already-partitioned system a month or two back. It took three days, ebcause the installer kept Blue Screening. I eventually discovered that it was because it was trying to read data from an unformatted partition. Seriously, getting a hexdump for something that simple should never happen.
No matter how painful a linux install may be, I have never been as frustrated as I was by XP. It was my first time installing XP, which emans that I experienced exactly what this article tried to convey.
As has already been said, this is not a buffer overflow, or a bug in the code. The problem is that the WMF *standard* says that media files can contain code, which can download things off of the internet without user intervention, and this is all hunky-dory. There *is* no Unix/X11 equivalent; any equivalents would be the OGG media formats, or maybe an XML document format. And, as far as I know, all of the open data formats were not specifically designed to allow arbitrary code execution. This is why this flaw is so bad: Microsoft *specifically allowed* this, and now it is being used by bad people. Surprise.
The inevitable patch will likely just make the system libraries ignore that particular bit of the WMF spec, which is a band-aid, not a solution.
Because you were going to log into gmail anyway? If you have better ways to get your RSS, then that's good for you. But some people will prefer seeing their RSS in gmail, and that's good for them. Why do you need to be so negative?
The first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated on April 15, 1872 in thanks for the recovery of the future King Edward VII from a serious illness. The next Thanksgiving didn't occur until 1879 when it was celebrated on a Thursday in November.
As for it being celebrated in October, it has more to do with Canada having a shorter growing season and that celebrating the harvest makes more sense near the end of harvest season in october. The holiday did bounce around a lot, but I don't think that Armistice day was the sole reason for the move to october.
"It's what you would expect with a consumer electronics instrument of this complexity.... Par for the course."
Can you imagine Panasonic or Toshiba using that excuse regarding a stereo? No. These are consumer-grade electronics, which should Just Work. Bugginess is par for the course in computers because Microsoft has convinced people of that; they are apparently trying to do the same with consumer electronics. If someone's stereo kept rebooting/hanging in the first 2 days that they got it, and they heard about other people having the same problem, widespread or not, they would go get a different brand.
Re:Is anyone else sad this caught on?
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
So, what better technologies would you recommend? SOAP? Something else entirely?
The best are the ones who insist that records sound better because they are analog, but then they play them through their digital stereo. There's just no reasoning with some people.
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 0
Um, it is exploiting flaws in *Microsoft's* products. Yes, sony was evil to do this, but Microsoft is clearly implicated in this whole mess. This is not a Sony rootkit running on Nintendo or on Linux; this is a sony rootkit exploiting holes in Microsoft Windows.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
"not to long ago likened mad cow disease to a new sort of plague with predictions of obscene death rates when in reality it was statistically low."
It wasn't statistically low; it was statistically insignificant.
Links? Slow down there, sonny. We don't need any of your fancy tables formatting or background colours. Lynx lets you browse the web the way it was meant to be browsed, without the bells *or* whistles!
Yeah, I've noticed that the forums/etc are pretty much useless. Jsut a bunch of people shouting questions into the void. As you said, just like a proprietary product.
Surprisingly, adding "-blog" to your search query will filter out the vast majority of the crap. I wonder if there's a way to automatically add that to every query...
I'm not sure why everyone claims that VS is a good editor. Dozens of better editors exist; vi and emacs as the best of them. They have syntax highlighting. They have regexps. They have bracket matching/highlighting. Hell, my vim install even has tab-completion of variables/etc, analagous to intellisense but less obnoxious. The editor in Visual Studio is really not all that good of an editor; it is in fact the one thing I hate most about VS.
Agreed, bad coders will write bad code in any language. My point is that perl at least provides the tainted/untainted concept; PHP does not even have that concept.
Exactly; if a person needs an IDE in order to understand the code, then that person is not a programmer, they are an IDE operator. IDEs are the assembly line of the programming world; you can get cheaper, less skilled labour to produce something adequate using it. I wouldn't say that they necessarily "rot the brain", but they do keep many people from ever improving beyond the level of being an IDE operator.
The same is true even if the software costs money; a $60k/year salary will always be the expensive bit, whether you're using BSD or Windows. Except that with Windows, you have to pay for the software too...
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried AmaroK, and prefer JuK because it does everything I want it to do and doesn't have bells and whistles that I don't need. I've dealt with far too many zealots pushing their favourite widget-polisher; it's great that you like amarok, but don't try to convert me.
Um, Bioware isn't in Vancouver, they're in Edmonton. Which, incidentally, is known for its grade A Alberta beef, generally considered superiour to corn-fed texas beef. :P
That is the 64 dollar question, right there. Dell apparently agrees; they sell it, but they certainly aren't confident enough in it to link to those linux systems from their front page. So, techies are confident with it; Dell and non-techies aren't. Perhaps it has something to do with all the FUD; maybe once the SCO case is finally over, Dell will open up. Or maybe it has to do with duration; the windows brand has been out there as "good" since win3.1, over 10 years of desktop usage, and MS uses that inertia to their advantage. Apple relied heavily on existing branding, both their own and that of BSD, to make sure OSX was trusted.
Linux has no such thing though; even as far as Unices go, it's a relative newcomer. What I said about linux being ready is true, but hasn't been for long. It might just take a few years of people hearing "linux does that" before the brand is established enough to be trusted.
You're right that the CLI is where you go if you really want to get something done, but that's just because the CLI is more powerful than any GUI could ever be. "A picture is worth 1000 words, but it is rarely the thousand you want". But your average user doesn't need nor want that extra power, and are intimidated by it even though they can do everything they need in the existing GUI apps. How can we fix this? It's the extra complexity that is scary, so perhaps we just need to improve things further so that the CLI is needed even less?
It doesn't matter what version of linux you run, if it has a package manager, you can find the right package and the right executable. I can install a new version of a program just by knowing its name; tell me how Windows provides anything even remotely that easy. Running a linux distro without a good package manager? You can download the same source code as everyone else and create the "Right" executable yourself.
"something as simple as a CPU temp monitoring app, turned out to be a nightmare."
Hmm. "apt-get install ksensors ktemperature". Or do it through Adept if you want a GUI; search for "temperature", click on the package you want (it shows the descriptions), click on "install", click on "commit changes". Again, far, far simpler than installing things in windows.
"Ease of use, ease of finding apps, ease of installing said apps."
If I can find and install the apps you are complaining about in less time than it took to write this comment, I think you are spreading FUD.
"MPlayer, for example: An app for watching movies, is command-line. "
You're right, mplayer sucks. Now how about Totem, VLC, Kaffeine, or Xine, all of which I have installed and all of which have nicer GUIs than Windows Media Player? This is not 1998; Linux *has* easy-to-use applications. Easier than the windows equivalents, in many cases. Examples:
K3B: CD/DVD burning, easier and more user-friendly than Nero
JuK: music collection player/manager, on the same level as iTunes, and *far* better than WMP.
Adept: package manager. windows equivalent: the "add/remove programs" dialog box, which is stone age.
Konserve: easy, simple backup tool. Windows equivalent: none?
A couple of other things: removable USB drives work wonderfully in linux (ubuntu, at least); to remove such a think I right click and choose "safely remove". The equivalent action in winXP takes at least 4 clicks through a bizarre and confusing popup that shows USB hubs. CD/DVD drives are treated just as easily in linux.
While my list is KDE-heavy and ubuntu-heavy, that is because I use KDE/Kubuntu. a Gnome user could likely list even more apps that are just as easy to use (Totem, for one).
"Most non-tech users don't even know Windows has a command line. "
Indeed, I can do everything from my GUI desktop in linux as well. Again, this isn't 1998; the linux command line is still present and is still invaluable, but in 2006, Linux *is* ready for the desktop.
Why not add a separate moderation system for stories? it could be as simple as being able to mark each story as a dupe or an advertisement, or a troll. It wouldn't even have to do anything; just give people the chance to register their disgust without posting an entire comment. People are obviously trying to get this across, and giving them some other way to do it should help reduce the number of redundant "dupe!" comments.
Personally, I think slashdot's moderation system works quite well; there will be abuse and off-topic discussion no matter what you do. Thanks for all your hard work!
Yes, you *can* do such things using the windows XP installer. But they are painful and non-inuitive. Why should I have to hit 'r' during any OS install? What is this, vi?
For what it's worth, I installed a copy of XP on an already-partitioned system a month or two back. It took three days, ebcause the installer kept Blue Screening. I eventually discovered that it was because it was trying to read data from an unformatted partition. Seriously, getting a hexdump for something that simple should never happen.
No matter how painful a linux install may be, I have never been as frustrated as I was by XP. It was my first time installing XP, which emans that I experienced exactly what this article tried to convey.
As has already been said, this is not a buffer overflow, or a bug in the code. The problem is that the WMF *standard* says that media files can contain code, which can download things off of the internet without user intervention, and this is all hunky-dory. There *is* no Unix/X11 equivalent; any equivalents would be the OGG media formats, or maybe an XML document format. And, as far as I know, all of the open data formats were not specifically designed to allow arbitrary code execution. This is why this flaw is so bad: Microsoft *specifically allowed* this, and now it is being used by bad people. Surprise.
The inevitable patch will likely just make the system libraries ignore that particular bit of the WMF spec, which is a band-aid, not a solution.
Because you were going to log into gmail anyway? If you have better ways to get your RSS, then that's good for you. But some people will prefer seeing their RSS in gmail, and that's good for them. Why do you need to be so negative?
I agree entirely. It's nice to see Windows finally getting security features that have been in Unix since the 70s. That's only what, 40 years late?
The first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated on April 15, 1872 in thanks for the recovery of the future King Edward VII from a serious illness. The next Thanksgiving didn't occur until 1879 when it was celebrated on a Thursday in November.
n _e.cfm
As for it being celebrated in October, it has more to do with Canada having a shorter growing season and that celebrating the harvest makes more sense near the end of harvest season in october. The holiday did bounce around a lot, but I don't think that Armistice day was the sole reason for the move to october.
http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/cpsc-ccsp/jfa-ha/actio
"It's what you would expect with a consumer electronics instrument of this complexity .... Par for the course."
Can you imagine Panasonic or Toshiba using that excuse regarding a stereo? No. These are consumer-grade electronics, which should Just Work. Bugginess is par for the course in computers because Microsoft has convinced people of that; they are apparently trying to do the same with consumer electronics. If someone's stereo kept rebooting/hanging in the first 2 days that they got it, and they heard about other people having the same problem, widespread or not, they would go get a different brand.
So, what better technologies would you recommend? SOAP? Something else entirely?
The best are the ones who insist that records sound better because they are analog, but then they play them through their digital stereo. There's just no reasoning with some people.
Um, it is exploiting flaws in *Microsoft's* products. Yes, sony was evil to do this, but Microsoft is clearly implicated in this whole mess. This is not a Sony rootkit running on Nintendo or on Linux; this is a sony rootkit exploiting holes in Microsoft Windows.
"not to long ago likened mad cow disease to a new sort of plague with predictions of obscene death rates when in reality it was statistically low."
It wasn't statistically low; it was statistically insignificant.
Links? Slow down there, sonny. We don't need any of your fancy tables formatting or background colours. Lynx lets you browse the web the way it was meant to be browsed, without the bells *or* whistles!
Yeah, I've noticed that the forums/etc are pretty much useless. Jsut a bunch of people shouting questions into the void. As you said, just like a proprietary product.
Surprisingly, adding "-blog" to your search query will filter out the vast majority of the crap. I wonder if there's a way to automatically add that to every query...
Your vote is worth exactly as much as everyone else's. If you want it to be worth more, try bribing your representatives.
"Customer Relationship Management", apparently. Though that doesn't really explain what is actually *does*...
I'm not sure why everyone claims that VS is a good editor. Dozens of better editors exist; vi and emacs as the best of them. They have syntax highlighting. They have regexps. They have bracket matching/highlighting. Hell, my vim install even has tab-completion of variables/etc, analagous to intellisense but less obnoxious. The editor in Visual Studio is really not all that good of an editor; it is in fact the one thing I hate most about VS.
Agreed, bad coders will write bad code in any language. My point is that perl at least provides the tainted/untainted concept; PHP does not even have that concept.
Exactly; if a person needs an IDE in order to understand the code, then that person is not a programmer, they are an IDE operator. IDEs are the assembly line of the programming world; you can get cheaper, less skilled labour to produce something adequate using it. I wouldn't say that they necessarily "rot the brain", but they do keep many people from ever improving beyond the level of being an IDE operator.
Just as soon as they discover oil there.
The same is true even if the software costs money; a $60k/year salary will always be the expensive bit, whether you're using BSD or Windows. Except that with Windows, you have to pay for the software too...