Sorry, back here in reality Theora's quality is at least on par with H.264 with the same size. But thanks for your attempt at FUD, though.
So... you linked to the Theora developer's site to support a Theora developer's claims that Theora was superior to competitors. And then you accuse him of FUD?
Nice.
The test you linked to, BTW, is crap. No triangle tests, no A/B testing, etc. Just one guy who uploaded and downloaded a sample from YouTube (the encoder and encoding parameters of which he did not know) and compared it to a Theora encode that he did using some rather... "interesting" settings, most notably this: "A keyframe interval of 250 frames was used for the Theora encoding."
A 250 frame keyframe rate? Are you kidding me?! I don't know what YouTube's using for its keyframe interval, but I guarangoddamntee you it's lower than that. That's a keyframe every 10 seconds. Let's try an encode with H.264 with that interval and see how it measures up to Theora, hm?
Look, I'm all for using open formats rather than closed ones, but citing a wildly flawed, extremely limited casual test as proof of your contender's superiority just reeks of desperation. Theora's pretty good for what it is: an open source continuation of an old codec that was donated because its commercial competitors had surpassed it. The OSS community's done a good job of improving it and evolving it, and it's great to even have an open-source video codec -- but claiming that it's superior is just flat-out false.
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
That's not really as relevant here as you might think.
There's a difference between being unable to rely on a particular piece of software being installed when webmasters are given carte blanche in terms of format (as was the case in the early days with object embedding) and simply relying on a platform-specific implementation to support a clearly-understood de-facto standard.
A better analogy would be the 'img' tag. There are three or four common image formats that quickly became the de-facto standard (despite the fact that the spec never mentioned file formats, IIRC.) Browsers rely on platform-specific implementations to handle decoding, etc.
Honestly, there's no reason not to do this for Firefox. The *only* reason to treat the video tag differently is ideology. As far as ideology goes, I agree with Mozilla -- an 'open' web is better than a patent-encumbered one, by far.
That said, at some point you have to be realistic. Mozilla simply doesn't have the clout necessary to force companies like Google to start using a technically-inferior solution (Theora -- yes, it *is* inferior.) While it's nice to imagine that Google will re-encode all their content into both formats so as to support Firefox, it just ain't gonna happen. Therefore, we're left with the coming situation: Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer -- the publishers of all of whom have no problem leveraging platform-specific decoding libraries -- will support YouTube's videos, but Firefox users will get a page saying "We're sorry, but your browser isn't supported. Click here to upgrade." with a link to one of the aforementioned. And what, pray tell, do you think the average user (the one whose geek friend installed Firefox for him) will do? Is he going to say "Ah, but Mozilla's pragmatic stance is better for the future of the web, thus I shall stick with Firefox"? Nope. He's gonna want to watch that video of a cat falling down stairs, or whatever, and he's gonna "upgrade" to Chrome or Safari or IE.
How would the unencumbered "free market" handle a problem like this? Especially since none of us who eat corn are actually direct customers of Monsanto's GM corn?
Well, for starters, we wouldn't have paid massive subsidies to farmers to grow corn. This subsidization has artificially distorted the supply and demand curves thereby making the profitability of the crop far less dependant on the market demand than it should be. Since farmers will grow more corn to get more subsidy money (as the subsidies are dependent on crop ratios and output), many farms will have a monoculture, thereby necessitating the use of more pesticides, etc. (Just as with operating systems, monocultures are *bad* when it comes to farming.) Due to the increased use of said pesticides, and the increased vulnerability of the crops, there will be an increased demand for plants engineered to withstand both the pesticides and the pests -- thereby creating Monsanto's market.
Simple, when you get right down to it.
Tell us how getting government out of business is going to prevent a little thing like people dying from organ failure for eating Monsanto's frankencorn?
Sorry, but I don't have a good answer. If I had to guess, I'd say that it would have no impact on the human death toll due to genetically-engineered food. Now admittedly, that's because (to the best of my knowledge) there isn't actually such a death toll, but still...
Also, just a tip: try to steer clear of those "clever" terms like "frankencorn". They don't make you sound witty -- they make you sound like a juvenile zealot who's more concerned about ranting against the opposition than actually discussing the issue at hand.
Love the smug, "I've got ya now!" attitude you've got going there though. It *did* succeed at getting some responses.
Lets face it, windows just works while Linux is usually a pain in the ass to configure.
Let's face it, Linux just works while Windows is usually a pain in the ass to configure.
There. Now we've both made absolute, unsupported assertions. Now let's move on to realistic claims.
First, neither Windows nor Linux "just works". Both require drivers and hardware-specific setup. The difference is, Windows has the advantage of OEM-pre-loading. How many "average users" do you think end up installing Windows from scratch? I'd wager the answer is "very, very few".
I'll touch on the configuration aspect later, but first I want to address some of your other points.
This is due to the arrogance and elitism of its developers, especially its kernel developers.
Yes. The kernel developers often do seem to be pretty arrogant. No contest there. The whole "switchable scheduler" thing underlined that pretty well.
The fact that Linux has horrendously documented hardware APIs and that it has no stable driver binary interfaces and that getting anything to work is a huge mess of kernel header errors, compiler errors, etc.
That's crap. Furthermore, if you've used any modern distro (and I suspect you have), you know that's crap.
The average user will never do any kernel-related compilation, nor will they need to. Modern distros build pretty much every hardware driver as a module for this reason. Plug something in, and the appropriate module is loaded.
Do you really think grandma is going to be able to debug source code and figure out why some crazy driver doesnt install, when on Windows you just put in the disk, click install and it works?
No, but grandma doesn't have to. Again, this isn't 1999 -- supported hardware is almost always supported automatically.
As for your Windows analogy... have you ever actually seen a grandma-type user try to install hardware? That sort of user will end up buying a printer, installing the HP adware, making three copies of the PDF manual on their desktop ("HP LaserJet 2040 Manual.pdf", "HP LaserJet 2040 Manual (1).pdf", "HP LaserJet 2040 Manual (2).pdf"), installing a copy of Acrobat Reader, setting QuickTime as the default for all files of type "AVI", making three other equally-unrelated changes, and still end up with a printer that can't print half the time.
Yes, you and I may be smart enough to run through the Add New Hardware wizard, click Have Disk, etc... but for the average user, hardware installs are a much hairier proposition.
I have always said that the deployment of open source software would increase by 100X if we allowed there to be a stable binary driver ABI on linux and we made it easy for hardware developers to write drivers for it. It would make Linux far more practical and usable. Hardware developers put drivers through extensive QA testing to make sure it works well so it would be more reliable than open source drivers.
Yeah... about that. No, they don't. Hardware developers put drivers through enough QA testing to make sure that 1) they get WHQL certification (if they care -- some don't) 2) it works most of the time. It's cool to imagine a building full of test engineers slaving away to make sure that every last configuration is tested and re-tested, but that's far from the reality of the situation.
Remember: these are hardware manufacturers. Hardware is what they do well. The software is just secondary -- a necessary evil required to get people to buy their hardware. They care about writing a driver that will let the hardware work; unless they're a graphics-card manufacturer, things like code quality, maintainability, and performance are but vague considerations (if considerations at all).
But the binary drivers could speed up development of open source ones since the binary drivers could be back eng
Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time
Other than S/MIME support and key management, which is completely non-existent on Symbian.
IMAP email (actually, IMAPS) works perfectly on my iPhone.
And S/MIME support?
It might not matter to you or to most home users/teens/hipsters/iPhone users, but S/MIME is damn crucial for a lot of government and enterprise users. The iPhone doesn't support S/MIME, nor does Android, nor does Symbian. There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality"), and none (that I know of) that provide S/MIME for Android, and definitely none for S/MIME on Symbian (I know because I checked last year when I was forced to use a Symbian phone.)
S/MIME support, along with management of the associated certs, etc. is one thing that BlackBerrys excel at and, like it or not, a reason that a lot of users choose them.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?
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FreeBSD 8.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
That of course would force me to upgrade from free television to $20 Comcast lifeline service.
Or, alternatively, it might force you to upgrade to becoming someone who actively seeks out information rather than someone who waits to be told what to enjoy, what to dislike, and what to feel.
Nah, sod it. Better just pay the $20 -- being a passive consumer is _much_ more comfortable...
As a dev, autoupdates are evil. It's great if the updates don't change the behavior of whatever is being updated, but it sucks ass when those updates break or as MS is so fond of, remove functionality.
Autoupdates are dangerous things. You get unexpected changes with no apparent reason
And one big, awesome feature that makes it totally worth the price of admission for me:
"Proxy" IMAP/POP/SMTP servers that accept SSL-protected connections on any port. The ability to have a secure connection to my mail provider for both inbound and outbound even when behind a braindead firewall that only allows 80/443 is absolutely worth the cost. The awesome reliability and low latency is even better.
Given the massive amount of regulation, restriction, and subsidization of US telecommunications, pretending that wireless service is a "free market" requires far more suspension of disbelief than I am willing to engage in.
Makes you wonder just how much this nations spends annually on corn and soy subsidies and just how much we will pay in the future as more and more people become sickly due to the low price of the poor nutrition that they are often offered. What if we got rid of those agricultural subsidies? How will that affect the cost of McDonalds', Wendys', etc. foods?
Maybe I'm showing my age here, but I remember a time when we [as a society] considered adults to be responsible for their own nutritional choices.
Yes, yes... I know that it's all somehow the fault of a faceless corporation that so many people are fat -- but the truth is, self-control has a lot to do with it too. It's not hard to eat healthy food even on a budget. All you have to do is forgo the convenience of having everything prepared for you and be willing to spend 20 minutes shopping for your own ingredients, plus a bit of time each day to prepare yourself meals. I've managed that very feat for many, many years, including several years as a near-broke college student.
Sure it's convenient to grab a burger and fries, but it's not any cheaper than preparing your own dinner (it's almost certainly more expensive to buy prepared food than to do your own cooking) and I guarantee it's not as healthy as cooking your own meal.
That's alright, I shouldn't blame you. You're probably just one of the DARE generation. Just so as to avoid misleading others, let's spend some time and fix your post:
"Decrease in testosterone levels and lower sperm counts for men"/"Increase in testosterone levels for women and increased risk of infertility". Funny, but I couldn't seem to find any long term, controlled studies across large groups that proved either of these points.
"Diminished or extinguished sexual pleasure" - Clearly you've never fucked whilst stoned. Anyone who has will tell you how laughably wrong this claim is. And even if it were true, so? A vast array of things can affect one's sexual pleasure.
Psychological dependence requiring more of the drug to get the same effect. I was about to post and point out that people don't tend to develop a tolerance to any of the cannabinoids in marijuana, but then I realized you said "psychological". Well come on... People can develop a psychological addiction to anything -- surely you've seen the articles about people who play WoW or Starcraft obsessively. Somehow I don't think that anyone's advocating a DEA crackdown on Blizzard....
Sleepiness Indeed. Marijuana is a useful, safe, non-addictive medication for treating insomnia. Oh. You meant that as a bad thing? Well consider this: reading "Catcher in the Rye" is still legal, and I'll be damned if I didn't sleep like a baby throughout most of middle-school English.
Difficulty keeping track of time, impaired or reduced short-term memory When under the influence of larger doses, yes. It wears off though, and as far as we can tell, the effect isn't permanent.
Reduced ability to perform tasks requiring concentration and coordination,such as driving a car. Yes, when under the influence, your coordination is impaired (although to a lesser extent than alcohol.) Driving under the influence is a bad idea, but I don't see how that's a strike against marijuana.
Increased heart rate/Potential cardiac dangers for those with preexisting heart disease If only this were mentioned in some authoritative government study. Oh wait. It has been. Acute Effects of Marihuana by the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse talks about the cardiovascular effects of marijuana. Their findings? That while the drug causes an increase of +10 to +40 BPM over baseline, but poses no significant acute danger to users' cardiovascular health. Translation: it raises your pulse rate, but it's not dangerous.
Bloodshot eyes Completely harmless.
Dry mouth and throat Probably due to the presence of CB1 and CB2 receptors in the salivarly glands. THC's a CB1 agonist, and there are most certainly some (at least partial) CB2 agonists in marijuana. And (in case you haven't spotted the pattern yet) this too is harmless.
Decreased social inhibitions Highly dependent on the individual.
Paranoia, hallucinations In very high doses, yes. For patients with a pre-existing history of mental illness, marijuana use is probably a bad idea. In healthy people, there appears to be absolutely no risk of long-term psychological damage.
Impaired or reduced short-term memory You... er... you listed this earlier in your post.:)
Impaired or reduced comprehension (and other similar claims.) True, but highly-dose dependent.
Psychological dependence See above. Executive summary: same goes for everything.
Intense anxiety or panic attacks Some people experience these when they smoke too much. This is highly user and dose dependent though, and listing
Well that didn't stop them from intercepting HTTPS with Opera Mini. Yes, they actually do something akin to a MITM attack -- your phone will connect to their server via HTTPS, and their server connects to the remote site via HTTPS. Seems kinda... well... sketchy to me.
If your GUI is crashing, you should consider using a different OS entirely. GUI crashes seem to be an acceptable event among Linux users, but most other users would not tolerate such occurrences.
No, they're definitely not acceptable amongst *nix users. The difference is, when X11 or your WM dies (rare, but it does happen) you can just restart it without taking down the whole OS. Up until Vista, that wasn't the case with Windows.
In Windows, there is a chance the "explorer" file manager might crash. For example, due to a 3rd party extension behaving badly. However, since XP and onward, a crashed explorer will restart automatically. Since explorer is only part of the GUI, none of your applications are disturbed.
Indeed. This is no different than gnome-panel or nautilus dying (for example.) Rare, but crashes do happen.
Crashes of the underlying GUI are almost unheard of unless there is a serious flaw with the graphics driver. Since Vista and onward, the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) can restart the graphics system if such a problem should occur.
Yes. With Windows, MS has finally caught up such that the Windows GUI is now as flexible in this regard as X has been for... err... a really long time.
I don't want to sound like Ubuntu is a POS, because that is not the case.
No no, you'd be justified doing so. The sheer number of regressions (combined with the attitude that folks get when they're reported on Bugzilla) indicates that Ubuntu is all about adding the latest flashy features with little to no regard for stability and reliability.
Still, I do feel I should respond to a few of your points:
Key signing for software packages is a pain in the ass & comlpicated. Surely there can be an easier way to get this working. How about downloading a file that contains the software source, and the key togeather and then import the file? I still can't get this thing working...
Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, this would completely defeat the purpose of signed packages.
Synaptic Software manager's sorting is crappy. I open it up search for xbmc and see packages availalbe for installation. I can click the column headers and sort, but for some reason, when I select a package, the list unsorts! This makes it hard to select packages of similar type (skins in this case).
Hm. Sounds like a problem with the version of Synaptic shipped with Ubuntu then. I actually tried to reproduce this, but I couldn't -- then again I'm running a strict Debian 5.0 install (nothing outside of main), so I'm definitely not running the same version as you are.
Overall, I think that Ubuntu is pretty cool, and I can't wait to learn more. However, given the issues that I came across, this is still not ready for the masses. Software installation is too convoluted and hard.
I've actually found apt-get to be far, far easier than installing anything on Windows. I don't have to go hunting for DLLs, I don't have to screw with the registry -- I just install the packages that I want and the package manager takes care of the rest. In the cases where it requires manual intervention, it does so for a good reason -- some tasks simply cannot be made any simpler without potentially compromising either your system's integrity or it's stability (or both, for that matter.)
I want to click to download, then click to install.
I know. But try to understand: it's that "ease of installation" that's responsible for the stability problems faced by Windows (apps routinely dump incompatible stuff into System32), as well as the numerous issues with security (if it's that simple to install software from a random website then you can bet that folks who aren't security-savvy will do exactly that.)
Clipboard should not kill your data if the host program has been terminated.
The last time I experienced this was with a random GNOME app c. 2002. I run Linux on the desktop full time, and I've never, ever seen this happen since then. I'm not saying that I don't believe you experienced that, but I'd urge you to consider that perhaps this is one of the numerous problems arising as a result of Ubuntu's poor quality control, rather than a problem endemic to Linux as a whole.
Programs should not terminate with no warning. Sorted lists should not unsort for no reason.
Again: Ubuntu's QA sucks. Hard. Please excuse my terseness, but I too find it irritating that someone's first experience with Linux is marred by Ubuntu's "bleeding edge" nature.
Do bugs exist that could cause this behavior in other distros? Sure. But by and large you're far more likely to see this sort of weirdness on a distro that focuses on "freshness" over stability.
Installs that will make your computer unusable should come with a warning.
Again, this is an issue with Ubuntu (and Fedora, and other "bleeding-edge" distros.) I've never, ever, *ever* witnessed a loss of stability due to a package that I've installed from Debian's stable repository. Not once. And I've been using Debia
Yes. I don't particularly care about the long-term health of the cow.
Provided that the meat contains sufficient amounts of protein (it does), is available in lean cuts (it is), and is free of known pathogens (barring the occasional outbreak, it is) I couldn't care less about what happens to the cow.
While it would be nice to think that putting taxes on garbage disguised as food would promote the availability of real food, I'm inclined to doubt that things work that way.
Oh, stop it.
High fructose corn syrup isn't somehow extraordinarily bad for you. Calories are calories -- barring things that are outright harmful to you (cyanide, large amounts of alcohol), calories from one food source are no different than those from another. 100 calories from HFCS are every bit as fattening as 100 calories from organically grown brown sugar or 100 calories from soy beans.
Think about how many calories are in a bag of carrots versus a bag of doritos. Measured per calorie, vegetables are MUCH more expensive.
Well using that logic, there's no possible way you can lose this one, is there?
Of course that's exactly the point -- fatty foods *do* contain more calories by volume, thus eating 99c worth of chips will "make you fatter" than 99c worth of carrots.
You can't have it both ways: either it's that the cheapest food available is horrendously awful for you (not true, as pointed out above), or the food that's got the best calorie/cost ratio is bad for you when consumed without regard for calorie density (see above: duh).
the fact the student had to repeatedly introduce the phony quote in the article and barely succeeded in having it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that wikipedia is pretty good at self-correcting itself !
And the fact that all he had to do was repeatedly introduce the phony quote into the article in order to have it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that it's not yet good enough.
The only way for Microsoft to make their legacy ODF documents work and to exclude other vendors would be to specifically look in the document for the name of the application that created the documentThis should be simple to test with a text editor, change the name of the application to match one that works and test that.
One thing came to my mind when I read that:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
It's really, really sad that in this country refraining from calling people niggers is a thing that automatically makes you a liberal.
No, it's not just that many modern "liberals" abhor the use of racial slang. It's also that these "liberals" decide to attempt to punish those who use it. While libertarians tend to believe all speech, even if it is personally offensive, is protected speech, many modern "liberals" seem to believe in free speech only as long as it doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities.
I refrain from calling people "niggers", but I'm by no means a liberal -- at least not in the modern sense of the term. Of course I also would oppose the censorship of an app such as the parent poster described. Would I buy it? No. But that doesn't mean that censoring it is the right thing to do.
*That* is what the parent poster was playing at. (I think...)
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Sorry, back here in reality Theora's quality is at least on par with H.264 with the same size. But thanks for your attempt at FUD, though.
So... you linked to the Theora developer's site to support a Theora developer's claims that Theora was superior to competitors. And then you accuse him of FUD?
Nice.
The test you linked to, BTW, is crap. No triangle tests, no A/B testing, etc. Just one guy who uploaded and downloaded a sample from YouTube (the encoder and encoding parameters of which he did not know) and compared it to a Theora encode that he did using some rather... "interesting" settings, most notably this: "A keyframe interval of 250 frames was used for the Theora encoding."
A 250 frame keyframe rate? Are you kidding me?! I don't know what YouTube's using for its keyframe interval, but I guarangoddamntee you it's lower than that. That's a keyframe every 10 seconds. Let's try an encode with H.264 with that interval and see how it measures up to Theora, hm?
Look, I'm all for using open formats rather than closed ones, but citing a wildly flawed, extremely limited casual test as proof of your contender's superiority just reeks of desperation. Theora's pretty good for what it is: an open source continuation of an old codec that was donated because its commercial competitors had surpassed it. The OSS community's done a good job of improving it and evolving it, and it's great to even have an open-source video codec -- but claiming that it's superior is just flat-out false.
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
That's not really as relevant here as you might think.
There's a difference between being unable to rely on a particular piece of software being installed when webmasters are given carte blanche in terms of format (as was the case in the early days with object embedding) and simply relying on a platform-specific implementation to support a clearly-understood de-facto standard.
A better analogy would be the 'img' tag. There are three or four common image formats that quickly became the de-facto standard (despite the fact that the spec never mentioned file formats, IIRC.) Browsers rely on platform-specific implementations to handle decoding, etc.
Honestly, there's no reason not to do this for Firefox. The *only* reason to treat the video tag differently is ideology. As far as ideology goes, I agree with Mozilla -- an 'open' web is better than a patent-encumbered one, by far.
That said, at some point you have to be realistic. Mozilla simply doesn't have the clout necessary to force companies like Google to start using a technically-inferior solution (Theora -- yes, it *is* inferior.) While it's nice to imagine that Google will re-encode all their content into both formats so as to support Firefox, it just ain't gonna happen. Therefore, we're left with the coming situation: Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer -- the publishers of all of whom have no problem leveraging platform-specific decoding libraries -- will support YouTube's videos, but Firefox users will get a page saying "We're sorry, but your browser isn't supported. Click here to upgrade." with a link to one of the aforementioned. And what, pray tell, do you think the average user (the one whose geek friend installed Firefox for him) will do? Is he going to say "Ah, but Mozilla's pragmatic stance is better for the future of the web, thus I shall stick with Firefox"? Nope. He's gonna want to watch that video of a cat falling down stairs, or whatever, and he's gonna "upgrade" to Chrome or Safari or IE.
How would the unencumbered "free market" handle a problem like this? Especially since none of us who eat corn are actually direct customers of Monsanto's GM corn?
Well, for starters, we wouldn't have paid massive subsidies to farmers to grow corn. This subsidization has artificially distorted the supply and demand curves thereby making the profitability of the crop far less dependant on the market demand than it should be. Since farmers will grow more corn to get more subsidy money (as the subsidies are dependent on crop ratios and output), many farms will have a monoculture, thereby necessitating the use of more pesticides, etc. (Just as with operating systems, monocultures are *bad* when it comes to farming.) Due to the increased use of said pesticides, and the increased vulnerability of the crops, there will be an increased demand for plants engineered to withstand both the pesticides and the pests -- thereby creating Monsanto's market.
Simple, when you get right down to it.
Tell us how getting government out of business is going to prevent a little thing like people dying from organ failure for eating Monsanto's frankencorn?
Sorry, but I don't have a good answer. If I had to guess, I'd say that it would have no impact on the human death toll due to genetically-engineered food. Now admittedly, that's because (to the best of my knowledge) there isn't actually such a death toll, but still...
Also, just a tip: try to steer clear of those "clever" terms like "frankencorn". They don't make you sound witty -- they make you sound like a juvenile zealot who's more concerned about ranting against the opposition than actually discussing the issue at hand.
Love the smug, "I've got ya now!" attitude you've got going there though. It *did* succeed at getting some responses.
"Looks like", dude... looks like.
Lets face it, windows just works while Linux is usually a pain in the ass to configure.
Let's face it, Linux just works while Windows is usually a pain in the ass to configure.
There. Now we've both made absolute, unsupported assertions. Now let's move on to realistic claims.
First, neither Windows nor Linux "just works". Both require drivers and hardware-specific setup. The difference is, Windows has the advantage of OEM-pre-loading. How many "average users" do you think end up installing Windows from scratch? I'd wager the answer is "very, very few".
I'll touch on the configuration aspect later, but first I want to address some of your other points.
This is due to the arrogance and elitism of its developers, especially its kernel developers.
Yes. The kernel developers often do seem to be pretty arrogant. No contest there. The whole "switchable scheduler" thing underlined that pretty well.
The fact that Linux has horrendously documented hardware APIs and that it has no stable driver binary interfaces and that getting anything to work is a huge mess of kernel header errors, compiler errors, etc.
That's crap. Furthermore, if you've used any modern distro (and I suspect you have), you know that's crap.
The average user will never do any kernel-related compilation, nor will they need to. Modern distros build pretty much every hardware driver as a module for this reason. Plug something in, and the appropriate module is loaded.
Do you really think grandma is going to be able to debug source code and figure out why some crazy driver doesnt install, when on Windows you just put in the disk, click install and it works?
No, but grandma doesn't have to. Again, this isn't 1999 -- supported hardware is almost always supported automatically.
As for your Windows analogy... have you ever actually seen a grandma-type user try to install hardware? That sort of user will end up buying a printer, installing the HP adware, making three copies of the PDF manual on their desktop ("HP LaserJet 2040 Manual.pdf", "HP LaserJet 2040 Manual (1).pdf", "HP LaserJet 2040 Manual (2).pdf"), installing a copy of Acrobat Reader, setting QuickTime as the default for all files of type "AVI", making three other equally-unrelated changes, and still end up with a printer that can't print half the time.
Yes, you and I may be smart enough to run through the Add New Hardware wizard, click Have Disk, etc... but for the average user, hardware installs are a much hairier proposition.
I have always said that the deployment of open source software would increase by 100X if we allowed there to be a stable binary driver ABI on linux and we made it easy for hardware developers to write drivers for it. It would make Linux far more practical and usable. Hardware developers put drivers through extensive QA testing to make sure it works well so it would be more reliable than open source drivers.
Yeah... about that. No, they don't. Hardware developers put drivers through enough QA testing to make sure that 1) they get WHQL certification (if they care -- some don't) 2) it works most of the time. It's cool to imagine a building full of test engineers slaving away to make sure that every last configuration is tested and re-tested, but that's far from the reality of the situation.
Remember: these are hardware manufacturers. Hardware is what they do well. The software is just secondary -- a necessary evil required to get people to buy their hardware. They care about writing a driver that will let the hardware work; unless they're a graphics-card manufacturer, things like code quality, maintainability, and performance are but vague considerations (if considerations at all).
But the binary drivers could speed up development of open source ones since the binary drivers could be back eng
Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time
Other than S/MIME support and key management, which is completely non-existent on Symbian.
IMAP email (actually, IMAPS) works perfectly on my iPhone.
And S/MIME support?
It might not matter to you or to most home users/teens/hipsters/iPhone users, but S/MIME is damn crucial for a lot of government and enterprise users. The iPhone doesn't support S/MIME, nor does Android, nor does Symbian. There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality"), and none (that I know of) that provide S/MIME for Android, and definitely none for S/MIME on Symbian (I know because I checked last year when I was forced to use a Symbian phone.)
S/MIME support, along with management of the associated certs, etc. is one thing that BlackBerrys excel at and, like it or not, a reason that a lot of users choose them.
Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
That of course would force me to upgrade from free television to $20 Comcast lifeline service.
Or, alternatively, it might force you to upgrade to becoming someone who actively seeks out information rather than someone who waits to be told what to enjoy, what to dislike, and what to feel.
Nah, sod it. Better just pay the $20 -- being a passive consumer is _much_ more comfortable...
As a dev, autoupdates are evil. It's great if the updates don't change the behavior of whatever is being updated, but it sucks ass when those updates break or as MS is so fond of, remove functionality.
Autoupdates are dangerous things. You get unexpected changes with no apparent reason
It doesn't have to be that way...
Come, friend... come and try stable. We'll treat you right.
And one big, awesome feature that makes it totally worth the price of admission for me:
"Proxy" IMAP/POP/SMTP servers that accept SSL-protected connections on any port. The ability to have a secure connection to my mail provider for both inbound and outbound even when behind a braindead firewall that only allows 80/443 is absolutely worth the cost. The awesome reliability and low latency is even better.
How is that free market working for us?
What free market?
Given the massive amount of regulation, restriction, and subsidization of US telecommunications, pretending that wireless service is a "free market" requires far more suspension of disbelief than I am willing to engage in.
Did you happen to know that Pharma spends more for advertising in the US than R&D?
And you base this on... what exactly?
Makes you wonder just how much this nations spends annually on corn and soy subsidies and just how much we will pay in the future as more and more people become sickly due to the low price of the poor nutrition that they are often offered. What if we got rid of those agricultural subsidies? How will that affect the cost of McDonalds', Wendys', etc. foods?
Maybe I'm showing my age here, but I remember a time when we [as a society] considered adults to be responsible for their own nutritional choices.
Yes, yes... I know that it's all somehow the fault of a faceless corporation that so many people are fat -- but the truth is, self-control has a lot to do with it too. It's not hard to eat healthy food even on a budget. All you have to do is forgo the convenience of having everything prepared for you and be willing to spend 20 minutes shopping for your own ingredients, plus a bit of time each day to prepare yourself meals. I've managed that very feat for many, many years, including several years as a near-broke college student.
Sure it's convenient to grab a burger and fries, but it's not any cheaper than preparing your own dinner (it's almost certainly more expensive to buy prepared food than to do your own cooking) and I guarantee it's not as healthy as cooking your own meal.
Holy hell, someone modded you Insightful.
Wow.
That's alright, I shouldn't blame you. You're probably just one of the DARE generation. Just so as to avoid misleading others, let's spend some time and fix your post:
Show me a state-run health service that doesn't ration health care.
Well that didn't stop them from intercepting HTTPS with Opera Mini. Yes, they actually do something akin to a MITM attack -- your phone will connect to their server via HTTPS, and their server connects to the remote site via HTTPS. Seems kinda... well... sketchy to me.
If your GUI is crashing, you should consider using a different OS entirely. GUI crashes seem to be an acceptable event among Linux users, but most other users would not tolerate such occurrences.
No, they're definitely not acceptable amongst *nix users. The difference is, when X11 or your WM dies (rare, but it does happen) you can just restart it without taking down the whole OS. Up until Vista, that wasn't the case with Windows.
In Windows, there is a chance the "explorer" file manager might crash. For example, due to a 3rd party extension behaving badly. However, since XP and onward, a crashed explorer will restart automatically. Since explorer is only part of the GUI, none of your applications are disturbed.
Indeed. This is no different than gnome-panel or nautilus dying (for example.) Rare, but crashes do happen.
Crashes of the underlying GUI are almost unheard of unless there is a serious flaw with the graphics driver. Since Vista and onward, the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) can restart the graphics system if such a problem should occur.
Yes. With Windows, MS has finally caught up such that the Windows GUI is now as flexible in this regard as X has been for... err... a really long time.
I don't want to sound like Ubuntu is a POS, because that is not the case.
No no, you'd be justified doing so. The sheer number of regressions (combined with the attitude that folks get when they're reported on Bugzilla) indicates that Ubuntu is all about adding the latest flashy features with little to no regard for stability and reliability.
Still, I do feel I should respond to a few of your points:
Key signing for software packages is a pain in the ass & comlpicated. Surely there can be an easier way to get this working. How about downloading a file that contains the software source, and the key togeather and then import the file? I still can't get this thing working...
Unless I'm misunderstanding your point, this would completely defeat the purpose of signed packages.
Synaptic Software manager's sorting is crappy. I open it up search for xbmc and see packages availalbe for installation. I can click the column headers and sort, but for some reason, when I select a package, the list unsorts! This makes it hard to select packages of similar type (skins in this case).
Hm. Sounds like a problem with the version of Synaptic shipped with Ubuntu then. I actually tried to reproduce this, but I couldn't -- then again I'm running a strict Debian 5.0 install (nothing outside of main), so I'm definitely not running the same version as you are.
Overall, I think that Ubuntu is pretty cool, and I can't wait to learn more. However, given the issues that I came across, this is still not ready for the masses. Software installation is too convoluted and hard.
I've actually found apt-get to be far, far easier than installing anything on Windows. I don't have to go hunting for DLLs, I don't have to screw with the registry -- I just install the packages that I want and the package manager takes care of the rest. In the cases where it requires manual intervention, it does so for a good reason -- some tasks simply cannot be made any simpler without potentially compromising either your system's integrity or it's stability (or both, for that matter.)
I want to click to download, then click to install.
I know. But try to understand: it's that "ease of installation" that's responsible for the stability problems faced by Windows (apps routinely dump incompatible stuff into System32), as well as the numerous issues with security (if it's that simple to install software from a random website then you can bet that folks who aren't security-savvy will do exactly that.)
Clipboard should not kill your data if the host program has been terminated.
The last time I experienced this was with a random GNOME app c. 2002. I run Linux on the desktop full time, and I've never, ever seen this happen since then. I'm not saying that I don't believe you experienced that, but I'd urge you to consider that perhaps this is one of the numerous problems arising as a result of Ubuntu's poor quality control, rather than a problem endemic to Linux as a whole.
Programs should not terminate with no warning. Sorted lists should not unsort for no reason.
Again: Ubuntu's QA sucks. Hard. Please excuse my terseness, but I too find it irritating that someone's first experience with Linux is marred by Ubuntu's "bleeding edge" nature.
Do bugs exist that could cause this behavior in other distros? Sure. But by and large you're far more likely to see this sort of weirdness on a distro that focuses on "freshness" over stability.
Installs that will make your computer unusable should come with a warning.
Again, this is an issue with Ubuntu (and Fedora, and other "bleeding-edge" distros.) I've never, ever, *ever* witnessed a loss of stability due to a package that I've installed from Debian's stable repository. Not once. And I've been using Debia
Is this really what you want to eat?
Yes. I don't particularly care about the long-term health of the cow.
Provided that the meat contains sufficient amounts of protein (it does), is available in lean cuts (it is), and is free of known pathogens (barring the occasional outbreak, it is) I couldn't care less about what happens to the cow.
While it would be nice to think that putting taxes on garbage disguised as food would promote the availability of real food, I'm inclined to doubt that things work that way.
Oh, stop it.
High fructose corn syrup isn't somehow extraordinarily bad for you. Calories are calories -- barring things that are outright harmful to you (cyanide, large amounts of alcohol), calories from one food source are no different than those from another. 100 calories from HFCS are every bit as fattening as 100 calories from organically grown brown sugar or 100 calories from soy beans.
Think about how many calories are in a bag of carrots versus a bag of doritos. Measured per calorie, vegetables are MUCH more expensive.
Well using that logic, there's no possible way you can lose this one, is there?
Of course that's exactly the point -- fatty foods *do* contain more calories by volume, thus eating 99c worth of chips will "make you fatter" than 99c worth of carrots.
You can't have it both ways: either it's that the cheapest food available is horrendously awful for you (not true, as pointed out above), or the food that's got the best calorie/cost ratio is bad for you when consumed without regard for calorie density (see above: duh).
the fact the student had to repeatedly introduce the phony quote in the article and barely succeeded in having it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that wikipedia is pretty good at self-correcting itself !
And the fact that all he had to do was repeatedly introduce the phony quote into the article in order to have it live for more than 24 hours demonstrates that it's not yet good enough.
The only way for Microsoft to make their legacy ODF documents work and to exclude other vendors would be to specifically look in the document for the name of the application that created the documentThis should be simple to test with a text editor, change the name of the application to match one that works and test that.
One thing came to my mind when I read that:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Let's not play this game again, please?
It's really, really sad that in this country refraining from calling people niggers is a thing that automatically makes you a liberal.
No, it's not just that many modern "liberals" abhor the use of racial slang. It's also that these "liberals" decide to attempt to punish those who use it. While libertarians tend to believe all speech, even if it is personally offensive, is protected speech, many modern "liberals" seem to believe in free speech only as long as it doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities.
I refrain from calling people "niggers", but I'm by no means a liberal -- at least not in the modern sense of the term. Of course I also would oppose the censorship of an app such as the parent poster described. Would I buy it? No. But that doesn't mean that censoring it is the right thing to do.
*That* is what the parent poster was playing at. (I think...)