People don't have much respect for free software until they've used it. Sometimes not after. Essentially, most businesspeople in a capitalist society are suspicious of anything that could cost money, or competes with something that costs money, but is free. They automatically think it's not worth money, that it's not nearly as good as the expensive competitor.
Also, MS Office and Adobe are established corporations. They existed before significant open source solutions did, so everyone was forced to use them. People are trained on Photoshop and MS Office, not the GIMP or OpenOffice. While in the long term continuous licensing will cost a significant amount, retraining will cost more immediately.
Lastly, if Photoshop crashes and corrupts all your documents, you have recourse. You know who to blame, at least. And that person isn't the manager who took a chance on a new tool.
For the home user, the main issue is knowledge--there are many more people who know what Photoshop is than who know what the GIMP is. And most OSS projects can't afford mass marketing.
The article mainly suggested that we replace a home computer's CPU with a mobile phone. It's implied, or outright stated, that the appliance would have its own hard drive; it'll definitely have its own display, and if you can get a new appliance with different features, you'd need to carry around an indefinite number of drivers on your phone. So your phone OS has to load drivers from the appliance, most likely.
And why shouldn't we use a computer and a phone, and just connect the two? Viruses (and phones are immune, I suppose), upgrades (I suppose phones never need firmware upgrades, security fixes, or anything like that--much less their applications), and the possibility of harddrive failure (again, mobile phones are immune to memory issues).
The listed 'deeper problems' of regular computers boils down to choice. "A standard PC offers multiple ways to do any given task" "A standard PC always has the potential for someone to come along and install performance-hogging software or otherwise compromise the system with configuration changes." "A standardly configured home PC running standard programs cannot have all of its software updated remotely and without the owner's intervention."
The main problem with mobile devices is getting a portable, convenient input method. The current system is unintuitive, involving up to five keypresses for a single letter. This is a suggestion that we change that.
However, I'd be afraid to run Gentoo on a phone. Not only would GCC take all the space; it would take weeks to compile Openoffice, not just hours.
In late Old English, we used a rather loose SOV word order (Subject-Verb-Object) with plenty of case inflection. Now, we use no case inflection and have a strict SVO word order. Before the Saxon invasion, it was probably VSO; and the Saxons used V2 order (where it doesn't matter what's first, as long as the verb is second).
In Old English, we sometimes had prepositions appearing after the nouns they control; now that's quite ungrammatical. ("I went the store to", anyone?)
And we developed articles somewhere along the way. How'd that happen?
Really, if you looked at the grammar of Old English, you'd think it a more complex form of German and probably not link it at all to modern English. And English stands out from the rest of the European languages a fair bit.
Traditional methods for tracking language relations are based on vocabulary. That's because every language has a rich vocabulary based on sound and meaning; and sound changes are usually widespread (that is, one sound change occurs wherever it can, changing perhaps every 'd' into an 'n'). So you can usually corrolate the basic vocabularies of two related languages rather predictably.
Grammar, on the other hand, is much smaller and more limited. It's possible for two unrelated languages to have very similar grammars, but much more difficult for them to have similar basic vocabularies. There's an Austronesian language which has a word 'dog' that means 'canine', but that's practically the only shared word between it and English. Usually you won't have more than a couple dozen shared words between unrelated languages.
Also, when two different languages interact, the result is usually grammatical simplification--even if both grammars are quite complex, you might drop a few cases and inflections. So it's extremely surprising that linguists could track language change via grammar in this case.
They have the funding to free divisions sufficiently for each to become the best or nearly the best at their particular task. I think the trouble might be an urge to integrate everything into one of three products: Office, XBox, or Windows. The marketing and management, mainly.
Just have a developer in charge. Then appoint business types to act more as quartermasters than as managers, at least until QA and UI testing. And allowing and encouraging pet projects like Google would never hurt.
Most presidents have their own wars. It's a way of encouraging others not to attack the US--even though there's a great bloody ocean, then the great bloody bulk of the US, and a load of manic farmers with guns to deal with.
More importantly, it's a way for that president to be feared internationally.
If we had presidents elected to single, ten-year terms, we'd get a war about every fifteen years on average, not every six.
Do you know what algorithm they applied to determine string similarity? If it were a naive algorithm, you could simply shift a 14-character string to the right each time.
Otherwise, you could rot-6 it each time. You'd quickly become familiar with rotational codes.
# chmod +x naked_sluts.exe #./naked_sluts.exe Removing/home/iclod/porn... Removing/home/iclod/work... Removing/home/iclod/Mail... Removing/home/iclod... Removing/home... Error: cannot remove/home: permission denied. * Entering phase 2 Scanning ports for viral spreading: No suitable ports available. * Entering phase 3 Accessing sendmail... Mailing... Mailing... Mailing... Error: mail blocked: too many recipients. Wait ten minutes and try again.
In short, users aren't a major problem because they should only be able to hurt themselves. The problem is that they often can and do hurt others. This is the result of poor design.
Actually, the article is a bit more general than that. It can be applied to any application. It's just that all the flaws seem to be present in MS Windows.
On the other hand, TFA seems to be saying that you shouldn't write flawed software. That's pretty much impossible when working on a large project.
If OSX gets a good DirectX emulator, then it won't be that difficult.
But you're right about the games. I use Linux exclusively; tried installing Windows for the games, but it's just too difficult. It insists on erasing an MBR and my boot partition, and setup crashes when I try using a different drive.
Actually, Enlightenment DR17 provides something like this.
Unless you put rolling balls on the underside of the mouse and clamps to tighten on a signal from the OS, you're not going to get physical resistance. But in Enlightenment, if you try to move a window to obscure a widget, the window doesn't move over right away, just to the border until you drag it a bit further. It does the same with the edges of the screen. But having the cursor stick at boundaries would suck. The cursor represents your attention or your hands; when you're using a desk, you don't put your hands directly on whatever you're working on and drag them over to another document to work on that.
Look, we actually want people to look at our sites. Otherwise we'd use Intercal rather than HTML. We don't want to exclude a portion of our potential viewers that could range from perhaps 10% to 95% (usually no less than 80% for non-technical sites, I'd guess). Therefore, we accept IE quirks as well as W3C standards.
I just launched a tiny site, tested mainly with Firefox during development. It validates with the W3C validator and renders just fine with every browser I've checked with--except IE (which spreads the navigation bar out).
The more I work with it, the more I realize that IE's just a bitch when it comes to CSS. I'm just going to get something that renders decently in IE and then quit. It's not worth it, wondering why my width: auto tag expands something to the widest possible width, or why I can't position something accurately in IE without displacing it in Firefox.
Nah, it's not Mork and Mindy that they're remembering, but the commonly used, unsung GNU applications. Next we'll see the iPod lsof, I think, followed by the grep.
Because the people who determine who gets paid what have MBAs. Since they got their job based on that MBA and know how much it cost and how much work it took (and if it were easy for them, they'd likely have gotten into a different field); so besides using that as a means to increase their own salaries, they sympathize with others who have done the same as they did.
And these are often the people who either wished they were as smart as the nerds or as cool as the popular kids, or looked down their noses at anyone who wasn't as cool as they were. No reason not to carry this bias over.
However, many open source solutions are equally time consuming as closed source solutions. Try installing Debian with a reasonable set of packages--media, office, communication--and compare that with the amount of time spent getting the same or comparable on Windows. (And no, WordPad doesn't count as office software.)
Haven't used Windows for serious work, so I can't comment on that side of affairs.
If the Blu-Ray player requires a telephone jack, then you'll be able to get software for any OS so you can plug the cable into your modem (if you have one) and ignore the whole process. Just wait a couple months.
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People don't have much respect for free software until they've used it. Sometimes not after. Essentially, most businesspeople in a capitalist society are suspicious of anything that could cost money, or competes with something that costs money, but is free. They automatically think it's not worth money, that it's not nearly as good as the expensive competitor.
Also, MS Office and Adobe are established corporations. They existed before significant open source solutions did, so everyone was forced to use them. People are trained on Photoshop and MS Office, not the GIMP or OpenOffice. While in the long term continuous licensing will cost a significant amount, retraining will cost more immediately.
Lastly, if Photoshop crashes and corrupts all your documents, you have recourse. You know who to blame, at least. And that person isn't the manager who took a chance on a new tool.
For the home user, the main issue is knowledge--there are many more people who know what Photoshop is than who know what the GIMP is. And most OSS projects can't afford mass marketing.
Strange; Ubuntu's the only distro that recognized my Hercules Fortissimo III.
O'course, I'm using Gentoo and a Soundblaster now; I just prefer portage to apt.
The article mainly suggested that we replace a home computer's CPU with a mobile phone. It's implied, or outright stated, that the appliance would have its own hard drive; it'll definitely have its own display, and if you can get a new appliance with different features, you'd need to carry around an indefinite number of drivers on your phone. So your phone OS has to load drivers from the appliance, most likely.
And why shouldn't we use a computer and a phone, and just connect the two? Viruses (and phones are immune, I suppose), upgrades (I suppose phones never need firmware upgrades, security fixes, or anything like that--much less their applications), and the possibility of harddrive failure (again, mobile phones are immune to memory issues).
The listed 'deeper problems' of regular computers boils down to choice.
"A standard PC offers multiple ways to do any given task"
"A standard PC always has the potential for someone to come along and install performance-hogging software or otherwise compromise the system with configuration changes."
"A standardly configured home PC running standard programs cannot have all of its software updated remotely and without the owner's intervention."
I for one welcome our new Telecom Overlords.
The main problem with mobile devices is getting a portable, convenient input method. The current system is unintuitive, involving up to five keypresses for a single letter. This is a suggestion that we change that.
However, I'd be afraid to run Gentoo on a phone. Not only would GCC take all the space; it would take weeks to compile Openoffice, not just hours.
So you'd just give the user ~30fps and have their terminal duplicate frames to give 85fps? That works.
Hm...
In late Old English, we used a rather loose SOV word order (Subject-Verb-Object) with plenty of case inflection. Now, we use no case inflection and have a strict SVO word order. Before the Saxon invasion, it was probably VSO; and the Saxons used V2 order (where it doesn't matter what's first, as long as the verb is second).
In Old English, we sometimes had prepositions appearing after the nouns they control; now that's quite ungrammatical. ("I went the store to", anyone?)
And we developed articles somewhere along the way. How'd that happen?
Really, if you looked at the grammar of Old English, you'd think it a more complex form of German and probably not link it at all to modern English. And English stands out from the rest of the European languages a fair bit.
Traditional methods for tracking language relations are based on vocabulary. That's because every language has a rich vocabulary based on sound and meaning; and sound changes are usually widespread (that is, one sound change occurs wherever it can, changing perhaps every 'd' into an 'n'). So you can usually corrolate the basic vocabularies of two related languages rather predictably.
Grammar, on the other hand, is much smaller and more limited. It's possible for two unrelated languages to have very similar grammars, but much more difficult for them to have similar basic vocabularies. There's an Austronesian language which has a word 'dog' that means 'canine', but that's practically the only shared word between it and English. Usually you won't have more than a couple dozen shared words between unrelated languages.
Also, when two different languages interact, the result is usually grammatical simplification--even if both grammars are quite complex, you might drop a few cases and inflections. So it's extremely surprising that linguists could track language change via grammar in this case.
Such as integrated MineSweeper, Lorem Ipsum generator, egg timer, and calming mantra from Dune?
AdBlock probably should be integrated into Firefox, as should TabX (an option to put close buttons on each tab). Other than that, no.
And there are only two places to look for extensions, usually: mozilla.org and extensionroom.mozdev.org.
Now, if you'd care to show me a GMail notifier for Enlightenment 17...?
But it's uglier than Opera, I admit, with fewer themes.
Well, OS X is next-to-useless out of the box.
Windows is next-to-useless after expending a lot of effort.
Linux is entirely useless unless you spend several weeks working on it, after which it may or may not be moderately useful.
Do you feel lucky?
Forget Epiphany, go with Dillo. Dillo won't even allow those CSS exploits to get through.
They have the funding to free divisions sufficiently for each to become the best or nearly the best at their particular task. I think the trouble might be an urge to integrate everything into one of three products: Office, XBox, or Windows. The marketing and management, mainly.
Just have a developer in charge. Then appoint business types to act more as quartermasters than as managers, at least until QA and UI testing. And allowing and encouraging pet projects like Google would never hurt.
You're not talking about Lojban, are you?
Most presidents have their own wars. It's a way of encouraging others not to attack the US--even though there's a great bloody ocean, then the great bloody bulk of the US, and a load of manic farmers with guns to deal with.
More importantly, it's a way for that president to be feared internationally.
If we had presidents elected to single, ten-year terms, we'd get a war about every fifteen years on average, not every six.
Do you know what algorithm they applied to determine string similarity? If it were a naive algorithm, you could simply shift a 14-character string to the right each time.
Otherwise, you could rot-6 it each time. You'd quickly become familiar with rotational codes.
# chmod +x naked_sluts.exe ./naked_sluts.exe /home/iclod/porn... /home/iclod/work... /home/iclod/Mail... /home/iclod... /home... /home: permission denied.
#
Removing
Removing
Removing
Removing
Removing
Error: cannot remove
* Entering phase 2
Scanning ports for viral spreading:
No suitable ports available.
* Entering phase 3
Accessing sendmail...
Mailing...
Mailing...
Mailing...
Error: mail blocked: too many recipients. Wait ten minutes and try again.
In short, users aren't a major problem because they should only be able to hurt themselves. The problem is that they often can and do hurt others. This is the result of poor design.
Or use a wireless network for the laptops, going through a separate server, and put extremely restrictive firewalls on that server.
It's not as fancy, but it works. Just use decent encryption.
Actually, the article is a bit more general than that. It can be applied to any application. It's just that all the flaws seem to be present in MS Windows.
On the other hand, TFA seems to be saying that you shouldn't write flawed software. That's pretty much impossible when working on a large project.
If OSX gets a good DirectX emulator, then it won't be that difficult.
But you're right about the games. I use Linux exclusively; tried installing Windows for the games, but it's just too difficult. It insists on erasing an MBR and my boot partition, and setup crashes when I try using a different drive.
Actually, Enlightenment DR17 provides something like this.
Unless you put rolling balls on the underside of the mouse and clamps to tighten on a signal from the OS, you're not going to get physical resistance. But in Enlightenment, if you try to move a window to obscure a widget, the window doesn't move over right away, just to the border until you drag it a bit further. It does the same with the edges of the screen. But having the cursor stick at boundaries would suck. The cursor represents your attention or your hands; when you're using a desk, you don't put your hands directly on whatever you're working on and drag them over to another document to work on that.
Look, we actually want people to look at our sites. Otherwise we'd use Intercal rather than HTML. We don't want to exclude a portion of our potential viewers that could range from perhaps 10% to 95% (usually no less than 80% for non-technical sites, I'd guess). Therefore, we accept IE quirks as well as W3C standards.
I just launched a tiny site, tested mainly with Firefox during development. It validates with the W3C validator and renders just fine with every browser I've checked with--except IE (which spreads the navigation bar out).
The more I work with it, the more I realize that IE's just a bitch when it comes to CSS. I'm just going to get something that renders decently in IE and then quit. It's not worth it, wondering why my width: auto tag expands something to the widest possible width, or why I can't position something accurately in IE without displacing it in Firefox.
Nah, it's not Mork and Mindy that they're remembering, but the commonly used, unsung GNU applications. Next we'll see the iPod lsof, I think, followed by the grep.
Because the people who determine who gets paid what have MBAs. Since they got their job based on that MBA and know how much it cost and how much work it took (and if it were easy for them, they'd likely have gotten into a different field); so besides using that as a means to increase their own salaries, they sympathize with others who have done the same as they did.
And these are often the people who either wished they were as smart as the nerds or as cool as the popular kids, or looked down their noses at anyone who wasn't as cool as they were. No reason not to carry this bias over.
However, many open source solutions are equally time consuming as closed source solutions. Try installing Debian with a reasonable set of packages--media, office, communication--and compare that with the amount of time spent getting the same or comparable on Windows. (And no, WordPad doesn't count as office software.)
Haven't used Windows for serious work, so I can't comment on that side of affairs.
If the Blu-Ray player requires a telephone jack, then you'll be able to get software for any OS so you can plug the cable into your modem (if you have one) and ignore the whole process. Just wait a couple months.