All fair points, and I agree that GDI printers are rubbish. Only snag is, my printer isn't a budget GDI printer. It's also not networked so Bonjour wouldn't help. For the record, it's a USB-connected Epson Stylus RX585, and if you see the drivers page for it, there is a Linux driver. I checked that before I bought it. It just will not work.
I'm perfectly aware that that's more likely to be Epson's fault (especially as the driver is 2.5 years old now, older than the printer somehow) and backwards compatibility is another of Linux's weak spots, but that's not the point.
The point is that if (for instance) if my Dad bought one of those printers he wouldn't have been able to get it running on a Linux desktop. Doesn't matter to him whose fault it is, it's going back to the shop. Unfortunately this happens far too often in my Linux desktop experience.
I have been trying for years to get a Linux desktop I can use as a full replacement of Windows. It's nearly there, certainly constantly improving, but absolutely not there yet. I'm not just a whinging Windows fanboi - I've been working and playing with Linux on and off since 1992, and on the server side I use a mix of Windows and Linux as appropriate for the job at hand, and have introduced successful Linux systems into Linux-hostile companies.
On the desktop,in the last couple of years especially, Ubuntu has driven it a long way forwards, and I enjoy trying each new release. But several fundamental things still don't work well enough and the help when things go wrong is still fairly awful.
Printing - still too hard to get up and running.
Wifi connectivity - my laptop 'just works' for any required length of time with a solid Wifi connection in Windows at home, but in several distros of Linux it has to re-establish a connection every couple of minutes.
Battery life on laptops still sucks relative to both XP and Windows 7.
Suspend/resume, and Hibernation/resume. In Windows I just fold the laptop and *know* it will close down cleanly, and come back when I open it. USB, sound, video - all will still be working when it comes back. Not so in Linux.
Yes, I as a computer user and engineer of over 20 years experience can get Ubuntu to work for me. But it's just too hard to be worthwhile. And it's a shame, but I certainly can't recommend the technophobe people I support (family, friends) switch to Linux as things are.
I do care, and it's good to know someone else does. I've seen so many queues recently where there should have been cues, it's getting nearly as bad as the misuse of 'momentarily'.
Cool, I was having a good reminisce the other day and couldn't remember the name of my old friend, Paradox for Windows. Thanks for jogging the memories.
....especially with the way the new systems connect the RAM to the CPUs directly - and as it's split over 6 channels (3 per socket), you get a theoretical RAM bandwidth of 42.6 GB/sec. Yum.
And the prices are great, if you steer clear of 4 GB and so-far-non-existent 8 GB DIMMs. A 6 GB kit of three 2 GB sticks of the DDR3-1333 can be had for only 79 GBP (around 120 USD), and that's from a decent supplier (Crucial). Four of those in one of these beasts and you have a very useful 24 GB for relatively little spend. Bring it on!
Agreed, and especially nowadays it's just so damn FAST! I think quite a lot of why I love it still is that it was my first X WM, but the speed and the lack of wasted screen space really help.
Phones are for PHONING!!!!! not texting, not taking pictures, nor playing mp3s, nor controlling radio controlled cars or anything else..
I hate having to learn to use my new nokias as it is, without piling in more crap.
Whatever happened to "Do one job and do it well".. Seems nowadays it's lets cram as much crap into something that half works.
Steady on. While I agree that using a phone to control the TV/DVD/etc makes no sense, as I may be on the phone in another room when someone else wants to browse the channels, I would personally hate to have a phone that is *just* a phone.
My phone has a good few functions that in the bad old days meant I had to cart around several devices, several chargers, and deal with several memory card types. I have one bluetooth headset which lets me listen to music, hear GPS driving instructions and take part in phone calls - it was very inconvenient to do all that with separate devices.
As well as letting me get to my email, browse the web pretty well (thankyou Opera), and sync with my main contacts and calendars (thankyou Google), I have TomTom GPS navigation software on it for when I'm driving. It has a few pictures of my family and so on, it has some music if I'm stuck somewhere without radio or other entertainment. I don't know where you've been but texting is fundamentally part of what a mobile phone should do (and has done for nearly 15 years for me).
It has a camera which I've only used a couple of times, but hey, if I don't want to take a picture with it, I don't have to. It also may come in useful one day (car accident insurance snaps, for instance). It's even useful just as a USB storage device.
There are functions on my phone I don't use, and that's fine. The next phone I have will do more, and that's a good thing. Maybe in a couple of years I won't have to carry a camera ever, as they are improving in leaps and bounds. Most days I just need my keys and my phone, and I love it.
If really all you want to do is use it as a phone, go for it. Any current model will easily let you do that. There really are bigger things to worry about, and they're so cheap (most are free to buy on contract), it's even less of a problem. You really might as well try and argue that computers should be just for crunching numbers, after all that's what they originally did...
> > There's no standard way to control a device from a standard headphone jack
> Sounds like a good argument to develop a standard rather than applaud this bad behaviour.
There is a kind-of standard which solved the problem years back, which (for instance) my old Sony Minidisc player and at least 3 or 4 of the phones I've had follow.
You have a propriety connection into the phone, and at the other end of the cable you have your clip with microphone/volume/pause/track-skip/answer-call buttons and sometimes a tiny screen, then have a standard 3.5mm jack on there. Problem solved. You can have all the control appropriate to the unit, and use whichever headphones you want.
You elect an imbecile to the most powerful office in the world. Twice.
You spend/borrow your way into a financial crisis.
You alienate and disgust 99% of the rest of the world with (just off the top of my head) Guantanamo, bombings inside Pakistan, extraordinary renditions, the whole Iraq fuckup, Kyoto, etc.
You remove more and more of the basic rights of your own citizens.
Apart from that, please think about the majority of humanity around the world, count your fucking blessings, and shut the fuck up. Try living just one day as an average Somali, Haitian, Zimbabwean, or Burmese.
Sigh. You wrote an intelligent, insightful, interesting piece directly relating to the article, and adding significant points for further discussion. You even spelled "seamless" correctly.
Just where in HELL do you think you are? This is Slashdot! Show some respect!
Seriously, so fricking what? This is how marketing works. If Linux wants to make it good in the big, bad business world, it needs marketing. Marketing involves half-truths, white lies, one-sided comparisons with competitors, massive amplififcation of small features, and a big dose of out-and-out bullshit. All Red Hat have to do is reflect in their marketing that their stuff works with Windows too - and I'm sure they already have people working on that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm perfectly aware that that's more likely to be Epson's fault (especially as the driver is 2.5 years old now, older than the printer somehow) and backwards compatibility is another of Linux's weak spots, but that's not the point.
The point is that if (for instance) if my Dad bought one of those printers he wouldn't have been able to get it running on a Linux desktop. Doesn't matter to him whose fault it is, it's going back to the shop. Unfortunately this happens far too often in my Linux desktop experience.
On the desktop,in the last couple of years especially, Ubuntu has driven it a long way forwards, and I enjoy trying each new release. But several fundamental things still don't work well enough and the help when things go wrong is still fairly awful.
Printing - still too hard to get up and running.
Wifi connectivity - my laptop 'just works' for any required length of time with a solid Wifi connection in Windows at home, but in several distros of Linux it has to re-establish a connection every couple of minutes.
Battery life on laptops still sucks relative to both XP and Windows 7.
Suspend/resume, and Hibernation/resume. In Windows I just fold the laptop and *know* it will close down cleanly, and come back when I open it. USB, sound, video - all will still be working when it comes back. Not so in Linux.
Yes, I as a computer user and engineer of over 20 years experience can get Ubuntu to work for me. But it's just too hard to be worthwhile. And it's a shame, but I certainly can't recommend the technophobe people I support (family, friends) switch to Linux as things are.
Best to do it from the computer of someone that you genuinely despise.
Good thinking. Er, can I use your computer for a few minutes?
I do care, and it's good to know someone else does. I've seen so many queues recently where there should have been cues, it's getting nearly as bad as the misuse of 'momentarily'.
Cool, I was having a good reminisce the other day and couldn't remember the name of my old friend, Paradox for Windows. Thanks for jogging the memories.
Another constrained orifice would work, but you will lose more air.
Wow, I never thought I'd ever see that sentence again. Thankfully the context for you using it was *completely* different to the last time.
Nicely put, you beat me to it! Wish I had some mod points for you...
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/dd262148.aspx
And the prices are great, if you steer clear of 4 GB and so-far-non-existent 8 GB DIMMs. A 6 GB kit of three 2 GB sticks of the DDR3-1333 can be had for only 79 GBP (around 120 USD), and that's from a decent supplier (Crucial). Four of those in one of these beasts and you have a very useful 24 GB for relatively little spend. Bring it on!
Agreed, and especially nowadays it's just so damn FAST! I think quite a lot of why I love it still is that it was my first X WM, but the speed and the lack of wasted screen space really help.
I see they were very major contributors to the winning side both times. Your point?
Phones are for PHONING!!!!! not texting, not taking pictures, nor playing mp3s, nor controlling radio controlled cars or anything else.. I hate having to learn to use my new nokias as it is, without piling in more crap. Whatever happened to "Do one job and do it well".. Seems nowadays it's lets cram as much crap into something that half works.
Steady on. While I agree that using a phone to control the TV/DVD/etc makes no sense, as I may be on the phone in another room when someone else wants to browse the channels, I would personally hate to have a phone that is *just* a phone.
My phone has a good few functions that in the bad old days meant I had to cart around several devices, several chargers, and deal with several memory card types. I have one bluetooth headset which lets me listen to music, hear GPS driving instructions and take part in phone calls - it was very inconvenient to do all that with separate devices.
As well as letting me get to my email, browse the web pretty well (thankyou Opera), and sync with my main contacts and calendars (thankyou Google), I have TomTom GPS navigation software on it for when I'm driving. It has a few pictures of my family and so on, it has some music if I'm stuck somewhere without radio or other entertainment. I don't know where you've been but texting is fundamentally part of what a mobile phone should do (and has done for nearly 15 years for me).
It has a camera which I've only used a couple of times, but hey, if I don't want to take a picture with it, I don't have to. It also may come in useful one day (car accident insurance snaps, for instance). It's even useful just as a USB storage device.
There are functions on my phone I don't use, and that's fine. The next phone I have will do more, and that's a good thing. Maybe in a couple of years I won't have to carry a camera ever, as they are improving in leaps and bounds. Most days I just need my keys and my phone, and I love it.
If really all you want to do is use it as a phone, go for it. Any current model will easily let you do that. There really are bigger things to worry about, and they're so cheap (most are free to buy on contract), it's even less of a problem. You really might as well try and argue that computers should be just for crunching numbers, after all that's what they originally did...
How did you manage a +3 informative for insulting my girlfriend?
He made a mistake and fluked it. Obviously, if he'd said it about your mom instead he would have got the full +5 insightful.
> Sounds like a good argument to develop a standard rather than applaud this bad behaviour.
There is a kind-of standard which solved the problem years back, which (for instance) my old Sony Minidisc player and at least 3 or 4 of the phones I've had follow.
You have a propriety connection into the phone, and at the other end of the cable you have your clip with microphone/volume/pause/track-skip/answer-call buttons and sometimes a tiny screen, then have a standard 3.5mm jack on there. Problem solved. You can have all the control appropriate to the unit, and use whichever headphones you want.
Shouldn't we make something that passes the original Turing Test first, before we go moving the goalposts?
You elect an imbecile to the most powerful office in the world. Twice.
You spend/borrow your way into a financial crisis.
You alienate and disgust 99% of the rest of the world with (just off the top of my head) Guantanamo, bombings inside Pakistan, extraordinary renditions, the whole Iraq fuckup, Kyoto, etc.
You remove more and more of the basic rights of your own citizens.
Apart from that, please think about the majority of humanity around the world, count your fucking blessings, and shut the fuck up. Try living just one day as an average Somali, Haitian, Zimbabwean, or Burmese.
FFS, this is the same country that made Bill a Knight. Same goes for Firefox market share
Er, which other country ever made anyone a knight, exactly?
Just where in HELL do you think you are? This is Slashdot! Show some respect!
Near me, this place has a handful of different ones.
...and Slashdot creates electronic noise...
Seriously, so fricking what? This is how marketing works. If Linux wants to make it good in the big, bad business world, it needs marketing. Marketing involves half-truths, white lies, one-sided comparisons with competitors, massive amplififcation of small features, and a big dose of out-and-out bullshit. All Red Hat have to do is reflect in their marketing that their stuff works with Windows too - and I'm sure they already have people working on that.
Just wanted to say thanks - never heard of xkcd before, but am enoying it a lot!
...3 hours to press the button, and they still missed!
Exactly the reason I won't visit the US now - fingerprinting us at the border, passing all my details to the US .gov while I'm flying there.... no way.