That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. While Ubuntu did recognize my Ipod and DVDs, there were just icons on the desktop. If I have a window maximized, I wouldn't have seen that.
As to Windows having drivers for tens of thousands of devices... yeah, that's what they're known for. It's not easy either. I do QA for drivers at a major corporation (hint: they make processors) and you'd be amazed at the hundreds of hours we have to go through with each tiny revision in features of the component.
Interesting you chose Apple as an example, given that--as far as I know, in my Apple newbie-ish-ness--Apple's OS is even *more* tied to their hardware, e.g. you can't even get one of their OSes without buying their hardware.
I had run Linux a few years ago as a primary OS, so I was hardly a new user. Some things I had trouble with:
* No built-in DVD playing * No built-in MP3 playing * Streaming MP3 problems * Various small and medium interface bugs (e.g. the power button in the upper right... the one that does logoff, etc. stopped working) * BitTorrent worked at *very* slow speeds, basically unusable
I managed to find workarounds for some of these issues, but some of them took awhile, e.g. had to do port forwarding on my DSL modem for BitTorrent.
There's no threat to Windows or OS X from Linux at this point. However, I will say that Linux is waaay ahead of where it was from when I used it 2-3 years ago. Hardware detection is excellent, for example.
In other words, it's going to take a lot more than simply UI polish to get more market share.
You think someone dry heaving, thinking non-stop about if-I-could-only-get-more smack is engaged in higher reasoning? As I said before, choice is not an either-or thing. We don't always have choice, and we don't always not-have choice; there's a lot of gray area too.
Let me guess, you have perfect will power, right? You have never regretted any of your actions because there was perfect choice each time for you. At the drop of a hat you can decide to do anything you like, no matter how much your body screams in protest. Haha, uh, no, I think not. Human beings are not machines.
I won't add you to my foes list, but I can only shake my head at the strange world you find yourself in, where there are never irresistible urges, overpowering demands, situations that compel you to choose between two things, neither of which you want, etc. It must be nice to live in such a black-and-white place.
Some good points. Too bad none of them address what I said. I was arguing against the overly simple and naive perspective of my parent poster, not saying we should coddle anyone.
Well, some people (like me) often have so much muscle tension that you end up taking shallow breaths. If you can remind yourself to breath deeply once in awhile, it helps. But, yeah, it is a silly product.
The factory tested the machines on a Windows box to make sure it worked on that OS. Your point is taken, though, and maybe there's a way to do it via emulation on OS X? Not sure..
Oh come on. Choice is not a binary thing. People are not all good or all bad. Purely ambitious or purely lazy. Etc. There are times when it's easy to stick with a new diet, and times when it's hard. And, yes, there are times when we have overpowering urges and have no choices.
Jeezus, take a psych class or something. Brains are not as simple as computers.
I hate to be devil's advocate on this topic, but it is actually common for CNN to not have direct links to sites they talk about. It's a pain, and I hate hunting down sites when a simple "a" tag would do the trick.
Desktop composting? Is that like when those awful desktops I've seen--the ones with dozens of icons spread around randomly--start decaying and produce something useful from the mess?
I found Opera's built-in adblocking to be wonderful. You can just drag the element you want to block. Simple, intuitive, no extension needed. I recently tried Opera, though, so you may just not have been on the bleeding edge version.
I've been thinking about switching to Opera, because I don't like the way Firefox is headed. The only real barrier is getting used to a different interface.
FWIW, I tried the 3.0 alpha nightly recently and found rendering speed to be noticeably quicker. I tried multiple sites and made sure there was no cache advantage.
Amen. I liked the old method much better. No need to hunt for a close button; it was consistent and, as you say, took up less space. I agree with the GPP that the tab overflow is poorly done. For example, it's not intuitive that mousing over the tab bar and using the mouse scroll wheel will scroll the tabs (it will, but I only learned this after reading a mozillazine.org thread).
Right. Another thing I've found is that, as good as Slashdot's method is, *timing* matters a whole lot. You can post a very insightful comment, but if you're X hours late to the party, there won't be moderators around to mod you up. Similarly, I have seen many examples both on here and on Digg where people post mediocre comments and get modded up highly and quickly just before they were among the first to comment.
It's an attempt to embarrass those of us who posted embarrassing content online years ago to be searchable by future employers, girlfriends, etc. I'm quite serious.
Right. Not only that, but the "MySpace now has X million users" stats are wrong too. I have registered several junk MySpace accounts just to view pictures in someone's profile, for example, and I doubt I'm the only one. Now if the stats were "MySpace has X million users who logged in within the last seven days," that would be close to accurate.
I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work. Corporations and other large orgs already pay Microsoft yearly fees to be able to get guaranteed updates at a fixed price. My university paid $250,000 per year to get unlimited seats for Office and the OS. However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.
1. Why would there be restrictions on doing it in the U.S.? Aren't these sources publicly available?
2. Don't we already know how the world feels about the U.S. (i.e. most don't like us, or at least our government)? Osama had rhetoric against the U.S. for years before 9/11. Then again, maybe it can be hard to tell when it's just blustering, and when a given opponent has the resources to follow through.
3. AI is neat, but wouldn't a human do a better job of understanding satire vs. real political threats, for instance?
Ah, you beat me to it. Yes, this is a great movie. Very thought provoking, like the best sci-fi is. Incidentally, here's the link you probably wanted: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. While Ubuntu did recognize my Ipod and DVDs, there were just icons on the desktop. If I have a window maximized, I wouldn't have seen that.
As to Windows having drivers for tens of thousands of devices... yeah, that's what they're known for. It's not easy either. I do QA for drivers at a major corporation (hint: they make processors) and you'd be amazed at the hundreds of hours we have to go through with each tiny revision in features of the component.
Interesting you chose Apple as an example, given that--as far as I know, in my Apple newbie-ish-ness--Apple's OS is even *more* tied to their hardware, e.g. you can't even get one of their OSes without buying their hardware.
I had run Linux a few years ago as a primary OS, so I was hardly a new user. Some things I had trouble with:
* No built-in DVD playing
* No built-in MP3 playing
* Streaming MP3 problems
* Various small and medium interface bugs (e.g. the power button in the upper right... the one that does logoff, etc. stopped working)
* BitTorrent worked at *very* slow speeds, basically unusable
I managed to find workarounds for some of these issues, but some of them took awhile, e.g. had to do port forwarding on my DSL modem for BitTorrent.
There's no threat to Windows or OS X from Linux at this point. However, I will say that Linux is waaay ahead of where it was from when I used it 2-3 years ago. Hardware detection is excellent, for example.
In other words, it's going to take a lot more than simply UI polish to get more market share.
You think someone dry heaving, thinking non-stop about if-I-could-only-get-more smack is engaged in higher reasoning? As I said before, choice is not an either-or thing. We don't always have choice, and we don't always not-have choice; there's a lot of gray area too.
Let me guess, you have perfect will power, right? You have never regretted any of your actions because there was perfect choice each time for you. At the drop of a hat you can decide to do anything you like, no matter how much your body screams in protest. Haha, uh, no, I think not. Human beings are not machines.
I won't add you to my foes list, but I can only shake my head at the strange world you find yourself in, where there are never irresistible urges, overpowering demands, situations that compel you to choose between two things, neither of which you want, etc. It must be nice to live in such a black-and-white place.
Some good points. Too bad none of them address what I said. I was arguing against the overly simple and naive perspective of my parent poster, not saying we should coddle anyone.
Well, some people (like me) often have so much muscle tension that you end up taking shallow breaths. If you can remind yourself to breath deeply once in awhile, it helps. But, yeah, it is a silly product.
The factory tested the machines on a Windows box to make sure it worked on that OS. Your point is taken, though, and maybe there's a way to do it via emulation on OS X? Not sure..
Oh come on. Choice is not a binary thing. People are not all good or all bad. Purely ambitious or purely lazy. Etc. There are times when it's easy to stick with a new diet, and times when it's hard. And, yes, there are times when we have overpowering urges and have no choices. Jeezus, take a psych class or something. Brains are not as simple as computers.
I hate to be devil's advocate on this topic, but it is actually common for CNN to not have direct links to sites they talk about. It's a pain, and I hate hunting down sites when a simple "a" tag would do the trick.
I never understood people of any age who work 40 hours a week, then go home and watch TV.
http://www.answers.com/introvert
...this number may go back up when Vista is released and/or if/when Microsoft pushes out IE7 as a Windows Update.
Desktop composting? Is that like when those awful desktops I've seen--the ones with dozens of icons spread around randomly--start decaying and produce something useful from the mess?
I found Opera's built-in adblocking to be wonderful. You can just drag the element you want to block. Simple, intuitive, no extension needed. I recently tried Opera, though, so you may just not have been on the bleeding edge version.
I've been thinking about switching to Opera, because I don't like the way Firefox is headed. The only real barrier is getting used to a different interface.
FWIW, I tried the 3.0 alpha nightly recently and found rendering speed to be noticeably quicker. I tried multiple sites and made sure there was no cache advantage.
You could already do that via middle-click. Granted, that wasn't a well-publicized feature.
Would this help? http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/
Amen. I liked the old method much better. No need to hunt for a close button; it was consistent and, as you say, took up less space. I agree with the GPP that the tab overflow is poorly done. For example, it's not intuitive that mousing over the tab bar and using the mouse scroll wheel will scroll the tabs (it will, but I only learned this after reading a mozillazine.org thread).
Right. Another thing I've found is that, as good as Slashdot's method is, *timing* matters a whole lot. You can post a very insightful comment, but if you're X hours late to the party, there won't be moderators around to mod you up. Similarly, I have seen many examples both on here and on Digg where people post mediocre comments and get modded up highly and quickly just before they were among the first to comment.
It's an attempt to embarrass those of us who posted embarrassing content online years ago to be searchable by future employers, girlfriends, etc. I'm quite serious.
Right. Not only that, but the "MySpace now has X million users" stats are wrong too. I have registered several junk MySpace accounts just to view pictures in someone's profile, for example, and I doubt I'm the only one. Now if the stats were "MySpace has X million users who logged in within the last seven days," that would be close to accurate.
I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work. Corporations and other large orgs already pay Microsoft yearly fees to be able to get guaranteed updates at a fixed price. My university paid $250,000 per year to get unlimited seats for Office and the OS. However, the one thing that could undue this is the very long delays for things like Vista. If Microsoft went to an Ubuntu-type model where they promised updates every six months, I could see it working.
1. Why would there be restrictions on doing it in the U.S.? Aren't these sources publicly available? 2. Don't we already know how the world feels about the U.S. (i.e. most don't like us, or at least our government)? Osama had rhetoric against the U.S. for years before 9/11. Then again, maybe it can be hard to tell when it's just blustering, and when a given opponent has the resources to follow through. 3. AI is neat, but wouldn't a human do a better job of understanding satire vs. real political threats, for instance?
The way Half Life 2 is written on the box, etc., it looks like an exponent, meaning you've got 1/4 of a life at best.
...get a life, is this what they mean?
Ah, you beat me to it. Yes, this is a great movie. Very thought provoking, like the best sci-fi is. Incidentally, here's the link you probably wanted: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364343/