a huge warning box [...] claiming that "Not all features are supported!" Doesn't OO.o do (or used to do) thos for.doc? I don't actually know, I use ODF for storage and PDF for sharing like a sane person.
Oh, so this is a source-based live CD? That's certainly a niche waiting to be filled; I always was pissed off that live CDs didn't compile a custom kernel before booting.
I fully expect someone to point me to a Gentoo live CD that does exactly that already, wouldn't put it past them.
Call it a "Console Mode" for PCs, where you can just boot up from the DVD and the game starts running instantly. Current OSs feature bootup time that is, umm... well, the term "instantly" does not come to mind, even from the HD, which is orders of magnitude faster than booting from DVD. And if it's not using a standard OS, it's not a PC in any meaningful sense anymore; it's an Xbox (or LinuXbox or whatever). All these nifty game APIs need time to load, you know.
One, AMD might shoot itself in the foot by targeting gamers especially (or not; I think gamers actually like to run AMD's top offerings on desktops so it might sense to concentrate on that market, but it's kind of sad).
Two, I think neither Intel nor Nvidia will ever want to get any of their hardware certified with their biggest competitor's logo. So if it's by component, it's dead in the water. If it's by system, it might have a little potential, but unless it gets the big shots (Sony, Dell, etc.) on board, it will be limited to the much smaller market of small run custom builders - and those are exactly the ones whose customers already know which systems run games well.
Net Start w3svc to start the webserver. iisreset to reset the webserver And of course, millions of home users DO THIS EVERY DAY and are just waiting for Linux to make it easier? Talk about power users not understanding what "the desktop" is all about.
Regular users don't need to rename several thousand files. Seriously.
Also, what it really comes down to is a thing said further up; Linux is about as usable as Windows these days, give or take a little at certain points, but for laypersons even Windows is HARD. They took more than 10 years to learn something alien and foreign to them, a huge investement. THAT is the reason Linux isn't taking the desktop by storm. To be competitive, it doesn't have to be as good as Windows, it has to be obviously and significantly better.
So you just want a cheap Mac with enough PCIe to stick a video card into to drive a monitor of your choosing? Seriously, what do you NEED PCIe these days for apart from graphics cards? Well, you might want to stick in a RAID card or something, but if you want to do that you are in the market for a Mac Pro. If you want non-integrated graphics, get an iMac and use its mini-DVI slot to drive a display for your choosing. Don't want to pay for the integrated display? Tough luck, Apple soes not want to support your niche. They have been historically only interested in filling niches they want, not what everybody is screaming at them to do, with pretty good success, especially lately. Also do keep in mind that the mid-90s desaster when they did exactly what you want burns on the mind of everyone at Apple; the company nearly died back then. YOu migh have forgotten, but they themseves sure haven't.
That said, I wish Apple would include an ExpressCard slot on the iMac. That would make the machine reasonably expandable without breaking their stylish case designs.
If it had all the nice things but none of the bloody annoying things, it would indeed be better. Now the big, big problem at the heart of this whole discussion is that one person's nice thing is the next person's bloody annoying thing.
Yes, people WILL complain about their Winmodems not working under Ubuntu. The very fact that you use this as a joke shows that you are exactly the kind of arrogant Linux nerd that is responsible for the lack of a Linux desktop revolution.
Except that nowadays, virtually all high-performance cars with some luxury have that method of shifting, and it's beginning to seep down to the middel class. I think the moral is to make Linux the Ferrari of the OS world, and its way of doing things will become the standard. Right now Linux isn't the Ferrari though, more like the Unimog.
>Also, on both Windows and Linux, it's easy to get to the computer's root partition (C:\ or/)... on OSX, I have yet to be able to get to / in finder, although I can get there in the terminal?
You see, that is why OS X is GOOD. You do not need to know how to get to / - it does not exist for the end user. If you even know what it is, you are also expected to know how to get there (terminal). In short, OS X does a great job at hiding its flexible underpinnings in a consistent and usable UI, far better than Windows or Ubuntu does.
>they could learn quite a lot about the average user experience of programs such as Pidgin and The GIMP
In the case of the GIMP, the wall seperating testers and UI designers better be sturdy. Very sturdy. Then again, having a couple of its designer strangled by enraged users would probably be the exact thing the GIMP needs.
No, it doesn't. I fact, it is a already a huge advantage that she did not have to install Ubuntu (Note: It's not that installing Windows is easier, but people do not install Windows, they buy computers with Windows on them. This is a real problem that no amount of whining about the unfairness of it all will make go away.) Now, imagine if she had the wrong wireless chipset; 0/12 points right there, instantly.
>I also think many of her problems were with gnome rather than with 'Linux'
Geekthink strikes again! You can consider yourself lucky that people by now know Linux at all, and a decent slice even know Ubuntu, but dan they will not care at all what the window manager is called. If it sucks, it's not GNome's fault, it's Ubuntu's fault (or, more likely, Linux's fault).
In before "Linux is a kernel, the OS is called GNU/Linux, Ubuntu is a distro". As if normal people would actually CARE about that. Or to think further, most Linux users DO care, because people who care are most liklely to use Linux in the first place. However, I was under the impression that was supposed to change somewhen (2004 I think it was).
Ahaha, good one. I thought the very point of this exercise was that users do not behave like developers expect or would like them to. Reading release notes is certainly among the things they rarely ever do, and so this hints at Ubuntu doing something wrong more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
You read can read A LOT about those on thedailywtf.com
Yes. Yes, it belongs on Slashdot. So we can make fun of it. Or not. Complaining about complainers is as bad as complaining in the first place.
Oh, so this is a source-based live CD? That's certainly a niche waiting to be filled; I always was pissed off that live CDs didn't compile a custom kernel before booting.
I fully expect someone to point me to a Gentoo live CD that does exactly that already, wouldn't put it past them.
One, AMD might shoot itself in the foot by targeting gamers especially (or not; I think gamers actually like to run AMD's top offerings on desktops so it might sense to concentrate on that market, but it's kind of sad).
Two, I think neither Intel nor Nvidia will ever want to get any of their hardware certified with their biggest competitor's logo. So if it's by component, it's dead in the water. If it's by system, it might have a little potential, but unless it gets the big shots (Sony, Dell, etc.) on board, it will be limited to the much smaller market of small run custom builders - and those are exactly the ones whose customers already know which systems run games well.
Yes, but on OS X that's a catastrophe and on Linux it's just par for the course.
If Microsoft keeps up what they did in Vista there will be 200 versions of Windows 7 as well. Hint: Everyone hated it, it is NOT A GOOD THING.
Regular users don't need to rename several thousand files. Seriously.
Also, what it really comes down to is a thing said further up; Linux is about as usable as Windows these days, give or take a little at certain points, but for laypersons even Windows is HARD. They took more than 10 years to learn something alien and foreign to them, a huge investement. THAT is the reason Linux isn't taking the desktop by storm. To be competitive, it doesn't have to be as good as Windows, it has to be obviously and significantly better.
apt-get install life, dependencies, etc.
Yeah this joke almost always works.
Thinking about this a little, it appears you should buy a secondhand PowerMac G5. I am almost serious about this.
So you just want a cheap Mac with enough PCIe to stick a video card into to drive a monitor of your choosing? Seriously, what do you NEED PCIe these days for apart from graphics cards? Well, you might want to stick in a RAID card or something, but if you want to do that you are in the market for a Mac Pro. If you want non-integrated graphics, get an iMac and use its mini-DVI slot to drive a display for your choosing. Don't want to pay for the integrated display? Tough luck, Apple soes not want to support your niche. They have been historically only interested in filling niches they want, not what everybody is screaming at them to do, with pretty good success, especially lately. Also do keep in mind that the mid-90s desaster when they did exactly what you want burns on the mind of everyone at Apple; the company nearly died back then. YOu migh have forgotten, but they themseves sure haven't.
That said, I wish Apple would include an ExpressCard slot on the iMac. That would make the machine reasonably expandable without breaking their stylish case designs.
If it had all the nice things but none of the bloody annoying things, it would indeed be better. Now the big, big problem at the heart of this whole discussion is that one person's nice thing is the next person's bloody annoying thing.
Yes, people WILL complain about their Winmodems not working under Ubuntu. The very fact that you use this as a joke shows that you are exactly the kind of arrogant Linux nerd that is responsible for the lack of a Linux desktop revolution.
Except that nowadays, virtually all high-performance cars with some luxury have that method of shifting, and it's beginning to seep down to the middel class. I think the moral is to make Linux the Ferrari of the OS world, and its way of doing things will become the standard. Right now Linux isn't the Ferrari though, more like the Unimog.
>Also, on both Windows and Linux, it's easy to get to the computer's root partition (C:\ or /) ... on OSX, I have yet to be able to get to / in finder, although I can get there in the terminal?
You see, that is why OS X is GOOD. You do not need to know how to get to / - it does not exist for the end user. If you even know what it is, you are also expected to know how to get there (terminal). In short, OS X does a great job at hiding its flexible underpinnings in a consistent and usable UI, far better than Windows or Ubuntu does.
>they could learn quite a lot about the average user experience of programs such as Pidgin and The GIMP
In the case of the GIMP, the wall seperating testers and UI designers better be sturdy. Very sturdy. Then again, having a couple of its designer strangled by enraged users would probably be the exact thing the GIMP needs.
No, it doesn't. I fact, it is a already a huge advantage that she did not have to install Ubuntu (Note: It's not that installing Windows is easier, but people do not install Windows, they buy computers with Windows on them. This is a real problem that no amount of whining about the unfairness of it all will make go away.) Now, imagine if she had the wrong wireless chipset; 0/12 points right there, instantly.
>I also think many of her problems were with gnome rather than with 'Linux'
Geekthink strikes again! You can consider yourself lucky that people by now know Linux at all, and a decent slice even know Ubuntu, but dan they will not care at all what the window manager is called. If it sucks, it's not GNome's fault, it's Ubuntu's fault (or, more likely, Linux's fault).
In before "Linux is a kernel, the OS is called GNU/Linux, Ubuntu is a distro". As if normal people would actually CARE about that. Or to think further, most Linux users DO care, because people who care are most liklely to use Linux in the first place. However, I was under the impression that was supposed to change somewhen (2004 I think it was).
>she should have read the release notes
Ahaha, good one. I thought the very point of this exercise was that users do not behave like developers expect or would like them to. Reading release notes is certainly among the things they rarely ever do, and so this hints at Ubuntu doing something wrong more than anything else.
And most people would rather stay with XP instead of moving to Vista. Just like they'd rather stay with XP than moving to Ubuntu.
Last time I checked Windows still had the 15 second reset countdown when you change screen resolution.
Open synaptic and install girlfriend (or just apt-get girlfriend like a true geek). Beware of the dependencies though.
I'm pretty sure running fsck was task number 13.