You turned the question around. You answered a question about Linux being hard to use with another question about Windows possibly being hard to use. It seems that Linux proponents never want to even come close to the possibility that Linux might be less intuitive or suitable for newbies than Windows is.
This has been going on for 50 years and in a way it has been going on for a lot longer. Now here comes open source and a completely different way of distributing a product, finding support and so on. People don't understand that new model yet, it takes time.
I hate this attitude. "the only reason Linux/open source hasn't taken off yet is because nobody understands it/everyone is brainwashed by Windows". Maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't as good as it's cracked up to be?
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft pours millions of dollars into making the workings of a computer obvious and making a full help system which people can access by clicking the start button and choosing 'Help', is it?
This is exactly what people are talking about; people can take a legitimate criticism of Linux (hard to use, no documentation, little attention paid to consistency) and turn it into an excuse to bash Windows and Microsoft.
There's a LOT of snobbery out there. A lot of the time problems are deemed to be the user's fault for having the wrong hardware, not enough memory, not a fast enough processor, wrong kernel...I once got told in #cedega on freenode that I would need at least a gig of RAM to run Half-Life 2 on Linux; this is a game that comfortably runs under 384MB of ram under Windows. It's not Cedega's fault that it gives crappy performance, it's my fault for having an old PC.
Then there's the RTFM thing...man pages are just about impenetrable, alright? They're a pain in the fucking ass. They do not give simple instructions, they give lists of command line switches. And TLDP is stupidly out of date. It still refers to kernel 2.2 for christ's sake.
I'll give kudos to FreeBSD here, the handbook is very up to date and gives step by step handholding guides to just about everything, from how UNIX works to setting up a firewall using pf. There's not an answer I couldn't find in there. Compared to that, Linux's documentation is utterly terrible.
As a whole, there's a dichotomy. You hear a lot about Linux on the desktop, but nobody wants to face facts and realise that the way things are isn't even near satisfactory. The UNIX filesystem layout is confusing to new users, but if someone raises this point there will inevitably be a stream of replies that it's far more logical than the Windows way of doing things (perish the thought that drives be given simple identifiers, like letters!) Being told you have to upgrade your hardware to use an OS which everyone says is faster and more reliable than what you have currently is ridiculous...nobody will go for that.
Back when Win3.1 was released, the Internet was only just beginning to be a factor in peoples' lives, and a computer's administrator also being its primary user could be considered a feature, as people could get things done. As a result, no (or very weak) multi-user support was in consumer Windows lines up til XP, by which time it was too late. Computer worms were a horrible reality, and although permissions were necessary they could not be implemented to the degree they should be for backwards compatibility reasons.
For this reason, MS is in between a rock and a hard place. They either remove all the backwards compatibility and start afresh, meaning that everyone gets pissed off cos app foo and game bar don't work any more, or they keep the backwards compatibility but make everyone run as a user and not an administrator, meaning that either everyone will log in as administrator as a matter of course or that MS has to support lots of pissed off people who can't change their computer's clock. I would love to see someone come up with a solution to this that isn't "switch to Linux/Mac/BSD" because for most people that simply isn't an option.
In case you're wondering what the point is, the smart people at MS, when most people asked what the Internet was would say it was something from a Terminator movie, would probably have said that for ease of use having a single user OS would be perfect (and Mac OS had the same thing IIRC). Now the times have changed and those smart people are having a job and a half trying to undo that mistake.
I would imagine Valve has a contract with their physical distributors (EA) stopping them from lowering prices for Steam users. If they did, practically everyone would just buy over steam, which would be a bad thing for EA.
Course if, like me, you're in the UK it makes things a helluva lot cheaper (about £12 versus £20 for HL2:E1).
Hmm... No. This is only true if you're designing DRM.
Wrong. If the user is going to do something stupid, which a lot of the time they are, then they are technically the enemy. This whole discussion has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with stopping a user from doing stupid things to compromise their own security.
I'm sure it's lovely for you to be able to sit and say that Microsoft are complete retards, but truth is that for a company whose No. 1 business is making and selling software (or at the very least licenses to use that software) I'd expect them to have some pretty smart individuals working for them.
YMMV, but I found that turning off Music Store links in Preferences made things speed up incredibly. I have most stuff turned off and it runs acceptably.
How are they the RIAA's laws? They're copyright laws, which have been in place since before the RIAA even existed, and i'd wager before even the gramophone had existed. There's no justification for downloading music as a form of protest, period. The great grandparent was right for comparing it to substance abuse.
If you're in a college or you're using broadband (I know my broadband ISP gives me an IP that only changes if I switch network cards or something) then IP addresses tend to point more reliably to a specific person. That and, if she agreed to the settlement, she's accepting guilt.
Not that it makes the RIAAs methods or suggestions any less grotesque (charging people thousands of dollars for a song that they are perfectly willing to sell for $1 is wrong), but attack that rather than the methods they use.
Finding the RIAA evil is no justification for downloading RIAA music. If you want to boycott a business, actually boycott them, don't just say you'll boycott them and then get their products through some other means.
Who said anything about people "produc[ing] their product (which is new media, not copies) without any prior promise of payment" and then demanding money for it? Most artists, upon signing with a record label, do so with the general assumption that they will be earning money from people who buy their CDs through the deal. Spreading music so people can leech it off BitTorrent (and most people I've met who download music do just that, leech large collections of MP3s for their own enjoyment and not on a try-before-you-buy basis) would be, under those circumstances, hurting artists.
Even if the artist doesn't demand money for their music, distributing it without their consent is still a pretty dickish thing to do, I'm sure you'll agree.
I certainly wouldn't consider it oppression. Do you consider speed limits oppression? I mean, practically everyone would give their front teeth to go down highways at 100mph to work.
Oppression I would class as something that restricts fundamental human rights such as free speech (and don't claim that sending other peoples' work around is free speech), rights to privacy and, well, for want of a better term the right to not have your door kicked in by the government for a minor indiscretion. Downloading music doesn't factor into that.
The reason we don't email 500MB files around is because our methods of picking up mail suck for large attachments. POP3; terrible. IMAP is slightly better, but still terrible, because you have to download the whole 500MB attachment to read the 10kb message. Webmail is close, but try finding a webmail provider who'll let you receive files of that size. Really, if you're trying to send stupidly large files, it's probably easier to burn them to a CD and mail them.
Sure musicians are artists, but they dont deserve more money than the creator of a cpu or a car. Its only music, its not a cancer cure.
So let's not give them anything. Because it's not a cure for cancer, or food for hungry people. it's just peoples' work. Let's just give away lots and lots of music for free based on our own value judgement...hey, fuck everyone who put work into that music, it's not a cure for cancer.
The music industry has decided this; you don't own the content, you're buying a right to play that content. This is why you shouldn't feel any guilt for downloading an album you own but for which the CD is damaged off of BitTorrent, or downloading a song you bought off iTunes but then lost off of Gnutella.
Slashdot Mirror
You turned the question around. You answered a question about Linux being hard to use with another question about Windows possibly being hard to use. It seems that Linux proponents never want to even come close to the possibility that Linux might be less intuitive or suitable for newbies than Windows is.
This has been going on for 50 years and in a way it has been going on for a lot longer. Now here comes open source and a completely different way of distributing a product, finding support and so on. People don't understand that new model yet, it takes time.
I hate this attitude. "the only reason Linux/open source hasn't taken off yet is because nobody understands it/everyone is brainwashed by Windows". Maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't as good as it's cracked up to be?
Can I ask how you learned Windows?
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft pours millions of dollars into making the workings of a computer obvious and making a full help system which people can access by clicking the start button and choosing 'Help', is it?
This is exactly what people are talking about; people can take a legitimate criticism of Linux (hard to use, no documentation, little attention paid to consistency) and turn it into an excuse to bash Windows and Microsoft.
There's a LOT of snobbery out there. A lot of the time problems are deemed to be the user's fault for having the wrong hardware, not enough memory, not a fast enough processor, wrong kernel...I once got told in #cedega on freenode that I would need at least a gig of RAM to run Half-Life 2 on Linux; this is a game that comfortably runs under 384MB of ram under Windows. It's not Cedega's fault that it gives crappy performance, it's my fault for having an old PC.
Then there's the RTFM thing...man pages are just about impenetrable, alright? They're a pain in the fucking ass. They do not give simple instructions, they give lists of command line switches. And TLDP is stupidly out of date. It still refers to kernel 2.2 for christ's sake.
I'll give kudos to FreeBSD here, the handbook is very up to date and gives step by step handholding guides to just about everything, from how UNIX works to setting up a firewall using pf. There's not an answer I couldn't find in there. Compared to that, Linux's documentation is utterly terrible.
As a whole, there's a dichotomy. You hear a lot about Linux on the desktop, but nobody wants to face facts and realise that the way things are isn't even near satisfactory. The UNIX filesystem layout is confusing to new users, but if someone raises this point there will inevitably be a stream of replies that it's far more logical than the Windows way of doing things (perish the thought that drives be given simple identifiers, like letters!) Being told you have to upgrade your hardware to use an OS which everyone says is faster and more reliable than what you have currently is ridiculous...nobody will go for that.
Back when Win3.1 was released, the Internet was only just beginning to be a factor in peoples' lives, and a computer's administrator also being its primary user could be considered a feature, as people could get things done. As a result, no (or very weak) multi-user support was in consumer Windows lines up til XP, by which time it was too late. Computer worms were a horrible reality, and although permissions were necessary they could not be implemented to the degree they should be for backwards compatibility reasons.
For this reason, MS is in between a rock and a hard place. They either remove all the backwards compatibility and start afresh, meaning that everyone gets pissed off cos app foo and game bar don't work any more, or they keep the backwards compatibility but make everyone run as a user and not an administrator, meaning that either everyone will log in as administrator as a matter of course or that MS has to support lots of pissed off people who can't change their computer's clock. I would love to see someone come up with a solution to this that isn't "switch to Linux/Mac/BSD" because for most people that simply isn't an option.
In case you're wondering what the point is, the smart people at MS, when most people asked what the Internet was would say it was something from a Terminator movie, would probably have said that for ease of use having a single user OS would be perfect (and Mac OS had the same thing IIRC). Now the times have changed and those smart people are having a job and a half trying to undo that mistake.
I would imagine Valve has a contract with their physical distributors (EA) stopping them from lowering prices for Steam users. If they did, practically everyone would just buy over steam, which would be a bad thing for EA.
Course if, like me, you're in the UK it makes things a helluva lot cheaper (about £12 versus £20 for HL2:E1).
Hmm... No. This is only true if you're designing DRM.
Wrong. If the user is going to do something stupid, which a lot of the time they are, then they are technically the enemy. This whole discussion has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with stopping a user from doing stupid things to compromise their own security.
I'm sure it's lovely for you to be able to sit and say that Microsoft are complete retards, but truth is that for a company whose No. 1 business is making and selling software (or at the very least licenses to use that software) I'd expect them to have some pretty smart individuals working for them.
P2P hogs expect to dine for close to free.
:D
Gee, I'd never expect that people too cheap to buy their own CDs and DVDs wouldn't want to pay more to get them for free.
Funny, yes i know.
No, you're not.
For Windows give MediaMonkey a go. It's like AmaroK, with quite a few nifty features.
YMMV, but I found that turning off Music Store links in Preferences made things speed up incredibly. I have most stuff turned off and it runs acceptably.
The Kubuntu control centre (i think it's called Guidance) looks quite damned similar to the OSX control centre. See here.
Thank you for the delightful image of Bill Gates indulging in some...fetishes. I'm now going to go and kill myself. You utter bastard.
How are they the RIAA's laws? They're copyright laws, which have been in place since before the RIAA even existed, and i'd wager before even the gramophone had existed. There's no justification for downloading music as a form of protest, period. The great grandparent was right for comparing it to substance abuse.
If you're in a college or you're using broadband (I know my broadband ISP gives me an IP that only changes if I switch network cards or something) then IP addresses tend to point more reliably to a specific person. That and, if she agreed to the settlement, she's accepting guilt.
Not that it makes the RIAAs methods or suggestions any less grotesque (charging people thousands of dollars for a song that they are perfectly willing to sell for $1 is wrong), but attack that rather than the methods they use.
I find your ideas intriguing etc etc etc.
Finding the RIAA evil is no justification for downloading RIAA music. If you want to boycott a business, actually boycott them, don't just say you'll boycott them and then get their products through some other means.
Who said anything about people "produc[ing] their product (which is new media, not copies) without any prior promise of payment" and then demanding money for it? Most artists, upon signing with a record label, do so with the general assumption that they will be earning money from people who buy their CDs through the deal. Spreading music so people can leech it off BitTorrent (and most people I've met who download music do just that, leech large collections of MP3s for their own enjoyment and not on a try-before-you-buy basis) would be, under those circumstances, hurting artists.
Even if the artist doesn't demand money for their music, distributing it without their consent is still a pretty dickish thing to do, I'm sure you'll agree.
That I would call oppression. Suing large-scale users of P2P networks isn't.
(How could they get jail terms anyway, I thought copyright infringement was a civil offense rather than a criminal one?)
I certainly wouldn't consider it oppression. Do you consider speed limits oppression? I mean, practically everyone would give their front teeth to go down highways at 100mph to work.
Oppression I would class as something that restricts fundamental human rights such as free speech (and don't claim that sending other peoples' work around is free speech), rights to privacy and, well, for want of a better term the right to not have your door kicked in by the government for a minor indiscretion. Downloading music doesn't factor into that.
The reason we don't email 500MB files around is because our methods of picking up mail suck for large attachments. POP3; terrible. IMAP is slightly better, but still terrible, because you have to download the whole 500MB attachment to read the 10kb message. Webmail is close, but try finding a webmail provider who'll let you receive files of that size. Really, if you're trying to send stupidly large files, it's probably easier to burn them to a CD and mail them.
Sure musicians are artists, but they dont deserve more money than the creator of a cpu or a car. Its only music, its not a cancer cure.
So let's not give them anything. Because it's not a cure for cancer, or food for hungry people. it's just peoples' work. Let's just give away lots and lots of music for free based on our own value judgement...hey, fuck everyone who put work into that music, it's not a cure for cancer.
You cannot seriously be likening laws against leeching music off P2P against the wishes of the artists to oppression. Even for Slashdot, that's a low.
I asked for that. :)
The music industry has decided this; you don't own the content, you're buying a right to play that content. This is why you shouldn't feel any guilt for downloading an album you own but for which the CD is damaged off of BitTorrent, or downloading a song you bought off iTunes but then lost off of Gnutella.