So are you saying that the Old Testament is non-Christian? Because as I understand it, there's quite a bit in there about the coming of Christ... In any case, nowhere in the Bible (New or Old Testaments) does it ever say that every bit of doctrine, revelation, or inspiration is contained within the Bible, and that anything else is garbage (how could it.. the Bible itself as we know it wasn't compiled for years and years after all its parts were written... Peter, Paul, James, John and the others didn't even know about a formally assembled collection of spiritual writings called a "New Testament"). I think that last sentence of yours may qualify as manmade garbage, though.
Some distributions do provide that, such as Linux Mint. Also, the Dell machines that ship with Ubuntu include DVD support, and mp3 support with Ubuntu is just a mouse click or two away when you try to play your first mp3 file.
Windows 2000 would also have been doing a lot less.
But what is this extra stuff that Vista is *just doing* all the time that makes it better? Do we need it? Does it really help anything?
It amazes me that, today, people still skimp on RAM when it is probably the single most important factor in overall system performance.... I got my first PC with 1G RAM nearly a decade ago.
Then I'm sure you paid quite a bit for it. I remember the first machine I saw that had 1GB of RAM... I was working in computer support at my university and one of the professors got a machine with a full GB of RAM... He needed it for some intense simulation stuff he was doing. That was probably in 2001 (7 years ago). It was a while after that before 1GB became a common configuration. My 8.5 year old 600 MHz P3 doesn't even support more than 768 MB, and I also have a 1GHz P3 that only supports 512 MB.
The point is that a decade ago, 1GB was not practical, and in many cases not possible for general users at all. 1GB may have been easily affordable for the past few years, but not a decade ago. If you even owned a computer that could support 1GB of RAM in the 90's, I would imagine that you had a very high-end machine and that you may be a little out of touch with what normal people can and do use. The rest of us have to make do with equipment that's available to common folk and stuff that's somewhat affordable. Many people have families to support, rent/mortgages and all kinds of other bills, so we can't go and blow several hundred dollars on RAM, even though you know how important it is to system performance.
And in a day where people are realizing they don't need super awesome hardware to do their day-to-day web surfing, IM and e-mail, low cost laptops and desktops are doing great running Linux on hardware that could never support Vista. Sure more RAM could increase performance... but so can a better OS. You actually can save money on hardware and software and still meet all your needs quite well. Enjoy your uber-1337 systems, though.
Heck, you can run Vista usably on hardware up to about 8 years old, with minor upgrades.
...
The "bloat" in Vista isn't the kernel, it's all the stuff that goes on top like the GUI.
Then why is it that when Vista came out, my 3-year old laptop ran it like a 3-legged dog, even after I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB? It wouldn't even run the Aero GUI (even though the same laptop runs compiz in Ubuntu without any problems). It was obviously not the GUI getting in the way, since I was forced to revert back to the W2K style GUI. The machine does great with Ubuntu and WinXP, though. Besides, if a GUI can be the cause of slow file copies, I'd say there's something seriously wrong with the OS.
And as a side note, I just barely replaced my home machine, which was an 8.5 year old P3 running XP... It was a great PC when I got it, but it wasn't doing so hot by the end of its Windows life. I think I'll turn it into a mythbox, though, it will handle that just fine.
I don't think that announcing breaking backwards compatibility is declaring defeat for a business model. It is more a cleansing process.
The whole reason why I have stuck with Microsoft for this long (as well as many other people), is that apps I use aren't compatible with other OS's. If I could have iTunes for Linux, my wife would let me switch at home. Why doesn't Apple provide it? Because Linux doesn't have the marketshare. Why doesn't it have the marketshare? Because there aren't enough of everyone's favorite apps.
How much of the corporate reluctance to migrate to Vista is because of incompatibility with current apps? Some people are still running Windows 2000 to support old apps that were never updated to be compatible with XP, muchless Vista.
I understand that MS would have reasons to want to "cleanse" itself, but doing so would make them lose the one major advantage they have over Linux. If software companies have to re-write every app to work with Win7, why even bother with it? Who would use Win7, since all the apps are broken? Why not just write for Linux or Mac? The Apple market may always stay relatively small because of the price and the limited number of PC configurations, but Linux doesn't have either of those issues.
Linux has been in a tough spot for years because its marketshare is tiny next to Windows. But with no functional applications, Win7 would be starting over on marketshare, with no good reasons for anyone to buy into the new OS. Apple was able to start over with OS X because there was a relatively small number of users, who are fiercely loyal, and the change enabled them to get more users. I don't think MS can risk pissing off 90%+ of all computer users. Their biggest problem is that they could lose users, and breaking backwards compatibility can only increase the probability.
I'm sure they'll have some type of virtualization-enabled "Classic Mode", but you can do that from other operating systems as well, and if we have 2 years to prepare for it, Apple and the Linux community can have solutions that are just as elegant (or more so) than what Microsoft will cobble together, because whatever solution MS provides will most likely be an afterthought, since it's just a stop-gap solution until all the developers move over to Win7... if they ever do.
He was very open about exactly when he tried it, and what distro he used. And please stop using the Windows 2000 analogy. If you're going to compare F7 to an older version of Windows, compare it to WinXP SP2. And saying he can't have an informed opinion about Linux in general because one of the popular distros gave him headaches a year ago is ridiculous. He tried, and gave a very concise explanation of why he felt Linux wasn't right for him at the time. He's been perfectly willing to consider trying Ubuntu now, but I'm a little surprised because of some of the reaction he's gotten here.
I think it's fine to point out that there are better distros out there for beginners, and that things are getting better all the time with Linux distros in general, but it's rude to say he can't have an informed opinion, even though he tried it (and apparently put a fair amount of effort into it).
My complaint is not that he tried it last year and not this year. My complaint is that he tried it last year and is basing his opinion of current versions of linux on last year's version. And to be fair to him, things move faster in the Linux world (although how long has it taken to get to "the Year of Linux on the Desktop"... as if we're there yet), but in the Windows world, it just took 5 years to release 2 service packs and one major release. That's the world a lot of Windows people are coming from. They use the same OS release for years. Most never even install the OS at all. They don't want to experiment with a bunch of different distros, and they don't want to keep trying them every few months. And even if Fedora 8 is so much "better" than Fedora 7, who's to say that it would necessarily fix the problems that he ran into? If you want to see more people switch over to Linux, you have to accept that people may have bad experiences, and find ways to be encouraging, instead of telling people their opinion is wrong and doesn't matter.
Nothing in that box describes rebooting my system. There's no disclaimers, footnotes, fine print, or anything else that says that Windows will give you a specific window of time where if you don't click on a box, we'll just shut everything down for you. I understand that I shouldn't be leaving unsaved work on my computer when I'm away from it, and that even when I am working on it, I should save often, because you never know. This hasn't ever really been an issue that's caused me to lose any work, either. For me, it's just been annoying. For others, I can see it being a real problem. People want their computer to be "up to date" and to have the latest security fixes, and heck, that dialog box says that it's the reccommended setting, so that must be the best, right? They don't know they're agreeing to random reboots. It's especially annoying that those reboots can be for something as stupid as an Outlook Express patch or Windows Genuine Advantage checking out your system again.
I can work around that and deal with it. Not everyone knows that the "recommended" setting is not the best one. And that's the complaint here. In some ways, Linux does things in ways that are better for regular people than Windows does.
And why are people so harsh here? I understand that we can all be opinionated about things, but "spouting nonsense"? Come on, suppose that this wasn't just a case of you ignoring the context of a discussion so you could act like a douche, suppose I really was spouting nonsense... that's still a bit much. No wonder people think that geeks, nerds and other computer people are so hard to get along with. A person can't even share a personal opinion or observation without being accused of "spouting nonsense", just because you have something to say that somewhat connects with what I was talking about, without actually contradicting it.
I'm sorry to hear you've had bad experiences in the past, and I apologize that someone comes in telling you you're doing it wrong... that's not fair.
The best advice that I can give, though, is to try again some day with a newer distro. The posts above are right in that things are getting better all the time, not that you should be criticized for using what was available at the time. Ubuntu is a good suggestion is it is updated often, and since it is more geared towards regular people.
I think Linux is great, and I prefer to use it when I can, but when it gets to the point where we say (implicitly or explicitly) that someone is an idiot just because they didn't try the distro we use, or that they tried it last year instead of this year, that's pretty sad, and that's a significant part of "Why Linux Doesn't Spread".
I'm sure your Linux experiences in the future will be better, good luck.
The only difference is that Linux tends to bundle the drivers for everything, because that's the only way it'll get supported. Windows doesn't tend to, because it's far easier to let the hardware OEM deal with that.
It's far easier for Microsoft and the PC manufacturer to do that. But it's a huge pain for the end-user when they have to re-install the OS and they can't find the driver disk. Especially in this example, networking drivers are the most important ones to have available, because without those, you can't download any other drivers or software.
I know people have issues with wireless support in Linux, but of the two laptops that I've used extensively in Linux, neither ever had a problem. I realize I'm probably pretty lucky because of that, but it was very easy. I installed Ubuntu, and the wireless worked. No problems, nothing else to install. It happens sometimes in the Linux world, but never in Windows.
How is installing mp3 support more complicated or difficult than setting up a second display? I agree that neither should be hard to do, and I have heard that dual-displays are a pain in Linux (I've never had to deal with it, though), but when you want to play an mp3 in Ubuntu, a dialog pops up telling you that you have to install mp3 support, and gives you a button you can click on to do it automagically. It's not hard. That dialog might seem weird (according to the GPP), but it's only because of PITA legal limitations imposed by the "not-so-free" culture. Of course it just explains why it's not installed by default, and gives you a button to click that will install it.
Honestly, most of the nit-picks I've seen in these comments today have even more annoying equivalents in the Windows world. How many *weird* pop-ups are there in Windows?
What bugs me about the Windows updates is that I can leave my computer at work on overnight, and in the morning find out that it has rebooted automatically, without my permission. Windows Update decided to run some updates, and rebooted my computer without asking. Or, sometimes updates get installed while I'm working, then I have a dialog box rudely interrupting what I'm working on every 15 minutes, stealing focus and causing an annoying system beep sound, telling me I need to reboot. I know there's a hack to make that dialog go away permanently, but if I have to search in forums all over the internet to find it, it means that Windows isn't that much easier to "just use" than Linux is.
As someone mentioned above, every app having its own update program gets really annoying, too. Adobe Reader pops up every other week trying to get me to install Japanese fonts or a new build of Reader. We just got a new HP scanner/printer for Christmas, and both of the times we've tried to scan something with it (about 1 month apart from each other), we push the scan button, and before the thing will scan, it looks for updates, and starts going through the whole process of downloading and installing updates, including an annoying registration form. It doesn't help that this is an old computer, so everything takes a long time already. Adding an unnecessary process, especially one that requires human interaction before we can even get the scanner to start scanning, is a major pain in the butt. One of these times was while I was at work, my wife didn't know what to do with it all so the picture didn't get scanned until I came home.
I like the fact that Firefox checks for updates to extensions and themes, but I wish it could do it silently and not force you to click on buttons when it does find updates, so you can just get on with using the browser. But that's a Mozilla problem, not really a Windows/Linux thing.
My wife is always so nervous about doing anything new on the computer, she just assumes she can't do it from the get-go, mostly because of things like this scanner fiasco. If I could switch over to Linux at home, I honestly think she'd have less "scary" stuff getting in her way. Thanks to our current iTunes dependency, switching to Linux probably won't happen anytime soon, but I think things in general would be less annoying for us in Linux.
Patent the process of "dividing two, common whole numbers for the purpose of usefully approximating the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle". That will get shot down immediately. You need to prefix it with "a computational device used for" and turn it into a software patent.
Don't forget "On the Internet..."
I agree whole heartedly. When I first saw that menu I absolutely hated it. And I haven't tried it again since then. It's even worse when you're trying to use it with a laptop trackpad than with a regular mouse, but even the regular mouse is awful.
Of course, since the menu probably won't ever be a part of the Windows port, it's probably not really relevant here, but you are absolutely right. I'm glad I finally found someone else who mentioned that.
A number of sites are offering features describing broadcast/cable TV alternatives while you wait for that next episode of 'Chuck'.
I might point out that there are two new episodes of Chuck airing tomorrow night... of course, as far as I'm aware, those are the last two episodes written before the strike, so you can start waiting after Thursday night.
I really don't care about the wired ethernet support, I just thought it fit nicely into the old "No wireless. less space than a Nomad. Lame." joke that the post above mine started.
wow... FUD? Troll? I was saying that I thought flash would be fine for a desktop machine, and that the number of write cycles probably wouldn't be a serious limitation... Apparently I underestimated just how suitable it is (although 51 years of continuous writing to disk sounds like a lot). Sensitive bunch we have here.
I also just noticed that it doesn't come with the Front Row remote by default... you have an option to pay $20 more to get that... what's the deal with that, when the other MBs include it?
Seriously, they have no moving parts - which do you think will fail first? The manufacturers have been working on the limited write capacity for years such that they believe it's no longer an issue. Modern flash memory can already silently correct for any parts that can no longer be written.
Not to mention that the big killer for flash memory is swap files. Your normal day-to-day operations aren't going to be doing so much disk writing that it's really going to be an issue for a long time. If you're swapping files to disk all the time, though, you might run into problems. I noticed they said that the Air comes with a minimum of 2GB of RAM, so that probably helps reduce the need for swapping.
I really thought it was funny back when all the flash-based mp3 players were coming out, and people would make comments about the limited number of write cycles... Even without wear-leveling, 100,000 write cycles is a lot for a music player. The pins on the dock connector would break before you reach that many rewrites.
And for general day-to-day computing, with wear-leveling and a healthy amount of RAM, I would think that Flash would be a pretty viable option.
I guess I did use the word "fault", but I'm not trying to say that software publishers are negligent for not making linux software. As I said, it's a catch-22, they won't make enough money until there's more users, and there won't be enough users until there's more software. But the more mainstream distro's are working to make things easier for end-users. Drivers are becoming more readily available, and in some cases are more available than the Windows equivalents. Making hardware cheap is one more great step that will help.
Software availability is one of the last obstacles, and with the rest of the progress going on, the software will slowly start becoming available. Corel and Loki should be commended for making linux efforts in the past, and unfortunately the other pieces weren't in place yet, but I think things are working out to where linux software will be profitable before much longer. As far as Corel's issues with the community go, the type of people that they will need to target are the switchers, not the hardcore GPL crowd. And now that so many things are changing for the better (including this announcement from Shuttle), there is a greater potential for switchers.
Let's face facts, there is tons of software that is not on Linux that people want. How much longer is the Linux community going to ignore this fact?
If you think about it for a minute, I think you'll realize that the linux community is not ignoring the fact, just doing its best to carry on in spite of it, living without some apps, trying to create replacements where possible, or trying to encourage software companies to release linux versions of their programs. When it comes down to it, though, it's the software companies's fault that the software you want isn't available for linux. It's kind of a chicken and egg kind of thing... not much incentive to create software for a system that doesn't have a lot of users... and there's not a lot of users because some of the necessary software isn't available. Things like these low-cost PCs that allow people to do some useful computing without paying for the expensive hardware required for the latest Microsoft OS are a part of what the linux community needs to encourage people to try linux, so that software companies will have more motivation to produce software for linux, which will encourage more users to switch, and so on.
Actually, tell them "your network is not secured, so I can see all of your computers and I can see everything that you do over the Internet." Then see if they care.
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So are you saying that the Old Testament is non-Christian? Because as I understand it, there's quite a bit in there about the coming of Christ... In any case, nowhere in the Bible (New or Old Testaments) does it ever say that every bit of doctrine, revelation, or inspiration is contained within the Bible, and that anything else is garbage (how could it.. the Bible itself as we know it wasn't compiled for years and years after all its parts were written... Peter, Paul, James, John and the others didn't even know about a formally assembled collection of spiritual writings called a "New Testament"). I think that last sentence of yours may qualify as manmade garbage, though.
Some distributions do provide that, such as Linux Mint. Also, the Dell machines that ship with Ubuntu include DVD support, and mp3 support with Ubuntu is just a mouse click or two away when you try to play your first mp3 file.
But what is this extra stuff that Vista is *just doing* all the time that makes it better? Do we need it? Does it really help anything?
It amazes me that, today, people still skimp on RAM when it is probably the single most important factor in overall system performance.... I got my first PC with 1G RAM nearly a decade ago.
Then I'm sure you paid quite a bit for it. I remember the first machine I saw that had 1GB of RAM... I was working in computer support at my university and one of the professors got a machine with a full GB of RAM... He needed it for some intense simulation stuff he was doing. That was probably in 2001 (7 years ago). It was a while after that before 1GB became a common configuration. My 8.5 year old 600 MHz P3 doesn't even support more than 768 MB, and I also have a 1GHz P3 that only supports 512 MB.
The point is that a decade ago, 1GB was not practical, and in many cases not possible for general users at all. 1GB may have been easily affordable for the past few years, but not a decade ago. If you even owned a computer that could support 1GB of RAM in the 90's, I would imagine that you had a very high-end machine and that you may be a little out of touch with what normal people can and do use. The rest of us have to make do with equipment that's available to common folk and stuff that's somewhat affordable. Many people have families to support, rent/mortgages and all kinds of other bills, so we can't go and blow several hundred dollars on RAM, even though you know how important it is to system performance.
And in a day where people are realizing they don't need super awesome hardware to do their day-to-day web surfing, IM and e-mail, low cost laptops and desktops are doing great running Linux on hardware that could never support Vista. Sure more RAM could increase performance... but so can a better OS. You actually can save money on hardware and software and still meet all your needs quite well. Enjoy your uber-1337 systems, though.
The "bloat" in Vista isn't the kernel, it's all the stuff that goes on top like the GUI.
Then why is it that when Vista came out, my 3-year old laptop ran it like a 3-legged dog, even after I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB? It wouldn't even run the Aero GUI (even though the same laptop runs compiz in Ubuntu without any problems). It was obviously not the GUI getting in the way, since I was forced to revert back to the W2K style GUI. The machine does great with Ubuntu and WinXP, though. Besides, if a GUI can be the cause of slow file copies, I'd say there's something seriously wrong with the OS.
And as a side note, I just barely replaced my home machine, which was an 8.5 year old P3 running XP... It was a great PC when I got it, but it wasn't doing so hot by the end of its Windows life. I think I'll turn it into a mythbox, though, it will handle that just fine.
The whole reason why I have stuck with Microsoft for this long (as well as many other people), is that apps I use aren't compatible with other OS's. If I could have iTunes for Linux, my wife would let me switch at home. Why doesn't Apple provide it? Because Linux doesn't have the marketshare. Why doesn't it have the marketshare? Because there aren't enough of everyone's favorite apps.
How much of the corporate reluctance to migrate to Vista is because of incompatibility with current apps? Some people are still running Windows 2000 to support old apps that were never updated to be compatible with XP, muchless Vista.
I understand that MS would have reasons to want to "cleanse" itself, but doing so would make them lose the one major advantage they have over Linux. If software companies have to re-write every app to work with Win7, why even bother with it? Who would use Win7, since all the apps are broken? Why not just write for Linux or Mac? The Apple market may always stay relatively small because of the price and the limited number of PC configurations, but Linux doesn't have either of those issues.
Linux has been in a tough spot for years because its marketshare is tiny next to Windows. But with no functional applications, Win7 would be starting over on marketshare, with no good reasons for anyone to buy into the new OS. Apple was able to start over with OS X because there was a relatively small number of users, who are fiercely loyal, and the change enabled them to get more users. I don't think MS can risk pissing off 90%+ of all computer users. Their biggest problem is that they could lose users, and breaking backwards compatibility can only increase the probability.
I'm sure they'll have some type of virtualization-enabled "Classic Mode", but you can do that from other operating systems as well, and if we have 2 years to prepare for it, Apple and the Linux community can have solutions that are just as elegant (or more so) than what Microsoft will cobble together, because whatever solution MS provides will most likely be an afterthought, since it's just a stop-gap solution until all the developers move over to Win7... if they ever do.
"But Main Street's still all cracked and broken"
"Sorry Mom, the Mob has spoken"
"Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!"
"Mono...D'oh!"
Would a series of light bridges allow me to send my internets faster than a series of tubes?
The headline says UCLA, but the summary and the article seem to mention the ACLU...
I realize they both have the same letters in them, but this seems pretty careless. Unless the Union for Civil Liberties in America is involved...
I think it's fine to point out that there are better distros out there for beginners, and that things are getting better all the time with Linux distros in general, but it's rude to say he can't have an informed opinion, even though he tried it (and apparently put a fair amount of effort into it). My complaint is not that he tried it last year and not this year. My complaint is that he tried it last year and is basing his opinion of current versions of linux on last year's version. And to be fair to him, things move faster in the Linux world (although how long has it taken to get to "the Year of Linux on the Desktop"... as if we're there yet), but in the Windows world, it just took 5 years to release 2 service packs and one major release. That's the world a lot of Windows people are coming from. They use the same OS release for years. Most never even install the OS at all. They don't want to experiment with a bunch of different distros, and they don't want to keep trying them every few months. And even if Fedora 8 is so much "better" than Fedora 7, who's to say that it would necessarily fix the problems that he ran into? If you want to see more people switch over to Linux, you have to accept that people may have bad experiences, and find ways to be encouraging, instead of telling people their opinion is wrong and doesn't matter.
Nothing in that box describes rebooting my system. There's no disclaimers, footnotes, fine print, or anything else that says that Windows will give you a specific window of time where if you don't click on a box, we'll just shut everything down for you. I understand that I shouldn't be leaving unsaved work on my computer when I'm away from it, and that even when I am working on it, I should save often, because you never know. This hasn't ever really been an issue that's caused me to lose any work, either. For me, it's just been annoying. For others, I can see it being a real problem. People want their computer to be "up to date" and to have the latest security fixes, and heck, that dialog box says that it's the reccommended setting, so that must be the best, right? They don't know they're agreeing to random reboots. It's especially annoying that those reboots can be for something as stupid as an Outlook Express patch or Windows Genuine Advantage checking out your system again.
I can work around that and deal with it. Not everyone knows that the "recommended" setting is not the best one. And that's the complaint here. In some ways, Linux does things in ways that are better for regular people than Windows does.
And why are people so harsh here? I understand that we can all be opinionated about things, but "spouting nonsense"? Come on, suppose that this wasn't just a case of you ignoring the context of a discussion so you could act like a douche, suppose I really was spouting nonsense... that's still a bit much. No wonder people think that geeks, nerds and other computer people are so hard to get along with. A person can't even share a personal opinion or observation without being accused of "spouting nonsense", just because you have something to say that somewhat connects with what I was talking about, without actually contradicting it.
I'm sorry to hear you've had bad experiences in the past, and I apologize that someone comes in telling you you're doing it wrong... that's not fair.
The best advice that I can give, though, is to try again some day with a newer distro. The posts above are right in that things are getting better all the time, not that you should be criticized for using what was available at the time. Ubuntu is a good suggestion is it is updated often, and since it is more geared towards regular people.
I think Linux is great, and I prefer to use it when I can, but when it gets to the point where we say (implicitly or explicitly) that someone is an idiot just because they didn't try the distro we use, or that they tried it last year instead of this year, that's pretty sad, and that's a significant part of "Why Linux Doesn't Spread".
I'm sure your Linux experiences in the future will be better, good luck.
It's far easier for Microsoft and the PC manufacturer to do that. But it's a huge pain for the end-user when they have to re-install the OS and they can't find the driver disk. Especially in this example, networking drivers are the most important ones to have available, because without those, you can't download any other drivers or software.
I know people have issues with wireless support in Linux, but of the two laptops that I've used extensively in Linux, neither ever had a problem. I realize I'm probably pretty lucky because of that, but it was very easy. I installed Ubuntu, and the wireless worked. No problems, nothing else to install. It happens sometimes in the Linux world, but never in Windows.
How is installing mp3 support more complicated or difficult than setting up a second display? I agree that neither should be hard to do, and I have heard that dual-displays are a pain in Linux (I've never had to deal with it, though), but when you want to play an mp3 in Ubuntu, a dialog pops up telling you that you have to install mp3 support, and gives you a button you can click on to do it automagically. It's not hard. That dialog might seem weird (according to the GPP), but it's only because of PITA legal limitations imposed by the "not-so-free" culture. Of course it just explains why it's not installed by default, and gives you a button to click that will install it.
Honestly, most of the nit-picks I've seen in these comments today have even more annoying equivalents in the Windows world. How many *weird* pop-ups are there in Windows?
What bugs me about the Windows updates is that I can leave my computer at work on overnight, and in the morning find out that it has rebooted automatically, without my permission. Windows Update decided to run some updates, and rebooted my computer without asking. Or, sometimes updates get installed while I'm working, then I have a dialog box rudely interrupting what I'm working on every 15 minutes, stealing focus and causing an annoying system beep sound, telling me I need to reboot. I know there's a hack to make that dialog go away permanently, but if I have to search in forums all over the internet to find it, it means that Windows isn't that much easier to "just use" than Linux is.
As someone mentioned above, every app having its own update program gets really annoying, too. Adobe Reader pops up every other week trying to get me to install Japanese fonts or a new build of Reader. We just got a new HP scanner/printer for Christmas, and both of the times we've tried to scan something with it (about 1 month apart from each other), we push the scan button, and before the thing will scan, it looks for updates, and starts going through the whole process of downloading and installing updates, including an annoying registration form. It doesn't help that this is an old computer, so everything takes a long time already. Adding an unnecessary process, especially one that requires human interaction before we can even get the scanner to start scanning, is a major pain in the butt. One of these times was while I was at work, my wife didn't know what to do with it all so the picture didn't get scanned until I came home.
I like the fact that Firefox checks for updates to extensions and themes, but I wish it could do it silently and not force you to click on buttons when it does find updates, so you can just get on with using the browser. But that's a Mozilla problem, not really a Windows/Linux thing.
My wife is always so nervous about doing anything new on the computer, she just assumes she can't do it from the get-go, mostly because of things like this scanner fiasco. If I could switch over to Linux at home, I honestly think she'd have less "scary" stuff getting in her way. Thanks to our current iTunes dependency, switching to Linux probably won't happen anytime soon, but I think things in general would be less annoying for us in Linux.
Don't forget "On the Internet..."
I agree whole heartedly. When I first saw that menu I absolutely hated it. And I haven't tried it again since then. It's even worse when you're trying to use it with a laptop trackpad than with a regular mouse, but even the regular mouse is awful.
Of course, since the menu probably won't ever be a part of the Windows port, it's probably not really relevant here, but you are absolutely right. I'm glad I finally found someone else who mentioned that.
I might point out that there are two new episodes of Chuck airing tomorrow night... of course, as far as I'm aware, those are the last two episodes written before the strike, so you can start waiting after Thursday night.
I really don't care about the wired ethernet support, I just thought it fit nicely into the old "No wireless. less space than a Nomad. Lame." joke that the post above mine started.
wow... FUD? Troll? I was saying that I thought flash would be fine for a desktop machine, and that the number of write cycles probably wouldn't be a serious limitation... Apparently I underestimated just how suitable it is (although 51 years of continuous writing to disk sounds like a lot). Sensitive bunch we have here.
I also just noticed that it doesn't come with the Front Row remote by default... you have an option to pay $20 more to get that... what's the deal with that, when the other MBs include it?
No wired. Lame.
Not to mention that the big killer for flash memory is swap files. Your normal day-to-day operations aren't going to be doing so much disk writing that it's really going to be an issue for a long time. If you're swapping files to disk all the time, though, you might run into problems. I noticed they said that the Air comes with a minimum of 2GB of RAM, so that probably helps reduce the need for swapping.
I really thought it was funny back when all the flash-based mp3 players were coming out, and people would make comments about the limited number of write cycles... Even without wear-leveling, 100,000 write cycles is a lot for a music player. The pins on the dock connector would break before you reach that many rewrites.
And for general day-to-day computing, with wear-leveling and a healthy amount of RAM, I would think that Flash would be a pretty viable option.
I guess I did use the word "fault", but I'm not trying to say that software publishers are negligent for not making linux software. As I said, it's a catch-22, they won't make enough money until there's more users, and there won't be enough users until there's more software. But the more mainstream distro's are working to make things easier for end-users. Drivers are becoming more readily available, and in some cases are more available than the Windows equivalents. Making hardware cheap is one more great step that will help.
Software availability is one of the last obstacles, and with the rest of the progress going on, the software will slowly start becoming available. Corel and Loki should be commended for making linux efforts in the past, and unfortunately the other pieces weren't in place yet, but I think things are working out to where linux software will be profitable before much longer. As far as Corel's issues with the community go, the type of people that they will need to target are the switchers, not the hardcore GPL crowd. And now that so many things are changing for the better (including this announcement from Shuttle), there is a greater potential for switchers.
If you think about it for a minute, I think you'll realize that the linux community is not ignoring the fact, just doing its best to carry on in spite of it, living without some apps, trying to create replacements where possible, or trying to encourage software companies to release linux versions of their programs. When it comes down to it, though, it's the software companies's fault that the software you want isn't available for linux. It's kind of a chicken and egg kind of thing... not much incentive to create software for a system that doesn't have a lot of users... and there's not a lot of users because some of the necessary software isn't available. Things like these low-cost PCs that allow people to do some useful computing without paying for the expensive hardware required for the latest Microsoft OS are a part of what the linux community needs to encourage people to try linux, so that software companies will have more motivation to produce software for linux, which will encourage more users to switch, and so on.
Actually, tell them "your network is not secured, so I can see all of your computers and I can see everything that you do over the Internet." Then see if they care.