And that probably means something like with wordxml, that not everything will be in there, and IE will know how to render it correctly, others will have to guess, like OOo does with docs.
For me it's completely okay to be able to read pdf files in konqueror while file browsing with a click, or two clicks if I want it opened in another tab. I don't want an "open" file format which needs no special software but IE (yes, so what do you call that), which I'm using no way on earth.
I noticed about myself recently, that I've become quite picky on file formats, I like less and less getting documents in not open formats. Whenever I can I demand documents to be used and sent in dvi,ps,pdf,odt,sxw,rtf,txt. Well, if only a few percent of the people catch on to that the [IT] world will be a bit better place.
And oh, MS, please, for god's sake, forget new wierd document formats, implement EPS handling instead and make doc specifications GPL. Now that would really be something.
The only concern, one might suppose, is for people who don't want this information accumulated should their computer later be searched by others (the law? An employer? A relative?). This is perhaps a legitimate concern, but hard to argue for, as a reason to cripple error reporting.
So you say official letters in/out company, banking data, confidential businness texts/data, developer's stuff i.e. program code, images, documents w/ nda, designs, e-mail texts, whatever else is data that nobody should ever hide and proudly send it to any software developer who wants a "black box" like that ? 'Cause this is what I understand you say above (The only concern...searched by others), and I don't really like how that sounds.
I only boot to Windows to play games like Half-Life, and it bothers me that Microsoft would know about everything I'm running on that Windows box
Well, there are some of us who run a load lot more than that, and no, not willing to let anyone trustworthy get their hands on anything. And no, I don't consider some MS developer browsing through crash data trustworthy.
Anyways, I don't care what their boxes' color will be:P if there will be the option to disable the error reporting service, as it is there now. That's all that counts.
It said, "what we have here is failure to communicate." What's that mean?
Oh, man, how old are you ?:D It's from Guns'n'Roses' Civil War, "what we've got here is failure to communicate, some men you just can't reach" and so on. Great stuff. And no, I won't go into what it could possibly mean in there.
Hey, we're not talking about MS here, so drop the cynical patches line thank you. And "old tech" can still bring you the best general web search results out there, no matter av,yah,msn,dp,whatever. Ad 1, we don't exactly know what they will use this "new" word for, what solution will it cover under its terminology. Ad 2, if Google seems to work on something, that's always a bit of joy:) as we constantly get something from them, so it would be a cause to worry if they weren't on to something:)
I agree with you. There is a music purchase/download service here (we don't have itms yet, or else) where a MS-DRMed album costs about 10% less as the normal CD album in a store, with around 256k mp3 quality (but in wma of course). I'd never ever in my life would buy songs from them for such a price. However, I didn't stop buying CDs, but I'm not buying any copy-protected/DRMed CDs if I can avoid it. But sometimes I can't like the latest Dido, or one Norah Jones album I bought couple of weeks ago, etc. But, if I couldn't rip these anyway:) than I would send them back complaining they don't play in my hifi, that's the way.
The others called bullshit, but I stand on your side. 128k is just fine for your everyday crap one just wants to listen to quickly but I'd never do that to my favourite stuff, like classic music, my Diana Krall albums, and I could just go on for hours. These I have 92-320k vbr encoded and I'd never settle for less. For me a store selling songs below 256k mp3 quality (I state explicitely again, 128k mp3 quality, since there are other formats which can settle with less) is definitely the wrong place to spend my money at. Anyway, in the last few months I've spent more on music CDs than in the last 2 years before. Now come RIAA with your decreasing sales figures.
I always use one word, or more shorter words cat together, or a word+number, and so on, but all of them written in l33t. This, combined with an occasional small/caps letters IMO is a good way. You avoid dictionary words, but still can think out stuff you can remember easily. Then again "easily" is not the same for everyone. My ones are usually quite scrambled pieces, but I never had trouble memorizing them (around 10 different, used for dozens of places, boxes, sites, servers, etc.).
...I feel that as long as your repositories are up to date and reasonably extensive (as is the case with, say, Gentoo, Ubunutu, SUSE(?), but not Mandrake), installation of software under Linux is way better than under Windows.
I will be trolled for this, but I'll - again - have to say this, Ubuntu as having reasonably extensive own repositories ? Huh ? Yeah, right. Like the somewhere above comment who states Ubuntu outnumbers Debian on desktops. Some people should be forced to read&prove before talking.
I have here a pIII500 and a dualpII300 both being servers running on woody and sarge respectively and also one pIII500 laptop with sid. Each and every one of them do fine and I really have nothing to complain about. As others have stated, it's really and absolutely _not_ the kernel that slows down your system, it's memory-intensive applications that you probably don't know enough to know why they are slowing you down, and which you should exchange in favor of smaller footprint sw. Which you can, being that we're talking about Linux here, and that means you are not trapped in conrete and sinking down [your favourite] bay.
It doesn't "load" those modules, it just checks whether there are such devices and _then_ loads them, otherwise, it won't. That's what good about it. But there are always people who can see good things as being bad. Like 90% of this whole thread and the article itself.
I think you're wrong, and I stand by it. I'll explain. One can _not_ expect 6packjoes to understand what a kernel is, what/why it is for, let alone to see why it would need to be (re)compiled, or anyways cared about. One level above there are the (l)users who know where and when to click and jave no real clue about system internals, but they think they know, so they often screw everything up and blame it on the weatherman. If one would make the - quite wrong and false - statement that kernel tweaking (I intentionally didn't write compiling) is easy and everybody can/could do it, that the above two category of people would make a lot more mess around their systems than before. I think it is good to provide a way of kernel configuration and compilation that is quite easy for those who know enough of it to do what they want, and which is not that hard for others to learn (think menuconfig/xconfig), but still seem "hard" enough for clickingjoes so as not to mess around with it.
I don't think it's too much to ask from anyone to understand a bit more about linux and the kernel before they start messing and complaining all over the place. I think it is good that they have to arrive to a certain - really not so high - level of knowledge beforehand.
download only the new core kernel and modules needed
This is just insane. What you talking is something like having some default binary kernel version and download the required modules for it. Why on earth would anyone want that ?
If you feel the whole source is too big, than for god's sake, download only the patches. And why would you want to use some binary compiled by someone when you can have a kernel tuned for your specific needs ?
This stands exactly opposite of everything I ever wandered into FOSS land, ever. I wouldn't want any of this, and I'm sure very many people wouldn't want it either.
In fact, it's pretty amazing, that when people don't have a kernel source to tweak [like in windows], they get nervous about it [i.e. the ones who care, not just click], but when there's a source you can compile on your own, and with tools that make your life quite easy - think menuconfig or xconfig - then one just pops up a hand and starts complainging: We have too much freedom, we don't want this !
Oh, come on. Sometimes when I read stuff like these above - the original article included - I just feel I am on the wrong track, among the wrong people and should've just learned to be a gardner instead.
Yup, just occured: Greg Stone, Microsoft's national technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, faced criticism during his presentation at the Australian Unix User Group conference in Canberra yesterday. - was he invited ? wanted to go ? MS wanted someone to be there ? what's the story ?
"However, it was the proprietary standards that grew up and allowed those open standards to develop."
There are probably enough people out there who would heartly defend FOSS against such a statement against MS for a simple reason: FOSS was there about one&half decades before MS started to appear.
The other thing that bothers: We had to ask the question of whether to include backwards compatibility for that [OpenOffice.org] specification. Is just this simple to brush away odf as sucking too much to even care [at MS], and, funny thing, nobody objects to this ?
Microsoft promoted common development of standards by sitting on all of the representative bodies working on them
Just one quick example. MS also was in boards creating h.264. And now they have a closed implementation of something like it in wmv10. MS being in all of those boards in absolutely not about helping anyone: it's about being there where these happen, to know about them, to influence it towards they see it best, etc. Is there anyone who honestly believes MS is there to help ?
"why should I have my documents from government in a proprietary format and have to ask a third party for permission to open them?".
Quite true. In the sense, that if e.g. an official body picks a proprietary format to distribute documents, they implicitely force everyone else to use these, which in MS's case means either more pirates or more money.
With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO.
How much more open do you want?
For example I can't send.odf or.sxw to a certain fella with whom I regularly swap documents to and fro, fro two main reasons: 1). he won't use OO.org (that's a quite unchangeable fact) 2). even if he would, OO.org just can't handle well a lot of things Word does to.docs, for the simple reason that they don't disclose the stuff (just one example is tracked changes).
One thing I could achieve was that I sent him pdfs and told him to make his notes in the pdf. This is still better than using Word. These days, unless I'm forced to comply, I use only OO.org (win&lin) and latex with kile (lin&cygwin).
Why is a Microsoft beta less credible than open source 0.87 alpha 'releases', which tend to find their way into many a Linux distribution.???;-)
Thing is, when you have to provide you full source code for everyone to see, you tend to produce quite clean and bugfree code, and if you don't succeed in the bugfree part, you always come out better if you tell people where the problems are. If you're lucky, someone will fix it for you. If you're even more lucky, you will be able to fix your bugs.
WHat I wanted to say is, even though very many FOSS apps get out into the world named as 0.0.0.1alpha whatever, this naming often hides quite a bit of honesty towards the community, and sometimes people tend to give lower version numbers, or even label their works as beta even though they think it's better than that, for the simple reason that they know: more eyes can notice more bugs, even ones you couldn't find at first.
In one sentence: I - usually, not every time and not above all - trust more FOSS apps labeled as beta than closed source apps labeled the same.
[fun] I think even MS would've come out better if labeling the whole win9x line as pre-alphas:P [/fun] People tend to tolerate unexplainable crashes a bit better when they have a bit of hope that something better is coming.
and I'm sick of us been labelled trolls just for having a view contrary to yours.
Nope, you get modded trolls for the lack of the ability to prove yourselves with credibility. Also, ignorance won't help avoinding trollness. Just count how many times the 'point release' crap is being mentioned from windows freaks up above, or the quite pointless forced comparing to sp2.
I could have sworn there was a firewall in previous releases of XP, they just tightened up the rules a bit and confused the heck out of everybody.
Quite right, and I have to add, both fraggin' useless too. [To other flame kids: you can argue over this, but it's hard to erase real experience.] On contrast, you can use ipfw on osx, which is 'the' tool one needs.
Great God, only on/. could such a comment [i.e. insightful] be modded "funny". I guess some 3 year old 6pack didn't have his morning coffee. Next time please mod some joke insightful, oh wait, that's nothing new either.
Yes, you obviously don't. Hyperthreading is not in any way like a dual processor or dualcore processor. On a HT processor you still can have threads waiting and not doing anything because another thread which is using e.g. the single FPU that the system has. If two computationally heavy threads want to run, they have to wait for their turn on the single FPU. And that is just one example for HT. On dualcore and dual processor systems you have everything doubled, which is a Good Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
without a special client
And that probably means something like with wordxml, that not everything will be in there, and IE will know how to render it correctly, others will have to guess, like OOo does with docs.
For me it's completely okay to be able to read pdf files in konqueror while file browsing with a click, or two clicks if I want it opened in another tab. I don't want an "open" file format which needs no special software but IE (yes, so what do you call that), which I'm using no way on earth.
I noticed about myself recently, that I've become quite picky on file formats, I like less and less getting documents in not open formats. Whenever I can I demand documents to be used and sent in dvi,ps,pdf,odt,sxw,rtf,txt. Well, if only a few percent of the people catch on to that the [IT] world will be a bit better place.
And oh, MS, please, for god's sake, forget new wierd document formats, implement EPS handling instead and make doc specifications GPL. Now that would really be something.
The only concern, one might suppose, is for people who don't want this information accumulated should their computer later be searched by others (the law? An employer? A relative?). This is perhaps a legitimate concern, but hard to argue for, as a reason to cripple error reporting.
So you say official letters in/out company, banking data, confidential businness texts/data, developer's stuff i.e. program code, images, documents w/ nda, designs, e-mail texts, whatever else is data that nobody should ever hide and proudly send it to any software developer who wants a "black box" like that ? 'Cause this is what I understand you say above (The only concern...searched by others), and I don't really like how that sounds.
"anyone trustworthy"
I only boot to Windows to play games like Half-Life, and it bothers me that Microsoft would know about everything I'm running on that Windows box
:P if there will be the option to disable the error reporting service, as it is there now. That's all that counts.
Well, there are some of us who run a load lot more than that, and no, not willing to let anyone trustworthy get their hands on anything. And no, I don't consider some MS developer browsing through crash data trustworthy.
Anyways, I don't care what their boxes' color will be
It said, "what we have here is failure to communicate." What's that mean?
:D It's from Guns'n'Roses' Civil War, "what we've got here is failure to communicate, some men you just can't reach" and so on. Great stuff. And no, I won't go into what it could possibly mean in there.
Oh, man, how old are you ?
We need new solutions, not patches on old ones.
:) as we constantly get something from them, so it would be a cause to worry if they weren't on to something :)
Hey, we're not talking about MS here, so drop the cynical patches line thank you. And "old tech" can still bring you the best general web search results out there, no matter av,yah,msn,dp,whatever. Ad 1, we don't exactly know what they will use this "new" word for, what solution will it cover under its terminology. Ad 2, if Google seems to work on something, that's always a bit of joy
I agree with you. There is a music purchase/download service here (we don't have itms yet, or else) where a MS-DRMed album costs about 10% less as the normal CD album in a store, with around 256k mp3 quality (but in wma of course). I'd never ever in my life would buy songs from them for such a price. However, I didn't stop buying CDs, but I'm not buying any copy-protected/DRMed CDs if I can avoid it. But sometimes I can't like the latest Dido, or one Norah Jones album I bought couple of weeks ago, etc. But, if I couldn't rip these anyway :) than I would send them back complaining they don't play in my hifi, that's the way.
The others called bullshit, but I stand on your side. 128k is just fine for your everyday crap one just wants to listen to quickly but I'd never do that to my favourite stuff, like classic music, my Diana Krall albums, and I could just go on for hours. These I have 92-320k vbr encoded and I'd never settle for less. For me a store selling songs below 256k mp3 quality (I state explicitely again, 128k mp3 quality, since there are other formats which can settle with less) is definitely the wrong place to spend my money at. Anyway, in the last few months I've spent more on music CDs than in the last 2 years before. Now come RIAA with your decreasing sales figures.
I always use one word, or more shorter words cat together, or a word+number, and so on, but all of them written in l33t. This, combined with an occasional small/caps letters IMO is a good way. You avoid dictionary words, but still can think out stuff you can remember easily. Then again "easily" is not the same for everyone. My ones are usually quite scrambled pieces, but I never had trouble memorizing them (around 10 different, used for dozens of places, boxes, sites, servers, etc.).
...I feel that as long as your repositories are up to date and reasonably extensive (as is the case with, say, Gentoo, Ubunutu, SUSE(?), but not Mandrake), installation of software under Linux is way better than under Windows.
I will be trolled for this, but I'll - again - have to say this, Ubuntu as having reasonably extensive own repositories ? Huh ? Yeah, right. Like the somewhere above comment who states Ubuntu outnumbers Debian on desktops. Some people should be forced to read&prove before talking.
I tried. Not once. With everything (hand, apt, alien, whatever). Sometimes, you can work it out. Sometimes, not. As for me, rather not even see them.
I have here a pIII500 and a dualpII300 both being servers running on woody and sarge respectively and also one pIII500 laptop with sid. Each and every one of them do fine and I really have nothing to complain about. As others have stated, it's really and absolutely _not_ the kernel that slows down your system, it's memory-intensive applications that you probably don't know enough to know why they are slowing you down, and which you should exchange in favor of smaller footprint sw. Which you can, being that we're talking about Linux here, and that means you are not trapped in conrete and sinking down [your favourite] bay.
It doesn't "load" those modules, it just checks whether there are such devices and _then_ loads them, otherwise, it won't. That's what good about it. But there are always people who can see good things as being bad. Like 90% of this whole thread and the article itself.
The kernel is fine it's the setup that sucks.
I think you're wrong, and I stand by it. I'll explain. One can _not_ expect 6packjoes to understand what a kernel is, what/why it is for, let alone to see why it would need to be (re)compiled, or anyways cared about. One level above there are the (l)users who know where and when to click and jave no real clue about system internals, but they think they know, so they often screw everything up and blame it on the weatherman. If one would make the - quite wrong and false - statement that kernel tweaking (I intentionally didn't write compiling) is easy and everybody can/could do it, that the above two category of people would make a lot more mess around their systems than before. I think it is good to provide a way of kernel configuration and compilation that is quite easy for those who know enough of it to do what they want, and which is not that hard for others to learn (think menuconfig/xconfig), but still seem "hard" enough for clickingjoes so as not to mess around with it.
I don't think it's too much to ask from anyone to understand a bit more about linux and the kernel before they start messing and complaining all over the place. I think it is good that they have to arrive to a certain - really not so high - level of knowledge beforehand.
download only the new core kernel and modules needed
This is just insane. What you talking is something like having some default binary kernel version and download the required modules for it. Why on earth would anyone want that ?
If you feel the whole source is too big, than for god's sake, download only the patches. And why would you want to use some binary compiled by someone when you can have a kernel tuned for your specific needs ?
This stands exactly opposite of everything I ever wandered into FOSS land, ever. I wouldn't want any of this, and I'm sure very many people wouldn't want it either.
In fact, it's pretty amazing, that when people don't have a kernel source to tweak [like in windows], they get nervous about it [i.e. the ones who care, not just click], but when there's a source you can compile on your own, and with tools that make your life quite easy - think menuconfig or xconfig - then one just pops up a hand and starts complainging: We have too much freedom, we don't want this !
Oh, come on. Sometimes when I read stuff like these above - the original article included - I just feel I am on the wrong track, among the wrong people and should've just learned to be a gardner instead.
Yup, just occured: Greg Stone, Microsoft's national technology officer for Australia and New Zealand, faced criticism during his presentation at the Australian Unix User Group conference in Canberra yesterday. - was he invited ? wanted to go ? MS wanted someone to be there ? what's the story ?
You can already do this if you don't confine yourself with Word/doc. And why would you do this when you have a choice. And you have.
without MS you have no web/html like we have today
And without ignorant guys like you MS wouldn't have so much revenue.
"However, it was the proprietary standards that grew up and allowed those open standards to develop."
There are probably enough people out there who would heartly defend FOSS against such a statement against MS for a simple reason: FOSS was there about one&half decades before MS started to appear.
The other thing that bothers: We had to ask the question of whether to include backwards compatibility for that [OpenOffice.org] specification. Is just this simple to brush away odf as sucking too much to even care [at MS], and, funny thing, nobody objects to this ?
Microsoft promoted common development of standards by sitting on all of the representative bodies working on them
Just one quick example. MS also was in boards creating h.264. And now they have a closed implementation of something like it in wmv10. MS being in all of those boards in absolutely not about helping anyone: it's about being there where these happen, to know about them, to influence it towards they see it best, etc. Is there anyone who honestly believes MS is there to help ?
"why should I have my documents from government in a proprietary format and have to ask a third party for permission to open them?".
Quite true. In the sense, that if e.g. an official body picks a proprietary format to distribute documents, they implicitely force everyone else to use these, which in MS's case means either more pirates or more money.
I, personally, wouldn't like either of those.
With Open Office, I can read and export every major Microsoft file in and out of OO.
.odf or .sxw to a certain fella with whom I regularly swap documents to and fro, fro two main reasons: 1). he won't use OO.org (that's a quite unchangeable fact) 2). even if he would, OO.org just can't handle well a lot of things Word does to .docs, for the simple reason that they don't disclose the stuff (just one example is tracked changes).
How much more open do you want?
For example I can't send
One thing I could achieve was that I sent him pdfs and told him to make his notes in the pdf. This is still better than using Word. These days, unless I'm forced to comply, I use only OO.org (win&lin) and latex with kile (lin&cygwin).
Why is a Microsoft beta less credible than open source 0.87 alpha 'releases', which tend to find their way into many a Linux distribution.??? ;-)
:P [/fun] People tend to tolerate unexplainable crashes a bit better when they have a bit of hope that something better is coming.
Thing is, when you have to provide you full source code for everyone to see, you tend to produce quite clean and bugfree code, and if you don't succeed in the bugfree part, you always come out better if you tell people where the problems are. If you're lucky, someone will fix it for you. If you're even more lucky, you will be able to fix your bugs.
WHat I wanted to say is, even though very many FOSS apps get out into the world named as 0.0.0.1alpha whatever, this naming often hides quite a bit of honesty towards the community, and sometimes people tend to give lower version numbers, or even label their works as beta even though they think it's better than that, for the simple reason that they know: more eyes can notice more bugs, even ones you couldn't find at first.
In one sentence: I - usually, not every time and not above all - trust more FOSS apps labeled as beta than closed source apps labeled the same.
[fun] I think even MS would've come out better if labeling the whole win9x line as pre-alphas
and I'm sick of us been labelled trolls just for having a view contrary to yours.
Nope, you get modded trolls for the lack of the ability to prove yourselves with credibility. Also, ignorance won't help avoinding trollness. Just count how many times the 'point release' crap is being mentioned from windows freaks up above, or the quite pointless forced comparing to sp2.
I could have sworn there was a firewall in previous releases of XP, they just tightened up the rules a bit and confused the heck out of everybody.
Quite right, and I have to add, both fraggin' useless too. [To other flame kids: you can argue over this, but it's hard to erase real experience.] On contrast, you can use ipfw on osx, which is 'the' tool one needs.
Great God, only on /. could such a comment [i.e. insightful] be modded "funny". I guess some 3 year old 6pack didn't have his morning coffee. Next time please mod some joke insightful, oh wait, that's nothing new either.
I don't get it
Yes, you obviously don't. Hyperthreading is not in any way like a dual processor or dualcore processor. On a HT processor you still can have threads waiting and not doing anything because another thread which is using e.g. the single FPU that the system has. If two computationally heavy threads want to run, they have to wait for their turn on the single FPU. And that is just one example for HT. On dualcore and dual processor systems you have everything doubled, which is a Good Thing.