"large parts of it read as a critique not of windows per se but rather of the whole money-for-software framework"
Isn't it entirely reasonable for a product review to include some mention of the costs? The section of the article you refer to basically said "Windows XP home costs $100 more (or whatever) compared to Mandriva, so we need to see whether this additional cost is justified by what you get"
What's wrong with that? If Toms Hardware review a bunch of widgets and find they all do similar things but one of them costs 3 times as much, would it not be relevant to mention that in the review?
"The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are also computer nerds."
If only...
The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are people who buy Dells because they've read somewhere that they're reliable, yet they've never asked the technical people about the uptime (or lack thereof) of their own servers.
They're people who pay more money than you can believe for the most useless software that a real nerd would just laugh at. When they need a software solution, they pick the nearest thing they can find from the Microsoft catalog, without even crossing their mind to do research on it. "VLSI layout software? I know, we'll use Powerpoint"
If you want an idea of the sort of computer-users these corporate buyers are, they're the ones still sending HTML email and doing the 'can't understand' face when it looks corrupted at the other end. And after pr0n web-surfing with a never-been-updated Windows OS running Internet Explorer, ask: "Why is my computer running so slowly today??"
"nearly all users in the world are technophobes who appreciate and need computers but have neither the desire, knowledge or need to access/tweak/control every last flippin' setting."
You'd like the new GNOME then -- all the decisions have been made on your behalf by usability experts, so you don't have the need, nor the ability, to change any settings.
"This is the file selector, and you will like it!"
Let's play "guess whether the widget is single-click or double-click"...
"Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office?"
Well you occasionally get people who use spreadsheets as databases, hitting the 32767-row limit on OpenOffice.org 1.1 Calc...
Seriously though, if you're still using "office suites" then OpenOffice.org is as good as any other (and Microsoft office is only just as good as any other) - I'd prefer it just because you get a usable drawing program (which MS-Office doesn't have unless you pay extra for the "hit me" version with Visio in)
The word-processor is crap, but then they all are. Unfortunately, all the good word processors (Ami Pro and Word 6.0) are no longer available.
And there's the Java issue with OpenOffice 2. As in, it depends on non-free software, so don't expect to see it bundled with any linux distributions.
Oh, and Mac-users don't get much of an OpenOffice choice because OpenOffice is buggy, ugly, and difficult to use on Mac, and by the time NeoOffice becomes usable then people will have finally realised how obsolete office-suites actually are. Unfortunately, all the other office software on Mac is crap too, which means it doesn't face much competition.
On a side-note, what is it with MS-Office users, who go on and on and on and on about the "integrated office suite" concept, and then only ever use Word? Has anyone actually embedded a video in a presentation in a spreadsheet, for any reason other than seeing if their computer crashes? Do people embed Excel spreadsheets in Word documents just to watch the confusion as someone on the other end opens it and waits 5 minutes for the computer to sort itself out? Aren't computers slow enough without trying to run MS-Office on them?!?
"Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?"
Baen free library has some pretty solid numbers to substantiate that. They've seen clear increases in the sales of books which are available for free (both compared to similar books which aren't available online, and compared to the sales of that same book before online distribution)
"I dont know if you are legally responsible, but do you want to help the anonomous distribution of child pornography, especially if the children are actually being harmed?"
Is there some variation of godwin's law that states that any technology you care to mention can be rubbished by mentioning that it can be used for child pornography?
It seems that any time a new network or protocol appears, someone jumps in with the same old "but it could be used for..." hype. I mean, what's the point?
Child pornographers drive cars too. Ban all automobiles on that basis, and then come back for the pseudononymous networks.
"I think it's far more likely that there are quite a few people out there with some sort of malware redirecting their failed DNS lookups to this site"
If there was, then the malware was working on a fully-patched and firewalled Ubuntu machine last night, which would be fairly unusual.
Perhaps something at the ISP level would be more likely, as it would affect large groups of people at a time and it's not like poisoning ISPs' DNS is unthinkable (most of the people I saw mentioning the outage were from the UK, from a couple of ISPs)
Or perhaps there's a real explanation, as yours and mine are really just guesses.
"Sounds something like the "Private Browsing" feature in Safari."
But does it restore cookies, cache, etc. to how it was before the confidential browsing session, or do you still have to leave the browser with a suspiciously empty profile.
It doesn't take too much effort to go from "the website I visited yesterday isn't in autocomplete" to "someone's cleared the cache to conceal their pron"
"Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam."
Basically, email doesn't currently seem a very good method for broadcasting messages to a large number of opt-in recipients.
It needs some system where people configure their client to say what they want to subscribe to, and then let the upstream servers know what to filter for. Perhaps a system where you could post the message to one place and it would be replicated. You could even arrange the "news" into categories so that people could organise it easily, like some sort of "internet news protocol"...
Bet nobody will implement that idea though. Sounds complicated.
"Your mother is familiar with computers being boxes with keyboards and screens... Today's preschoolers will be growing up with more and more humanoid robots around, and therefore will not be bothered by them at all."
Perhaps people who are more familiar with computers know how unreliable they are, how malicious their software can be, and how they nearly always seem to be taking orders from some big corporation which programmed their software.
(We're not talking movie plots here, I mean things like RealPlayer, WMP, Viruses, Claria etc.)
So taking the same-generation software, written by the same companies, and putting into an object capable of physically pushing children around... we can understand why some people might be unhappy with the idea.
"Should I expect less if I make jerky motions into my pockets when a police officer pulls me over for a routine traffic accident?"
As a road-user, I find it worrying that you'd consider any traffic accident "routine" (ignoring for a moment the whole "shoot anyone who looks at you funny" argument)
"How many systems are actually vulnerable to password cracking anyway? Most ATM machines eat your card if you enter 5 incorrect PINs... most enterprise networks disable accounts if you have multiple incorrect passwords."
And while setting-up Webmin today at work, it locked-out all accesses from 127.0.0.1 because I'd tried too many times to guess which password it was using (unix password? root password? some default? blank?)
I mean, I'm sure that's a valid idea on some internet-exposed bank machine, but not being able to trust localhost is getting towards the "unusable" side of the trade-off...
"The bigger question for me is if the open source software is used and fails then where does the accountability lie?"
(a) If software fails?!? (b) Software accountability?!?
Not sure which world you're living on, but it's not the same one as us, where people buy/use unreliable software all the time, with no accountability on the part of the publisher.
It's normal. No matter who you get the software from, it's crap and it fails. And just like everything else, nobody will take responsibility for it (regardless of how much you paid)
"What I really meant was when will these planes have a market share comparable to Airbus and Boing?"
Probably 2 main things:
(1) The people who fly around the most seem to be Americans, as they have both the money available, and a large enough country to make it worthwhile.
(2) American aerospace people don't buy anything that isn't made in America.
For pretty much the rest of the world, the USA may as well not exist as far as aerospace customers go. (That, and the value of the dollar) So it's hardly surprising that India, China, and Brazil aren't developing airliner industries in the hope of selling to the US.
Airbus of course, enjoys similar local advantages in Europe, another group of people who occasionally use the airlines to fly around. Again, the "what to buy" decision is always so political that it would be crazy for someone to suggest an airliner that didn't create "local jobs" for their voters/customers.
"Then, show me one point of sale system that is as easy to set up and use as, say, Intuit QBPOS or MS RMS. Until you can do that, then you are the one astroturfing, either that, or you're just talking out of your ass."
Uhh, pretty much all the big point-of-sale systems are running on SCO Unix. That much at least, we learned from the SCO/linux fiasco.
"When does digital exceed film? 5 megapixels? 6 megapixels? More?"
Looking at the resolutions you can get from film cameras -- do you own calculations, but mine came out to about 17-28 megapixels needed to approach the limits of film that typical hobbyist photographers use.
(That's real megapixels of course - multiply by 3 to get the number of megapixels to look for in a catalog)
Now, argue all you like about whether it's lens (diameter = resolution) or distortion-limited or colour-depth-limited or film-resolution-limited or something in the processing stages, but a naive estimate would indicate that the shops' "6 megapixels == film quality" claims are wildly optimistic.
"I've been messing around with Ubuntu for x86-64 lately and while it is pretty snappy"
Ahah! Someone who's got Ubuntu running "snappily". A 64-bit machine, you say? Any reccomendations for memory and processor-speed to get Gnome running at a proper speed?
(On my 700MHz machine, it runs as if every window-activtion request has to go through the post or something...)
"Disclaimer: I'm British, so I may have misunderstood some aspect of the problem."
I suppose it's analogous (sp?) to the British way of using public information such as mothers' maiden name, date of birth, place of birth, etc. as "secure" passwords. If you were around when someone got born, you can have their bank account.
Opening new bank accounts, new driving licenses etc. is supposed to be nominally harder now, although we seem to have just shifted the security problem to the postal system (the DVLA sends your driving license and passport together through the post, your internet bank requires certified copies of driving license, passport, etc. through the post and returns them through the post, etc., etc.)
"This one looks like the works of a group of hackers and now has the FBI's computer crime squad joined in the investigation."
Out of interest, how did they manage that? Did they have to declare a ludicrous dollar-cost for the problem, or was it just the publicity? FBI are notorious for being about as active as a large rock when it comes to investigating hacks.
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page. Is it just me or does anyone else see a whole new can of worms (heh) open up here?
No, actually we see Konqueror, and wonder why they're trying to copy this feature which wasn't particularly useful 5 years ago in KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
"large parts of it read as a critique not of windows per se but rather of the whole money-for-software framework"
Isn't it entirely reasonable for a product review to include some mention of the costs? The section of the article you refer to basically said "Windows XP home costs $100 more (or whatever) compared to Mandriva, so we need to see whether this additional cost is justified by what you get"
What's wrong with that? If Toms Hardware review a bunch of widgets and find they all do similar things but one of them costs 3 times as much, would it not be relevant to mention that in the review?
"The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are also computer nerds."
If only...
The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are people who buy Dells because they've read somewhere that they're reliable, yet they've never asked the technical people about the uptime (or lack thereof) of their own servers.
They're people who pay more money than you can believe for the most useless software that a real nerd would just laugh at. When they need a software solution, they pick the nearest thing they can find from the Microsoft catalog, without even crossing their mind to do research on it. "VLSI layout software? I know, we'll use Powerpoint"
If you want an idea of the sort of computer-users these corporate buyers are, they're the ones still sending HTML email and doing the 'can't understand' face when it looks corrupted at the other end. And after pr0n web-surfing with a never-been-updated Windows OS running Internet Explorer, ask: "Why is my computer running so slowly today??"
"nearly all users in the world are technophobes who appreciate and need computers but have neither the desire, knowledge or need to access/tweak/control every last flippin' setting."
You'd like the new GNOME then -- all the decisions have been made on your behalf by usability experts, so you don't have the need, nor the ability, to change any settings.
"This is the file selector, and you will like it!"
Let's play "guess whether the widget is single-click or double-click"...
"Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office?"
Well you occasionally get people who use spreadsheets as databases, hitting the 32767-row limit on OpenOffice.org 1.1 Calc...
Seriously though, if you're still using "office suites" then OpenOffice.org is as good as any other (and Microsoft office is only just as good as any other) - I'd prefer it just because you get a usable drawing program (which MS-Office doesn't have unless you pay extra for the "hit me" version with Visio in)
The word-processor is crap, but then they all are. Unfortunately, all the good word processors (Ami Pro and Word 6.0) are no longer available.
And there's the Java issue with OpenOffice 2. As in, it depends on non-free software, so don't expect to see it bundled with any linux distributions.
Oh, and Mac-users don't get much of an OpenOffice choice because OpenOffice is buggy, ugly, and difficult to use on Mac, and by the time NeoOffice becomes usable then people will have finally realised how obsolete office-suites actually are. Unfortunately, all the other office software on Mac is crap too, which means it doesn't face much competition.
On a side-note, what is it with MS-Office users, who go on and on and on and on about the "integrated office suite" concept, and then only ever use Word? Has anyone actually embedded a video in a presentation in a spreadsheet, for any reason other than seeing if their computer crashes? Do people embed Excel spreadsheets in Word documents just to watch the confusion as someone on the other end opens it and waits 5 minutes for the computer to sort itself out? Aren't computers slow enough without trying to run MS-Office on them?!?
"Apparently, HP is determined to make certain models work 100 percent with Ubuntu."
Yet... from HP website
"HP recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional"
With linux-advocates like these... who needs microsoft?
"Doctorow's assertion, of course, is entirely anecdotal. Where are the numbers that might substantiate it?"
Baen free library has some pretty solid numbers to substantiate that. They've seen clear increases in the sales of books which are available for free (both compared to similar books which aren't available online, and compared to the sales of that same book before online distribution)
"I dont know if you are legally responsible, but do you want to help the anonomous distribution of child pornography, especially if the children are actually being harmed?"
Is there some variation of godwin's law that states that any technology you care to mention can be rubbished by mentioning that it can be used for child pornography?
It seems that any time a new network or protocol appears, someone jumps in with the same old "but it could be used for..." hype. I mean, what's the point?
Child pornographers drive cars too. Ban all automobiles on that basis, and then come back for the pseudononymous networks.
"Their site starts cheerful enough with the reaching kid graphic"
On my browser, the kid's head is separated from his body by (to scale) a shear of about 8 inches. Maybe it's just a freudian rendering-bug on Firefox.
"I think it's far more likely that there are quite a few people out there with some sort of malware redirecting their failed DNS lookups to this site"
If there was, then the malware was working on a fully-patched and firewalled Ubuntu machine last night, which would be fairly unusual.
Perhaps something at the ISP level would be more likely, as it would affect large groups of people at a time and it's not like poisoning ISPs' DNS is unthinkable (most of the people I saw mentioning the outage were from the UK, from a couple of ISPs)
Or perhaps there's a real explanation, as yours and mine are really just guesses.
"Sounds something like the "Private Browsing" feature in Safari."
But does it restore cookies, cache, etc. to how it was before the confidential browsing session, or do you still have to leave the browser with a suspiciously empty profile.
It doesn't take too much effort to go from "the website I visited yesterday isn't in autocomplete" to "someone's cleared the cache to conceal their pron"
"Found this out in testing. We send messages to students enrolled in our program. I was initially bccing a large list. But places like Hotmail and Yahoo were marking them as spam."
Basically, email doesn't currently seem a very good method for broadcasting messages to a large number of opt-in recipients.
It needs some system where people configure their client to say what they want to subscribe to, and then let the upstream servers know what to filter for. Perhaps a system where you could post the message to one place and it would be replicated. You could even arrange the "news" into categories so that people could organise it easily, like some sort of "internet news protocol"...
Bet nobody will implement that idea though. Sounds complicated.
"Just what is the reward for whoring Longhorn in a blog? If it's a free iPod, I am so there."
A free* Microsoft media player. That plays WMA files only.
* Free as in "freedom to innovate"
"Your mother is familiar with computers being boxes with keyboards and screens... Today's preschoolers will be growing up with more and more humanoid robots around, and therefore will not be bothered by them at all."
Perhaps people who are more familiar with computers know how unreliable they are, how malicious their software can be, and how they nearly always seem to be taking orders from some big corporation which programmed their software.
(We're not talking movie plots here, I mean things like RealPlayer, WMP, Viruses, Claria etc.)
So taking the same-generation software, written by the same companies, and putting into an object capable of physically pushing children around... we can understand why some people might be unhappy with the idea.
"The most interesting thing that I've found in it so far is that apparently VOIP is a primary communications mechanism for Army units over there."
Or that its failure led to this unit not having any communications with their headquarters.
"Should I expect less if I make jerky motions into my pockets when a police officer pulls me over for a routine traffic accident?"
As a road-user, I find it worrying that you'd consider any traffic accident "routine" (ignoring for a moment the whole "shoot anyone who looks at you funny" argument)
"the "biggest compromise in history" of secure data was perpetrated by idiot employees selling peoples profiles for $10 ea"
Minor quibble, but the "idiot" here isn't the person making $10/record for selling data, it's the people who allowed that company to keep such data.
"How many systems are actually vulnerable to password cracking anyway? Most ATM machines eat your card if you enter 5 incorrect PINs... most enterprise networks disable accounts if you have multiple incorrect passwords."
And while setting-up Webmin today at work, it locked-out all accesses from 127.0.0.1 because I'd tried too many times to guess which password it was using (unix password? root password? some default? blank?)
I mean, I'm sure that's a valid idea on some internet-exposed bank machine, but not being able to trust localhost is getting towards the "unusable" side of the trade-off...
"The bigger question for me is if the open source software is used and fails then where does the accountability lie?"
(a) If software fails?!?
(b) Software accountability?!?
Not sure which world you're living on, but it's not the same one as us, where people buy/use unreliable software all the time, with no accountability on the part of the publisher.
It's normal. No matter who you get the software from, it's crap and it fails. And just like everything else, nobody will take responsibility for it (regardless of how much you paid)
"What I really meant was when will these planes have a market share comparable to Airbus and Boing?"
Probably 2 main things:
(1) The people who fly around the most seem to be Americans, as they have both the money available, and a large enough country to make it worthwhile.
(2) American aerospace people don't buy anything that isn't made in America.
For pretty much the rest of the world, the USA may as well not exist as far as aerospace customers go. (That, and the value of the dollar) So it's hardly surprising that India, China, and Brazil aren't developing airliner industries in the hope of selling to the US.
Airbus of course, enjoys similar local advantages in Europe, another group of people who occasionally use the airlines to fly around. Again, the "what to buy" decision is always so political that it would be crazy for someone to suggest an airliner that didn't create "local jobs" for their voters/customers.
"Then, show me one point of sale system that is as easy to set up and use as, say, Intuit QBPOS or MS RMS. Until you can do that, then you are the one astroturfing, either that, or you're just talking out of your ass."
Uhh, pretty much all the big point-of-sale systems are running on SCO Unix. That much at least, we learned from the SCO/linux fiasco.
"When does digital exceed film? 5 megapixels? 6 megapixels? More?"
Looking at the resolutions you can get from film cameras -- do you own calculations, but mine came out to about 17-28 megapixels needed to approach the limits of film that typical hobbyist photographers use.
(That's real megapixels of course - multiply by 3 to get the number of megapixels to look for in a catalog)
Now, argue all you like about whether it's lens (diameter = resolution) or distortion-limited or colour-depth-limited or film-resolution-limited or something in the processing stages, but a naive estimate would indicate that the shops' "6 megapixels == film quality" claims are wildly optimistic.
"I've been messing around with Ubuntu for x86-64 lately and while it is pretty snappy"
Ahah! Someone who's got Ubuntu running "snappily". A 64-bit machine, you say? Any reccomendations for memory and processor-speed to get Gnome running at a proper speed?
(On my 700MHz machine, it runs as if every window-activtion request has to go through the post or something...)
"Disclaimer: I'm British, so I may have misunderstood some aspect of the problem."
I suppose it's analogous (sp?) to the British way of using public information such as mothers' maiden name, date of birth, place of birth, etc. as "secure" passwords. If you were around when someone got born, you can have their bank account.
Opening new bank accounts, new driving licenses etc. is supposed to be nominally harder now, although we seem to have just shifted the security problem to the postal system (the DVLA sends your driving license and passport together through the post, your internet bank requires certified copies of driving license, passport, etc. through the post and returns them through the post, etc., etc.)
"This one looks like the works of a group of hackers and now has the FBI's computer crime squad joined in the investigation."
Out of interest, how did they manage that? Did they have to declare a ludicrous dollar-cost for the problem, or was it just the publicity? FBI are notorious for being about as active as a large rock when it comes to investigating hacks.
Longhorn doesn't just show you an icon for a document, for example, but rather an itsy-bitsy picture of the first page.
Is it just me or does anyone else see a whole new can of worms (heh) open up here?
No, actually we see Konqueror, and wonder why they're trying to copy this feature which wasn't particularly useful 5 years ago in KDE.