"I doubt it has tight integration with iTunes, which is a major selling point of the various iPods."
Presumably it's just USB mass-storage as far as the computer is concerned? Opinions may vary, but I find "cp -ru Music/mnt/usb" much quicker and more convenient than buying a Mac, running iTunes, importing my music and synchronising that with an iPod.
"You want companies to support linux, yet when they do you bash their stuff!"
Who thinks that? Everyone I know here wants companies to support Free Software.
Getting confused (deliberately?) between an operating system and a philosophy sounds rather too similar to some of the "corporate world needs enterprise class solutions and the costlier the better" trolls we see so often.
Hint: Nero don't support this program. So your argument about corporate types "wanting it for the support" is a load of crap. Compare to K3B, which is supported by whatever company you buy your distro from.
Yet again, someone assumes that becuase somthing is proprietary, it's (a) better, and (b) supported. Neither are true in this case, or many others.
"Never having used Nero on Windows, are there advantages to using Nero on Linux?"
Short answer: If you're the kind of person who already uses RealPlayer on Linux, Yahoo Messenger on Linux, Macromedia Flash on Linux, and all the rest of the proprietary Windows apps, then you'll probably be interested in Nero on Linux. For a while. Until Nero realise that everyone is ignoring them and quietly abandons the software.
Shorter answer: No, it can't be distributed freely so there's a good chance you won't even have it on a typical machine, while K3B will be installed by default.
The Linux packaging mechanisms are optimised for software which can be freely shared, modified and redistributed. Nero are complete outsiders to that mechanism.
"when MS 'upgrades' something it costs twice as much, has almost no new functionality, and is usually less secure.consider the upgrade price for Windows XP and imo the only thing worth having was the bluetooth support."
What do you mean? WindowsXP came with blue titlebars, a totally reorganised control panel, and a handy program to read zip files. Totally worth £150, everyone should buy it!
Well obviously. Your shop was advertising goods at a certain price, then failing to offer those goods, and failing to offer that price. It's incredible that you as a CompUSA manager would be whining about this being a problem caused by your customers
"Every weekend a flyer hit the paper offering about 10 different items that were "free after rebate."
First example: newspaper advert saying that you'll sell a particular item at a particular price.
"Those people who came in after the rush would get belligerent that we didn't have any more and start big scenes in the store"
You've advertised a product that you don't sell. These people have wasted a journey that they made specifically in response to that advert, and you have the cheek to imply it's their fault they're upset with you?
"Or, we wouldn't have enough rebate forms for everyone."
So again, you're not honouring the price you advertised. In my country that's illegal, and for a very good reason. Again, you seem to think the customer is unreasonable to complain about this.
"What most seem to not understand is that 99% of the rebates that were offered were given buy the manufacturer, not CompUSA."
And this is a surprise why? Shops are always the customer's point of contact. They don't care, nor need to care, about your relationship with the suppliers. They are doing business with you, and if the advertising is fraudulent, that's your problem, not something you can palm-off to a company with a Taiwanese URL that the customer has never formed a contract with.
For a related challenge, Maplin.co.uk is displaying a big sign labelled "Hacker safe, tested daily" on their front page. Netcraft lists it as running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000, its IP address is 195.92.224.143, and the only TCP access is through HTTP and HTTPS ports.
"Even though I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan, I find something slightly disturbing about my government sending my tax dollars out of country with a software contract award."
Well out of all people, they've probably spent the most time reviewing why Microsoft is a bad place to spend money inside the country...
"Why not Open Office?"
They're the government. Spending your money is what they do.
"I don want messenger icons, shopping links,and what ever else they sqeezed in to fill the empty spots. Back - Forward - Print is all I need on my browser."
Ah, so you're the one who's been asking for that print-icon which wastes so much space on a default FireFox install?
Perhaps in future, software will be intelligent enough to remove the print button, the print menu, the print keyboard-shortcut, and the print context menu when it detects that you don't have a printer installed...
"I post this out of genuine curiosity and do not intend to troll. Where is the innovation in OO.org? From my experience it is just a direct recreation of MS Office. Any feature that is added to Office seems to just show up a version later in OO. They are nearly identical even down to the UI."
At the risk of offending the people who are doing innovative stuff in OpenOffice.org (I appreciate all of you!), I can't think of any obvious reason why you'd be wrong. Yes, it's pretty blatantly copying Microsoft Office.
Look at the history to see why:
"The company [StarDivision] and the rights to StarOffice were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 for US$73.5 million, as Sun were seeking to compete with Microsoft Office." (from Wikipedia)
So it started with Sun wanting something to compete directly with MS-Office. Now and it's being used by the Free Software community to compete directly with MS-Office. And it's being used to convert people who don't have any technical gripes with their current office suite.
As far as I can tell, it's not seen as good place for innovation. Any difference, no matter how slight, will be jumped on as "not being compatible" or "too difficult to learn" or "not the de-facto standard" or "not what people have learned on". Keeping it the same as MS-Office makes it a drop-in replacement, it means you can switch to Linux or BSD without changing how you write documents, it means you can get 20 extra office-suites for your new graduates without having to pay licensing, but it doesn't offer many immediate technical advantages.
So how to explain that when the community is so known for being innovative? I guess that they direct creative energies elsewhere. Maybe they do so in web-based collaborative authoring systems. (MediaWiki is just a big word processor) Maybe they're working on better paradigms for document-production (LyX is the obvious example, as are specialised things like perldoc, LaTeX and programs which work with HTML documents)
Or maybe people find their creativity works better on other projects. AbiWord is being written ground-up as Free Software, rather than having the methodology tacked-on at a late stage. Gnumeric the same. GnuCash the same. Project management software and presentation software are becoming web-based.
Even things like Bugzilla, SourceForge/GForge, Plone/Zope/PHProjekt and the other Groupware tools are competing directly against the office suite in many places. Compare the small businesses using Excel for bug-tracking, or Access for workflow management, or Powerpoint for software architecture. (hell, my own office uses MS-Word for bug-reporting!) so Bugzilla and not OpenOffice is where that competition should take place.
OpenOffice might carry on adding new features, but it's unlikely to do anything scarily innovative because most people don't seem to want it to. They stick with the same tired old role of "Word processor, spreadsheet, drawings, presentations" with a bit of database and email integration, but it would be silly to add (for example) simultaneous internet multi-author features when that role is probably better served by a web-based "Text to LaTeX/HTML/PDF" solution.
Similarly, adding the best database interface in the world would be nice, but a Plone or Ruby on Rails solution would probably interest the developers more. It would do the same job, but is simpler to program, more reliable, more flexible, more useful, inherantly multi-user cross-platform and all the rest, and they don't have to deal with people saying "it's just not the same as Access".
Maybe. Or maybe the community has been using "Office Suites" long enough to know how useful they truly are. Perhaps the innovation comes from moving beyond that 30-year-old business paradigm.
"Hmmm... nowhere in the summary does it tell what "Ruby on Rails" is"
We already know. Sorry. We watched the first video, and have been using it ever since. Seriously, it's fairly well-known among developers.
"or why I should care about it" You don't have to care about it. And Slashdot summaries probably won't help. The video however, probably will, so it's good that they linked to that.
Just my luck that at the moment I wanted to get RoR anyway for a project, I look on slashdot and see they've posted a story about it, with link to MPEG.
"How about including a 1-sentence summary of what the topic of any story IS"
Highlight any words you don't understand, right-click, and select "web search for selected text".
As with many other technology definitions, you could just type the phrase literally into wikipedia and expect a reasonably good answer.
"There's a reason Ars Technica switched from Linux to Windows, and stayed there. If anyone on the planet is competent, it's those guys."
From the sounds of things, everyone competent there was utterly against the WindowsNT switch, which was introduced by management, caused horrible delays in shipping all their products, and caused most of the technical guys to leave.
China and other countries should put pressure on Florida to get them to clean up their ISPs. If you reduce the number of safe-spamming havens, you should reduce the amount of spam.
"Apple is never going to dominate until they can convince people who can already work a computer reasonably well that it's worth paying twice the price for prettier fonts & icons."
Ohhh, there's an interesting comment. Perhaps you could back-up your numbers by showing us the $250 PC which is equivalent to the Mac-Mini without this "Apple Tax" you mention?
"I've NEVER seen 2000 or XP produce a blue screen of death EVER"
Try installing a few soundcards, they're normally fairly reliable when you want to see a BSOD. I've had Windows2000 bluescreening reliably when certain cards are installed, and it's different for different machines. In fact, lots of hardware drivers become unstable when you put them on dual-processor machines.
USB is the old favorite of course, but most devices nowadays you can plug them in and unplug them without ever causing Windows to bluescreen.
The ultimate way if you need a BSOD demo though is to run a Java program or Java applet. Preferably with the Microsoft virtual machine, or if you can find one that does audio.
Linux users need to make-do with the BSOD screensaver.
Apparently they added a "fuel dump" capability after the first few test flights. It didn't sound like an instant thing though, more like "yet another fuel pipe leading outwards".
In fact, the whole fuel system sounds complicated - presumably when 80% the aircraft's mass is fuel, you can't move it around too fast if you want to stay upright.
"I propose that a more cost effective device. It would be made of baked clay. This rectangular object could be placed at any location. Not just on a runway. 80 hours later we could verify that it was it was still there."
And that after 24 hours, it would have gone around the world...
Slashdot Mirror
"I doubt it has tight integration with iTunes, which is a major selling point of the various iPods."
/mnt/usb" much quicker and more convenient than buying a Mac, running iTunes, importing my music and synchronising that with an iPod.
Presumably it's just USB mass-storage as far as the computer is concerned? Opinions may vary, but I find "cp -ru Music
In other news, one of IBM's new sourceforge projects is SBLIM (Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability)
"The goal of this project is to provide a complete Open Source implementation of a WBEM-based management solution for Linux. "
"You want companies to support linux, yet when they do you bash their stuff!"
Who thinks that? Everyone I know here wants companies to support Free Software.
Getting confused (deliberately?) between an operating system and a philosophy sounds rather too similar to some of the "corporate world needs enterprise class solutions and the costlier the better" trolls we see so often.
Hint: Nero don't support this program. So your argument about corporate types "wanting it for the support" is a load of crap. Compare to K3B, which is supported by whatever company you buy your distro from.
Yet again, someone assumes that becuase somthing is proprietary, it's (a) better, and (b) supported. Neither are true in this case, or many others.
"Never having used Nero on Windows, are there advantages to using Nero on Linux?"
Short answer: If you're the kind of person who already uses RealPlayer on Linux, Yahoo Messenger on Linux, Macromedia Flash on Linux, and all the rest of the proprietary Windows apps, then you'll probably be interested in Nero on Linux. For a while. Until Nero realise that everyone is ignoring them and quietly abandons the software.
Shorter answer: No, it can't be distributed freely so there's a good chance you won't even have it on a typical machine, while K3B will be installed by default.
The Linux packaging mechanisms are optimised for software which can be freely shared, modified and redistributed. Nero are complete outsiders to that mechanism.
"when MS 'upgrades' something it costs twice as much, has almost no new functionality, and is usually less secure.consider the upgrade price for Windows XP and imo the only thing worth having was the bluetooth support."
What do you mean? WindowsXP came with blue titlebars, a totally reorganised control panel, and a handy program to read zip files. Totally worth £150, everyone should buy it!
Well obviously. Your shop was advertising goods at a certain price, then failing to offer those goods, and failing to offer that price. It's incredible that you as a CompUSA manager would be whining about this being a problem caused by your customers
"Every weekend a flyer hit the paper offering about 10 different items that were "free after rebate."
First example: newspaper advert saying that you'll sell a particular item at a particular price.
"Those people who came in after the rush would get belligerent that we didn't have any more and start big scenes in the store"
You've advertised a product that you don't sell. These people have wasted a journey that they made specifically in response to that advert, and you have the cheek to imply it's their fault they're upset with you?
"Or, we wouldn't have enough rebate forms for everyone."
So again, you're not honouring the price you advertised. In my country that's illegal, and for a very good reason. Again, you seem to think the customer is unreasonable to complain about this.
"What most seem to not understand is that 99% of the rebates that were offered were given buy the manufacturer, not CompUSA."
And this is a surprise why? Shops are always the customer's point of contact. They don't care, nor need to care, about your relationship with the suppliers. They are doing business with you, and if the advertising is fraudulent, that's your problem, not something you can palm-off to a company with a Taiwanese URL that the customer has never formed a contract with.
"The key is to carefully evaluate each component you are planning on including. Go to the manufacturers websites and look for a decibel rating."
Then add 20dB to the manufacturer's claim to get a rough idea of the true noise level.
And look for the small print "20dB... at 10 metres, from the side, while idle and/or underclocked. 1dB = 10.24bel. Actual formatted noise may vary."
For a related challenge, Maplin.co.uk is displaying a big sign labelled "Hacker safe, tested daily" on their front page. Netcraft lists it as running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000, its IP address is 195.92.224.143, and the only TCP access is through HTTP and HTTPS ports.
"Even though I'm not the biggest Microsoft fan, I find something slightly disturbing about my government sending my tax dollars out of country with a software contract award."
Well out of all people, they've probably spent the most time reviewing why Microsoft is a bad place to spend money inside the country...
"Why not Open Office?"
They're the government. Spending your money is what they do.
"Another third-party browser will ultimately help the browser scene"
Third-party? I seem to recall Netscape being derived from the first ever browser...
"I don want messenger icons, shopping links,and what ever else they sqeezed in to fill the empty spots. Back - Forward - Print is all I need on my browser."
Ah, so you're the one who's been asking for that print-icon which wastes so much space on a default FireFox install?
Perhaps in future, software will be intelligent enough to remove the print button, the print menu, the print keyboard-shortcut, and the print context menu when it detects that you don't have a printer installed...
At the risk of offending the people who are doing innovative stuff in OpenOffice.org (I appreciate all of you!), I can't think of any obvious reason why you'd be wrong. Yes, it's pretty blatantly copying Microsoft Office.
Look at the history to see why:So it started with Sun wanting something to compete directly with MS-Office. Now and it's being used by the Free Software community to compete directly with MS-Office. And it's being used to convert people who don't have any technical gripes with their current office suite.
As far as I can tell, it's not seen as good place for innovation. Any difference, no matter how slight, will be jumped on as "not being compatible" or "too difficult to learn" or "not the de-facto standard" or "not what people have learned on". Keeping it the same as MS-Office makes it a drop-in replacement, it means you can switch to Linux or BSD without changing how you write documents, it means you can get 20 extra office-suites for your new graduates without having to pay licensing, but it doesn't offer many immediate technical advantages.
So how to explain that when the community is so known for being innovative? I guess that they direct creative energies elsewhere. Maybe they do so in web-based collaborative authoring systems. (MediaWiki is just a big word processor) Maybe they're working on better paradigms for document-production (LyX is the obvious example, as are specialised things like perldoc, LaTeX and programs which work with HTML documents)
Or maybe people find their creativity works better on other projects. AbiWord is being written ground-up as Free Software, rather than having the methodology tacked-on at a late stage. Gnumeric the same. GnuCash the same. Project management software and presentation software are becoming web-based.
Even things like Bugzilla, SourceForge/GForge, Plone/Zope/PHProjekt and the other Groupware tools are competing directly against the office suite in many places. Compare the small businesses using Excel for bug-tracking, or Access for workflow management, or Powerpoint for software architecture. (hell, my own office uses MS-Word for bug-reporting!) so Bugzilla and not OpenOffice is where that competition should take place.
OpenOffice might carry on adding new features, but it's unlikely to do anything scarily innovative because most people don't seem to want it to. They stick with the same tired old role of "Word processor, spreadsheet, drawings, presentations" with a bit of database and email integration, but it would be silly to add (for example) simultaneous internet multi-author features when that role is probably better served by a web-based "Text to LaTeX/HTML/PDF" solution.
Similarly, adding the best database interface in the world would be nice, but a Plone or Ruby on Rails solution would probably interest the developers more. It would do the same job, but is simpler to program, more reliable, more flexible, more useful, inherantly multi-user cross-platform and all the rest, and they don't have to deal with people saying "it's just not the same as Access".
Maybe. Or maybe the community has been using "Office Suites" long enough to know how useful they truly are. Perhaps the innovation comes from moving beyond that 30-year-old business paradigm.
"I have a new server coming in exactly tomorrow according to the last time I tracked it at UPS. Figures, eh?"
It could be worse.
You could have just received the new server, and been halfway through setting-up the firewall and database passwords when it got posted to slashdot...
"Hmmm... nowhere in the summary does it tell what "Ruby on Rails" is"
We already know. Sorry. We watched the first video, and have been using it ever since. Seriously, it's fairly well-known among developers.
"or why I should care about it"
You don't have to care about it. And Slashdot summaries probably won't help. The video however, probably will, so it's good that they linked to that.
Just my luck that at the moment I wanted to get RoR anyway for a project, I look on slashdot and see they've posted a story about it, with link to MPEG.
"How about including a 1-sentence summary of what the topic of any story IS"
Highlight any words you don't understand, right-click, and select "web search for selected text".
As with many other technology definitions, you could just type the phrase literally into wikipedia and expect a reasonably good answer.
"Does the first amendment still apply?"
Score:4, Funny
Who said you can't make a wry joke just by using moderation?
"There's a reason Ars Technica switched from Linux to Windows, and stayed there. If anyone on the planet is competent, it's those guys."
From the sounds of things, everyone competent there was utterly against the WindowsNT switch, which was introduced by management, caused horrible delays in shipping all their products, and caused most of the technical guys to leave.
But it sounded so much better as a soundbyte
China and other countries should put pressure on Florida to get them to clean up their ISPs. If you reduce the number of safe-spamming havens, you should reduce the amount of spam.
"Apple is never going to dominate until they can convince people who can already work a computer reasonably well that it's worth paying twice the price for prettier fonts & icons."
Ohhh, there's an interesting comment. Perhaps you could back-up your numbers by showing us the $250 PC which is equivalent to the Mac-Mini without this "Apple Tax" you mention?
Go forth and edit!
"I've NEVER seen 2000 or XP produce a blue screen of death EVER"
Try installing a few soundcards, they're normally fairly reliable when you want to see a BSOD. I've had Windows2000 bluescreening reliably when certain cards are installed, and it's different for different machines. In fact, lots of hardware drivers become unstable when you put them on dual-processor machines.
USB is the old favorite of course, but most devices nowadays you can plug them in and unplug them without ever causing Windows to bluescreen.
The ultimate way if you need a BSOD demo though is to run a Java program or Java applet. Preferably with the Microsoft virtual machine, or if you can find one that does audio.
Linux users need to make-do with the BSOD screensaver.
"I would bet they have a way to dump extra fuel"
Apparently they added a "fuel dump" capability after the first few test flights. It didn't sound like an instant thing though, more like "yet another fuel pipe leading outwards".
In fact, the whole fuel system sounds complicated - presumably when 80% the aircraft's mass is fuel, you can't move it around too fast if you want to stay upright.
"Hopefully the OpenOffice team has incorperated support for Clippy"
How about the seagull?
"I propose that a more cost effective device. It would be made of baked clay. This rectangular object could be placed at any location. Not just on a runway. 80 hours later we could verify that it was it was still there."
And that after 24 hours, it would have gone around the world...
"120W/sq. in. is totally impossible for Earth based solar - or they're being taken for a ride."
Somewhere with a lot of mirrors and lenses...
"Well, now Microsoft have something to think about in reagrd it's pushing for EU software patent law..."
So the company with the most money and the most lawyers wins? I'm sure that prospect frightens Microsoft...