I'm sure there's plenty of Unicode characters which look like a period too, so yeah, if you just want it to look like it you're probably fine. At worst the dot could be replaced with a dot at half-line height (which would probably be more accurate to the word "dot" anyway;) ).
I still have a hard time as an administrator to get things like HP Printers to work with Linux. When I do get them working, I run into strange things like not being able to print out a landscape PDF in portrait.
This could explain why the version of Ubuntu I'm running (Feisty, the development branch) has had (I think; I'm at work at the moment) an extra control panel added which is HP-branded, specifically for their printers. It seemed strange at the time but if HP printers require some crazy non-standard software I guess that makes sense.
I think the GP was implying a generic downloading system that companies could license like they do graphics engines. Imagine something like the World of Warcraft delivery system that companies could license and pay per-download. Valve (or whatever company) would manage the entire operation and just get a cut of the profit from each copy sold.
Steam does this right now, so far as I can tell. There's loads of non-Valve games available through Steam these days.
I think the "no exceptions" clause probably only applied to desktop tasks! I think it's quite unreasonable to expect any OS to entirely forgo the command line (certainly, it's not advisable). You might as well have said "but you can't use the command line without using the command line"; it's not a relevant use-case.
Personally I think that (desktop) Linux distributions are generally easily usable without the command line these days (I've been experimenting with using my Ubuntu just like this, and I've not run into problems where I wouldn't have found the same problems on OS X or Windows yet), but this immediate rush of people to condemn Windows rather than to defend Linux on its merits seems kinda bitter and unhelpful.
I'm not certain that playing with a routing table is something that's done often in fixing desktop user's networking problems (I've certainly never had to do it on a desktop system, running any OS), and in any case by the time someone gets to the point of "diagnostics" they probably have help (as you imply) from someone experienced to at least talk them through it anyway.
But it's this part which I was replying to:
However I did object to the previous post claiming that to be considered user friendly Linux could not use the command line or edit config files, whilst Windows could , as well as require users to edit the registry from time to time.
That is not what the post you replied to claimed (although I'm sure it could be inferred), but when they don't even mention Windows I think it's going overboard to start laying into it. Windows is "mainstream-friendly" through a combination of having a friendly interface earlier (which, given the relative commercial pressures on the operating systems, is far from surprising) and because MS is just ubiquitous anyway.
I think the better response to the post would have been to point out that one genuinely does not require the command line or manual editing of config files, regardless of whether you like editing config files or not. As you point out, for basically anything that can be done in Windows there is a configuration tool available in many Linux distributions.
I just don't get why people immediately jump to the "but editing config files is easy!" response (there was a few!), or the "but Microsoft/Apple are just as bad!" response (I mean, the implication that free software is aspiring to Microsoft/Apple's standards can be taken as pretty insulting; it should be aiming far beyond), when the fact is that the poster was just unaware of how much progress has been made in Linux distributions recently.
I'm sorry, but how many home users actually need to edit their hosts file, or their routing table? Or, for that matter, anything within the registry? I've never had to do any of these things for a desktop Windows install, despite the fact that I know how to. These are system administrator tasks, and at that point using the command-line is fine because the user can be expected have some understanding of these concepts already. These tasks and those that Linux distributions are (often wrongly) accused of forcing the user to use the command-line for are profoundly different; it's a ludicrous analogy.
What would be more useful would be to point out that in some distributions (obviously those which are geared towards user-friendliness, which seems the only fair comparison for "desktop" use), the "edit a text config file" and "use the command line" commandments are being met. The eagerness of people to dig on Windows for invalid reasons instead of defending Linux distributions which are perfectly capable of standing on their own merits bewilders me.
Users shouldn't ever have to edit the registry; I've never had to other than to fix problems I've caused myself. And as for installing drivers, most of the time the drivers are pre-installed; and when one obtains new hardware, the drivers come on a disk with the hardware with a graphical installer. It's not perfect, but it's not especially bad.
Worth noting that I recently decided to see how much I could get done in Ubuntu without the command line, and the answer was "pretty much everything"; with the help of a script from the forums (obviously not perfect) which I could easily click to install my graphics drivers it was all basically flawless, including installing utorrent and Steam through Wine.
Too hard, still(bear in mind that you need to open xorg.conf in a sudo'd text editor, which is more complex). And there's absolutely no reason that the process can't be automated. I'm sure I managed to set up my ATI card using a script (which I could double-click; I was seeing how easy it was to get everything set up without the command line) though. Very close now. And apparently the upcoming versions of Xorg will be able to do away with xorg.conf pretty much entirely. That's the ideal.
Crystal Reports is a tool commonly used to enhance the reporting capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio. The case here is Oracle buying up the manufacturer of tools which are used to enhance their competitor's product, and I suppose Apple buying Crystal Reports would be a similar case if you consider Apple's dev tools as competitors to Microsoft's. I'm not sure I do, though.
It could be as simple as them just not testing OpenGL thoroughly, since DirectX was a more sensible goal and they had a finite amount of time to do testing. That'd be a pretty reasonable reason to hide it away (but still bundle it for those who wanted to use it).
I heard that there were, at least a while ago, bunch of stability problems with Ogg-enclosed FLAC files. It could just be that people were put off by the earlier teething problems, regardless of whether they're still relevant now.
Add this to the fact that one really doesn't need administrator privileges to make a system into a botnet zombie and you're flying. Just create a process which runs whenever the user logs in; most home users are the only user on their machine, so you lose little to "downtime" from other users logging on, and most of these users won't even know to look for a rogue process, let alone how.
It is a problem for AVI. Explaining why someone's file won't work because the codec isn't there ("but I just played another video file yesterday, it must have the video thing!") to people without much computing knowledge is a complete pain.
The fact that Xiph traditionally contract the two together to "Ogg Vorbis" doesn't help either. People assume that "Ogg" is short for "Ogg Vorbis" (and, in context, it often is, regardless of whether that's "correct"). If there was a single other commonly-used format in the Ogg container there's a chance that this would help disambiguate, but as it is it just lends to confusion.
To clarify (more caffiene and less headache later!), I was only going on about "device class" because it effects not just whether a device can run the software in question, but whether it can run it well. iTunes is not really software suitable for a device the size of an iPod; regardless of whether you can do the skips and jumps required to make it run, it's never going to run well or perform on the device. One could slap another frontend over it in some crazy way but at this point you're essentially just kidding yourself.
Your point, which I didn't miss, was pretty much irrelevant. I realise that qualifying things by "device class" is clumsy, but it's still pretty accurate here. There isn't software for a portable music player which can play Fairplay. If you made a computer capable of playing it on such a small scale, you'd need to map mouse clicks or some other nonsense in order to make the software play, so it's just not the same.
We'll see how that works out; I can imagine that the source code or documentation for a kernel driver might, in some cases, fall under the protections of the NDA, but I hope that ways are found around this.
Yeah, it's a pain. I've seen they've put up some NDA "protection" clauses there in order to become more lawyer-friendly, but it may still not work fully; I can't even think about how they can meet all NDA clauses in all cases, unfortunately. The fact that they specifically mention such things is a step forward, though; it shows they're willing to deal with companies on their terms so long as the work can get done.
Another way of looking at it would be as formalising the rule that "if you give us specifications, the driver will get written". A lot of the problems with free software drivers is lack of information on how a device works; if this makes it better known that all they have to do is provide some specification, it might encourage companies to submit more of them, and encourage customers to ask people to submit more of them.
The thing is that it's an artificial complaint. Apple doesn't prevent anybody from selling music that can play on the iPod, and they don't charge any licensing fees for the ability either. Other companies are simply unhappy with Apple's (more than reasonable) terms.
Not sure I agree there. Apple's terms mean that people can't sell DRMed content for the iPod. I'd be quite happy with those terms so long as they couldn't do so themselves, but they can. It's a strange, arbitrary double standard.
Apple don't require their users to only listen to iTMS music. Clearly not. But the class of music that iTMS delivers - that is, DRMed music - can only be provided by iTMS. Considering that the rationale for DRM in this case is that music companies won't allow it another way, the logic of that argument leads to "any online-distributed music from said companies", which seems pretty unacceptable to me.
I'd really rather there was another way. And honestly, I can't help but feel there is.
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I'm sure there's plenty of Unicode characters which look like a period too, so yeah, if you just want it to look like it you're probably fine. At worst the dot could be replaced with a dot at half-line height (which would probably be more accurate to the word "dot" anyway ;) ).
This could explain why the version of Ubuntu I'm running (Feisty, the development branch) has had (I think; I'm at work at the moment) an extra control panel added which is HP-branded, specifically for their printers. It seemed strange at the time but if HP printers require some crazy non-standard software I guess that makes sense.
Steam does this right now, so far as I can tell. There's loads of non-Valve games available through Steam these days.
I think the "no exceptions" clause probably only applied to desktop tasks! I think it's quite unreasonable to expect any OS to entirely forgo the command line (certainly, it's not advisable). You might as well have said "but you can't use the command line without using the command line"; it's not a relevant use-case.
Personally I think that (desktop) Linux distributions are generally easily usable without the command line these days (I've been experimenting with using my Ubuntu just like this, and I've not run into problems where I wouldn't have found the same problems on OS X or Windows yet), but this immediate rush of people to condemn Windows rather than to defend Linux on its merits seems kinda bitter and unhelpful.
I'm not certain that playing with a routing table is something that's done often in fixing desktop user's networking problems (I've certainly never had to do it on a desktop system, running any OS), and in any case by the time someone gets to the point of "diagnostics" they probably have help (as you imply) from someone experienced to at least talk them through it anyway.
But it's this part which I was replying to:
That is not what the post you replied to claimed (although I'm sure it could be inferred), but when they don't even mention Windows I think it's going overboard to start laying into it. Windows is "mainstream-friendly" through a combination of having a friendly interface earlier (which, given the relative commercial pressures on the operating systems, is far from surprising) and because MS is just ubiquitous anyway.
I think the better response to the post would have been to point out that one genuinely does not require the command line or manual editing of config files, regardless of whether you like editing config files or not. As you point out, for basically anything that can be done in Windows there is a configuration tool available in many Linux distributions.
I just don't get why people immediately jump to the "but editing config files is easy!" response (there was a few!), or the "but Microsoft/Apple are just as bad!" response (I mean, the implication that free software is aspiring to Microsoft/Apple's standards can be taken as pretty insulting; it should be aiming far beyond), when the fact is that the poster was just unaware of how much progress has been made in Linux distributions recently.
I'm sorry, but how many home users actually need to edit their hosts file, or their routing table? Or, for that matter, anything within the registry? I've never had to do any of these things for a desktop Windows install, despite the fact that I know how to. These are system administrator tasks, and at that point using the command-line is fine because the user can be expected have some understanding of these concepts already. These tasks and those that Linux distributions are (often wrongly) accused of forcing the user to use the command-line for are profoundly different; it's a ludicrous analogy.
What would be more useful would be to point out that in some distributions (obviously those which are geared towards user-friendliness, which seems the only fair comparison for "desktop" use), the "edit a text config file" and "use the command line" commandments are being met. The eagerness of people to dig on Windows for invalid reasons instead of defending Linux distributions which are perfectly capable of standing on their own merits bewilders me.
Users shouldn't ever have to edit the registry; I've never had to other than to fix problems I've caused myself. And as for installing drivers, most of the time the drivers are pre-installed; and when one obtains new hardware, the drivers come on a disk with the hardware with a graphical installer. It's not perfect, but it's not especially bad.
Worth noting that I recently decided to see how much I could get done in Ubuntu without the command line, and the answer was "pretty much everything"; with the help of a script from the forums (obviously not perfect) which I could easily click to install my graphics drivers it was all basically flawless, including installing utorrent and Steam through Wine.
Too hard, still(bear in mind that you need to open xorg.conf in a sudo'd text editor, which is more complex). And there's absolutely no reason that the process can't be automated. I'm sure I managed to set up my ATI card using a script (which I could double-click; I was seeing how easy it was to get everything set up without the command line) though. Very close now. And apparently the upcoming versions of Xorg will be able to do away with xorg.conf pretty much entirely. That's the ideal.
These are examples of things that you should never have to do unless you're a system administrator; how is this relevant?
Crystal Reports is a tool commonly used to enhance the reporting capabilities of Microsoft Visual Studio. The case here is Oracle buying up the manufacturer of tools which are used to enhance their competitor's product, and I suppose Apple buying Crystal Reports would be a similar case if you consider Apple's dev tools as competitors to Microsoft's. I'm not sure I do, though.
It only needs to be tested on thsoe platforms, however. Testing OpenGL on Windows would be pretty unnecessary, although they probably kept it working.
It could be as simple as them just not testing OpenGL thoroughly, since DirectX was a more sensible goal and they had a finite amount of time to do testing. That'd be a pretty reasonable reason to hide it away (but still bundle it for those who wanted to use it).
I heard that there were, at least a while ago, bunch of stability problems with Ogg-enclosed FLAC files. It could just be that people were put off by the earlier teething problems, regardless of whether they're still relevant now.
Doesn't this seem a little complex to explain?
Add this to the fact that one really doesn't need administrator privileges to make a system into a botnet zombie and you're flying. Just create a process which runs whenever the user logs in; most home users are the only user on their machine, so you lose little to "downtime" from other users logging on, and most of these users won't even know to look for a rogue process, let alone how.
It is a problem for AVI. Explaining why someone's file won't work because the codec isn't there ("but I just played another video file yesterday, it must have the video thing!") to people without much computing knowledge is a complete pain.
The fact that Xiph traditionally contract the two together to "Ogg Vorbis" doesn't help either. People assume that "Ogg" is short for "Ogg Vorbis" (and, in context, it often is, regardless of whether that's "correct"). If there was a single other commonly-used format in the Ogg container there's a chance that this would help disambiguate, but as it is it just lends to confusion.
To clarify (more caffiene and less headache later!), I was only going on about "device class" because it effects not just whether a device can run the software in question, but whether it can run it well. iTunes is not really software suitable for a device the size of an iPod; regardless of whether you can do the skips and jumps required to make it run, it's never going to run well or perform on the device. One could slap another frontend over it in some crazy way but at this point you're essentially just kidding yourself.
Your point, which I didn't miss, was pretty much irrelevant. I realise that qualifying things by "device class" is clumsy, but it's still pretty accurate here. There isn't software for a portable music player which can play Fairplay. If you made a computer capable of playing it on such a small scale, you'd need to map mouse clicks or some other nonsense in order to make the software play, so it's just not the same.
We'll see how that works out; I can imagine that the source code or documentation for a kernel driver might, in some cases, fall under the protections of the NDA, but I hope that ways are found around this.
Yeah, it's a pain. I've seen they've put up some NDA "protection" clauses there in order to become more lawyer-friendly, but it may still not work fully; I can't even think about how they can meet all NDA clauses in all cases, unfortunately. The fact that they specifically mention such things is a step forward, though; it shows they're willing to deal with companies on their terms so long as the work can get done.
Another way of looking at it would be as formalising the rule that "if you give us specifications, the driver will get written". A lot of the problems with free software drivers is lack of information on how a device works; if this makes it better known that all they have to do is provide some specification, it might encourage companies to submit more of them, and encourage customers to ask people to submit more of them.
I suspect that, unfortunately, media companies are aware of the inverted-commas around the "can't" there by now.
Thank you, but I was just trying to put the position of the courts in Norway into context. The post above was quite clearly crazy in that regard.
Not sure I agree there. Apple's terms mean that people can't sell DRMed content for the iPod. I'd be quite happy with those terms so long as they couldn't do so themselves, but they can. It's a strange, arbitrary double standard.
Apple don't require their users to only listen to iTMS music. Clearly not. But the class of music that iTMS delivers - that is, DRMed music - can only be provided by iTMS. Considering that the rationale for DRM in this case is that music companies won't allow it another way, the logic of that argument leads to "any online-distributed music from said companies", which seems pretty unacceptable to me.
I'd really rather there was another way. And honestly, I can't help but feel there is.