That's right, consumers aren't smart enough, YOU know whats better for them.
Actually, I reckon it's more of a case of mis- or undereducation of the average mass consumer buyer. Someone without a background in computing definitely might not know what the meaning of an operating system is, or even what precisely is the difference between Windows and Word. That doesn't necessarily make them any "worse", as you seem to presume.
I'd probably ask my more "car-literate" friends a bit before actually buying a car. I'd certainly consult with a doctor before taking any prescription medication. So, what is it that makes computing professionals so repulsive to some people in the analogous situation?
Yeah, but that's with that particular PC and laptop model. Abilities can vary wildly from one manufacturer and model to the next.
Indeed, but I wouldn't say that a setup menu and boot device selection are manufacturer specialties since the mid-90's at least. Things like network boot are also increasingly more common in newer (in scope of a few years) motherboards.
The logical way to go is indeed to make them standard, we're not really disagreeing here. I'm just more happy to see hardware vendors finally get closer to ditching useless, obsolete parts of the PC architecture.
And like you said, having the right boot disk matters for you.
Pretty much any Linux Live-CD, and UBCD (for more arcane tasks, like remaking a partition table you accidentally erased... d'oh!) are a good combination for me. The latter also comes in a form with an included live Linux boot option so there's only need for one emergency boot disk.
For me, I can put a hosed Mac into target mode and connect it as an external drive to any Mac with a FireWire port, to attempt to repair it and/or retrieve data.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but didn't you imply earlier that you don't need another Mac for troubleshooting?
Granted, I can't turn my PC into a NAS box with the press of a button, but I can count without hands the times I've really had to swap drives around to solve some problem. I've probably been lucky too, but are you sure you're not just making things needlessly difficult for yourself?
With my PC, if I press a key, I get to a menu where I can choose from a number of boot methods, including network boot. My laptop's BIOS also has a special feature that allows me to boot straight off a CD/DVD by pressing a different key. With the right boot disk it's a breeze to, say, save files from affected partitions to USB/CD/DVD media, (re)install a bootloader or fix the partition table, without having to touch another computer.
So no, that's not really the key functional difference. It's the internals and their flexibility that counts far more. For starters, the PC BIOS requires some of the hardware to initialise to what's essentially a legacy mode, retained for compatibility with the IBM PC circa 1983 and resulting in some rather useless weight in modern operating systems.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make this personal, but you stated, quite succinctly, one of the core fallacies with the Linux on Desktop argument. It's easy to use if you know how to use it.
I guess that would also be why Windows fails on the desktop. It's so horrible they have to teach its use to children at schools.
A recent example: In order to get the newest Electric Sheep screensaver to work with the newest Ubuntu I had to forcibly update about 6 different dependencies (a couple of which were dependencies of a dependency) which took 2 hours.
You mean "newest" as in Breezy, which is undergoing heavy development, is expected to be broken for a while and is tagged "DON'T USE" for anything at all which is meant to be stable?
I know I just installed the same screensaver in about a half minute with synaptic in Hoary, the latest release. No unresolved dependencies, just searched for the package and clicked four times.
I don't use GNOME or KDE simply because they are trying to reimplement Windows (which is a terrible terrbile thing to copy... do everything exactly opposite instead!)
Who told you that? Someone must have if you don't use them. I've noticed influence coming from a lot of directions, but then I don't just look at screenshots either.
Or are you saying that Apple is going to hell now that it has icons on the Finder bar, similar to Windows' taskbar?
I'm wondering why even though there is a working closed source driver, even if its limited in its scope(only X86, only ppc, only whatever), why open source people would rather make it hard for others and not make those drivers also available.
Essentially because there's the probability of a snowball effect if you make binary-only development comfortable. You might find yourself in a situation where suddenly most of new "support" is scope-limited binary packages, which again destroys the point of having an open source base system.
I don't think this is just paranoia, either. Some argue that ndiswrapper is the prime reason why programming specs and open source drivers are so scarce for WLAN interfaces (seriously, what's there to hide in the APIs?). I've even met developers who think "it runs with WINE" constitutes a level of Linux support.
The response to my question I originally got was simply that ubuntu people didn't want to hinder the freedom of their machine by including the driver.
Ubuntu includes the open source drivers for both Nvidia and ATI cards, as well as the binary drivers as installable packages. What exactly are you missing? Why would you be forced to throw away your video card simply because not all of its features are enabled after install? How exactly does this differ from the Windows treatment where you get a crippled driver preinstalled and spend time fetching driver installers off the net manually?
If you were, as I understood from your original post, looking for reasons why Linux people insist on open source drivers, you have gotten many. I'd think your post was a raging success.
Many of the good things about an open source OS are simply lost when you start plugging in black boxes on a low level, and not just "freedom". Display drivers I can still barely take, but if the only way to make a USB/Bluetooth/CardBus device work is a platform-specific binary driver, something is seriously wrong. If Joe Consumer has a friend running Linux on, say, a slightly older PPC Mac, he'll be confused if the WLAN NIC doesn't work when it did on his Linux PC at home (if this seems too far-fetched, imagine the same situation with digital cameras in my current Windows scenario).
What is "working"? PowerPC Linux users don't have nVidia's or ATI's binary drivers, let alone wrappered network drivers, even though the hardware is mostly the same. Problems on the x86 platform depend solely on how well the builders of the black boxes have anticipated my run-time environment.
You try to make it sound like we're talking about two entirely different things, but the disadvantages of closed-source drivers are the same either way. I happen to think they outweigh their advantages enormously on many fronts.
Why someone who runs linux feels they should get more than that confounds me.
I got an AMD64 box early this year. Since the 64-bit Windows was a late release candidate and a free-beer download back then, I thought I would try it out.
Most mainstream hardware worked after a few downloads, but I have some devices (mainly two digital cameras) that still lack drivers, despite that even the release version has been out for months. I indeed feel like I should get more than this.
There's also lots of hardware which is not very old per se, but the vendors don't manufacture it anymore and would much rather have you buy their newer models. If they have kept their APIs reasonably similar, you might have better luck with future support, otherwise prepare to say goodbye to either software updates or your cash. It's not your interests they are pursuing, after all.
And not to sound trollish, but the native Linux distribution I also installed had everything working right out of the box. I see no need to worsen the situation.
I'm no astronomer, but wouldn't reducing the Moon's mass like that affect Earth's geological life, not to mention the respective orbits and possibly the stability of our orbital system? Depending on the extent of the built infrastructure, of course.
machines can't feel as a general rule, and i am fairly confident that machines will never get a feeling for a certain piece of music (if you're into playing you know what i mean by this). it's just one of those things that i believe is unprogrammable.
You misunderstand me: I only claimed that the expression of feeling can be programmed. To a listener it's likely all one and the same in the end. If the intent is to produce "interpretations" of a given piece, I'm sure one could work out some less esoteric algorithms for that as well.
If you're familiar with, for instance, the ELIZA and Megahal chatterbots, then you probably know on some level that people overrate themselves when it comes to detection of genuine human intelligence and emotion. Music doesn't necessarily require two-way interaction with the audience so it could be easier in that regard. On the other hand it could be more difficult since the listener won't help in directing his own expectations.
the only people i could think of who would bother with the machine played route are those who want the challenge of making it happen.
What better motivation to do it? Some people would argue that that's the only real reason there is to develop artificial intelligence.
Sorry if I come off as rude, but I've come to notice that people who make "machines will never..." statements often seem to have less actual grasp of machines and more of a hunch based on popular literature.
You don't need to enter notes into the machine by feeding it sheet music through OCR - you can "program" in those nuances just as well as you can play them yourself. The fact that a lot of free General MIDI song files seem to be made with no regard to note velocity, tempo variation etc. doesn't mean that MIDI doesn't support it either. It's a matter of skill just as is handling a traditional acoustic instrument.
Agreed. NAT isn't a permanent solution. I disagree that sooner is better though. As with anything, the most cost effective transition will begin on its own when the time is right.
That is to say, on the last minute, when people will be sure to take financial advantage of the distress. Just think back six or seven years.
play the backstab/lobbying-game to the end and you just might win.
You'd be playing a fixed game against the dominant player. That's called "stupid".
I thought the whole idea was to make something better anyway. Taking MS down from its inflated position would be fine, but the point in replacing it with a Sun World or a Red Hat World completely eludes me.
What cracks me up is the nerd infatuation with, basically, "only the trivia _I_ know are the essential things. And you're an idiot if you don't know them, no matter how utterly useless or irrelevant they are to _your_ job or interests."
You've completely misunderstood the stereotypical tech support frustration. A difficult customer is difficult wether he appears in a bank, an insurance company or a grocery store.
What completely drives tech support people nuts, I suppose, are people whose first presumption is that the guy at the other end is a complete arse to begin with, and one should at no circumstance help with solving the problem. In other words: this is broken, you are being paid, I want this fixed yesterday.
Of course, if computers are utterly useless or irrelevant to the task at hand, why call support anyway?
Computers are nowhere near that easy yet, or not without investing some signifficant time.
Is this supposed to surprise someone? Computers are not simple devices. Neither are cars, but the user interfaces are designed to hide that fact. That is, up and until something goes wrong. That's what tech support and experts are for, but the difference is that usually people have some level of respect for car repair people.
Interesting idea but when Micro$oft proposes the same thing the local/. denziens go bonkers.
On the other hand, the real difference is that the Palladium concept insists on you, the user, to trust an omnipotent outside third party in determining what is trustworthy and what isn't.
I see your point in this analogy, kids don't know whats best for them, but does that mean you never let them have any candy? Moderation is the key word here.
Moderation isn't such a simple thing either. When my dad decided I was spending too much time with the computer, he turned on the keyboard lock and took the key with him when he went to work. So I picked the lock. I also occasionally had fun playing hide and seek with the NES and its game carts.
No, this highlights a weakness in UNIX shells: we have to parse things. It's slow and it's a huge pain.
Well, most of actual parsing is done by the tools that act on the data. The rest is just application of the results to whatever traverses down the pipe. The overhead from this not particularly significant, considering that with Monad you also have to have a functional framework - essentially another abstraction layer - for passing around those objects.
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Actually, I reckon it's more of a case of mis- or undereducation of the average mass consumer buyer. Someone without a background in computing definitely might not know what the meaning of an operating system is, or even what precisely is the difference between Windows and Word. That doesn't necessarily make them any "worse", as you seem to presume.
I'd probably ask my more "car-literate" friends a bit before actually buying a car. I'd certainly consult with a doctor before taking any prescription medication. So, what is it that makes computing professionals so repulsive to some people in the analogous situation?
That's just a sign that they're doing a good job remaining undetected by their target audience. It's called "spyware" for a reason.
Indeed, but I wouldn't say that a setup menu and boot device selection are manufacturer specialties since the mid-90's at least. Things like network boot are also increasingly more common in newer (in scope of a few years) motherboards.
The logical way to go is indeed to make them standard, we're not really disagreeing here. I'm just more happy to see hardware vendors finally get closer to ditching useless, obsolete parts of the PC architecture.
Pretty much any Linux Live-CD, and UBCD (for more arcane tasks, like remaking a partition table you accidentally erased... d'oh!) are a good combination for me. The latter also comes in a form with an included live Linux boot option so there's only need for one emergency boot disk.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but didn't you imply earlier that you don't need another Mac for troubleshooting?
Granted, I can't turn my PC into a NAS box with the press of a button, but I can count without hands the times I've really had to swap drives around to solve some problem. I've probably been lucky too, but are you sure you're not just making things needlessly difficult for yourself?
With my PC, if I press a key, I get to a menu where I can choose from a number of boot methods, including network boot. My laptop's BIOS also has a special feature that allows me to boot straight off a CD/DVD by pressing a different key. With the right boot disk it's a breeze to, say, save files from affected partitions to USB/CD/DVD media, (re)install a bootloader or fix the partition table, without having to touch another computer.
So no, that's not really the key functional difference. It's the internals and their flexibility that counts far more. For starters, the PC BIOS requires some of the hardware to initialise to what's essentially a legacy mode, retained for compatibility with the IBM PC circa 1983 and resulting in some rather useless weight in modern operating systems.
Imagine a Beowulf cl-- *BANG*
Great! Where can I get the source?
How about the functional NextStep window manager clone, WindowMaker? I have a feeling that Jobs brought the idea along with his company.
That said, I'm pretty sure there's also some blatant OS X dock clones around, but I haven't been interested enough to really look.
I guess that would also be why Windows fails on the desktop. It's so horrible they have to teach its use to children at schools.
You mean "newest" as in Breezy, which is undergoing heavy development, is expected to be broken for a while and is tagged "DON'T USE" for anything at all which is meant to be stable?
I know I just installed the same screensaver in about a half minute with synaptic in Hoary, the latest release. No unresolved dependencies, just searched for the package and clicked four times.
Who told you that? Someone must have if you don't use them. I've noticed influence coming from a lot of directions, but then I don't just look at screenshots either.
Or are you saying that Apple is going to hell now that it has icons on the Finder bar, similar to Windows' taskbar?
Essentially because there's the probability of a snowball effect if you make binary-only development comfortable. You might find yourself in a situation where suddenly most of new "support" is scope-limited binary packages, which again destroys the point of having an open source base system.
I don't think this is just paranoia, either. Some argue that ndiswrapper is the prime reason why programming specs and open source drivers are so scarce for WLAN interfaces (seriously, what's there to hide in the APIs?). I've even met developers who think "it runs with WINE" constitutes a level of Linux support.
The response to my question I originally got was simply that ubuntu people didn't want to hinder the freedom of their machine by including the driver.Ubuntu includes the open source drivers for both Nvidia and ATI cards, as well as the binary drivers as installable packages. What exactly are you missing? Why would you be forced to throw away your video card simply because not all of its features are enabled after install? How exactly does this differ from the Windows treatment where you get a crippled driver preinstalled and spend time fetching driver installers off the net manually?
If you were, as I understood from your original post, looking for reasons why Linux people insist on open source drivers, you have gotten many. I'd think your post was a raging success.
Many of the good things about an open source OS are simply lost when you start plugging in black boxes on a low level, and not just "freedom". Display drivers I can still barely take, but if the only way to make a USB/Bluetooth/CardBus device work is a platform-specific binary driver, something is seriously wrong. If Joe Consumer has a friend running Linux on, say, a slightly older PPC Mac, he'll be confused if the WLAN NIC doesn't work when it did on his Linux PC at home (if this seems too far-fetched, imagine the same situation with digital cameras in my current Windows scenario).
Who has claimed that? Indeed most of the criticism toward TFA's claim has been that "neck and neck" does not follow from "both have vulnerabilities".
But if you want to show the latter, for your own sake at least link to actual vulnerabilities that aren't several years old.
Ah, you mean like this!
Limiting searches makes the numbers a lot less exciting, doesn't it?
What is "working"? PowerPC Linux users don't have nVidia's or ATI's binary drivers, let alone wrappered network drivers, even though the hardware is mostly the same. Problems on the x86 platform depend solely on how well the builders of the black boxes have anticipated my run-time environment.
You try to make it sound like we're talking about two entirely different things, but the disadvantages of closed-source drivers are the same either way. I happen to think they outweigh their advantages enormously on many fronts.
I got an AMD64 box early this year. Since the 64-bit Windows was a late release candidate and a free-beer download back then, I thought I would try it out.
Most mainstream hardware worked after a few downloads, but I have some devices (mainly two digital cameras) that still lack drivers, despite that even the release version has been out for months. I indeed feel like I should get more than this.
There's also lots of hardware which is not very old per se, but the vendors don't manufacture it anymore and would much rather have you buy their newer models. If they have kept their APIs reasonably similar, you might have better luck with future support, otherwise prepare to say goodbye to either software updates or your cash. It's not your interests they are pursuing, after all.
And not to sound trollish, but the native Linux distribution I also installed had everything working right out of the box. I see no need to worsen the situation.
I'm no astronomer, but wouldn't reducing the Moon's mass like that affect Earth's geological life, not to mention the respective orbits and possibly the stability of our orbital system? Depending on the extent of the built infrastructure, of course.
You misunderstand me: I only claimed that the expression of feeling can be programmed. To a listener it's likely all one and the same in the end. If the intent is to produce "interpretations" of a given piece, I'm sure one could work out some less esoteric algorithms for that as well.
If you're familiar with, for instance, the ELIZA and Megahal chatterbots, then you probably know on some level that people overrate themselves when it comes to detection of genuine human intelligence and emotion. Music doesn't necessarily require two-way interaction with the audience so it could be easier in that regard. On the other hand it could be more difficult since the listener won't help in directing his own expectations.
What better motivation to do it? Some people would argue that that's the only real reason there is to develop artificial intelligence.
Sorry if I come off as rude, but I've come to notice that people who make "machines will never..." statements often seem to have less actual grasp of machines and more of a hunch based on popular literature.
You don't need to enter notes into the machine by feeding it sheet music through OCR - you can "program" in those nuances just as well as you can play them yourself. The fact that a lot of free General MIDI song files seem to be made with no regard to note velocity, tempo variation etc. doesn't mean that MIDI doesn't support it either. It's a matter of skill just as is handling a traditional acoustic instrument.
That is to say, on the last minute, when people will be sure to take financial advantage of the distress. Just think back six or seven years.
You'd be playing a fixed game against the dominant player. That's called "stupid".
I thought the whole idea was to make something better anyway. Taking MS down from its inflated position would be fine, but the point in replacing it with a Sun World or a Red Hat World completely eludes me.
You've completely misunderstood the stereotypical tech support frustration. A difficult customer is difficult wether he appears in a bank, an insurance company or a grocery store.
What completely drives tech support people nuts, I suppose, are people whose first presumption is that the guy at the other end is a complete arse to begin with, and one should at no circumstance help with solving the problem. In other words: this is broken, you are being paid, I want this fixed yesterday.
Of course, if computers are utterly useless or irrelevant to the task at hand, why call support anyway?
Is this supposed to surprise someone? Computers are not simple devices. Neither are cars, but the user interfaces are designed to hide that fact. That is, up and until something goes wrong. That's what tech support and experts are for, but the difference is that usually people have some level of respect for car repair people.
On the other hand, the real difference is that the Palladium concept insists on you, the user, to trust an omnipotent outside third party in determining what is trustworthy and what isn't.
Moderation isn't such a simple thing either. When my dad decided I was spending too much time with the computer, he turned on the keyboard lock and took the key with him when he went to work. So I picked the lock. I also occasionally had fun playing hide and seek with the NES and its game carts.
I also spent time with him outside. Figures.
Well, most of actual parsing is done by the tools that act on the data. The rest is just application of the results to whatever traverses down the pipe. The overhead from this not particularly significant, considering that with Monad you also have to have a functional framework - essentially another abstraction layer - for passing around those objects.