That's the magic of Apple and "usability." Everything's so "intuitive" that if it's not intuitive to you you're screwed. Everything a Mac can't do is called "something you don't really need to do." Every bug is a design feature. I was out with a bunch of friends, all young and techie iPod lovers, and every one of them, when we got to talking, "hated" their iPod, and all mostly for the same reason: there was such a huge learning curve because Apple's response to everything is "just use it, it'll just work." And after 25 years, we shouldn't keep believing them.
You know that's an urban legend, right? I remember hearing exactly that story 20 years ago, long before salary.com existed. As one commenter put it, "Find me a CEO with two employees, no revenue, and $200,000 in assets who makes $146,000 a year." If I do delivery for a pizza place, I do not get the combined salaries of a chauffer, a uniform tailor, a public relations consultant, a salesperson, and a french chef. Moms are basically like the best nannies, and those make $40K. My wife deserves millions, but not in a free market.
You obviously know as little about management and hiring as they know about programming. I know about programming, and I would still blackball anyone who made comments with your tone or content. In fact, I have google alerts set up on most of my employees (and their usernames and whatever), so if I were your boss I'd probably already know you posted this and be joking about it with your other bosses... My advice, look at the Myers Briggs types (I know your type of people don't believe in that voodoo) and learn that HR people think programmers are illogical idiots as much as programmers think the same of HR people. Why? Not because one of them is right. Programmers, no matter how "management" their title is, have no more business hiring than HR people have programming. Neither HR nor management care about saving money as much as they care about making money, they just understand exactly what you just said--a new graduate probably is more excited to work there, will work for less, and won't complain or sue; and old programers have their old ways of doing things, always demand more than market forces dictate, and always end up suing. I was in one place where we had to keep the AC on full-blast at all times, AND keep a space heater (most of the time on full-blast) at every station. That's not worth it when a young punk will do 80% as good for 50% of the money, and will have ideas. And if anyone ever said "I'm not here to..." or "That isn't part of my job" within earshot of me, they'd be gone befor they finished the sentence. No exceptions.
Of the 60 million active websites out there, they're trying to tell me that I've even heard of any of the worst 25? I was expecting 25 on par with "neuticles" or "rabies for kids," not another baseless rant against Windows Update. And don't nobody mention Dancing Baby, which is so good that 7 years later I just showed it to my wife a week ago (who's too young to have seen it--25.) Moral of the story: no major magazine has ever put out a legit list (besides the Fortune 500.) PC World's list of the worst websites was as much of a letdown as every time you get suckered into reading those "PC World's 25 ways to speed up your computer!"
Scribus looks great to me, but you gotta' admit it would look vastly different if it were a commercial product. I'm never quite sure why, because I'm not a pro, but it generally comes down to the look of the buttons--too big, too square, too colorful. But if Microsoft put it out, it would look like an Office product and there would be no learning curve.
The threat of multiple windows in multiple processes scares me to death after trying so many times to switch to GIMP.
As to support, a simple phpBB3 installation would do wonders. Bugtrackers and IRC don't work with most nerds (how many of the most extreme nerds below age 30 have an IRC account?), let alone the average user with a problem.
So don't mark this offtopic, because it's the same subject as Linux v. Microsoft. If Microsoft put it out, none of the above would apply, and these above comments apply 100% to every non-commercial software product made.
Linux can never be properly marketed until their open source team consists of more than one personality type. Right now it's a technical marvel with no usability and no support, and any attempts at such are driven entirely by extreme-left-brained people who think they can do the usability and marketing themselves. I've never seen an open source standalone program that looks good enough to be mass-marketed, and really doubt I ever will.
What about adding a video?! Every report I've seen says that adding a video is a gold mine, especially since it's not that common yet since eBay hasn't mass-marketed their "default" provider of video, Auction Video. I've only tried it once, on an iPod I went and bought at the store, and that sold for more than retail with over 2,000 page views. Flash video is getting easier to post (although that level of streaming still at this point justifies using a service like eBay's Auction Video above.)
I think people need to realize also that there is an organized marketing movement by each government to downplay the importance and perceived infallibility of the U.S. Remember, the stronger the dollar gets, the weaker the euro, the pound, the peso, whatever... On a macro sense, they're better off letting the US raise the world's standard of living, but corruption on both sides leaves unnecessary competition. If you're in Germany, you think there are all kinds of atrocities going on in the US because your competitive, zero-sum, government-owned news tells you so. That was the whole fight over trying to get German to be the official language of the EU. If you live in any other country, ditto. The US is doing a darn good job at most everything it does, and the perceived atrocities of the Bush administration are mostly marketing campaigns financed and written by those who would feign to compete.
I've been on full fiber for about a year now, on the nation's largest and fastest all fiber network in Orem, Utah. The basic plan, what any home would get, including me, has 15 Mbps down (and 15 Mbps up!), but the business plans get 100 Mbps up and down! And I pay $38/mo. I'm from San Francisco (Novato), but this is one more advantage to leaving California...
Granted, in the US, there need to be hefty fines, but the ACLU has always, and probably always will, fight to defend the "rights" of those marketing porn to children. That's just who they are and how they are--check their website.
The only solution that really works is the good old fashioned Okipoki/BlackFrog/BlueFrog anti-spam vigilanteism. What the world needs now is frontier justice. If the law won't protect you, if your kids are molested or someone you know is killed, wake up and fix the problem in any way necessary.
>>There is no bias if people can't even tell.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If it's good enough for our military; it's good enough for FOSS. From the same people who said, "Just because you're showering with a gay guy doesn't mean he's looking at you." Uh, yes it does...
If you ask me, when politics enters, the purity of science leaves. No exceptions.
Working at a company specializing in videoconferencing Accent Reduction tutoring to Call Centers in India and a few other countries which market to American corporations, I have for years been watching both sides of this. The Americans don't like dealing with people they can't understand (no, it has nothing to do with Racism or even much to do with Nationalism. It's mostly frustration not understanding people.) Not to mention politicians pitting unionists and senior citizens against the whole idea of outsourcing, insisting it's magically bad for the economy (which anyone who's studied Econ disagrees with.) I live in Utah, so half the call centers that aren't in India are in Utah (for stereotypical reasons of over-educated, overly nice, morally opposed to suing their boss populus here.) The providers in India are frustrated that they have to spend a ton to get a huge fiber connection to support their VoIP call center, which they have no risk control over since any day the US Congress or mob rule could pass some law against their existence. Their employees are similarly over-educated, and half only speak English, but since they speak with a Hindu-British accent they can't keep their customers happy. I've helped a couple companies overcome their accent issues and become extremely profitable, but at the same time that is always met with cultural skepticism, as removing someone's accent is, among the masses, considered a violation of their ethnic identity. Luckily India doesn't have those problems as much as we do in the US, so you can always find people who are more concerned with global progress... Anyway, that's my summary. The market for call centers is just centralizing, as the small guys go out of business and the big guys merge. Call centers in the US need to be in Utah, and outside the US need to be in Jamaica, Ireland, or India; and those trends will continue as soon as some minor hurdles evolve away.
Colin Jensen, www.sharpenglish.com, (801) 368-1623, colin@sharpenglish.com
When I read through today's top stories on Slashdot, I really thought they were all pranks:
- HD Video coming to an iPod (ignoring the complete lack of demand for such.)
- Proposal to Update the Electoral College (which turns out to be a ridiculous article about a ridiculous and unresearched book about how the only solution to the Electoral College "problem" is for everyone to agree not to use it.)
- Investing tips for college students (which is totally outside the realm of slashdotters. It's just a bunch of financial illiterates ranting on how everything is a scam.)
- United States Cedes Control of the internet (which makes no sense to anyone. I mean, good for them, but why in the world would they give it away? It would be like "California gives Hollywood to Bollywood to be fair.")
- Kazaa agrees to pay $100M to the MPAA. (Yeah, right. And since when do they have 100M; since when are they not going out of business; since when does anyone care whether they go legit when no legit downloading service has ever made a dime, except itunes, which did it through their standard brand of "marketing", which means invoking Apple's religionists to pay tithing. This is a token fine that everyone knows no one is expected to pay a cent toward. My money says there's an arbitration contract which overrules the fine secretly--that's how it's done, folks.)
You see? This is exactly why Firefox will never really take off versus IE. All the slashdotters have to huddle 'round their Linux monitors and debate about which command-line voodoo is necessary to get it to really work; and they back all their points up with mythical snopes-ish conspiracies about what resources IE7 or Windows really uses. 90% of people are still using IE simply because it works and you never have to deal with it. Firefox and Linux is like becoming a Jehovah's Witness--you have to study it for years before you dabble in it for years before you actually become a user.
That being said, I have two examples of companies that don't work on IE7 yet, and I wish they did. First, Google Desktop's RSS reader which brought me this article is opening everything in a new browser instance instead of a new tab. That's just annoying. But second, last.fm. Their new redesign won't load correctly under IE7, and there's no way to inform them of it because their fora don't work on IE7.
Amen. It's a horrible idea, because it transfers all the power to the coasts. Right now, the only reason any person in Nebraska has a say at all is because he gets an equal number of Senators as California and New York, and because of the Electoral College. If everything were defined by Mob Rule, can you imagine how far certain dumping ground states would be punished? i.e. nuclear testing in Nevada, nuclear storage in Utah, indian gaming in Nebraska... the entire economy would shift to autoperpetuate the current hyper-urbanization that is the root of half our environmental and economic ills.
>> We are not talking about tar.gz here, are we? Or ogg?
Well, if he's talking about tar.gz or ogg he should apologize and restate that 99.999999999% of people have never heard of it and there is no documentation.:) I've used both, but am not about to throw out my ZIP and MP3 files...
Seriously, last time I took a weekend to try to switch a leftover box to linux, I had two friends, both Linux junkies, over, and between them no one could get it working. It's a great platform, just not ready for the mainstream public yet.
Amen to both comments. *nix is unsustainable because the GUI is designed by scripting fans--there's not yet been a theme or skin that looks professional to me, and that would be if you were allowed to stick within the GUI. My office terminal is entirely *nix, and I spent half my salary correcting people when they call it DOS (because the ONLY differences are under the hood.)
And Apple still fulfills the age old stereotype: nothing I want is written for it (I didn't even have to mention that about *nix), the "security advantages" of not being able to mess anything up also means you don't have the ability to customize it or fix things when they break, they're expensive, no one supports them, and they're still run like a religion, with much more effort put into establishing "loyalty" than good hardware & software. Come to think of it, most all those arguments work for *nix also.
Newsforge is reporting that Linus Torvalds took a few minutes to review the cross-platform proof of concept virus covered yesterday and has proven...
HA! I know Slashdot is cultishly pro-linux, but the bias above is hilarious! I keep hearing Mr. Subliminal saying "Linus Torvalds (God) took a few minutes (every person in Seattle has been working at this individually and collectively this for weeks...) to prove (Bill Gates is just making stuff up, but anything Linus spends a few minutes perusing is proven. Oh, and despite the mobs developing Linux, )"
IE will always be alive and kicking so long as it has hundreds of billions of dollars...;) Firefox will always be nothing more than an academic project so long as it has zero dollars. There are no exceptions in history.
Linux will never get anywhere until NO ONE ever needs a shell.
I'm relatively advanced at computers, have taught computer-oriented classes at the college level, and have programmed for Fortune 500 companies. However, when I've tried switching to Linux for my own education's sake, there was always just too much to learn to get it working, too many unsupported drivers, etc., not enough software, and of all my professional computer friends, even the Linux fans, I could never find anyone who could answer my questions. While I firmly believe that there will one day be a financial incentive for me to know Linux, that day hasn't come yet, and it won't come as long as Linux users continue to insist their lack of usability is their greatest asset.
Again, I have nothing against the shell, but it should be a quick option for hardcore users, not a mandate for the average computer-afraid user. All they hear is "we can make your new P4 run DOS!"
Hi! I'm the first audio CD you ever bought back in the late 80s... I capriciously decided that buying me retroactively allowed the government and private companies to spy on all your activities. If you try to get rid of any of the 300 of my siblings that you now own, I'll get my father the RIAA to look through your garbage without a warrant in the name of artistic freedom. You agreed to a lifetime of harassment by giving me a home when you were 14.
I don't like replying to the original post, but no one here has attempted to answer the real question. They've only given answers about how you should toughen up or pray for bolsheviks to come kill everyone. The real question is about whether an employer should pay for training on his time and his dime. And while I don't know the intricacies of HR law, the answer is yes.
My wife's company, a software company full of programmers, just got sued for asking someone to go learn a new programming language on their time. It was a legal question, was solved legally, and they had a to pay a buttload to apologize.
From opm.gov:
For employees subject to the FLSA, time spent in training or preparing for training outside regular working hours shall be considered hours of work for the purpose of computing FLSA overtime if an agency requires the training to:
bring performance up to a fully successful, or equivalent level; or provide knowledge or skills to perform new duties and responsibilities in the employee's current position. See also 5 C.F.R. §410.402(d)(1) (1997), 5 C.F.R. §551.423 (1997), 29 C.F.R. §785.27 through §785.32 (1996).
Time spent in training or preparing for training outside regular working hours is not hours of work for employees subject to the FLSA if the training:
improves the employee's performance above a fully successful, or equivalent level; or provides the employee with knowledge or skills required for reassignment to another position or advancement to a higher grade in another position.
See also http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/get-cfr.cg i?TITLE=5&PART=551&SECTION=423&TYPE=TEXT
The point is, no slashdotter but an HR specialist or a free consultation with an HR attorney out of the yellow pages will give you a straight answer. But the answer they'll give is spent an hour of their time reading the Fair Labor Standards Act (google it), and then chat with an attorney from the phone book, then present your findings to your boss (of course without ever telling him you talked to an attorney.) And don't anyone say he'll fire you, because bosses generally aren't that stupid... if he fires you, that's handing you a million bucks.
Out of the thousands of horrible video-blogs, and millions of horrible weblogs, there are still some goodies. I have the lovely job of searching out good video content and video blogs for a living, and posting it via one of the available video blogging utilities (mostly auctionvideo, but also DMRevolution, as well as some standards, i.e. WordPress or Moveable Type's new utility, etc.) There are definitely some good vlogs out there, but no more as a percentage than normal blogs, and, as this article implies, probably less as a percentage. But many real bloggers can or will become real vloggers.
Let's also remember that most people with video-enhanced blogs are not vloggers. By that I mean most people who use a video somewhere in their blog, or ocassionally vlog for a particular purpose, don't altogether quit text-blogging. Likewise, most people with videos on an eBay auction have it on one item, or their About Me page, not on every item as the central definition of their listings.
Oh, one more point, video hosting still must be external. You really have to have your own servers, a huge hosting plan, or a separate video host to vlog, and those 99% of bloggers who aren't serious aren't close to being able to handle that bandwidth, no matter the format. (Plus, there's only one real format for video right now--Flash.) I have a 15Mbps upload at my house to handle what I do, and I'm not even one of the biggies...
But my headquarters is in Japan, and I'm pretty satisfied in putting my money for futuretech anywhere Japan is now, and they're not only totally into vlogs now, but putting out some pretty entertaining ones.
I think you're stretching to make a point... "Xerox" is still probably the second most popular verb for "copy." "Rollerblades" still is the main term for "inline skates." Like products are still called "band-aids" and "kleenex." I've even heard iPods described as "a type of walkman." I know the guy who is "the father of the Walkman," and he can still influence his way into any mp3 corporation position. These words may be synechdochal, metonymic, or downright zeugmatic, but they're not one hit wonders.
And "rootkit" is a technical word, and overt technical words aren't in even the largest dictionaries. The OED, as mentioned above, has close to 700,000 words, and is always considered the definitive source for what words "exist," and yet doesn't have "phyrritic granulonum" or "rootkit."
Slashdot Mirror
That's the magic of Apple and "usability." Everything's so "intuitive" that if it's not intuitive to you you're screwed. Everything a Mac can't do is called "something you don't really need to do." Every bug is a design feature. I was out with a bunch of friends, all young and techie iPod lovers, and every one of them, when we got to talking, "hated" their iPod, and all mostly for the same reason: there was such a huge learning curve because Apple's response to everything is "just use it, it'll just work." And after 25 years, we shouldn't keep believing them.
You know that's an urban legend, right? I remember hearing exactly that story 20 years ago, long before salary.com existed. As one commenter put it, "Find me a CEO with two employees, no revenue, and $200,000 in assets who makes $146,000 a year." If I do delivery for a pizza place, I do not get the combined salaries of a chauffer, a uniform tailor, a public relations consultant, a salesperson, and a french chef. Moms are basically like the best nannies, and those make $40K. My wife deserves millions, but not in a free market.
You obviously know as little about management and hiring as they know about programming. I know about programming, and I would still blackball anyone who made comments with your tone or content. In fact, I have google alerts set up on most of my employees (and their usernames and whatever), so if I were your boss I'd probably already know you posted this and be joking about it with your other bosses... My advice, look at the Myers Briggs types (I know your type of people don't believe in that voodoo) and learn that HR people think programmers are illogical idiots as much as programmers think the same of HR people. Why? Not because one of them is right. Programmers, no matter how "management" their title is, have no more business hiring than HR people have programming. Neither HR nor management care about saving money as much as they care about making money, they just understand exactly what you just said--a new graduate probably is more excited to work there, will work for less, and won't complain or sue; and old programers have their old ways of doing things, always demand more than market forces dictate, and always end up suing. I was in one place where we had to keep the AC on full-blast at all times, AND keep a space heater (most of the time on full-blast) at every station. That's not worth it when a young punk will do 80% as good for 50% of the money, and will have ideas. And if anyone ever said "I'm not here to..." or "That isn't part of my job" within earshot of me, they'd be gone befor they finished the sentence. No exceptions.
Of the 60 million active websites out there, they're trying to tell me that I've even heard of any of the worst 25? I was expecting 25 on par with "neuticles" or "rabies for kids," not another baseless rant against Windows Update. And don't nobody mention Dancing Baby, which is so good that 7 years later I just showed it to my wife a week ago (who's too young to have seen it--25.) Moral of the story: no major magazine has ever put out a legit list (besides the Fortune 500.) PC World's list of the worst websites was as much of a letdown as every time you get suckered into reading those "PC World's 25 ways to speed up your computer!"
The threat of multiple windows in multiple processes scares me to death after trying so many times to switch to GIMP.
As to support, a simple phpBB3 installation would do wonders. Bugtrackers and IRC don't work with most nerds (how many of the most extreme nerds below age 30 have an IRC account?), let alone the average user with a problem.
So don't mark this offtopic, because it's the same subject as Linux v. Microsoft. If Microsoft put it out, none of the above would apply, and these above comments apply 100% to every non-commercial software product made.
Linux can never be properly marketed until their open source team consists of more than one personality type. Right now it's a technical marvel with no usability and no support, and any attempts at such are driven entirely by extreme-left-brained people who think they can do the usability and marketing themselves. I've never seen an open source standalone program that looks good enough to be mass-marketed, and really doubt I ever will.
If you have any questions, download GIMP.
What about adding a video?! Every report I've seen says that adding a video is a gold mine, especially since it's not that common yet since eBay hasn't mass-marketed their "default" provider of video, Auction Video. I've only tried it once, on an iPod I went and bought at the store, and that sold for more than retail with over 2,000 page views. Flash video is getting easier to post (although that level of streaming still at this point justifies using a service like eBay's Auction Video above.)
I think people need to realize also that there is an organized marketing movement by each government to downplay the importance and perceived infallibility of the U.S. Remember, the stronger the dollar gets, the weaker the euro, the pound, the peso, whatever... On a macro sense, they're better off letting the US raise the world's standard of living, but corruption on both sides leaves unnecessary competition. If you're in Germany, you think there are all kinds of atrocities going on in the US because your competitive, zero-sum, government-owned news tells you so. That was the whole fight over trying to get German to be the official language of the EU. If you live in any other country, ditto. The US is doing a darn good job at most everything it does, and the perceived atrocities of the Bush administration are mostly marketing campaigns financed and written by those who would feign to compete.
I've been on full fiber for about a year now, on the nation's largest and fastest all fiber network in Orem, Utah. The basic plan, what any home would get, including me, has 15 Mbps down (and 15 Mbps up!), but the business plans get 100 Mbps up and down! And I pay $38/mo. I'm from San Francisco (Novato), but this is one more advantage to leaving California...
Granted, in the US, there need to be hefty fines, but the ACLU has always, and probably always will, fight to defend the "rights" of those marketing porn to children. That's just who they are and how they are--check their website. The only solution that really works is the good old fashioned Okipoki/BlackFrog/BlueFrog anti-spam vigilanteism. What the world needs now is frontier justice. If the law won't protect you, if your kids are molested or someone you know is killed, wake up and fix the problem in any way necessary.
>>There is no bias if people can't even tell. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. If it's good enough for our military; it's good enough for FOSS. From the same people who said, "Just because you're showering with a gay guy doesn't mean he's looking at you." Uh, yes it does... If you ask me, when politics enters, the purity of science leaves. No exceptions.
Working at a company specializing in videoconferencing Accent Reduction tutoring to Call Centers in India and a few other countries which market to American corporations, I have for years been watching both sides of this. The Americans don't like dealing with people they can't understand (no, it has nothing to do with Racism or even much to do with Nationalism. It's mostly frustration not understanding people.) Not to mention politicians pitting unionists and senior citizens against the whole idea of outsourcing, insisting it's magically bad for the economy (which anyone who's studied Econ disagrees with.) I live in Utah, so half the call centers that aren't in India are in Utah (for stereotypical reasons of over-educated, overly nice, morally opposed to suing their boss populus here.) The providers in India are frustrated that they have to spend a ton to get a huge fiber connection to support their VoIP call center, which they have no risk control over since any day the US Congress or mob rule could pass some law against their existence. Their employees are similarly over-educated, and half only speak English, but since they speak with a Hindu-British accent they can't keep their customers happy. I've helped a couple companies overcome their accent issues and become extremely profitable, but at the same time that is always met with cultural skepticism, as removing someone's accent is, among the masses, considered a violation of their ethnic identity. Luckily India doesn't have those problems as much as we do in the US, so you can always find people who are more concerned with global progress... Anyway, that's my summary. The market for call centers is just centralizing, as the small guys go out of business and the big guys merge. Call centers in the US need to be in Utah, and outside the US need to be in Jamaica, Ireland, or India; and those trends will continue as soon as some minor hurdles evolve away. Colin Jensen, www.sharpenglish.com, (801) 368-1623, colin@sharpenglish.com
When I read through today's top stories on Slashdot, I really thought they were all pranks: - HD Video coming to an iPod (ignoring the complete lack of demand for such.) - Proposal to Update the Electoral College (which turns out to be a ridiculous article about a ridiculous and unresearched book about how the only solution to the Electoral College "problem" is for everyone to agree not to use it.) - Investing tips for college students (which is totally outside the realm of slashdotters. It's just a bunch of financial illiterates ranting on how everything is a scam.) - United States Cedes Control of the internet (which makes no sense to anyone. I mean, good for them, but why in the world would they give it away? It would be like "California gives Hollywood to Bollywood to be fair.") - Kazaa agrees to pay $100M to the MPAA. (Yeah, right. And since when do they have 100M; since when are they not going out of business; since when does anyone care whether they go legit when no legit downloading service has ever made a dime, except itunes, which did it through their standard brand of "marketing", which means invoking Apple's religionists to pay tithing. This is a token fine that everyone knows no one is expected to pay a cent toward. My money says there's an arbitration contract which overrules the fine secretly--that's how it's done, folks.)
You see? This is exactly why Firefox will never really take off versus IE. All the slashdotters have to huddle 'round their Linux monitors and debate about which command-line voodoo is necessary to get it to really work; and they back all their points up with mythical snopes-ish conspiracies about what resources IE7 or Windows really uses. 90% of people are still using IE simply because it works and you never have to deal with it. Firefox and Linux is like becoming a Jehovah's Witness--you have to study it for years before you dabble in it for years before you actually become a user. That being said, I have two examples of companies that don't work on IE7 yet, and I wish they did. First, Google Desktop's RSS reader which brought me this article is opening everything in a new browser instance instead of a new tab. That's just annoying. But second, last.fm. Their new redesign won't load correctly under IE7, and there's no way to inform them of it because their fora don't work on IE7.
Amen. It's a horrible idea, because it transfers all the power to the coasts. Right now, the only reason any person in Nebraska has a say at all is because he gets an equal number of Senators as California and New York, and because of the Electoral College. If everything were defined by Mob Rule, can you imagine how far certain dumping ground states would be punished? i.e. nuclear testing in Nevada, nuclear storage in Utah, indian gaming in Nebraska... the entire economy would shift to autoperpetuate the current hyper-urbanization that is the root of half our environmental and economic ills.
>> We are not talking about tar.gz here, are we? Or ogg? Well, if he's talking about tar.gz or ogg he should apologize and restate that 99.999999999% of people have never heard of it and there is no documentation. :) I've used both, but am not about to throw out my ZIP and MP3 files...
Seriously, last time I took a weekend to try to switch a leftover box to linux, I had two friends, both Linux junkies, over, and between them no one could get it working. It's a great platform, just not ready for the mainstream public yet.
Amen to both comments. *nix is unsustainable because the GUI is designed by scripting fans--there's not yet been a theme or skin that looks professional to me, and that would be if you were allowed to stick within the GUI. My office terminal is entirely *nix, and I spent half my salary correcting people when they call it DOS (because the ONLY differences are under the hood.) And Apple still fulfills the age old stereotype: nothing I want is written for it (I didn't even have to mention that about *nix), the "security advantages" of not being able to mess anything up also means you don't have the ability to customize it or fix things when they break, they're expensive, no one supports them, and they're still run like a religion, with much more effort put into establishing "loyalty" than good hardware & software. Come to think of it, most all those arguments work for *nix also.
...despite the mobs developing Linux, Linus should be given all the credit, Amen.)"
Newsforge is reporting that Linus Torvalds took a few minutes to review the cross-platform proof of concept virus covered yesterday and has proven...
HA! I know Slashdot is cultishly pro-linux, but the bias above is hilarious! I keep hearing Mr. Subliminal saying "Linus Torvalds (God) took a few minutes (every person in Seattle has been working at this individually and collectively this for weeks...) to prove (Bill Gates is just making stuff up, but anything Linus spends a few minutes perusing is proven. Oh, and despite the mobs developing Linux, )"
IE will always be alive and kicking so long as it has hundreds of billions of dollars... ;) Firefox will always be nothing more than an academic project so long as it has zero dollars. There are no exceptions in history.
Linux will never get anywhere until NO ONE ever needs a shell. I'm relatively advanced at computers, have taught computer-oriented classes at the college level, and have programmed for Fortune 500 companies. However, when I've tried switching to Linux for my own education's sake, there was always just too much to learn to get it working, too many unsupported drivers, etc., not enough software, and of all my professional computer friends, even the Linux fans, I could never find anyone who could answer my questions. While I firmly believe that there will one day be a financial incentive for me to know Linux, that day hasn't come yet, and it won't come as long as Linux users continue to insist their lack of usability is their greatest asset. Again, I have nothing against the shell, but it should be a quick option for hardcore users, not a mandate for the average computer-afraid user. All they hear is "we can make your new P4 run DOS!"
Hi! I'm the first audio CD you ever bought back in the late 80s... I capriciously decided that buying me retroactively allowed the government and private companies to spy on all your activities. If you try to get rid of any of the 300 of my siblings that you now own, I'll get my father the RIAA to look through your garbage without a warrant in the name of artistic freedom. You agreed to a lifetime of harassment by giving me a home when you were 14.
Out of the thousands of horrible video-blogs, and millions of horrible weblogs, there are still some goodies. I have the lovely job of searching out good video content and video blogs for a living, and posting it via one of the available video blogging utilities (mostly auctionvideo, but also DMRevolution, as well as some standards, i.e. WordPress or Moveable Type's new utility, etc.) There are definitely some good vlogs out there, but no more as a percentage than normal blogs, and, as this article implies, probably less as a percentage. But many real bloggers can or will become real vloggers. Let's also remember that most people with video-enhanced blogs are not vloggers. By that I mean most people who use a video somewhere in their blog, or ocassionally vlog for a particular purpose, don't altogether quit text-blogging. Likewise, most people with videos on an eBay auction have it on one item, or their About Me page, not on every item as the central definition of their listings. Oh, one more point, video hosting still must be external. You really have to have your own servers, a huge hosting plan, or a separate video host to vlog, and those 99% of bloggers who aren't serious aren't close to being able to handle that bandwidth, no matter the format. (Plus, there's only one real format for video right now--Flash.) I have a 15Mbps upload at my house to handle what I do, and I'm not even one of the biggies... But my headquarters is in Japan, and I'm pretty satisfied in putting my money for futuretech anywhere Japan is now, and they're not only totally into vlogs now, but putting out some pretty entertaining ones.
I think you're stretching to make a point... "Xerox" is still probably the second most popular verb for "copy." "Rollerblades" still is the main term for "inline skates." Like products are still called "band-aids" and "kleenex." I've even heard iPods described as "a type of walkman." I know the guy who is "the father of the Walkman," and he can still influence his way into any mp3 corporation position. These words may be synechdochal, metonymic, or downright zeugmatic, but they're not one hit wonders. And "rootkit" is a technical word, and overt technical words aren't in even the largest dictionaries. The OED, as mentioned above, has close to 700,000 words, and is always considered the definitive source for what words "exist," and yet doesn't have "phyrritic granulonum" or "rootkit."