Why in GODs name would you want to get rid of ActiveX? Do you even know what it is? It has to be one of the greatest things in component reuse in a long time. It's unsecured inclusion into webpages is unfortunate, but not at all its only use.
It's COM in IE, and it's a really, really, really bad idea.
It's never 'equivalent to what Linux does' because there is no Linux corporation that is trying to have everyone use their browser, media player, etc.
You know, we gripe a lot about the advantages that Microsoft has (bundling, lots of legal dollars, advertising), but you forget that the open source world has huge advantages of its own. The developers in this market are primarily interested in making good *software*, not in trying to chisel as much money out of users as possible. This solves a lot of problems in and of itself.
Dell installs shittily-written software that runs in the background, installs tons of hooks and slows your system down.
There's nothing wrong with having lots of software *installed*, as Linux distros do, if it's inert when you're not actually using it (unless you're really worried about hard drive space).
Call me old fashioned, call me Mr-I-Want-To-Avoid-Trojans, but I don't actually like systems that download binaries AND run them without prompting you. When MS does something like this everyone jumps up and down but this guy seems to think it would be a good thing for Linux to exhibit this sort of behaviour.
They really aren't the same thing.
The beef that people have with Microsoft is that they make it really easy for a newbie to execute (or their browser/mail client/word processor/etc) automatically executes code from random people. This *is* going to be exploited. Nobody wants Linux distro maintainers to do this -- it's a huge security risk.
A Linux distro maintainer tests and checks updates, and releases them when some problem needs to be resolved. All the update downloads are cryptographically signed and checked before installation. This is not a security risk. It's like getting a very talented and knowledgeable admin fixing problems on your machine for you.
IIRC, Microsoft has a commercial service that can do a very limited form of this (can't handle updating all the software on your system, but apparently can look for common misconfigurations and stuff for you). I forget the name, though.
4. although i have found *excellent* documentation on microsoft.com, much of it is hidden behind MS-isms - stick to "standard naming of standard problems" here.
Yeah, I've never figured out *why* the hell they do that. The language of man pages is that of RFCs, and the language that just about everyone (except Microsoft) uses. Microsoft has a special set of terms that they make up just for their own products. Apple doesn't do this. Sun doesn't do this. Why does this happen with Microsoft? I try describing this to people, and it's tough to do, if they've never read anything other than MS's documents.
So having just one partition is more difficult than having 3 or more?
You can install Linux on one partition.
The first release of Windows XP in 2001 doesn't support drives larger than 137GB. I'm sure that the Ubuntu release you were installing wasn't from 2001 was it?
I think this is still legitimate criticism. You only get new releases of Windows rarely. Ubuntu gets updated frequently.
They were support to include drivers that didn't exist yet? So they left the window in there that asks? You only have to deal with this ONE time; before you've installed your video drivers.
Linux distros are updated frequently and the updates are free. If your copy of XP is from 2001 -- that's just an unfortunate artifact of the way Microsoft's business model works. Furthermore, with a typical Linux distro, the latest kernel and xorg will be automatically pulled down -- so you'll *have* that new video support in short order.
The only ones I've seen that involve long downloads are sound and video drivers (keep in mind this is only on occasion).
I've never seen a small Windows video driver package. Sound driver, maybe, with older sound cards.
1) There most certainly virtual desktops. You can download the desktop manager powertoy from microsoft directly. No, it doesn't come with the OS directly, but it is there.
A number of people make virtual desktop software for Windows, but it's generally slow and universally buggy (some of which is not really its fault, but because the software it is managing is not being written for a world with virtual desktop managers, and because that software cannot be fixed because it is not open source).
2) no modern C++ compiler. I have VC++ 6.0, but I couldn't port my code from gcc over to msvc.
You can install gcc-mingw. VC++ 6.0 is kinda broken WRT a number of C++ features, but there are newer Visual Studios out there (which, unfortunately, got slower, less stable, and lost features like profiling). I'm not a big fan of VS, but honestly, if you can live with the not-so-great virtual terminals in Windows, you can use gcc just fine.
3)The windows command line is just as capable as the Linux command line, if you read the documentation.
I can think of *many* ways in which cmd.com is much less powerful for basic usability than even a vanilla bash. command.com has no job control. Cmd.com doesn't have double-tap-to-list-completions tab completion. Cmd.com's scripting language is about as rudimentary as you can get and still have a scripting language. Just for basic use of the command line, it's extremely helpful to have a colored prompt, as I do, to be able to visually locate the last line -- cmd.com lacks this. Seriously, your statement is just not true. Type "man bash" on a Unix box -- cmd.com can't do much of anything on there.
4)True, Linux does _feel_ safer.
No, he's right. It is a pain in the ass to run as non-admin in Windows. There are lots of workarounds -- user switching is slow but better than logging out, and you can use run as, which given enough time put into it, can at least give you a rudimentary admin environment.
5)I'll give you that. Then again does SUSE provide the updates for all software not their own (serious question, I don't know).
Yes, and this is one of the major user-visible benefits of Linux distros. You install it, you enable automatic updates, you forget about it. On my Fedora system, bugs across the board fix themselves overnight and features show up. I don't need to shut down (the sole exception is in a kernel upgrade, and even then the new kernel starts being used on the next boot -- but I can keep using the old one as long as I want).
6)You can set the drive letters back in the disk manager.
Drive letters are still a really awful legacy of DOS.
On the up side, Microsoft apparently did recognize that they're a bad idea, and does provide some mechanism for arbitrary mount points of drives these days, with a unified file namespace, but it still isn't the default (and I've no idea how to use it).
Is he saying sarcastically that the daft Windows users moving to Linux articles are actually correct and it is more difficult? Or is he just stupid and genuinly believes all this stuff?
He's trying to make a point -- that a good deal of disorientation (not all, mind you) from people trying Linux from the first time is the fact that they're going from an OS that they have maybe a decade of experience in using to one that they have no experience using. They learn to adapt to the flaws in the product that they know, and can easily identify any missing or hard-to-find features in the new product.
It's not that surprising. In System 7 days, I remember that any Windows user using Mac OS would complain bitterly about that OS's shortcomings -- and visa versa.
Now, a lot of that article was ranting, but it's got some reasonable nuggets. Windows still has better support for unusual hardware, just because the vendors are going to write their driver for Windows first. On the other hand, those drivers don't come with the OS -- you have to locate and track them down, and hope that the vendor is maintaining them and still exists. Linux distros, on the other hand, tend to have driver support already in the OS a much larger chunk of the time -- aside from a few special cases (some wireless Ethernet chipsets and Nvidia's binary drivers are probably the most prominent). Product keys *are* a pain in the ass -- I listened to a pissed off guy at work yell at a series of people at Microsoft for over an hour because something was wrong with his product key. It *is* still more of a pain in the ass, in my experience, to get specificially the video card working with a copy of Windows. A good chunk of the time, I see people installing Windows sitting in 640x480 until they install their video drivers (which requires knowing what's wrong, knowing what to do to fix it, knowing what the manufacturer of their card is and what the model is, and where to look). That's not as trivial as it seems -- my housemate had no idea where to look when she went looking for her current drivers and saw something like four video-card related packages, some of which was related to multiple desktops and so forth. And she *built* her computer.
The fact that OEM Ethernet chipsets seem to often not be supported out of the box under Windows does suck. HP or Dell machines just never seem to fully work after a new reinstall until you go poking around on the OEM's website for driver downloads.
Many of the people here probably pirate copies of Windows software for home use, and so often don't consider what "normal" people wind up having to pay. If they don't, prices can add up. Office is hundreds of dollars, Photoshop hundreds more. If you want even basic features provided by Linux distros, like profiling, when you do development, you apparently have to buy the expensive Enterprise Architect version of Visual Studio. Virus checking software plus service costs more (and doesn't even apply under Linux -- no viruses). Partition Magic costs money. Ghost costs money. CD burning software costs money (granted, Windows finally has some very rudimentary burning software built into the OS). Newsreading software costs money (unless you like having ads on your screen). Instant messaging software is free, as long as you can stand having ads on your screen. PDF creation software costs money. WinZip costs money (granted, there's 7-Zip, but most people still seem to use WinZip). Illustrator costs money. MATLAB (granted, not as general-purpose as the above, but my dad uses it) costs money. All of these have Free, open source alternatives that are part of all major Linux distros, no additional installation required.
Free is fine, as long as you never lock yourself in to the service.
Google and Yahoo's search are fine, because other than a bit of familiarity with their interfaces, they have no lock-in on me. They can't hurt me much other than sticking ads around (and eventually, if the search pages gets unusable, I have to switch.) But every time you use a "free" service provided by a company, you gotta ask yourself ("how exactly could this company hurt me?") Ultimately, they're a business out to make money, and unless you've got a really good answer in which your interests and their own are permanently conjoined, you might want to think again.
Free email providers (c'mon, neither email nor domains are that expensive -- I use mailsnare for $20 a *year*, and domains are something like $10 a year and you can do other stuff with 'em) are going to want to make money off of the lock-in that they've established, and that means doing something that you don't like sooner or later. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. Maybe after they get bought or their management changes or they sell their email wing to someone else, or they hit hard times...who knows.
I've never actually used a monitor this big, but I'm guessing it's of most value to people who are displaying large images with lots of screen-wasting toolboxes etc. (or using Visual Studio, which seems to waste well over 50% of the available screen space on things other than code these days).
Seriously, every time I see someone using Visual Studio, they have eight million tearable panes and toolbars slapped on their monitor, and a tiny portal in the middle -- about 25% of their screen, at best -- to actually see their code. And most of the toolbars are for ridiculous things that they almost *never* use -- who on earth uses a toolbar button to copy text or save?
All the people that use emacs at work, on the other hand, have an emacs window that's stretches the entire vertical size of the monitor (and in my case, probably a second emacs window next to it).
Normally, I'd say something snide about software flaws being fixed by better/more expensive hardware -- but Visual Studio doesn't *force* you keep all that stuff on your screen. Most of it is just noise, dead space, basically useless pixels, but people still leave it up there. So people choose to do this.
On the same note -- one thing that Win/Mac OS X boxes should really have, IMHO (I believe that both have accessability software that can do at least a limited version of this, granted), is the ability to kick into a "magnified" mode. I can do this with Ctrl-Alt-KP+ and Ctrl-Alt-KP- on my Linux box, and it's useful for showing someone across the room something quickly or examining fine detail on something. It's really frusterating that there isn't a quick way to do this under Windows. Every time I see two people with their noses scrunched up against their monitor, pointing at some artsy website, and saying "no, I'm pretty sure that that's an 'i'", I wish that Windows had a full-screen magnifier that you could get at from a simple keystroke.
The only reason that we spend vast amounts of money (which translates to man-hours) of production on huge monitors is because the mass-market windowing systems, Windows and Mac OS X, lack the ability to deal with a sizeable number of windows simultaneously.
Both have improved somewhat recently. These days, Windows can at least group windows, and Mac OS X is somewhat better off, with Expose. However, both pale in comparison to even a rudimentary multiple-viewport window manager.
I have three monitors easily to hand, including 21" monitors. I instead use a single 19" monitor (though running at 1600x1200) on my Linux box. I could easily have a larger, dual monitor setup, but choose not to do so. Because I want to keep my work in my most comfortable viewing position. I use sawfish (which switches viewports extremely quickly), and have bindings to switch viewports on my keyboard. I have zero delay edge flipping with the mouse -- it hits the edge of the screen, I go to the next viewport in that direction. As a result, I can snap between viewports instantly -- as quickly as a dual-monitor user might look between two monitors.
And here's the great thing about a single, smaller monitor -- Everything that you're working on is right where you want it to be -- directly in front of you. I have twin 20" monitors on my Windows box at work -- I have to look off to the side then look back to the other side. Even on a single 21" monitor, it becomes awkward to work with two things on opposite corners.
Now, I'll grant that it takes you a while to learn a setup like this effectively -- anyone that tries the thing has gotten used to Windows and Mac OS X-style solid edges, and tends to just throw their mouse off to the edge. Also, with such a large desktop, you probably want a very high mouse sensitivity -- when moving my mouse quickly, it probably takes about a centimeter of mouse movement to move my cursor all the way across one viewport. However, once you are comfortable with such an approach, it is far faster than a dual monitor setup.
Also, if you have something like this, you can expand your desktop as much as you want. I normally use 12 viewports (I used to use 9, and finally decided that I needed a bit more space). Now, you could always get dual monitors and *then* use viewports, granted, but then you have the above drawbacks.
My largest concern is for resolution. I don't want to have individual pixels identifiable as such. Now, 1600x1200 is a minimum for such a requirement -- if I could get an even higher resolution display, I might go for that.
If you sit very far back from your monitor, you might want to get a larger monitor, granted, so that the same visual arc is provided by your monitor. If I sat further away from my monitor, I'd want the thing to be progressively larger and able to throw off more light to compensate for the greater distance.
And if you are spending $2000+ on a display, I don't think a couple hundred dollars is a huge deal.
One of the best human fallacies marketers love to exploit is that of context. People will drive across town to save $10 on a $30 toaster purchase, but not to save $50 -- five times as much -- on a $20,000 car purchase.
If the machine can somehow behave in a way that doesn't piss people off, why not put it in that mode all the time?
Because the desired behavior, the behavior that each person wants, differs from person to person.
I get really irritated when I have to use a Windows box. From my standpoint, it lacks major functionality that I use on a daily basis, performs like a cow, forces every minor action to be confirmed, and generally isn't very capable of being configured to work the way I like. And a lot of the software for it *really* sucks.
A Windows programmer that I work with really hates having to use Linux. To him, Linux is cryptic, lacks dedicated help lines to call if he runs into problems, has a ton of different distributions, doesn't currently support.NET well, forces him to look at a man page every time he wants to do something, and doesn't warn him before he does something potentially damaging.
Now, each of us has a different set of knowledge, and while each of us is competent in our own areas, both of us have a different set of things that set us off. He doesn't want to see command lines or man pages, and I don't want to see wizards or popup balloons.
For a while, websites tried incorporating this sort of thing: "Help us improve: Was this page helpful to you?" The problem is, no user is going to waste time doing work for a company that then just owns his work, without getting something back for it.
A stress monitor would provide continuous background feedback. Some software (Microsoft Office is particularly notable here) tries using heuristics to guess what a user wants. As you're probably aware, this hasn't worked very well in the past. One possible fix would be to incorporate more data -- every time Clippy shows up, your irritation level rises? You don't see Clippy any more.
I'd say that this is a long way from being useful in the general workplace -- there are a lot of social barriers to wearing stuff like this, and there are some costs that I'm not sure are being taken into account (use of heuristics to guess what the user wants just makes them feel *less* in control of their computer -- something that my parents acutely suffer from.) However, one thing that could be done would be to have it hooked up to testers for usability testing. Instead of having bugs based on misbehavior, file bugs based on the number of times a user gets pissed off at a particular dialog or window.
So here are things you can do:
* Identify (though maybe not fix) problem areas for user frusteration.
* When the user is searching documentation, play hot-and-cold with what the user wants.
On the other hand, if there's a way to telepath "Skip the wizards and guides, just give me all the options" into the machine, I'll take that. Let it smell newbies coming and dumb the interface down for them.
The problem is that a simple split between "newbies" and "experts" isn't really all that useful.
Okay, I've been using GUIs for a number of years, and I'm familiar with many of their conventions. I know where (of several places) to go looking if I want to change the setting of a program. I know how to close a program. I know how to copy-and-paste in Windows, even if a program doesn't allow use of the contextual menu. However, I'm not sure that that immediately qualifies me as an expert in the area of 3d modelling, say.
Secondly, I strongly oppose the use of newbie/expert interfaces (where the "newbie interface" is often called a "wizard" under Windows). The problem with such an interface is that the wizard is generally quite different from the expert interface. This means that, as a newbie gains familiarity with a program, he only learns to operate the wizard interface. He does not gain any skills that transfer over into making him a "serious" user of the program.
I've certainly fallen prey to this. For example, when I first used Excel, I remember trying to create a chart. I could create *almost* wha
in much the same way most people would consider a recommendation to read Marx's Communist Manefesto to be offensive.
Who on earth would consider *that* offensive? It's a major philosophical and sociological work. It's not as if you have to be an advocate of world communism to get useful concepts from the book.
I mean, most of Plato and Aristotle are kind of outdated or disagreed with by people today, but that doesn't mean that you can't derive good ideas from them.
I've never read the Communist Manifesto, but I read a paraphrasal (which was, itself, about 50 pages), and I'm glad that I did.
Err...I strongly suspect that a chunk of the humor in that cartoon comes from the fact that originally opponents of *evolution* portrayed advocates of evolution as monkeys. If you search for darwin monkey, you will get many, many portrayals of Darwin as a monkey.
And, secondly, let's look at your statement:
Yes, now it is used as an expression of discrimination...
Discrimination != criticism. I personally don't think very highly of advocates of creationism/intelligent design/what-have-you, but I'm not about to subject them to unfair treatment, though I'm more than happy to criticize them.
Yet, If I didn't want anyone to be able to figure out who I am in the first place I'd post anonymously.
Sure, but there's a *benefit* to having a pseudonym -- you can accure reputation, yet need not associate your ideas with your real name.
My point is not that it is (or even should be) feasible to do this and remain anonymous -- I don't want to get stuck on the details of this particular example. I'm just pointing out that, assuming that it *is* possible to prevent people from compiling information, there are definite (I would even say many) examples of situations where it is very beneficial to release snippits of information individually. That net benefit becomes a net drawback if the information is compiled.
I bet people would be singing a different tune if it were four documentaries about 9/11 mixed with Mahmoud Darwish's The Shahid?
Nope, still wouldn't care. Seriously, do people go around all day with a chip on their shoulder looking for something to get pissed off about? I mean, given the sheer scope of human history, and of the range of products out there, I'm sure that you can find tiny patterns like this everywhere. You could spend your *entire life* being pissed off about absurd things, if you wanted.
Political correctness has gotten ridiculous. I don't have any sympathy for people who are upset about this. It's pretty fucking obvious that it's computer-generated in a (perhaps imperfect) attempt to maximize sales, and that no human is out with a "secret agenda".
Even in a world where the conspiracy theorists were right, if the "secret agenda" consists of sticking three movie recommendations on another movie, that's kind of, well, not something to worry about, you know? I mean, if you want to find someone with an actually nasty agenda on the Internet, it's pretty easy.
Very simple principle. Lots of data is individually acceptable, but when compiled or processed, is unacceptable.
For example, say you maintain a Slashdot identity that you don't link to your real name. While no one post of yours may be sufficient to tie your identity to your name, the sum total may be sufficient.
Or security cameras. Most people don't worry about *one* security camera, but a lot of people get concerned when they are constantly being monitored by cameras which are tied together by computer to monitor where they go each day.
(1) In the past couple years multi-processor systems have slid further out of the hobbyist market and towards the server market.
(2) While it's not that uncommon to run sound processing or something relatively light in a second thread, most games do most of their work in a single thread. If you're buying a system to game rather than to run PHP for Apache, getting more CPUs probably isn't going to help you much.
I only have a very high end AGP card and it runs every game out there quite nicely - only FEAR gives it any trouble.
You know...it isn't actually all that important to have fancy hardware to make a good, fun, replayable game. Oh, it's easier to sell games with fancy graphics -- you can slap screenshots all over the box. Ultimately, though, there are an awful lot of more-technically-advanced games that have falled by the wayside, and I've played a lot more angband and tetris than any of them, and kept playing over the years.
I'm not denying that you can make more accurate renditions of real-world environments...but does that really make for better games?
Nintendo started to deviate from this a while ago -- most of Nintendo's 3d games are graphically pretty primitive compared to the competition. However, you can't deny that they make some very entertaining software.
It's always nice to have more tools...but ultimately, these days, a little more 3d hardware doesn't really buy you much more game.
My favorite PSP game is Lumines, which is possibly the most graphically primitive game on the PSP. It uses...well...alpha blending, a handful of textures, and that's it that I can think of off the top of my head. It doesn't even do any perspective rendering.
I can already empathize with characters in 3d games -- the limiting factor isn't the polygon count or the texture resolution, but in how good the modelling and animation is -- not a hardware-dependent issue.
A fundamental Christian goes by the Bible, which doesn't say anything like what the wackjob nutcases say.
I'd say that the whackjob nutcases are saner than the Bible. Let's look at the Bible:
If your brother kicks the bucket, *you* had damn well better be balling his widow:
Deut. 25:5 "If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall now marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her."
Let's say that you said "Well, I'll do my Christian duty, but I'm going to avoid impregnating the woman." No, no. Now you are in serious shit:
Genesis 38:8-10 "8 And Judah said unto Onan: 'Go in unto thy brother's wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.' 9 And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother. 10 And the thing which he did was evil in the sight of the LORD; and He slew him also."
Ouch. So now you know -- if you're getting it on with your dead brother's wife (which you had better be doing), you had better *impregnate* the woman. None of this pulling out business. Knock her up.
Quick question: say you're the nice, Christian wife of some guy, and some other drunken sonovabitch decides that he's going to *knife* this your hubby, and you try pulling your Jim or John or whatever out of the way to safety, and, in the excitement, accidently touch his nuts. What's the Christian thing to do? Right, your husband should promptly cut your hands off!
Deut. 25:11-12 "11 When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: 12 Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her. "
Let's take a quick look at Lot, considered a righteous man by the Bible, one of the few non-evil men in his city. The man is one of the Bible's examples of good Christians:
"And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after them, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof. . . . And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take they wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city" (Genesis 19:5-15). "And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father . . . and the younger arose, and lay with him . . . Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father" (Genesis 19:33-36). "
Prostitution of your daughters (and having sex with them when you aren't pimping them out, for that matter) is peachy with the Bible. Knock 'em up good!
Recently, the United States had a bit of a PR tizzy about some prisoners being humiliated -- having nude pictures taken of them. Let's see what the *Bible* thinks of the sexual treatment of captives:
Deut 21:10-14
"10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, 11 and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 12 then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13 and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14 And
So for the untrained driver who simply hits the brakes and waits for impact, ABS can result in higher impact velocities.
I don't think that this is the case.
There are three ways to brake:
1) Jam the brake pedal down hard and hold it.
2) Pump the brakes hard, rapidly locking and unlocking them.
3) Hold down the brakes until *just* before the wheels begin to slide, but never actually lock them.
A driver lacking ABS who tries strategy 1 is going to be worse off than a driver with ABS.
A driver who tries strategy 2 on an ABS car is going to be worse off than a driver who uses strategy 2 on a non-ABS car -- however, most folks know that you aren't supposed to pump the brakes on an ABS car. Except for people trained on non-ABS who automatically use this strategy on ABS, most ABS users are going to use strategy 1 versus non-ABS people using strategy 2 -- and the ABS users are going to be better off again.
Strategy 3 is more of a theoretical argument, IMHO. You have to have experience with skidding in your vehicle, with a similar load to what you are driving with during your emergency stop, at the same speed as you are travelling during your emergency stop, on the same surface as you are travelling during your emergency stop, under the same conditions as you are travelling during your emergency stop. This doesn't seem to be really likely -- who tears up their tires practicing skidding in their car? Race car drivers...okay, maybe they get enough practice sliding in a vehicle to beat that same vehicle equipped with an automatic system.
In any event, a driver who tries strategy 3 on an ABS car should perform as well as one using strategy 3 on a non-ABS car -- he avoids sliding, so the ABS never kicks in.
I think that people that say that no-ABS beats ABS assume that the driver of the ABS vehicle is using simple, dumb strategy 1 -- just hit the brakes hard -- and trying to outbrake an experienced driver in a non-ABS vehicle who is successfully attempting strategy 3. That's hardly an apples-and-apples comparison.
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Make up your mind! You can't have it both ways.
I know. It's a fundamental problem of closed-source, commercial OSes. There isn't a reasonable fix for Microsoft to do.
Why in GODs name would you want to get rid of ActiveX? Do you even know what it is? It has to be one of the greatest things in component reuse in a long time. It's unsecured inclusion into webpages is unfortunate, but not at all its only use.
It's COM in IE, and it's a really, really, really bad idea.
It's never 'equivalent to what Linux does' because there is no Linux corporation that is trying to have everyone use their browser, media player, etc.
You know, we gripe a lot about the advantages that Microsoft has (bundling, lots of legal dollars, advertising), but you forget that the open source world has huge advantages of its own. The developers in this market are primarily interested in making good *software*, not in trying to chisel as much money out of users as possible. This solves a lot of problems in and of itself.
Dell installs shittily-written software that runs in the background, installs tons of hooks and slows your system down.
There's nothing wrong with having lots of software *installed*, as Linux distros do, if it's inert when you're not actually using it (unless you're really worried about hard drive space).
Call me old fashioned, call me Mr-I-Want-To-Avoid-Trojans, but I don't actually like systems that download binaries AND run them without prompting you. When MS does something like this everyone jumps up and down but this guy seems to think it would be a good thing for Linux to exhibit this sort of behaviour.
They really aren't the same thing.
The beef that people have with Microsoft is that they make it really easy for a newbie to execute (or their browser/mail client/word processor/etc) automatically executes code from random people. This *is* going to be exploited. Nobody wants Linux distro maintainers to do this -- it's a huge security risk.
A Linux distro maintainer tests and checks updates, and releases them when some problem needs to be resolved. All the update downloads are cryptographically signed and checked before installation. This is not a security risk. It's like getting a very talented and knowledgeable admin fixing problems on your machine for you.
IIRC, Microsoft has a commercial service that can do a very limited form of this (can't handle updating all the software on your system, but apparently can look for common misconfigurations and stuff for you). I forget the name, though.
4. although i have found *excellent* documentation on microsoft.com, much of it is hidden behind MS-isms - stick to "standard naming of standard problems" here.
Yeah, I've never figured out *why* the hell they do that. The language of man pages is that of RFCs, and the language that just about everyone (except Microsoft) uses. Microsoft has a special set of terms that they make up just for their own products. Apple doesn't do this. Sun doesn't do this. Why does this happen with Microsoft? I try describing this to people, and it's tough to do, if they've never read anything other than MS's documents.
So having just one partition is more difficult than having 3 or more?
You can install Linux on one partition.
The first release of Windows XP in 2001 doesn't support drives larger than 137GB. I'm sure that the Ubuntu release you were installing wasn't from 2001 was it?
I think this is still legitimate criticism. You only get new releases of Windows rarely. Ubuntu gets updated frequently.
They were support to include drivers that didn't exist yet? So they left the window in there that asks? You only have to deal with this ONE time; before you've installed your video drivers.
Linux distros are updated frequently and the updates are free. If your copy of XP is from 2001 -- that's just an unfortunate artifact of the way Microsoft's business model works. Furthermore, with a typical Linux distro, the latest kernel and xorg will be automatically pulled down -- so you'll *have* that new video support in short order.
The only ones I've seen that involve long downloads are sound and video drivers (keep in mind this is only on occasion).
I've never seen a small Windows video driver package. Sound driver, maybe, with older sound cards.
1) There most certainly virtual desktops. You can download the desktop manager powertoy from microsoft directly. No, it doesn't come with the OS directly, but it is there.
A number of people make virtual desktop software for Windows, but it's generally slow and universally buggy (some of which is not really its fault, but because the software it is managing is not being written for a world with virtual desktop managers, and because that software cannot be fixed because it is not open source).
2) no modern C++ compiler. I have VC++ 6.0, but I couldn't port my code from gcc over to msvc.
You can install gcc-mingw. VC++ 6.0 is kinda broken WRT a number of C++ features, but there are newer Visual Studios out there (which, unfortunately, got slower, less stable, and lost features like profiling). I'm not a big fan of VS, but honestly, if you can live with the not-so-great virtual terminals in Windows, you can use gcc just fine.
3)The windows command line is just as capable as the Linux command line, if you read the documentation.
I can think of *many* ways in which cmd.com is much less powerful for basic usability than even a vanilla bash. command.com has no job control. Cmd.com doesn't have double-tap-to-list-completions tab completion. Cmd.com's scripting language is about as rudimentary as you can get and still have a scripting language. Just for basic use of the command line, it's extremely helpful to have a colored prompt, as I do, to be able to visually locate the last line -- cmd.com lacks this. Seriously, your statement is just not true. Type "man bash" on a Unix box -- cmd.com can't do much of anything on there.
4)True, Linux does _feel_ safer.
No, he's right. It is a pain in the ass to run as non-admin in Windows. There are lots of workarounds -- user switching is slow but better than logging out, and you can use run as, which given enough time put into it, can at least give you a rudimentary admin environment.
5)I'll give you that. Then again does SUSE provide the updates for all software not their own (serious question, I don't know).
Yes, and this is one of the major user-visible benefits of Linux distros. You install it, you enable automatic updates, you forget about it. On my Fedora system, bugs across the board fix themselves overnight and features show up. I don't need to shut down (the sole exception is in a kernel upgrade, and even then the new kernel starts being used on the next boot -- but I can keep using the old one as long as I want).
6)You can set the drive letters back in the disk manager.
Drive letters are still a really awful legacy of DOS.
On the up side, Microsoft apparently did recognize that they're a bad idea, and does provide some mechanism for arbitrary mount points of drives these days, with a unified file namespace, but it still isn't the default (and I've no idea how to use it).
Is he saying sarcastically that the daft Windows users moving to Linux articles are actually correct and it is more difficult? Or is he just stupid and genuinly believes all this stuff?
He's trying to make a point -- that a good deal of disorientation (not all, mind you) from people trying Linux from the first time is the fact that they're going from an OS that they have maybe a decade of experience in using to one that they have no experience using. They learn to adapt to the flaws in the product that they know, and can easily identify any missing or hard-to-find features in the new product.
It's not that surprising. In System 7 days, I remember that any Windows user using Mac OS would complain bitterly about that OS's shortcomings -- and visa versa.
Now, a lot of that article was ranting, but it's got some reasonable nuggets. Windows still has better support for unusual hardware, just because the vendors are going to write their driver for Windows first. On the other hand, those drivers don't come with the OS -- you have to locate and track them down, and hope that the vendor is maintaining them and still exists. Linux distros, on the other hand, tend to have driver support already in the OS a much larger chunk of the time -- aside from a few special cases (some wireless Ethernet chipsets and Nvidia's binary drivers are probably the most prominent). Product keys *are* a pain in the ass -- I listened to a pissed off guy at work yell at a series of people at Microsoft for over an hour because something was wrong with his product key. It *is* still more of a pain in the ass, in my experience, to get specificially the video card working with a copy of Windows. A good chunk of the time, I see people installing Windows sitting in 640x480 until they install their video drivers (which requires knowing what's wrong, knowing what to do to fix it, knowing what the manufacturer of their card is and what the model is, and where to look). That's not as trivial as it seems -- my housemate had no idea where to look when she went looking for her current drivers and saw something like four video-card related packages, some of which was related to multiple desktops and so forth. And she *built* her computer.
The fact that OEM Ethernet chipsets seem to often not be supported out of the box under Windows does suck. HP or Dell machines just never seem to fully work after a new reinstall until you go poking around on the OEM's website for driver downloads.
Many of the people here probably pirate copies of Windows software for home use, and so often don't consider what "normal" people wind up having to pay. If they don't, prices can add up. Office is hundreds of dollars, Photoshop hundreds more. If you want even basic features provided by Linux distros, like profiling, when you do development, you apparently have to buy the expensive Enterprise Architect version of Visual Studio. Virus checking software plus service costs more (and doesn't even apply under Linux -- no viruses). Partition Magic costs money. Ghost costs money. CD burning software costs money (granted, Windows finally has some very rudimentary burning software built into the OS). Newsreading software costs money (unless you like having ads on your screen). Instant messaging software is free, as long as you can stand having ads on your screen. PDF creation software costs money. WinZip costs money (granted, there's 7-Zip, but most people still seem to use WinZip). Illustrator costs money. MATLAB (granted, not as general-purpose as the above, but my dad uses it) costs money. All of these have Free, open source alternatives that are part of all major Linux distros, no additional installation required.
Free is fine, as long as you never lock yourself in to the service.
Google and Yahoo's search are fine, because other than a bit of familiarity with their interfaces, they have no lock-in on me. They can't hurt me much other than sticking ads around (and eventually, if the search pages gets unusable, I have to switch.) But every time you use a "free" service provided by a company, you gotta ask yourself ("how exactly could this company hurt me?") Ultimately, they're a business out to make money, and unless you've got a really good answer in which your interests and their own are permanently conjoined, you might want to think again.
Free email providers (c'mon, neither email nor domains are that expensive -- I use mailsnare for $20 a *year*, and domains are something like $10 a year and you can do other stuff with 'em) are going to want to make money off of the lock-in that they've established, and that means doing something that you don't like sooner or later. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday. Maybe after they get bought or their management changes or they sell their email wing to someone else, or they hit hard times...who knows.
I've never actually used a monitor this big, but I'm guessing it's of most value to people who are displaying large images with lots of screen-wasting toolboxes etc. (or using Visual Studio, which seems to waste well over 50% of the available screen space on things other than code these days).
Seriously, every time I see someone using Visual Studio, they have eight million tearable panes and toolbars slapped on their monitor, and a tiny portal in the middle -- about 25% of their screen, at best -- to actually see their code. And most of the toolbars are for ridiculous things that they almost *never* use -- who on earth uses a toolbar button to copy text or save?
All the people that use emacs at work, on the other hand, have an emacs window that's stretches the entire vertical size of the monitor (and in my case, probably a second emacs window next to it).
Normally, I'd say something snide about software flaws being fixed by better/more expensive hardware -- but Visual Studio doesn't *force* you keep all that stuff on your screen. Most of it is just noise, dead space, basically useless pixels, but people still leave it up there. So people choose to do this.
On the same note -- one thing that Win/Mac OS X boxes should really have, IMHO (I believe that both have accessability software that can do at least a limited version of this, granted), is the ability to kick into a "magnified" mode. I can do this with Ctrl-Alt-KP+ and Ctrl-Alt-KP- on my Linux box, and it's useful for showing someone across the room something quickly or examining fine detail on something. It's really frusterating that there isn't a quick way to do this under Windows. Every time I see two people with their noses scrunched up against their monitor, pointing at some artsy website, and saying "no, I'm pretty sure that that's an 'i'", I wish that Windows had a full-screen magnifier that you could get at from a simple keystroke.
The only reason that we spend vast amounts of money (which translates to man-hours) of production on huge monitors is because the mass-market windowing systems, Windows and Mac OS X, lack the ability to deal with a sizeable number of windows simultaneously.
Both have improved somewhat recently. These days, Windows can at least group windows, and Mac OS X is somewhat better off, with Expose. However, both pale in comparison to even a rudimentary multiple-viewport window manager.
I have three monitors easily to hand, including 21" monitors. I instead use a single 19" monitor (though running at 1600x1200) on my Linux box. I could easily have a larger, dual monitor setup, but choose not to do so. Because I want to keep my work in my most comfortable viewing position. I use sawfish (which switches viewports extremely quickly), and have bindings to switch viewports on my keyboard. I have zero delay edge flipping with the mouse -- it hits the edge of the screen, I go to the next viewport in that direction. As a result, I can snap between viewports instantly -- as quickly as a dual-monitor user might look between two monitors.
And here's the great thing about a single, smaller monitor -- Everything that you're working on is right where you want it to be -- directly in front of you. I have twin 20" monitors on my Windows box at work -- I have to look off to the side then look back to the other side. Even on a single 21" monitor, it becomes awkward to work with two things on opposite corners.
Now, I'll grant that it takes you a while to learn a setup like this effectively -- anyone that tries the thing has gotten used to Windows and Mac OS X-style solid edges, and tends to just throw their mouse off to the edge. Also, with such a large desktop, you probably want a very high mouse sensitivity -- when moving my mouse quickly, it probably takes about a centimeter of mouse movement to move my cursor all the way across one viewport. However, once you are comfortable with such an approach, it is far faster than a dual monitor setup.
Also, if you have something like this, you can expand your desktop as much as you want. I normally use 12 viewports (I used to use 9, and finally decided that I needed a bit more space). Now, you could always get dual monitors and *then* use viewports, granted, but then you have the above drawbacks.
My largest concern is for resolution. I don't want to have individual pixels identifiable as such. Now, 1600x1200 is a minimum for such a requirement -- if I could get an even higher resolution display, I might go for that.
If you sit very far back from your monitor, you might want to get a larger monitor, granted, so that the same visual arc is provided by your monitor. If I sat further away from my monitor, I'd want the thing to be progressively larger and able to throw off more light to compensate for the greater distance.
And if you are spending $2000+ on a display, I don't think a couple hundred dollars is a huge deal.
One of the best human fallacies marketers love to exploit is that of context. People will drive across town to save $10 on a $30 toaster purchase, but not to save $50 -- five times as much -- on a $20,000 car purchase.
If the machine can somehow behave in a way that doesn't piss people off, why not put it in that mode all the time?
.NET well, forces him to look at a man page every time he wants to do something, and doesn't warn him before he does something potentially damaging.
Because the desired behavior, the behavior that each person wants, differs from person to person.
I get really irritated when I have to use a Windows box. From my standpoint, it lacks major functionality that I use on a daily basis, performs like a cow, forces every minor action to be confirmed, and generally isn't very capable of being configured to work the way I like. And a lot of the software for it *really* sucks.
A Windows programmer that I work with really hates having to use Linux. To him, Linux is cryptic, lacks dedicated help lines to call if he runs into problems, has a ton of different distributions, doesn't currently support
Now, each of us has a different set of knowledge, and while each of us is competent in our own areas, both of us have a different set of things that set us off. He doesn't want to see command lines or man pages, and I don't want to see wizards or popup balloons.
For a while, websites tried incorporating this sort of thing: "Help us improve: Was this page helpful to you?" The problem is, no user is going to waste time doing work for a company that then just owns his work, without getting something back for it.
A stress monitor would provide continuous background feedback. Some software (Microsoft Office is particularly notable here) tries using heuristics to guess what a user wants. As you're probably aware, this hasn't worked very well in the past. One possible fix would be to incorporate more data -- every time Clippy shows up, your irritation level rises? You don't see Clippy any more.
I'd say that this is a long way from being useful in the general workplace -- there are a lot of social barriers to wearing stuff like this, and there are some costs that I'm not sure are being taken into account (use of heuristics to guess what the user wants just makes them feel *less* in control of their computer -- something that my parents acutely suffer from.) However, one thing that could be done would be to have it hooked up to testers for usability testing. Instead of having bugs based on misbehavior, file bugs based on the number of times a user gets pissed off at a particular dialog or window.
So here are things you can do:
* Identify (though maybe not fix) problem areas for user frusteration.
* When the user is searching documentation, play hot-and-cold with what the user wants.
On the other hand, if there's a way to telepath "Skip the wizards and guides, just give me all the options" into the machine, I'll take that. Let it smell newbies coming and dumb the interface down for them.
The problem is that a simple split between "newbies" and "experts" isn't really all that useful.
Okay, I've been using GUIs for a number of years, and I'm familiar with many of their conventions. I know where (of several places) to go looking if I want to change the setting of a program. I know how to close a program. I know how to copy-and-paste in Windows, even if a program doesn't allow use of the contextual menu. However, I'm not sure that that immediately qualifies me as an expert in the area of 3d modelling, say.
Secondly, I strongly oppose the use of newbie/expert interfaces (where the "newbie interface" is often called a "wizard" under Windows). The problem with such an interface is that the wizard is generally quite different from the expert interface. This means that, as a newbie gains familiarity with a program, he only learns to operate the wizard interface. He does not gain any skills that transfer over into making him a "serious" user of the program.
I've certainly fallen prey to this. For example, when I first used Excel, I remember trying to create a chart. I could create *almost* wha
in much the same way most people would consider a recommendation to read Marx's Communist Manefesto to be offensive.
Who on earth would consider *that* offensive? It's a major philosophical and sociological work. It's not as if you have to be an advocate of world communism to get useful concepts from the book.
I mean, most of Plato and Aristotle are kind of outdated or disagreed with by people today, but that doesn't mean that you can't derive good ideas from them.
I've never read the Communist Manifesto, but I read a paraphrasal (which was, itself, about 50 pages), and I'm glad that I did.
Err...I strongly suspect that a chunk of the humor in that cartoon comes from the fact that originally opponents of *evolution* portrayed advocates of evolution as monkeys. If you search for darwin monkey, you will get many, many portrayals of Darwin as a monkey.
And, secondly, let's look at your statement:
Yes, now it is used as an expression of discrimination...
Discrimination != criticism. I personally don't think very highly of advocates of creationism/intelligent design/what-have-you, but I'm not about to subject them to unfair treatment, though I'm more than happy to criticize them.
Yet, If I didn't want anyone to be able to figure out who I am in the first place I'd post anonymously.
Sure, but there's a *benefit* to having a pseudonym -- you can accure reputation, yet need not associate your ideas with your real name.
My point is not that it is (or even should be) feasible to do this and remain anonymous -- I don't want to get stuck on the details of this particular example. I'm just pointing out that, assuming that it *is* possible to prevent people from compiling information, there are definite (I would even say many) examples of situations where it is very beneficial to release snippits of information individually. That net benefit becomes a net drawback if the information is compiled.
I bet people would be singing a different tune if it were four documentaries about 9/11 mixed with Mahmoud Darwish's The Shahid?
Nope, still wouldn't care. Seriously, do people go around all day with a chip on their shoulder looking for something to get pissed off about? I mean, given the sheer scope of human history, and of the range of products out there, I'm sure that you can find tiny patterns like this everywhere. You could spend your *entire life* being pissed off about absurd things, if you wanted.
Political correctness has gotten ridiculous. I don't have any sympathy for people who are upset about this. It's pretty fucking obvious that it's computer-generated in a (perhaps imperfect) attempt to maximize sales, and that no human is out with a "secret agenda".
Even in a world where the conspiracy theorists were right, if the "secret agenda" consists of sticking three movie recommendations on another movie, that's kind of, well, not something to worry about, you know? I mean, if you want to find someone with an actually nasty agenda on the Internet, it's pretty easy.
Very simple principle. Lots of data is individually acceptable, but when compiled or processed, is unacceptable.
For example, say you maintain a Slashdot identity that you don't link to your real name. While no one post of yours may be sufficient to tie your identity to your name, the sum total may be sufficient.
Or security cameras. Most people don't worry about *one* security camera, but a lot of people get concerned when they are constantly being monitored by cameras which are tied together by computer to monitor where they go each day.
Two reasons:
(1) In the past couple years multi-processor systems have slid further out of the hobbyist market and towards the server market.
(2) While it's not that uncommon to run sound processing or something relatively light in a second thread, most games do most of their work in a single thread. If you're buying a system to game rather than to run PHP for Apache, getting more CPUs probably isn't going to help you much.
I only have a very high end AGP card and it runs every game out there quite nicely - only FEAR gives it any trouble.
You know...it isn't actually all that important to have fancy hardware to make a good, fun, replayable game. Oh, it's easier to sell games with fancy graphics -- you can slap screenshots all over the box. Ultimately, though, there are an awful lot of more-technically-advanced games that have falled by the wayside, and I've played a lot more angband and tetris than any of them, and kept playing over the years.
I'm not denying that you can make more accurate renditions of real-world environments...but does that really make for better games?
Nintendo started to deviate from this a while ago -- most of Nintendo's 3d games are graphically pretty primitive compared to the competition. However, you can't deny that they make some very entertaining software.
It's always nice to have more tools...but ultimately, these days, a little more 3d hardware doesn't really buy you much more game.
My favorite PSP game is Lumines, which is possibly the most graphically primitive game on the PSP. It uses...well...alpha blending, a handful of textures, and that's it that I can think of off the top of my head. It doesn't even do any perspective rendering.
I can already empathize with characters in 3d games -- the limiting factor isn't the polygon count or the texture resolution, but in how good the modelling and animation is -- not a hardware-dependent issue.
A fundamental Christian goes by the Bible, which doesn't say anything like what the wackjob nutcases say.
I'd say that the whackjob nutcases are saner than the Bible. Let's look at the Bible:
If your brother kicks the bucket, *you* had damn well better be balling his widow:
Deut. 25:5 "If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall now marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her."
Let's say that you said "Well, I'll do my Christian duty, but I'm going to avoid impregnating the woman." No, no. Now you are in serious shit:
Genesis 38:8-10 "8 And Judah said unto Onan: 'Go in unto thy brother's wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother unto her, and raise up seed to thy brother.' 9 And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother. 10 And the thing which he did was evil in the sight of the LORD; and He slew him also."
Ouch. So now you know -- if you're getting it on with your dead brother's wife (which you had better be doing), you had better *impregnate* the woman. None of this pulling out business. Knock her up.
Quick question: say you're the nice, Christian wife of some guy, and some other drunken sonovabitch decides that he's going to *knife* this your hubby, and you try pulling your Jim or John or whatever out of the way to safety, and, in the excitement, accidently touch his nuts. What's the Christian thing to do? Right, your husband should promptly
cut your hands off!
Deut. 25:11-12 "11 When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: 12 Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her. "
Let's take a quick look at Lot, considered a righteous man by the Bible, one of the few non-evil men in his city. The man is one of the Bible's examples of good Christians:
"And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after them, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof. . . . And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot, saying, Arise, take they wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city" (Genesis 19:5-15). "And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father . . . and the younger arose, and lay with him . . . Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father" (Genesis 19:33-36). "
Prostitution of your daughters (and having sex with them when you aren't pimping them out, for that matter) is peachy with the Bible. Knock 'em up good!
Recently, the United States had a bit of a PR tizzy about some prisoners being humiliated -- having nude pictures taken of them. Let's see what the *Bible* thinks of the sexual treatment of captives:
Deut 21:10-14
"10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, 11 and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 12 then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and
pare her nails; 13 and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14 And
So for the untrained driver who simply hits the brakes and waits for impact, ABS can result in higher impact velocities.
I don't think that this is the case.
There are three ways to brake:
1) Jam the brake pedal down hard and hold it.
2) Pump the brakes hard, rapidly locking and unlocking them.
3) Hold down the brakes until *just* before the wheels begin to slide, but never actually lock them.
A driver lacking ABS who tries strategy 1 is going to be worse off than a driver with ABS.
A driver who tries strategy 2 on an ABS car is going to be worse off than a driver who uses strategy 2 on a non-ABS car -- however, most folks know that you aren't supposed to pump the brakes on an ABS car. Except for people trained on non-ABS who automatically use this strategy on ABS, most ABS users are going to use strategy 1 versus non-ABS people using strategy 2 -- and the ABS users are going to be better off again.
Strategy 3 is more of a theoretical argument, IMHO. You have to have experience with skidding in your vehicle, with a similar load to what you are driving with during your emergency stop, at the same speed as you are travelling during your emergency stop, on the same surface as you are travelling during your emergency stop, under the same conditions as you are travelling during your emergency stop. This doesn't seem to be really likely -- who tears up their tires practicing skidding in their car? Race car drivers...okay, maybe they get enough practice sliding in a vehicle to beat that same vehicle equipped with an automatic system.
In any event, a driver who tries strategy 3 on an ABS car should perform as well as one using strategy 3 on a non-ABS car -- he avoids sliding, so the ABS never kicks in.
I think that people that say that no-ABS beats ABS assume that the driver of the ABS vehicle is using simple, dumb strategy 1 -- just hit the brakes hard -- and trying to outbrake an experienced driver in a non-ABS vehicle who is successfully attempting strategy 3. That's hardly an apples-and-apples comparison.
They probably are safer in their huge SUV. Too bad they are not thinking about the people they will murder though.
Kill, not murder.