It's not the incompetent that are the big problem. In general, stupid people only end up hurting themselves, or other people stupid enough to hang around with them. The problem is that a gun gives someone a lot more power than their used to.
Not many people could reasonably kill someone else with their bare hands, and a knife makes the task somewhat easier, but it is still a lot more difficult than a gun. Power has funny effects one people.
NO, YOU DO NOT NEED TO HANDLE ANNOYING POPUPS WHEN BROWSING ALL THE TIME. I keep getting that a lot, and it just doesn't happen anywhere except in people's anti-MS imaginations.
I've never used Vista myself, but one of my sysadmins at school tried it out and ended up turning of UAC because of all the hassle it gave him. He uses Redhat on a few of his boxes, so he's not foreign to the idea of running as a regular user, but apparently, he can't do that in Vista and still work effectively.
Instead I think the entire thing should be organised by Yukoslavia, not because they'll be neutral about it, but because they never get a turn at having way too much power.
Not them, but they'd sell out to a powerful neighbor that could.
I wondered how many dorks were going to pick up on the fact that what she was doing isn't private given that everything she's using is the company's.
When I go to the bathroom, I'm using the company's facilities; but that doesn't give them the right to invade my privacy while I'm doing my "business".
If the PC can run Vista (Aero is not Vista), then it can say it's Vista capable. What's wrong with that? I am also a Linux user and MS basher (Like much of Slashdot), but this is just stupid.
Because whenever Microsoft advertises Vista, they always showcase Aero. Therefore, consumers have been lead to believe that they are the same.
Actually, if you talk the kernel devs, they'll tell you it's a feature, not a bug. They'll tell you that the problem is with Nvidia and that they need to release the source code to their drivers. The kernel devs haven't gone to any lengths to stop people like Nvidia from violating the GPL (they wanted to, but Linus put a stop to it), but they have stated time and time again, that they're not going to go to any extra effort to play nice with closed source drivers.
Nvidia doesn't really have much of an exuse in this case. All they can do is mumble some nonsense about IP. The Linux devs even offer free driver development with NDAs and all that jazz.
My humble experience would say otherwise. All the services on my desktop system were either explicitly enabled by me (like SSH and Apache) or they are boot level daemons (like checkfs, clock, consolefont, etc). I can check what each script does by reading it's entry in/etc/init.d/ (as long as the author doesn't use too much crazy BASH magic). If I want to find the dependencies, I just look for something that looks like this:
depend() { use logger dns need net provide cron }
I hardly know anything about shell scripting and I can figure out what that does.
Yeah, I know about services in Windows. You can open up a little Windows with a huge list of services. Thankfully, most of them are turned off by default these days (it wasn't always this way). I don't know any way of finding out the dependencies (besides trial and error) and there's no way in hell you'll be able to read the code that it runs. Most of them are fairly well behaved, although there's the Licensing Service that has given my friends a fair amount of trouble (no, they're not software pirates). And there's the DRM services that make me feel a bit less than welcome.
Actually, anonymous connections are the only thing FTP is good for. Anything that requires authentication should use an encrypted protocol like SSH or SFTP (if you use key based authentication you can kind of get away with no encryption, but it's still a bad idea).
Nobody said anything about Windows. Why are Linux users so unable to let Linux stand on its own? You never see Mac users constantly comparing everything about OS X to Windows, instead they judge OS X on its own merits and criticize it for its own failings.
Uh, I seem to remember some ads with a Windows guy and a Mac guy produced by a company called Apple.
I won't say you're wrong about the BS part. I think that's quite likely (or that it's a sincere effort, but sometime in the near future, a PHB whith a single-digit IQ will call the whole thing of cause it doesn't "come with Microsoft").
But aside from that, I don't think there's any reason to be cynical about what's going on. If this project takes off, Dell will need support staff. Remember that most of the problems that users have are not straight-forward problems. Most of them are PEBKAC or just a matter of getting the user familiar with a new way of doing things. Take, for example, the 'Start' menu on a windows system. In GNOME there are 3 menus, and the applications are in the 'Applications' menu and each sorted under it's category. Now 'Applications' makes a lot more sense that 'Start' and the categories each have lovely icons and easy names, but I still have to explain this to people who've never used GNOME before (and these are CS students!).
The hackers who build Linux and maintain the various distros aren't setup to deal with these kinds of problems. Ubuntu has some wonderful forums, but otherwise it's kind of patchy. Also, customers want to feel like their talking to Dell personally and not some random teenager on the Internet. It turns out that Dell is really some random guy in India, but that's what they want.
I don't they think of that as a problem. The GPL doesn't cover content created by the application. Also, you need to ask your self, what is a web app? phpBB is probably considered a web app, but what about something like Apache (pretend Apache was GPL for a moment)? I don't see anything about phpBB that makes it different then the web server, web servers can generate their own content if set up properly. Does that mean if you patch your own web server install, you need to provide your patch's source code.
It doesn't work this way for non-web content. If I compile my program with the gcc I'm not forced to use the GPL.
The complaints aren't all bogus. PHP does have a number of painful points. Probably the one that's given me the most trouble is error handling. PHP has exceptions, but most of the error handling in the language doesn't use exception. Then there's fatal errors which aren't really possible to handle (you can use an output buffer handler, but that introduces other problems which may/may not be worth the effort).
PHP also has those crazy globals floating all over the place. Sure, you can implement your own MVC-like architecture, but why should you have to do the work?
Finally, the object model in PHP has a number of deficiencies (C++/Java programmer may not notice; but if you've ever learned Python, PHP will make you cry). Much of this has been fixed in PHP5, but there are still a good number of things you can't do (mostly because classes are not first-class objects).
That said, it still is my first choice in most situations due to it's massive level of support from web hosts and acceptance among web developers.
Of course nevermind that VS2005 defaults to strict XHTML 1.1 code
You know, it would have been better if they hadn't. The problem is they make code that pretends to be XHTML, but it isn't. They still use the HTML mime type: sending XHTML with the text/html mime-type is bad. If they had stuck with XHTML 1.0 Transitional that would have been okay, because those specs make room for nasty browsers that don't support XHTML, but XHTML 1.1 should always be sent as application/xhtml+xml.
For me, the mouse has always been one of the worst causes of any stiffness or pain in my hands or wrists. I think this is because you're hand and fingers have a much more reduced range of motion when it's stuck to the mouse.
Actually, Microsoft is still in violation of the law. They simply said that they plan to comply with the law, but that they don't quite know how they're going to do it. And, of course, it's not like Microsoft has ever promised something and not delivered, right?
Funny, my experience with Fedora was pretty much like that. Of course the details were different. Dependency hell instead of USE flags. Instead of spending hours compiling, I spent hours looking for documentation (and I still failed). Eventually you realize that your going to have to compile it yourself cause none of the rpm's work, and then all hell breaks lose. You need to find all the dev packages for all the dependencies get the gcc, hope to God you're version of libc or whatever is correct. Finally I gave up and used Gentoo instead.
It would be accurate to say that they are breaking the law (at least in some countries) by using the software without a license, but it might be a bit far to make a moral judgment about it.
Most people I know don't really treat information as something that can be owned. If I make a good joke, others might give me attribution, but they wouldn't go and ask me permission to tell someone else the joke. We may talk about software products or media as being owned, but even then it's more because we've been told so than because we actually believe it.
So if ideas (and by extension, software) can't be owned, than I wouldn't be stealing it, right?
No, they can charge as much as they want for the software. Free as in speech doesn't mean free as in beer, necessarily.
That said, the source code must be available (in a usable form) for for free. Actually, they may charge for distribution costs of the source code too, but that's generally a pretty nominal fee. Therefore, there's nothing to stop you from compiling it yourself and then distributing your build to all your friends. So the above isn't a terribly effective business model unless you're offering support or providing a service (like shipping a computer with the software already installed).
I don't know who Coulter is (I'm not an American) but from what I've heard Limbaugh say, I don't think he's a terrible accurate representation of the Republican party. That would be somewhat like bashing professional journalists because Dvorak came out with another 'ZOMG! Apple to buy out Microsoft!!11' article.
I know that technically this shouldn't be Linux's problem, but from my experience, storing the timestamps in UTC will cause Windows (at least XP) to go nuts and screw up your time. I actually haven't used Windows for months so this wouldn't really affect any more, but for many people it's a big problem.
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It's not the incompetent that are the big problem. In general, stupid people only end up hurting themselves, or other people stupid enough to hang around with them. The problem is that a gun gives someone a lot more power than their used to.
Not many people could reasonably kill someone else with their bare hands, and a knife makes the task somewhat easier, but it is still a lot more difficult than a gun. Power has funny effects one people.
I've never used Vista myself, but one of my sysadmins at school tried it out and ended up turning of UAC because of all the hassle it gave him. He uses Redhat on a few of his boxes, so he's not foreign to the idea of running as a regular user, but apparently, he can't do that in Vista and still work effectively.
Not them, but they'd sell out to a powerful neighbor that could.
When I go to the bathroom, I'm using the company's facilities; but that doesn't give them the right to invade my privacy while I'm doing my "business".
More importantly, they probably won't learn as much either, not being in school and all.
Because whenever Microsoft advertises Vista, they always showcase Aero. Therefore, consumers have been lead to believe that they are the same.
Actually, if you talk the kernel devs, they'll tell you it's a feature, not a bug. They'll tell you that the problem is with Nvidia and that they need to release the source code to their drivers. The kernel devs haven't gone to any lengths to stop people like Nvidia from violating the GPL (they wanted to, but Linus put a stop to it), but they have stated time and time again, that they're not going to go to any extra effort to play nice with closed source drivers.
Nvidia doesn't really have much of an exuse in this case. All they can do is mumble some nonsense about IP. The Linux devs even offer free driver development with NDAs and all that jazz.
My humble experience would say otherwise. All the services on my desktop system were either explicitly enabled by me (like SSH and Apache) or they are boot level daemons (like checkfs, clock, consolefont, etc). I can check what each script does by reading it's entry in /etc/init.d/ (as long as the author doesn't use too much crazy BASH magic). If I want to find the dependencies, I just look for something that looks like this:
I hardly know anything about shell scripting and I can figure out what that does.
Yeah, I know about services in Windows. You can open up a little Windows with a huge list of services. Thankfully, most of them are turned off by default these days (it wasn't always this way). I don't know any way of finding out the dependencies (besides trial and error) and there's no way in hell you'll be able to read the code that it runs. Most of them are fairly well behaved, although there's the Licensing Service that has given my friends a fair amount of trouble (no, they're not software pirates). And there's the DRM services that make me feel a bit less than welcome.
Actually, anonymous connections are the only thing FTP is good for. Anything that requires authentication should use an encrypted protocol like SSH or SFTP (if you use key based authentication you can kind of get away with no encryption, but it's still a bad idea).
Uh, I seem to remember some ads with a Windows guy and a Mac guy produced by a company called Apple.
I won't say you're wrong about the BS part. I think that's quite likely (or that it's a sincere effort, but sometime in the near future, a PHB whith a single-digit IQ will call the whole thing of cause it doesn't "come with Microsoft").
But aside from that, I don't think there's any reason to be cynical about what's going on. If this project takes off, Dell will need support staff. Remember that most of the problems that users have are not straight-forward problems. Most of them are PEBKAC or just a matter of getting the user familiar with a new way of doing things. Take, for example, the 'Start' menu on a windows system. In GNOME there are 3 menus, and the applications are in the 'Applications' menu and each sorted under it's category. Now 'Applications' makes a lot more sense that 'Start' and the categories each have lovely icons and easy names, but I still have to explain this to people who've never used GNOME before (and these are CS students!).
The hackers who build Linux and maintain the various distros aren't setup to deal with these kinds of problems. Ubuntu has some wonderful forums, but otherwise it's kind of patchy. Also, customers want to feel like their talking to Dell personally and not some random teenager on the Internet. It turns out that Dell is really some random guy in India, but that's what they want.
Ah, that's my fault, it's application/xhtml+xml, not application/xml+xhtml
I don't they think of that as a problem. The GPL doesn't cover content created by the application. Also, you need to ask your self, what is a web app? phpBB is probably considered a web app, but what about something like Apache (pretend Apache was GPL for a moment)? I don't see anything about phpBB that makes it different then the web server, web servers can generate their own content if set up properly. Does that mean if you patch your own web server install, you need to provide your patch's source code.
It doesn't work this way for non-web content. If I compile my program with the gcc I'm not forced to use the GPL.
The complaints aren't all bogus. PHP does have a number of painful points. Probably the one that's given me the most trouble is error handling. PHP has exceptions, but most of the error handling in the language doesn't use exception. Then there's fatal errors which aren't really possible to handle (you can use an output buffer handler, but that introduces other problems which may/may not be worth the effort).
PHP also has those crazy globals floating all over the place. Sure, you can implement your own MVC-like architecture, but why should you have to do the work?
Finally, the object model in PHP has a number of deficiencies (C++/Java programmer may not notice; but if you've ever learned Python, PHP will make you cry). Much of this has been fixed in PHP5, but there are still a good number of things you can't do (mostly because classes are not first-class objects).
That said, it still is my first choice in most situations due to it's massive level of support from web hosts and acceptance among web developers.
You know, it would have been better if they hadn't. The problem is they make code that pretends to be XHTML, but it isn't. They still use the HTML mime type: sending XHTML with the text/html mime-type is bad. If they had stuck with XHTML 1.0 Transitional that would have been okay, because those specs make room for nasty browsers that don't support XHTML, but XHTML 1.1 should always be sent as application/xhtml+xml.
For me, the mouse has always been one of the worst causes of any stiffness or pain in my hands or wrists. I think this is because you're hand and fingers have a much more reduced range of motion when it's stuck to the mouse.
maybe you should do 's/gifted/snobbish/'
Actually, Microsoft is still in violation of the law. They simply said that they plan to comply with the law, but that they don't quite know how they're going to do it. And, of course, it's not like Microsoft has ever promised something and not delivered, right?
It still has a place as a meta-distribution. Gentoo has been fairly successful on that model.
Funny, my experience with Fedora was pretty much like that. Of course the details were different. Dependency hell instead of USE flags. Instead of spending hours compiling, I spent hours looking for documentation (and I still failed). Eventually you realize that your going to have to compile it yourself cause none of the rpm's work, and then all hell breaks lose. You need to find all the dev packages for all the dependencies get the gcc, hope to God you're version of libc or whatever is correct. Finally I gave up and used Gentoo instead.
It would be accurate to say that they are breaking the law (at least in some countries) by using the software without a license, but it might be a bit far to make a moral judgment about it.
Most people I know don't really treat information as something that can be owned. If I make a good joke, others might give me attribution, but they wouldn't go and ask me permission to tell someone else the joke. We may talk about software products or media as being owned, but even then it's more because we've been told so than because we actually believe it.
So if ideas (and by extension, software) can't be owned, than I wouldn't be stealing it, right?
No, they can charge as much as they want for the software. Free as in speech doesn't mean free as in beer, necessarily.
That said, the source code must be available (in a usable form) for for free. Actually, they may charge for distribution costs of the source code too, but that's generally a pretty nominal fee. Therefore, there's nothing to stop you from compiling it yourself and then distributing your build to all your friends. So the above isn't a terribly effective business model unless you're offering support or providing a service (like shipping a computer with the software already installed).
I don't know who Coulter is (I'm not an American) but from what I've heard Limbaugh say, I don't think he's a terrible accurate representation of the Republican party. That would be somewhat like bashing professional journalists because Dvorak came out with another 'ZOMG! Apple to buy out Microsoft!!11' article.
You insensitive clod! Not everyone can be complex, proprietary LDAP server. Give the guy a chance!
I know that technically this shouldn't be Linux's problem, but from my experience, storing the timestamps in UTC will cause Windows (at least XP) to go nuts and screw up your time. I actually haven't used Windows for months so this wouldn't really affect any more, but for many people it's a big problem.