Do they seriously think users are going to return to FYE? No, if anything, they're going to limewire or just buying used CDs, or buying through allofmp3/mp3sparks, which is entirely legal, much to the chagrin of the RIAA and its overseas equivalents.
I quit "consuming" most RIAA material years ago. Prince's new release caught my interest though (it sounds like his best guitar work to date!) BUT I looked up NPG records and it's part of the warner group (it's no longer independent), and distributed by ENI. So, Warner? EMI? Read this: I won't be buying Prince's new release on CD, nor through iTunes.
It might be a good opportunity for me to try mp3sparks when they rip it though. Legal (perhaps through loopholes, nonetheless), so I get the music cheap, and the label gets screwed just like the labels screw the artist. Everybody wins!;) Record industry douchebaggery may have earned mp3sparks.com a new customer in the very near future. Keep up the douchebaggery and become irrelevant and ultimately go by the wayside -- or embrace the new business models, treat the customer fairly, and see your riches multiply!
Google offers their service (advertising) for FREE, If they want a conventional model, perhaps they ought to pay Google to advertise for them, or opt out of Google's free service via robots.txt
The business model they chose for presenting their paper online is like this. Consumer goes to www.somenewspaper.com main page, browses around, clicks on some interesting articles, clicks on some more interesting articles, clicks on some local ads, moves along happily until they have meet their news reading needs.
What a news aggregation like Google provides is allow the consumer to search for a specific topic, pick from one to hundreds of sources to read about it, and move along.
But, the thing is, I don't go to boston.com, nyt.com, or bostonherald.com. I go to the Google news site, or Yahoo's, and scan headlines there. I'm not going to browse all of boston.com to get the news highlights. They (AP and their outlets) need to get with the program and embrace search engines. If it weren't for aggregation sites, I wouldn't visit their sites at ALL. I'm not going to be clicking around randomly to find what's going on. If I had that kind of time, I'd actually be buying newspapers. As it is I don't have as much time as I'd like to comment on here on stories that capture my interest.
The newspapers are missing the point: Google is providing a FREE service, and the newspapers do not have a right to that service. They should be glad Google does not require them to pay a fee for inclusion in their index and for providing summaries to their product (readership) to capture their interest. Advertising usually costs a lot of money, and being an advertising medium themselves, they ought to "get" it.
Usually companies make money producing product prospects actually WANT. They don't generally abuse a monopoly to force customers to buy new product they despise.
re: 2. Why don't people live away from where tornadoes exist?
Tornadoes can occur anywhere on the globe. They occur in NY, PA, and New England every year.The ones we get are usually much smaller and do not cause as much damage but have caused significant property damage. My parents' property has been hit a couple of times. One tornado just tore off the tops of a couple of trees, and the other just ripped the foliage off of a swath of trees in the woods, crossed the river next door and caused over a quarter of a million dollars damage to our neighbor's property, uprooting many old-growth trees, damaging cars and the roof of the house. They were very, very small tornadoes (may have even just been "down drafts" which up close resembled funnel clouds) and I do not envy anyone who has suffered losses from "real" tornadoes in the midwest. The ones that hit here are just dust devils by comparison. Large dust devils, and unlikely to ever occur again, IMHO.
Even the larger ones that hit the New England region are very small, maybe a couple hundred feet in diameter, and they dissipate very quickly.
I've gone to see the damage local tornadoes have caused and it was impressive to see a path of trees cleared out in the forest on either side of the road, but still, those were small storms.
Oddly enough, we lived miles away from any trailer parks, so I'm mystified as to why tornadoes could even exist in the area.;)
Why do people live in regions where tornadoes can hit? They can occur ANYWHERE on the planet. The population density is so low out in the plains (ever fly across America? If not, fire up google earth and explore that way, although it just doesn't have the same impact) that it's unlikely that any given point will get hit by a tornado in your lifetime. You probably have a higher chance of hitting the lottery twice than having your home wiped out by a tornado.
Now, granted, in some cases there may be specific geographical features which make tornadoes particularly likely in a given point, just like being in a valley between two hills or mountain ranges can drive weather to extremes, but in most cases you'd be unlikely to experience a tornado.
Feh. Sometimes I'll drink caffeine-free diet coke and buy decaf coffee beans and I don't get withdrawl symptoms. The only thing I'll notice is that when I do start drinking caffeinated beverages again, I'll have trouble falling to sleep.
How much caffeine do I drink, and how many cokes?
generally:
* one 24-ounce hazelnut coffee in the morning (or 1-3 cups at home if I get up early enough)
* two bottles of coke zero or diet coke
* occasionally another 24-ounce coffee or a mocha, more usually 1 to 3 cups of hazelnut coffee at home at night
That's quite a bit of caffeine, and I don't get withdrawal symptoms if I go without. I drink coffee because I LIKE it. If I can't get the coffee I like, I go without. I hate dunkin's coffee, and I hate coffees flavored with syrup, so it's pretty often I'll just go without.
I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.
Having said that, I voted for Bush (well, more accurately, voted against his opponent, who is one of the two worst senators my state has ever had) and I think Bush is an idiot. He just happened to be the lesser of two evils, even as bad as he was.
I completely disagree with Obama's foreign policy. Bush's was too impulsive, but Obama's a complete sellout. We're also edging closer toward a global government with his willingness to submit the US to an international taxation body, international commerce oversight, and a single global exchange currency, which will naturally lead to a single global currency used by everyone. In such a scheme only those in control will be the haves, and everyone else, rich or poor, will become the have-nots.
I disagree with the Obama administration and the $1.20 TRILLION of OUR money he is giving to the "international community" for the global bailout. I disagree with Obama's cutting the F-22 program. I disagree with Obama's cutting back the military. I disagree with Obama's foreign policy, which should ALWAYS be nationalistic in nature; not global. I live in the USA, so I value my country's economic interests over other nations'. Other nations engage in protectionism and tariff our exports heavily. We need to preserve our own economy so we need to re=institute import tariffs, and they need to be pretty hefty.
One can engage in deficit trade and deficit spending only so long before our currency becomes worthless and we become the paper tiger China claims we are.
They want revenue from sites which link to their articles? Here's a hint, AP: If you put it on the interweb, it's going to get linked to. However, if you try to squeeze money out of people, they'll just lift your content and NOT link to you, causing you to lose revenue.
Think of links to your content as free adverting, driving more product (readers/viewers) to your site or affilate sites. Or, if you're so retarded, er, um, I mean "mentally challenged," more directly to the point: links to your stories are free money. Take it and stop complaining about it.
FWIW, I'd LOVE to see Yahoo. Google, et. al ban you from their indexes/indices for a month. You'll change your tune real fast, because with newspapers dying, the Internet is all you have keeping your gangrene-infested corpse alive right now.
Is there an AP release of this that we can copy & paste here?;)
A lot of sites syndicate summaries of it through fair use. google's cache is fair use, as it is represented as a snapshot of the original host site and cached in case the site goes temporarily offline, not misrepresented as google's own site. google's news site draws readers to your own site(s). bloggers, etc. draw more eyes to your content and responsible bloggers will link to the source they borrowed the content (for fair-use purposes, usually to critique the content), drawing more content to your sites.
If you do not want google (or other search engines) to index, crawl, cache the site, may I introduce you to robots.txt?
If you do not want people to take advantage of the Fair Use exclusions, may I suggest you get out of publishing anything anywhere and just keep your precious "intellectual property" to yourself, or at least, keep it off the internet altogether? Trust me, you won't be missed. You're old world anyway. New networks who a) understand fair use b) understand technology and c) know how to market themselves will take your place soon enough either way. Just expedite the process and get off the internet, please, if you cannot understand how the both the Internet and how Fair Use works.
Now I understand some of what is going on is not Fair Use, but when there is a critique included (even if an article is quoted in entirety) let's assume that the content was copied in entirety for the sake of convenience of the reader, since even sources like CNN and FAUX^H^H^HOX make links go dead after a few days, so the reader would have to hunt archives on those sites to dig up the articles. Having said that, without an article ID, how is the original reader to locate the original article? Obviously quoting the entire article (which is generally just a few paragraphs to begin with - come on, admit it, your "IP" is over-valued in your minds) is not unreasonable, and as long as credit is given to the source and it's for the purpose of critique or a response, where is your complaint? It should be limited to those who engage in content scraping without adding any substantial new content, i.e., obviously not fair use -- not just what you wish isn't fair use.
Why is no consideration given to these things when building other large structures (bridges, office towers, wide office buildings, stadiums, water towers/tanks, oil tanks, and heck, even homes!) which disrupt airflow MORE than a turbine, but suddenly it's a major concern when the disruption is less than that of other structures, but just receiving focus because that minor disruption is generating power?
This same sort of focus on disrupting airflow ought to be made on every structure built anywhere, then we can achieve banana (build absolutely nothing near anyone) rather than nimby (not in my back yard) then everyone will see the greenies' theology for what it is: an extreme religion which is actually a sort of pantheism. Once that is seen that environmentalism has shifted away from science and has become a religion of extremists, it can be addressed, then we can get on with _responsibly_ using fossil fuels where necessarily, and developing truly green power where possible and practical.
FWIW, on the sysadmin side I'd rather deal with config files than registry entries and cumbersome GUIs. Take IIS vs. apache and Exchange vs. Postfix for example. In either case I'd prefer to admin Apache and Postfix over the Microsoft alternatives. I can automate most tasks, and I can find at a glance what is configured wrong in Apache, whereas IIS requires a TON of point-and-clicking around and you can't see all the settings all at once - andif you do need to tweak something manually time to deal with the metabase editor, which is the equivalent of PEEK and POKE, except PEEK was a lot more informative in its day.
At one point I was emailing Adobe weekly asking them to consider offering the creative suite for Linux. I gave up. I'm hoping Gimp and Inkscape will mature enough to either make the Adobe products irrelevant, or to make Adobe perceive them as a threat and release the complete suite for Linux.
Amen. Why go to a cinema where there is always some wank shouting at the movie ("Oh no you di'n't!"), the movie is out of focus (despite the pre-movie advertisements being in PERFECT focus), and put up with sticky floors and armrests when you can wait for the DVD or Blu-Ray disc and watch it sitting 5.5' from a 46" TV that is always in perfect focus?
Yeah, but like condoms, Peerguardian is not 100% effective.
There are plenty of critics
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been complaining about the dumbing down of Gnome (they think gnome users are idiots - just look at the file dialog for one example), the crappy Flash player Adobe puts out for Firefox (why can't DHTML float over flash like it can in MSIE? Is the problem Flash or Firefox? Either way, it's been broken since day one and needs fixing), OpenOffice is spaghetti code and I/O is very slow, *something* needs to be done so more preconfigured systems can be shipped (NVidia & GPL "license" incompatibility creates legal issues when it comes to shipping preinstalled systems), X11 and VNC are horribly inefficient over a WAN, whereas Windows' Remote Desktop Protocol works great even over dial-up connections, oh, and yeah, developers still suck when it comes with users who bother to submit bug reports - especially the OpenOffice folks. They just don't want to fix horrid architectural issues or bugs, because developing new buggy features is more interesting than fixing their previous garbage.
Having said that, I do recommend Linux whenever and wherever it makes sense. I've slowly been convincing the Rabbi at my congregation to go F/OSS at home, the congregation's infrastructure is going to be 90% linux, my business is >90% Linux, and some of my customers run Linux. However, there are many cases where Linux just is not a good fit. It's not the one-size-fits-all BFH. Sometimes a a screwdriver or wrench is a more appropriate tool.
Where is AutoCAD?
Where is the Adobe Creative Suite? (I personally get by with inkscape + gimp + pdfedit + Krita, but my art director NEEDS the Adobe CS (So it's Windows at work and OS X at home for him). It takes me ~3 hours to do a task that takes him under a half hour in Illustrator or Gimp, because to get the same final product requires a lot more manual steps in Gimp and Inkscape; no layer effects, no droplets, Macro recording and playback doesn't exist in any user-friendly way (and no I am NOT about to get into scripting gimp. I'll stick to shell scripting server maintenance and monitoring, and writing installers. thanks anyway!)
Where is Quickbooks for Linux? They have a server component that runs on Linux, but where is the Quickbooks Pro desktop app?
Where are Linux-based embroidery apps? Windows XP is going to be on my new Dell Precision notebook so I can design embroidery patterns. I draw them in Inkscape but I need them to be converted to an embroidery format my machine can understand. So, I do the design AND conversion in Windows, then I don't have to reboot to run the embroidery machine.
Also, more specific to Linux itself (meaning the kernel, not the integrated distro end users refer to as Linux): Where are the merges from RedHat, Ubuntu, Novell, and so forth? Each vendor has incredible extensions to the kernel which makes automounting, user-space drivers, WiFi, and various other features work better than the vanilla kernel. Why can't LSB become a reality, and along with that, a more stable-yet-almost-bleeding-edge kernel come from kernel.org? That would make it much easier for users of $foo and $bar distros to run new hardware without losing fixes and enhancements added by the various vendors? Ubuntu works extremely well with WiFi (but I hate their standard desktops, and I hate ubuntu's administrative GUI) and with 11.x OpenSuse works almost-but-not-quite as well as Ubuntu. DeadRat, er, RedHat/Centos, not so much. Fedora? Every time I've tried it, it's been on bleeding-edge motherboards and would kernel panic or simply not boot, whereas (K)Ubuntu and OpenSuSE would always Just Work(TM). Centos/RedHat? I run it on servers, but hate it for desktops.
I love running Linux, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. I can't even use it as my sole OS at home any more because embroidery software I need doesn't exist.:(
Lots of us users are plenty critical of Linux, even though we are Linux evangelists. It's just that while many/most developers take feedback readily (the KDE team is particularly good in this regard!) others
In a commercial airline you will not have access to the avionics cabling to hold your phone directly next to any signal leads. If the avionics is picking up interference from WiFi, cellphones, bluetooth, and similar radio-equipped devices, it's due to a crappy install or improper maintenance - or faulty equipment. In any of those three cases the aircraft ought to be grounded.
Cellphones, bluetooth, wifi can all adversely affect avionics, but in those cases it is due to either improper installation (wrong impedance cables, unshielded cables, sloppy terminations) or lousy maintenance (chafed shielding, cables crimped and crushing the insulation, bringing the conductors close and thus affecting capacitance and/or impedance, etc.). If WiFi is going to affect the avionics on a particular aircraft, neither you nor I want to be in that aircraft in IFR conditions. Period. The craft needs to be grounded and repaired.
Oh wait, there is one more possibility: if you have your radio-equipped device's antenna directly next to and parallel the signal cables or the unit itself - I could see the equipment causing interference in those cases. However those situations simply would not happen in the passenger cabin.
Precision models vs. Studio and XPS is no comparison. Precisions don't suck, and the build quality is actually quite good. Comparing a Studio or an XPS to a Macbook Pro is like comparing a brand-new Lamborghini Murcielago to a beat-up rusted-out old 1978 Camaro with a tuner engine. Sure, the tuner car might be fast, but it's still a poorly-built rusty piece of crap.
Oh crap, I just used a car analogy. Ugh. What's next, measuring hard drive capacity in the unit of Libraries of Congress?
Slashdot Mirror
Do they seriously think users are going to return to FYE? No, if anything, they're going to limewire or just buying used CDs, or buying through allofmp3/mp3sparks, which is entirely legal, much to the chagrin of the RIAA and its overseas equivalents.
I quit "consuming" most RIAA material years ago. Prince's new release caught my interest though (it sounds like his best guitar work to date!) BUT I looked up NPG records and it's part of the warner group (it's no longer independent), and distributed by ENI. So, Warner? EMI? Read this: I won't be buying Prince's new release on CD, nor through iTunes.
It might be a good opportunity for me to try mp3sparks when they rip it though. Legal (perhaps through loopholes, nonetheless), so I get the music cheap, and the label gets screwed just like the labels screw the artist. Everybody wins! ;) Record industry douchebaggery may have earned mp3sparks.com a new customer in the very near future. Keep up the douchebaggery and become irrelevant and ultimately go by the wayside -- or embrace the new business models, treat the customer fairly, and see your riches multiply!
Google offers their service (advertising) for FREE, If they want a conventional model, perhaps they ought to pay Google to advertise for them, or opt out of Google's free service via robots.txt
But, the thing is, I don't go to boston.com, nyt.com, or bostonherald.com. I go to the Google news site, or Yahoo's, and scan headlines there. I'm not going to browse all of boston.com to get the news highlights. They (AP and their outlets) need to get with the program and embrace search engines. If it weren't for aggregation sites, I wouldn't visit their sites at ALL. I'm not going to be clicking around randomly to find what's going on. If I had that kind of time, I'd actually be buying newspapers. As it is I don't have as much time as I'd like to comment on here on stories that capture my interest.
Well, HTML is more like programming than "programming" a VCR, DVD recorder, or DVR is. :)
The newspapers are missing the point: Google is providing a FREE service, and the newspapers do not have a right to that service. They should be glad Google does not require them to pay a fee for inclusion in their index and for providing summaries to their product (readership) to capture their interest. Advertising usually costs a lot of money, and being an advertising medium themselves, they ought to "get" it.
Usually companies make money producing product prospects actually WANT. They don't generally abuse a monopoly to force customers to buy new product they despise.
re: 2. Why don't people live away from where tornadoes exist?
Tornadoes can occur anywhere on the globe. They occur in NY, PA, and New England every year.The ones we get are usually much smaller and do not cause as much damage but have caused significant property damage. My parents' property has been hit a couple of times. One tornado just tore off the tops of a couple of trees, and the other just ripped the foliage off of a swath of trees in the woods, crossed the river next door and caused over a quarter of a million dollars damage to our neighbor's property, uprooting many old-growth trees, damaging cars and the roof of the house. They were very, very small tornadoes (may have even just been "down drafts" which up close resembled funnel clouds) and I do not envy anyone who has suffered losses from "real" tornadoes in the midwest. The ones that hit here are just dust devils by comparison. Large dust devils, and unlikely to ever occur again, IMHO.
Even the larger ones that hit the New England region are very small, maybe a couple hundred feet in diameter, and they dissipate very quickly.
I've gone to see the damage local tornadoes have caused and it was impressive to see a path of trees cleared out in the forest on either side of the road, but still, those were small storms.
Oddly enough, we lived miles away from any trailer parks, so I'm mystified as to why tornadoes could even exist in the area. ;)
Why do people live in regions where tornadoes can hit? They can occur ANYWHERE on the planet. The population density is so low out in the plains (ever fly across America? If not, fire up google earth and explore that way, although it just doesn't have the same impact) that it's unlikely that any given point will get hit by a tornado in your lifetime. You probably have a higher chance of hitting the lottery twice than having your home wiped out by a tornado.
Now, granted, in some cases there may be specific geographical features which make tornadoes particularly likely in a given point, just like being in a valley between two hills or mountain ranges can drive weather to extremes, but in most cases you'd be unlikely to experience a tornado.
I learned from Futurama that the point where one reaches caffeine intoxication is somewhere between 99 and 100 cups, and what happens is time seems to slow down for the person, enabling him to rescue all of his friends from a burning building.
Feh. Sometimes I'll drink caffeine-free diet coke and buy decaf coffee beans and I don't get withdrawl symptoms. The only thing I'll notice is that when I do start drinking caffeinated beverages again, I'll have trouble falling to sleep.
How much caffeine do I drink, and how many cokes?
generally:
* one 24-ounce hazelnut coffee in the morning (or 1-3 cups at home if I get up early enough)
* two bottles of coke zero or diet coke
* occasionally another 24-ounce coffee or a mocha, more usually 1 to 3 cups of hazelnut coffee at home at night
That's quite a bit of caffeine, and I don't get withdrawal symptoms if I go without. I drink coffee because I LIKE it. If I can't get the coffee I like, I go without. I hate dunkin's coffee, and I hate coffees flavored with syrup, so it's pretty often I'll just go without.
let's review a quote from Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Having said that, I voted for Bush (well, more accurately, voted against his opponent, who is one of the two worst senators my state has ever had) and I think Bush is an idiot. He just happened to be the lesser of two evils, even as bad as he was.
I completely disagree with Obama's foreign policy. Bush's was too impulsive, but Obama's a complete sellout. We're also edging closer toward a global government with his willingness to submit the US to an international taxation body, international commerce oversight, and a single global exchange currency, which will naturally lead to a single global currency used by everyone. In such a scheme only those in control will be the haves, and everyone else, rich or poor, will become the have-nots.
I disagree with the Obama administration and the $1.20 TRILLION of OUR money he is giving to the "international community" for the global bailout. I disagree with Obama's cutting the F-22 program. I disagree with Obama's cutting back the military. I disagree with Obama's foreign policy, which should ALWAYS be nationalistic in nature; not global. I live in the USA, so I value my country's economic interests over other nations'. Other nations engage in protectionism and tariff our exports heavily. We need to preserve our own economy so we need to re=institute import tariffs, and they need to be pretty hefty.
One can engage in deficit trade and deficit spending only so long before our currency becomes worthless and we become the paper tiger China claims we are.
They want revenue from sites which link to their articles? Here's a hint, AP: If you put it on the interweb, it's going to get linked to. However, if you try to squeeze money out of people, they'll just lift your content and NOT link to you, causing you to lose revenue.
Think of links to your content as free adverting, driving more product (readers/viewers) to your site or affilate sites. Or, if you're so retarded, er, um, I mean "mentally challenged," more directly to the point: links to your stories are free money. Take it and stop complaining about it.
FWIW, I'd LOVE to see Yahoo. Google, et. al ban you from their indexes/indices for a month. You'll change your tune real fast, because with newspapers dying, the Internet is all you have keeping your gangrene-infested corpse alive right now.
Is there an AP release of this that we can copy & paste here? ;)
A lot of sites syndicate summaries of it through fair use. google's cache is fair use, as it is represented as a snapshot of the original host site and cached in case the site goes temporarily offline, not misrepresented as google's own site. google's news site draws readers to your own site(s). bloggers, etc. draw more eyes to your content and responsible bloggers will link to the source they borrowed the content (for fair-use purposes, usually to critique the content), drawing more content to your sites.
If you do not want google (or other search engines) to index, crawl, cache the site, may I introduce you to robots.txt?
If you do not want people to take advantage of the Fair Use exclusions, may I suggest you get out of publishing anything anywhere and just keep your precious "intellectual property" to yourself, or at least, keep it off the internet altogether? Trust me, you won't be missed. You're old world anyway. New networks who a) understand fair use b) understand technology and c) know how to market themselves will take your place soon enough either way. Just expedite the process and get off the internet, please, if you cannot understand how the both the Internet and how Fair Use works.
Now I understand some of what is going on is not Fair Use, but when there is a critique included (even if an article is quoted in entirety) let's assume that the content was copied in entirety for the sake of convenience of the reader, since even sources like CNN and FAUX^H^H^HOX make links go dead after a few days, so the reader would have to hunt archives on those sites to dig up the articles. Having said that, without an article ID, how is the original reader to locate the original article? Obviously quoting the entire article (which is generally just a few paragraphs to begin with - come on, admit it, your "IP" is over-valued in your minds) is not unreasonable, and as long as credit is given to the source and it's for the purpose of critique or a response, where is your complaint? It should be limited to those who engage in content scraping without adding any substantial new content, i.e., obviously not fair use -- not just what you wish isn't fair use.
Thanksforplaying.
Why is no consideration given to these things when building other large structures (bridges, office towers, wide office buildings, stadiums, water towers/tanks, oil tanks, and heck, even homes!) which disrupt airflow MORE than a turbine, but suddenly it's a major concern when the disruption is less than that of other structures, but just receiving focus because that minor disruption is generating power?
This same sort of focus on disrupting airflow ought to be made on every structure built anywhere, then we can achieve banana (build absolutely nothing near anyone) rather than nimby (not in my back yard) then everyone will see the greenies' theology for what it is: an extreme religion which is actually a sort of pantheism. Once that is seen that environmentalism has shifted away from science and has become a religion of extremists, it can be addressed, then we can get on with _responsibly_ using fossil fuels where necessarily, and developing truly green power where possible and practical.
If tagging weren't broken I'd tag this story "pitchforks" :D
FWIW, on the sysadmin side I'd rather deal with config files than registry entries and cumbersome GUIs. Take IIS vs. apache and Exchange vs. Postfix for example. In either case I'd prefer to admin Apache and Postfix over the Microsoft alternatives. I can automate most tasks, and I can find at a glance what is configured wrong in Apache, whereas IIS requires a TON of point-and-clicking around and you can't see all the settings all at once - andif you do need to tweak something manually time to deal with the metabase editor, which is the equivalent of PEEK and POKE, except PEEK was a lot more informative in its day.
$.02 and then some. . .
At one point I was emailing Adobe weekly asking them to consider offering the creative suite for Linux. I gave up. I'm hoping Gimp and Inkscape will mature enough to either make the Adobe products irrelevant, or to make Adobe perceive them as a threat and release the complete suite for Linux.
No, because Three Mile Island actually contained the accident. This is more like the Chernobyl version of "containment" ;)
Amen. Why go to a cinema where there is always some wank shouting at the movie ("Oh no you di'n't!"), the movie is out of focus (despite the pre-movie advertisements being in PERFECT focus), and put up with sticky floors and armrests when you can wait for the DVD or Blu-Ray disc and watch it sitting 5.5' from a 46" TV that is always in perfect focus?
Yeah, but like condoms, Peerguardian is not 100% effective.
I've been complaining about the dumbing down of Gnome (they think gnome users are idiots - just look at the file dialog for one example), the crappy Flash player Adobe puts out for Firefox (why can't DHTML float over flash like it can in MSIE? Is the problem Flash or Firefox? Either way, it's been broken since day one and needs fixing), OpenOffice is spaghetti code and I/O is very slow, *something* needs to be done so more preconfigured systems can be shipped (NVidia & GPL "license" incompatibility creates legal issues when it comes to shipping preinstalled systems), X11 and VNC are horribly inefficient over a WAN, whereas Windows' Remote Desktop Protocol works great even over dial-up connections, oh, and yeah, developers still suck when it comes with users who bother to submit bug reports - especially the OpenOffice folks. They just don't want to fix horrid architectural issues or bugs, because developing new buggy features is more interesting than fixing their previous garbage.
Having said that, I do recommend Linux whenever and wherever it makes sense. I've slowly been convincing the Rabbi at my congregation to go F/OSS at home, the congregation's infrastructure is going to be 90% linux, my business is >90% Linux, and some of my customers run Linux. However, there are many cases where Linux just is not a good fit. It's not the one-size-fits-all BFH. Sometimes a a screwdriver or wrench is a more appropriate tool.
Where is AutoCAD?
Where is the Adobe Creative Suite? (I personally get by with inkscape + gimp + pdfedit + Krita, but my art director NEEDS the Adobe CS (So it's Windows at work and OS X at home for him). It takes me ~3 hours to do a task that takes him under a half hour in Illustrator or Gimp, because to get the same final product requires a lot more manual steps in Gimp and Inkscape; no layer effects, no droplets, Macro recording and playback doesn't exist in any user-friendly way (and no I am NOT about to get into scripting gimp. I'll stick to shell scripting server maintenance and monitoring, and writing installers. thanks anyway!)
Where is Quickbooks for Linux? They have a server component that runs on Linux, but where is the Quickbooks Pro desktop app?
Where are Linux-based embroidery apps? Windows XP is going to be on my new Dell Precision notebook so I can design embroidery patterns. I draw them in Inkscape but I need them to be converted to an embroidery format my machine can understand. So, I do the design AND conversion in Windows, then I don't have to reboot to run the embroidery machine.
Also, more specific to Linux itself (meaning the kernel, not the integrated distro end users refer to as Linux): Where are the merges from RedHat, Ubuntu, Novell, and so forth? Each vendor has incredible extensions to the kernel which makes automounting, user-space drivers, WiFi, and various other features work better than the vanilla kernel. Why can't LSB become a reality, and along with that, a more stable-yet-almost-bleeding-edge kernel come from kernel.org? That would make it much easier for users of $foo and $bar distros to run new hardware without losing fixes and enhancements added by the various vendors? Ubuntu works extremely well with WiFi (but I hate their standard desktops, and I hate ubuntu's administrative GUI) and with 11.x OpenSuse works almost-but-not-quite as well as Ubuntu. DeadRat, er, RedHat/Centos, not so much. Fedora? Every time I've tried it, it's been on bleeding-edge motherboards and would kernel panic or simply not boot, whereas (K)Ubuntu and OpenSuSE would always Just Work(TM). Centos/RedHat? I run it on servers, but hate it for desktops.
I love running Linux, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. I can't even use it as my sole OS at home any more because embroidery software I need doesn't exist. :(
Lots of us users are plenty critical of Linux, even though we are Linux evangelists. It's just that while many/most developers take feedback readily (the KDE team is particularly good in this regard!) others
I was hoping OMG PONIES!!! would make a comeback today. :(
In a commercial airline you will not have access to the avionics cabling to hold your phone directly next to any signal leads. If the avionics is picking up interference from WiFi, cellphones, bluetooth, and similar radio-equipped devices, it's due to a crappy install or improper maintenance - or faulty equipment. In any of those three cases the aircraft ought to be grounded.
Cellphones, bluetooth, wifi can all adversely affect avionics, but in those cases it is due to either improper installation (wrong impedance cables, unshielded cables, sloppy terminations) or lousy maintenance (chafed shielding, cables crimped and crushing the insulation, bringing the conductors close and thus affecting capacitance and/or impedance, etc.). If WiFi is going to affect the avionics on a particular aircraft, neither you nor I want to be in that aircraft in IFR conditions. Period. The craft needs to be grounded and repaired.
Oh wait, there is one more possibility: if you have your radio-equipped device's antenna directly next to and parallel the signal cables or the unit itself - I could see the equipment causing interference in those cases. However those situations simply would not happen in the passenger cabin.
Precision models vs. Studio and XPS is no comparison. Precisions don't suck, and the build quality is actually quite good. Comparing a Studio or an XPS to a Macbook Pro is like comparing a brand-new Lamborghini Murcielago to a beat-up rusted-out old 1978 Camaro with a tuner engine. Sure, the tuner car might be fast, but it's still a poorly-built rusty piece of crap.
Oh crap, I just used a car analogy. Ugh. What's next, measuring hard drive capacity in the unit of Libraries of Congress?
You're welcome to go drink some and then report the results, AC! :)