By that token, Windows is a bad solution because you have applications which directly access the Windows API (analagous to X11 controls), MFC,.Net, and various other libraries - and then you have third-party libraries like Stingray.
If you find that having to have lots of libraries installed to support various GUI elements is a bad thing, you might want to check out Amiga, BeOS, or just plain old DOS - because even OS X is not going to give you what you want.
This problem is likely to never go away - if, for example, you didn't have a tree control which allowed for drag & drop and you really, really needed one, you'd likely look for a third-party control which is prebuilt, or develop your own custom control - and now you've just added a new library. Need an outlook-like bar which supports Drag & Drop? Now you've just run into the same issue - another library or extending an existing one which does "almost" what you want.
You could of course stick with what you get out of the box, but good luck building a modern-looking application that doesn't bury functionality under three levels of submenus and obscure shortcut keys.
Can't we use Kennedy as fuel? I mean, the guy is so steeped in alcohol that he ought to keep a coal plant fired up for at least a few minutes, and residual hot air from him should keep the plant going for several weeks alone.
I remember when the wind farm was first proposed here, his remark was "I think it'd be unsightly as I cruise in my yacht" --- yeah, he's a real environmentalist and gives a shit about our state all right. Damned fucking hypocrite. I hope the fucker chokes on his own vomit tonight in one of his usual drunken stupors. I don't know WHY people keep voting that fucker back into office.
There are few people I truly hate in life, but Senator Kennedy is one of them. I sincerely he burns in Hell for all of eternity, if there is a Hell.
Not quite - it was IBM's doing. They had to put hardware registers (BIOS, video, HDD controller, FDD controller, Serial and parallel ports, and other misc. controllers) somewhere -- so within the 1MB address space of the 8086/8088 processor they reserved the upper 25% of memory for hardware so that programs had 75% of available address space available as one contiguous block. I don't think anyone at the time ever suspected that the PC would still be around in essentially the same form on 32-bit and 64-bit processors 25+ years later - they probably figured the PC architecture would be around for a few years and then be replaced with something else totally different and imcompatible, as was characteristic of the computer industry of the time. The PC revolution took pretty much everyone by surprise.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig- iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right- hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
I don't know about you, but I'd pay $250 to see Pink Floyd play again (if Gimour would get over himself and just tour - the rest of the band would go in a shot. Hell, even Waters pretty much admitted he was a bit of an ass between Animals and The Final Cut), and they hit it big WAY before my time.
Madonna? Rolling Stones? I wouldn't pay a dime to go to either concert. There are very few bands I'm interested in seeing live.
Moneydance looks like a great replacement for Quicken or Money, but definitely not Quickbooks.
Think of Quickbooks as something more along the lines of Peachtree, only with a less steep learning curve for office manager types, and less maintenance from an IT perspective. A Money-equivalent does NOT cut it. Google may have done it with Quicken in the beginning, but I'm sure they had to track lots of other stuff separately in home-brew spreadsheets and databases - e.g., making business accounting more work than it needs to be.
Quasar? It looks like it might be an option to consider in the future. As it is now, my office manager JUST finished getting two years' worth of data into Quickbooks. I'll definitely check Quasar out and keep a close watch on it as we grow. Thanks for the tip, rhendershot.:)
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well the drawback to Linux is that it is only part of the equation.
Your computer is a tool and for certain things you need pretty specific tools, like Quicken, Adobe CS2, Premiere/Final Cut/Media Studio Pro.
While there is Inkscape, Scribus, The Gimp, Ghostscript, and Krita on Linux, they don't match up feature-for-feature with Adobe CS2. They do their jobs "Good enough" but. . .
Image editing/digital painting: Every time I use The Gimp, I just cringe at the UI, I hate its window management (when I bring one Gimp document to the foreground, so should ALL of the palettes), and it only does about 95% of what I need. It does not have ANY vector support.:(
Illustration/drawing: Inkscape? It does its job fairly well, but its PDF support is horrid. If you use alpha blending, export to TIFF or PNG and use another program to convert to PDF. Also, printing directly from Inkscape stinks.
Accounting: Quickbooks? There IS no replacement. Folks will quickly suggest kmymoney or gnucash, but not having ever owned a business, they naively think that the Linux equivalent of MS Money or Quicken will get the job done. Hint: it won't.
Video NLE: Cinelerra is a bear to build, configure, and learn. Hell, you're lucky if you can resolve the 3,129,812 dependendencies and get it built.
With that said, I use Linux on my work machine >99% of the time. If I need Adobe CS2, I go to another workstation and do my work there, then copy it over. If I need to access Quickbooks, I remote desktop to the office manager's desktop and take care of what I need, but otherwise, we're running mostly Linux. Windows (and OS X) will always be around on at least one or two machines due to certain applications being unavailable on Linux, and no real suitable alternatives to those applications being available on Linux.
If Adobe CS2 and Quickbooks were to come out for Linux tomorrow, we'd be able to punt Windows for the most part, booting to it only when we need to develop a Windows solution for a client. Until the tools we need are available on Linux, it's not the complete solution and there is still some room for Microsoft at my office. In fact we're in the process of punting Exchange right now and hopefully by next Monday the cutover will be complete.:)
Both forums also suffer from a surfeit of immature, ignorant or downright stupid comments.
. . . and aside from the really bad stuff (racism, etc.) the immature, ignorant, and downright stupid comments should be simply ignored rather than modded down. I'd rather be able to set my threshold at 2 or 3 and read a really great discussion/debate/commentary than to set it to 1 to read the great posts that folks didn't mod up because they spent their points modding down the attention whores who created second, third, and eighth accounts for the express purpose of trolling.
See, this is exactly the kind of thing that too many people waste mod points on. This post right here (#15167035) is obviously not a troll, is topical (if on a tangeant, is still within reasonable bounds) and rather than using points to mod up a really spectactular post elsewhere on this site, someone decided to throw theirs away marking a mediocre post down. I hope that the post ends up meta moderated properly and the person who threw mod points away modding a post down has their chances for future points adjusted correctly.
A similar thing happened a while back when I decided to get even with someone who responded to my post and really annoyed me. So I had Mod Points at the time so I went in and searched for that user and I modded everything he had that I could moderate as a Troll.
It serves you right, IMHO. Besides, aside from obvious racist crap you should focus on modding great stuff up, and leave the trolls and "funny" posts alone. Also, half the "troll" or "flamebait" posts I see are just funny and people with mod points having no sense of humor misapplying their mod points. Even when I was a n00b I knew this, and when I created a new account here last year I re-read the FAQs and renembered that.
Shortly after that I didn't have moderation rights for a few months. Most likely because Meta Moderators saw that completely untoll marked as troll and Meta-Moderated it correctly.
Well there's a shocker!;) I'm glad you admit that though - many people wouldn't.
One of the great things about the/. system (as opposed to fark) is that moderation is done largely by peers, and is peer-reviewed - one moderator with an agenda (be it Pro-MS/Anti-MS, Pro-Linux/Anti-Linux, Pro-Gay/Anti-Gay, Pro-Platypus/Anti-Platypus) can only do a very limited amount of damage, will not result in users' getting banned for simply expressing a different opinion (or posting an error in good faith), and will have their mod privileges removed for a while if they do seem to be using their mod points to push an agenda and result in a one-sided discussion. That is one of./'s finer points. That's why it's so important to focus on modding great posts up rather than modding bad or mediocre ones down (or modding jokes you don't get or don't like).
Well, see, ill effects from drugs deters more people than in the past, and explosives? No building explosives at home and you certainly won't be buying any chemicals at the druggist for experiments - they won't sell them to you. Just TRY buying saltpeter and black powder for making your own model rocket fuel. That's reserved for large corporations in which Cheney & co. own a large stake.
Why? Because only terrorists actually find chemistry experimentation interesting. Isn't living in a paranoid society where we have exchanged many essential freedoms for temporary security a beautiful thing?;)
Questions from people where it is blatantly obvious they have done none of the aforementioned steps piss people off. My favorite questions to ignore are the ones where it is obvious that they haven't read the docs, and want step by step hand holding, as if it is their right as a newbie to not have to research anything, they typically go something like this: "I want to setup my webserver, I'm a newbie and just want step by step instructions, I don't have time to RTFM, or search google. I have posted this question before and all I got was RTFM, or no response. I need it done now for my job, it's an emergency! What is up with all these rude people out in linux land?"
That kind of idiot deserves only one response: "Hire someone at $100/hour to set it up for you, because you're asking us to do your fucking work for you and while we're happy to nudge you in the right direction and help you with certain configuration issues when you hit a snag, sorry, we don't do soup-to-nuts work for free. have a nice day."
In those cases what you do is copy & paste TFM back to the thread and respond to the developer who pointed you at TFM:
"TODO: write this."
Okay, I wrote "this" on a piece of paper, so now what do I do, oh mighty one? I'm but a poor plebeian but surely you could be gracious enough to condescend and point me in the right direction, oh dear potentate"
Seriously though - in many cases people DO need to RTFM. Even more importantly, on support forums there is NO excuse for:
1. Not using the search feature 2. Not reading the stickies that fucking say "read before posting" 3. Posting the same exact question which itself is the title of a thread just three posts down 4. Asking "which distro" because it's like asking "which care should I buy" 5. Asking "How do I compile the kernel" when a) many distributions now come with VERY good instructions on compiling a kernel b) practically every Linux support forum and howto site lists it in their tutorials or howtos and c) in spite of A and B, there are generally many, many, MANY threads covering that exact topic
Even a topic like "I forgot my password, and don't remember the root password either. how do I fix it?" is a stupid question because a) it's the same for every freaking Linux distribution and b) see #1-3 and #5 above.
There is no excuse for laziness.
Now, if the questions were more specific and not answered in a gadzillion howtos already, like "how do I do gradient transparency in gimp" or "how do I get a DOS-style directory listing with the directories first?" or "is there a way to get konqueror to display file details in the left pane, like Windows Explorer does?" they wouldn't be stupid questions.
Stupid questions are questions which have already been answered a million times already, and all you need to do is open your fucking eyes or type in "compile kernel" and click "search" to get your answer immediately - instant gratification. It's one thing if you don't know what to search for (in which case politely tell the user "if you search for 'foo bar' you'd find the answer at http://forum.zag.nut.com/threadid=98723 - let us know if you still have problems after reading that") - then you're teaching newbies a) how to search b) how to find solutions more quickly, c) how to ask smarter questions.
My TV has an automatic volume feature, but I use a neat hack called the "volume control" -- if the broadcaster decides to jack up the volume on advertisements too much, I use that hack to turn it down. Amazing resourcefulness, eh?;)
How about the DoJ investigate Network Associates, McAfee, etc. to see what viruses they've been cooking up, either internally or through offshore Russian contractors? I'm sure there would be some very interesting findings regarding virus, worm, and rootkit appearances and money trails leading from the major antivirus vendors straight to virus creators.
That's my crackpot conspiracy theory FUD of the day, and I stand by it!!
ATI has consistently shipped broken drivers and quickly phases out chipsets older than a year or so, Nvidia's drivers are a heck of a lot more stable and easier to configure (and better performing) and even though they tend to support older chipsets for longer, they do eventually phase them out. Also, NEITHER vendor supports their media products' features in Windows.
The solution for the x.org and kernel teams:
Ignore the EULA since a EULA means precisely squat. Decompile the binary Windows drivers, take notes on precisely which register does what in the video chipset. Hand off those notes to another engineer (if you're somewhere where the engineer taking notes cannot implement new drivers, otherwise if you're a) where it's legal and b) have enough integrity to not simply copy&paste code, reimplement it yourself) and develop new drivers based on those notes. That way, not only will we get open source drivers, albeit very likely a bit slower than the proprietary ones, they will be drivers which will work in 2.6.15, 2.4.x if someone wants to backport them, 2.7.x, and down the road in 4.x.x when you have to upgrade the kernel but you simply CANNOT abandon that last data acquisition box floating around that has a PCI or (less likely) ISA slot.
Fuck EULAs. You don't void your right to reverse engineer drivers when you buy commodity products. You only void them if you rent the products in a contract. When you buy a commodity item, you can pretty do whatever the hell you want with it, include reverse engineer it (patent issues aside - which with software can pretty much be ignored since algorithms should not be patented to begin with).
Choosing video cards is choosing the lesser of evils. Right now there are two vendors worth mentioning:
- ATI
- Nvidia
and then there is of course Intel, but their video chipsets are painfully slow.
No sane person wants to get rid of Microsoft. Eliminate Ballmer maybe, but not Microsoft. Competition is good, and aside from Microsoft's redefining terms like "downtime" to appear competitive and obfuscating configuration tools (e.g., tools like Exchange, Active Directory, the IIS metabase) Windows is a good choice for a good number of people. The costs need to come more in line with its real value and maintenance and configuration tools need to improve to bring the true TCO in line with other operating systems, but for a system that Joe Sixpack can click through and get a basic server configuration up and running, you cannot beat Windows. Linux is "getting there" from that perspective, and so is OS X server, but neither is quite there yet.
Competition is good for everyone. You can bet that if Microsoft, Apple, and Sun were gone tomorrow and Linux were considered the be-all-end-all of operating systems, development sponsorship from corporate entities would decrease or simply stop and development would slow to a crawl.
What would be interesting is if Novell, MySQL, and Trolltech were to merge.
Out of the distributions I like SuSE the best, and here's why:
- Quickest time to get to real work
- It's as close to plug & play as the distributions come
- It uses fairly recent kernels
- Its KDE configuration out of the box is the best I've seen
- If you're into Gnome, it has a full Gnome configuration as well (I hate Gnome but my KDE is configured such that it looks like a mix of OS X and Gnome - what I hate about Gnome is the developers dumbed it down so much it removed any flexibility I need/want, and when I sit novices down at Gnome and KDE, they're invariably lost in Gnome. Windows and even MacOS have trained them to expect more functionality)
- The retail version comes with a fairly good selection of packages
- YaST is a dream for desktop configurations. On servers I use it for only package management but on desktops I primarily rely on YaST. For servers I go straight to the config files.
Ubuntu is my second favorite right now. Mandriva used to be, but not any more. Ubuntu has matured a lot since I first tried it.
Debian? Even though Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, I despise Debian - it's so out of date that I find a lot of machines won't even boot the install disc. I know a lot of people swear by Debian, but if it won't support the 915 and newer chipsets, it's not even an option. I haven't even attempted it on an nForce chipset but I'm sure that if it failed on even a now-outdated Intel 915 chipset, it won't be too friendly on the newer chipsets for AMD.
Fedora? I keep trying it but I hate it. I've had trouble with the install disc booting on various configurations. RHEL? I hate working on it if I need X - its desktop configuration is the most disorganized I've seen, even compared to Slackware circa 1995. I used to like RedHat but from what I've seen they've taken leaps backwards - it seems as though they spent many man-hours planning the most counter-intuitive desktop imaginable. If I need RedHat or a RedHat-esque distribution, I run CentOS. I wouldn't pay for RHEL until they clean things up.
I keep going back and revisiting various distributions every 6 months or so (I don't blindly choose the distribution) but I invariably end up going back to SuSE because it Just Works(tm) (well, I hit some snags in 10.0 in Evolution and in the KDE/Samba integration but fixed those issues, but 10.1 seems to have resolved those).
Slashdot Mirror
Gilmour != Pink Floyd
Gilmour + Waters + Write + Mason = Pink Floyd
By that token, Windows is a bad solution because you have applications which directly access the Windows API (analagous to X11 controls), MFC, .Net, and various other libraries - and then you have third-party libraries like Stingray.
If you find that having to have lots of libraries installed to support various GUI elements is a bad thing, you might want to check out Amiga, BeOS, or just plain old DOS - because even OS X is not going to give you what you want.
This problem is likely to never go away - if, for example, you didn't have a tree control which allowed for drag & drop and you really, really needed one, you'd likely look for a third-party control which is prebuilt, or develop your own custom control - and now you've just added a new library. Need an outlook-like bar which supports Drag & Drop? Now you've just run into the same issue - another library or extending an existing one which does "almost" what you want.
You could of course stick with what you get out of the box, but good luck building a modern-looking application that doesn't bury functionality under three levels of submenus and obscure shortcut keys.
But see, environmentalists would then protest against huts and tents.
- tents: think of all the poor animals. FUR IS MURDER! *heart bleeds*
- Huts: think of the poor trees. Have you hugged a tree today? *heart bleeds*
I believe in being responsible, you can have progress and industry AND a clean environment. One does not have to negate the other.
Can't we use Kennedy as fuel? I mean, the guy is so steeped in alcohol that he ought to keep a coal plant fired up for at least a few minutes, and residual hot air from him should keep the plant going for several weeks alone.
I remember when the wind farm was first proposed here, his remark was "I think it'd be unsightly as I cruise in my yacht" --- yeah, he's a real environmentalist and gives a shit about our state all right. Damned fucking hypocrite. I hope the fucker chokes on his own vomit tonight in one of his usual drunken stupors. I don't know WHY people keep voting that fucker back into office.
There are few people I truly hate in life, but Senator Kennedy is one of them. I sincerely he burns in Hell for all of eternity, if there is a Hell.
Not quite - it was IBM's doing. They had to put hardware registers (BIOS, video, HDD controller, FDD controller, Serial and parallel ports, and other misc. controllers) somewhere -- so within the 1MB address space of the 8086/8088 processor they reserved the upper 25% of memory for hardware so that programs had 75% of available address space available as one contiguous block. I don't think anyone at the time ever suspected that the PC would still be around in essentially the same form on 32-bit and 64-bit processors 25+ years later - they probably figured the PC architecture would be around for a few years and then be replaced with something else totally different and imcompatible, as was characteristic of the computer industry of the time. The PC revolution took pretty much everyone by surprise.
Yep. 1984 is here!
I don't know about you, but I'd pay $250 to see Pink Floyd play again (if Gimour would get over himself and just tour - the rest of the band would go in a shot. Hell, even Waters pretty much admitted he was a bit of an ass between Animals and The Final Cut), and they hit it big WAY before my time.
Madonna? Rolling Stones? I wouldn't pay a dime to go to either concert. There are very few bands I'm interested in seeing live.
Moneydance looks like a great replacement for Quicken or Money, but definitely not Quickbooks.
:)
Think of Quickbooks as something more along the lines of Peachtree, only with a less steep learning curve for office manager types, and less maintenance from an IT perspective. A Money-equivalent does NOT cut it. Google may have done it with Quicken in the beginning, but I'm sure they had to track lots of other stuff separately in home-brew spreadsheets and databases - e.g., making business accounting more work than it needs to be.
Quasar? It looks like it might be an option to consider in the future. As it is now, my office manager JUST finished getting two years' worth of data into Quickbooks. I'll definitely check Quasar out and keep a close watch on it as we grow. Thanks for the tip, rhendershot.
Well the drawback to Linux is that it is only part of the equation.
:(
:)
Your computer is a tool and for certain things you need pretty specific tools, like Quicken, Adobe CS2, Premiere/Final Cut/Media Studio Pro.
While there is Inkscape, Scribus, The Gimp, Ghostscript, and Krita on Linux, they don't match up feature-for-feature with Adobe CS2. They do their jobs "Good enough" but. . .
Image editing/digital painting: Every time I use The Gimp, I just cringe at the UI, I hate its window management (when I bring one Gimp document to the foreground, so should ALL of the palettes), and it only does about 95% of what I need. It does not have ANY vector support.
Illustration/drawing: Inkscape? It does its job fairly well, but its PDF support is horrid. If you use alpha blending, export to TIFF or PNG and use another program to convert to PDF. Also, printing directly from Inkscape stinks.
Accounting: Quickbooks? There IS no replacement. Folks will quickly suggest kmymoney or gnucash, but not having ever owned a business, they naively think that the Linux equivalent of MS Money or Quicken will get the job done. Hint: it won't.
Video NLE: Cinelerra is a bear to build, configure, and learn. Hell, you're lucky if you can resolve the 3,129,812 dependendencies and get it built.
With that said, I use Linux on my work machine >99% of the time. If I need Adobe CS2, I go to another workstation and do my work there, then copy it over. If I need to access Quickbooks, I remote desktop to the office manager's desktop and take care of what I need, but otherwise, we're running mostly Linux. Windows (and OS X) will always be around on at least one or two machines due to certain applications being unavailable on Linux, and no real suitable alternatives to those applications being available on Linux.
If Adobe CS2 and Quickbooks were to come out for Linux tomorrow, we'd be able to punt Windows for the most part, booting to it only when we need to develop a Windows solution for a client. Until the tools we need are available on Linux, it's not the complete solution and there is still some room for Microsoft at my office. In fact we're in the process of punting Exchange right now and hopefully by next Monday the cutover will be complete.
. . . and aside from the really bad stuff (racism, etc.) the immature, ignorant, and downright stupid comments should be simply ignored rather than modded down. I'd rather be able to set my threshold at 2 or 3 and read a really great discussion/debate/commentary than to set it to 1 to read the great posts that folks didn't mod up because they spent their points modding down the attention whores who created second, third, and eighth accounts for the express purpose of trolling.
See, this is exactly the kind of thing that too many people waste mod points on. This post right here (#15167035) is obviously not a troll, is topical (if on a tangeant, is still within reasonable bounds) and rather than using points to mod up a really spectactular post elsewhere on this site, someone decided to throw theirs away marking a mediocre post down. I hope that the post ends up meta moderated properly and the person who threw mod points away modding a post down has their chances for future points adjusted correctly.
It serves you right, IMHO. Besides, aside from obvious racist crap you should focus on modding great stuff up, and leave the trolls and "funny" posts alone. Also, half the "troll" or "flamebait" posts I see are just funny and people with mod points having no sense of humor misapplying their mod points. Even when I was a n00b I knew this, and when I created a new account here last year I re-read the FAQs and renembered that.
Well there's a shocker!
One of the great things about the
You mean: "It compiled? Ship it?"
Well, see, ill effects from drugs deters more people than in the past, and explosives? No building explosives at home and you certainly won't be buying any chemicals at the druggist for experiments - they won't sell them to you. Just TRY buying saltpeter and black powder for making your own model rocket fuel. That's reserved for large corporations in which Cheney & co. own a large stake.
;)
Why? Because only terrorists actually find chemistry experimentation interesting. Isn't living in a paranoid society where we have exchanged many essential freedoms for temporary security a beautiful thing?
Well, Pink Floyd lyrics would entice me to read it! :)
That kind of idiot deserves only one response: "Hire someone at $100/hour to set it up for you, because you're asking us to do your fucking work for you and while we're happy to nudge you in the right direction and help you with certain configuration issues when you hit a snag, sorry, we don't do soup-to-nuts work for free. have a nice day."
Seriously though - in many cases people DO need to RTFM. Even more importantly, on support forums there is NO excuse for:
1. Not using the search feature
2. Not reading the stickies that fucking say "read before posting"
3. Posting the same exact question which itself is the title of a thread just three posts down
4. Asking "which distro" because it's like asking "which care should I buy"
5. Asking "How do I compile the kernel" when a) many distributions now come with VERY good instructions on compiling a kernel b) practically every Linux support forum and howto site lists it in their tutorials or howtos and c) in spite of A and B, there are generally many, many, MANY threads covering that exact topic
Even a topic like "I forgot my password, and don't remember the root password either. how do I fix it?" is a stupid question because a) it's the same for every freaking Linux distribution and b) see #1-3 and #5 above.
There is no excuse for laziness.
Now, if the questions were more specific and not answered in a gadzillion howtos already, like "how do I do gradient transparency in gimp" or "how do I get a DOS-style directory listing with the directories first?" or "is there a way to get konqueror to display file details in the left pane, like Windows Explorer does?" they wouldn't be stupid questions.
Stupid questions are questions which have already been answered a million times already, and all you need to do is open your fucking eyes or type in "compile kernel" and click "search" to get your answer immediately - instant gratification. It's one thing if you don't know what to search for (in which case politely tell the user "if you search for 'foo bar' you'd find the answer at http://forum.zag.nut.com/threadid=98723 - let us know if you still have problems after reading that") - then you're teaching newbies a) how to search b) how to find solutions more quickly, c) how to ask smarter questions.
My TV has an automatic volume feature, but I use a neat hack called the "volume control" -- if the broadcaster decides to jack up the volume on advertisements too much, I use that hack to turn it down. Amazing resourcefulness, eh? ;)
And yet, you feel the need to hide behind the AC feature. Bravo!
Ack! What a lousy title!
Obviously I meant Easy problem to solve. D'oh!
How about the DoJ investigate Network Associates, McAfee, etc. to see what viruses they've been cooking up, either internally or through offshore Russian contractors? I'm sure there would be some very interesting findings regarding virus, worm, and rootkit appearances and money trails leading from the major antivirus vendors straight to virus creators.
That's my crackpot conspiracy theory FUD of the day, and I stand by it!!
(hey if those guys can sling FUD so can we!)
ATI has consistently shipped broken drivers and quickly phases out chipsets older than a year or so, Nvidia's drivers are a heck of a lot more stable and easier to configure (and better performing) and even though they tend to support older chipsets for longer, they do eventually phase them out. Also, NEITHER vendor supports their media products' features in Windows.
The solution for the x.org and kernel teams:
Ignore the EULA since a EULA means precisely squat. Decompile the binary Windows drivers, take notes on precisely which register does what in the video chipset. Hand off those notes to another engineer (if you're somewhere where the engineer taking notes cannot implement new drivers, otherwise if you're a) where it's legal and b) have enough integrity to not simply copy&paste code, reimplement it yourself) and develop new drivers based on those notes. That way, not only will we get open source drivers, albeit very likely a bit slower than the proprietary ones, they will be drivers which will work in 2.6.15, 2.4.x if someone wants to backport them, 2.7.x, and down the road in 4.x.x when you have to upgrade the kernel but you simply CANNOT abandon that last data acquisition box floating around that has a PCI or (less likely) ISA slot.
Fuck EULAs. You don't void your right to reverse engineer drivers when you buy commodity products. You only void them if you rent the products in a contract. When you buy a commodity item, you can pretty do whatever the hell you want with it, include reverse engineer it (patent issues aside - which with software can pretty much be ignored since algorithms should not be patented to begin with).
Choosing video cards is choosing the lesser of evils. Right now there are two vendors worth mentioning:
- ATI
- Nvidia
and then there is of course Intel, but their video chipsets are painfully slow.
Are there any software products from major software vendors who boast EULAS which don't effectively state AYBABTU?
No sane person wants to get rid of Microsoft. Eliminate Ballmer maybe, but not Microsoft. Competition is good, and aside from Microsoft's redefining terms like "downtime" to appear competitive and obfuscating configuration tools (e.g., tools like Exchange, Active Directory, the IIS metabase) Windows is a good choice for a good number of people. The costs need to come more in line with its real value and maintenance and configuration tools need to improve to bring the true TCO in line with other operating systems, but for a system that Joe Sixpack can click through and get a basic server configuration up and running, you cannot beat Windows. Linux is "getting there" from that perspective, and so is OS X server, but neither is quite there yet.
Competition is good for everyone. You can bet that if Microsoft, Apple, and Sun were gone tomorrow and Linux were considered the be-all-end-all of operating systems, development sponsorship from corporate entities would decrease or simply stop and development would slow to a crawl.
What would be interesting is if Novell, MySQL, and Trolltech were to merge.
Out of the distributions I like SuSE the best, and here's why:
- Quickest time to get to real work
- It's as close to plug & play as the distributions come
- It uses fairly recent kernels
- Its KDE configuration out of the box is the best I've seen
- If you're into Gnome, it has a full Gnome configuration as well (I hate Gnome but my KDE is configured such that it looks like a mix of OS X and Gnome - what I hate about Gnome is the developers dumbed it down so much it removed any flexibility I need/want, and when I sit novices down at Gnome and KDE, they're invariably lost in Gnome. Windows and even MacOS have trained them to expect more functionality)
- The retail version comes with a fairly good selection of packages
- YaST is a dream for desktop configurations. On servers I use it for only package management but on desktops I primarily rely on YaST. For servers I go straight to the config files.
Ubuntu is my second favorite right now. Mandriva used to be, but not any more. Ubuntu has matured a lot since I first tried it.
Debian? Even though Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, I despise Debian - it's so out of date that I find a lot of machines won't even boot the install disc. I know a lot of people swear by Debian, but if it won't support the 915 and newer chipsets, it's not even an option. I haven't even attempted it on an nForce chipset but I'm sure that if it failed on even a now-outdated Intel 915 chipset, it won't be too friendly on the newer chipsets for AMD.
Fedora? I keep trying it but I hate it. I've had trouble with the install disc booting on various configurations. RHEL? I hate working on it if I need X - its desktop configuration is the most disorganized I've seen, even compared to Slackware circa 1995. I used to like RedHat but from what I've seen they've taken leaps backwards - it seems as though they spent many man-hours planning the most counter-intuitive desktop imaginable. If I need RedHat or a RedHat-esque distribution, I run CentOS. I wouldn't pay for RHEL until they clean things up.
I keep going back and revisiting various distributions every 6 months or so (I don't blindly choose the distribution) but I invariably end up going back to SuSE because it Just Works(tm) (well, I hit some snags in 10.0 in Evolution and in the KDE/Samba integration but fixed those issues, but 10.1 seems to have resolved those).