nonono! I didn't say "Little Red Book".. I said "Fat Jolly Little Man in a Red Suit"..
If I write "Gestern bin ich im Laden gewesen, und ich habe ein paar Geschenke dort gekauft." will I get a vacation in Guantanamo this holiday season?
Anyone think the Patriot Act not getting renewed will make one bit of difference in government monitoring of phone calls, internet, libraries, etc.? They'll just be more covert about it, I think.
I've actually always had the hardest time searching for "James" because invariably it returns James Brown, James Taylor, and every other person on earth named James, but never just the band named "James"..:/
> even though Netscape was a more mature product
So mature they threw all the code away
> and had better support for standards
Completely untrue.
> and crashed less,
Arguable at best.
OK, I'll take the trollbait... But only because there's probably a lot of young people here who don't remember the 90's and I don't want them to get the wrong idea by your trolling. You can go back to your dillo if you like it, but it doesn't change history. Netscape was at version 3 by the time IE was at version 1. And IE wasn't even marginally usable until version 3. Really, it was version 4 where IE finally caught up to Netscape.
And yes, Netscape had better support for standards because they basically set them! It's kind of hard not to have better support for standards when you're the reference implementation! Yes, Netscape added a lot of their own HTML, but it didn't make it any less compatible with the W3C standard. Netscape had better HTML and HTTP support than IE for a long time, and Netscape had invented Javascript, so 100% of websites' Javascript worked on Netscape. No one even bothered making their Javascript work with IE until IE hit 4.0.
As far as crashing less, I will concede that Netscape Navigator was a freaking nightmare on Mac OS, but this probably had a lot to do with Mac OS' limitations as much as it was Netscape's fault. They were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole in porting Navigator to the Mac. But on Windows, Netscape would occasionally die (usually because of a bad plugin) and you'd be able to click on "Close" and move on. With IE, you crashed more often and the crashes tended to bring your whole operating system to BSOD and if you got past that, the system became so unstable you had to reboot. This was even worse with Windows 98 when they decided to make IE essentially the OS shell. One bad website could totally hose Windows. Netscape never did that.
Right. Netscape ran on just about every platform known to man (and probably a few we haven't discovered yet ), so it wasn't IE that brought people to Windows. It was Windows that brought people to IE. I think it was mostly a matter of most people having 28.8k or slower dialup access and Netscape being something like a 7M download, whereas Internet Explorer was already there, and even though Netscape was a more mature product and had better support for standards and crashed less, IE was "good enough" and didn't cause people to spend time and money (remember also, that unlimited calling plans weren't as ubiquitous in 1996 as they are now) to download Netscape. Or you could buy it in CompUSA for $30. But again, IE was free and it was already installed on your PC.
I actually just bought several Pink Floyd albums on iTMS. These were albums that I used to have on cassette tape, copied from friends' CDs and tapes. So, the recording industry made money not only on the subsidies they get from the sale of blank cassette tapes and dual cassette decks, but then also on the legitimate copies I eventually bought on iTMS.
But iTMS is killing the industry! Legal music downloads were down a whopping zero-point-four-four per cent since the previous quarter! (For anyone who can't tell.. that's sarcasm!)
"Use vi, too. And vote Democrat. Oh, and cats are better than dogs. You know what else? Abortion should be legal. So should euthenasia. And as for toast? Butter side up!"
Butter side up? Do people really eat it butter side down? Talk about user interface issues.. the dripping, the getting it on your hands.. definitely doesn't conform to the GNOME HIG!
A lot of the issues with stability (and performance) with earlier KDE versions had mostly to do with the really wretched C++ implementation in older versions of GCC. This has been improved by several orders of magnitude on recent versions of the compiler.
If you remember SIGSEGV messages whenever you blinked at the wrong moment or applications taking 30 seconds to launch, you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much better KDE is on a modern system.
It lasted about a minute before I found it to be very annoying and turned it off. At least we're allowed to turn it off. Have to give Google credit there.
But, Google, how about working on something really useful, like right-click functionality?
It may have a hundred more lines of resolution, but it flickers like hell. When I was an exchange student in Germany, I used to get headaches if I watched TV for more than 15 minutes. It was nauseating. Interlaced video at 25 Hz is just plain inadequate.
Remember when a cassette tape cost $8.98? Now we pay twice that for CDs that are 90% cheaper to mass produce. And the RIAA wonders where people get the incentive to illegally copy and download music.. Maybe if it weren't for the collusive pricing of their industry cartel (the OPEC of entertainment)..
What I want to know is, why hasn't Congress looked into recording industry collusion on pricing that keeps CDs priced at an exceedingly high margin beyond what the market demands!
If Apple put out a mini that came with Front Row and included the remote, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. It would replace my DVD player and I'd get an EyeTV and replace my TiVo as well. I was actually thinking of buying a mini for precisely this purpose, but I'm hesitant to do it without a decent remote control and portal (i.e., Front Row). The beauty of the mini is it's a sub-$600 computer with no frills and takes up next to no space. If they married it to Front Row, they'd easily steal the entry-level (which is, honestly, where average Joe Consumer is) from Windows Media Center, which last I checked, required a behemoth $1000+ PC and is not as simple as FrontRow.
At home, between the ages of 13 and 15. And do you think they can afford $800 for Photoshop, or $200-400 for Office? When their Dell is DRMed, and the download doesn't work but one time out of a hundred, they're going to pick up OpenOffice or GIMP.
And you must be around what, 12?
First of all, IT professionals don't often use Photoshop. Heck, I barely even used MS Office as an IT professional other than helpdesk support. Sure, I wrote documentation in Word and used Excel for spreadsheets, but it's not like I was doing the kind of stuff that required 10 years of Office experience. I was an administrator, not a secretary. When I was between the ages of 13 and 15, I had a Commodore 64. I'm sure that Bank Street Writer and Koala Paint are what made me a good network administrator. It had nothing to do with the internships I had during college. It was all my C64!
If you're talking about, say, a graphic designer, who might need something as powerful as Photoshop, I dare say that someone that ambitious may very well actually save his money to buy it. After all, most of them are using Macs anyway and have no problem paying the Apple tax (i.e., your hardware costs twice what it should if it were a PC).
Now go back to your l33t w4r3z and leave the discussion to us adults.
I dunno. If OS X stays DRMed to Macs, and DRM arrives for Windows Machines (no more free copies of Photoshop/Office), Linux is going to clean up overnight
Do you really think that most businesses pirate their applications? Perhaps some smaller businesses will buy one copy of Photoshop and install it on everyone's PC, but any business that is even remotely ethical would place the value of not being fined or sued over saving a couple hundred bucks on software. Anyone that needs that many copies of Photoshop anyway is probably in a business where they need to have support for Photoshop because it is essential to their business. There are cheaper programs that you can buy for people who just need to do light graphics work. Photoshop is for professionals. You budget the number of copies that your professional artists need, and everyone else who might just need to view the graphics or make small edits, gets ACDSee or Paint Shop Pro.
Seriously, where do you live that businesses operate this way? China?
That $0 Linux solution also comes with no telephone support, no guarantees of any kind of compatibility, requires hiring more expensive people or training the people you have, and likely doesn't have compatibility with the other kinds of software an actual business is likely to require.
I can see how Linux on the desktop could be helpful in an environment where you might just have data entry clerks who need access to a few web-based applications and occasionally a word processor, but for people who do more than that, there really is no viable alternative to Windows, particularly from a time/cost POV.
If you're talking about getting the same level of support and compatibility assurances, you better start making comparisons with RHEL and the like, which are even more expensive than Windows!
Also, how much support do you think you're going to get from your hardware vendor when your Linux box stops working and they can't troubleshoot it because the hardware wasn't designed for it? Sure, Dell will sell you a Linux workstation, but you'll pay more money for it. Business is about making more money than you spend.
Most businesses, for that reason, will continue to buy cheap Dell PCs preloaded with Windows and MS Office, hire the most cost-effective people to run the datacenter (the recent tech school grads with MCSEs, not the Unix geeks from the university), and rely on the fact that they can call Dell or Microsoft at any time to get instant phone support, and actually have some assurance that the other software they buy will be compatible with their operating system because it says so on the box and there is a company a 1-800 phone call away to help if they have trouble. That, like MasterCard says, is priceless!
Norton and McAfee have been so bad for so long that it's about time that Microsoft stepped up and offered something. The version of McAfee that comes bundled with MSN9 was constantly causing applications to hang and generally slowing my wife's laptop to a crawl. Norton has to be the most useless product of all. I'm convinced its only purpose is to serve as a vehicle for Symantec's own spyware.
There are so many companies offering crap antivirus right now that, for users' own protection, it's probably best for Microsoft to put out a good, integrated product. There are a few good ones like F-Secure, Trend, NOD32, and Avast!, but they all cost money except Avast!. Most folks don't want to spend $40+ for antivirus software, especially when they have to buy one for each computer they own. Most of the other free AV packages lack important features like on-access scanning, and so a lot of people buy the garbage $9 no-name-probably-contains-shitloads-of-spyware antivirus they see in the bargain bin at Staples. But if Microsoft were offering one that they stood behind, I'd definitely consider it, and if it were free, especially something that would be an automatic update or included in the next service pack, that would be even better!
Microsoft is not the monopolist in this case. They are providing competition in a market that's becoming dominated by half-assed products that cause more problems than they eliminate. And besides, this is long overdue. Microsoft used to ship MSAV (an MS-branded version of Central Point Antivirus) with DOS 6. They should have kept that up when they shipped Windows 95! It was the only feature of DOS that did not make it into Win95. Disk compression, all the DOS command line utilities, everything else made it into Win95, but no antivirus.
...as it is the user. I've run Windows for about 10 years and have never gotten a virus or had any spyware infections. Of course, I'm also very careful about where I go on the internet and what I download. The problem is that "Joe User" sees "get stuff for free" and "shoot the bunny" and goes looking for free porn and pirated software, and gets his ass bit.
Granted, there's still a lot of nasty stuff that just spreads by looking for open TCP ports, but if you're behind a NAT router, this is not an issue.
If it made sense for spyware companies to target Mac or Linux, they would, but it would generate so little money for them because of the smaller installed base that it wouldn't be worth it for them. Most spyware gets bundled with software that people want, like Kazaa. How hard do you think it is to bundle something with an application for, say, Linux or Mac OS X, and have it place itself as a hidden file in your startup folder? It doesn't have to have root priviledges to make itself autorun in a user's environment.
Actually, the diversity of Linux makes this probably less likely to occur, just because most Linux software doesn't get distributed in binary format because of the incompatibilities between different distributions (dependency and VFS layout issues). If you're distributing source, someone's going to figure out that you're including some nasty stuff in your software. But it is entirely feasible and easy to do in Mac OS X because it is a standard platform. But as I said, with the Mac OS X user community being outnumbered by Windows users something like 20-to-1, it just isn't a big moneymaker and no one's going to bother. You don't make money from spyware unless you're getting hundreds of thousands of installations.
If Mac OS X were to become as ubiquitous as Windows, you bet there'd be a ton of spyware for it. It's because of stupid users, not because the platform is somehow more secure. Spyware typically runs in userspace, no root priviledges needed.
I wasn't making any "wild accusations of impropriety." I was just trying to point out that the mafia has better rackets than operating shady camera and electronic stores. I wasn't trying to tar all Jewish business as being shady either. Obviously, B&H is a good example of a reputable Jewish photo/electronics store. Nobody Beats The Wiz was too, before they were bought up by Cablevision. Also J&R Music World. But for every one of those, there's like a dozen of these little warehouses in Brooklyn or the west side of Manhattan. I'm just speaking from personal experience, being a former Broooklynite (Crown Heights) and having done business with some of these and being able to recognize a Yiddish accent or the fact that a guy named "Moishe Stern" is probably not Italian-American. I'm sure some of these are probably owned by Catholic or Orthodox Poles or Russians, too. There is a major Eastern European element in these businesses, as well. I'm sure some of them are even Indian or West Indian. It really doesn't matter. Someone made an accusation that these were mob fronts, and I wanted to point out that the majority of them probably have absolutely nothing at all to do with the mob. God's Duck has it right, though, it's an issue of demographics more than anything else. I was really just trying to dispel the myth that any kind of foul business based in New York or New Jersey is run by the mafia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Sopranos is probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to our area in terms of public perception. Now everyone thinks it's cool to be a mobster and that everyone, particularly anyone Italian or Russian, in New York is a mafioso. You even have a lot of these rappers and such acting like they're mafiosi and giving themselves Italian pseudonyms. It's very upsetting to see this kind of thing glorified and to have an entire community's and an entire region's reputation sullied by it.
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hmmmm... Spycraft... sounds like an interesting game. Has anyone contacted Blizzard yet?
I can't.. The library doesn't have the book since the GOP Rally/Bookburning last month.. bummer!
If I write "Gestern bin ich im Laden gewesen, und ich habe ein paar Geschenke dort gekauft." will I get a vacation in Guantanamo this holiday season?
Anyone think the Patriot Act not getting renewed will make one bit of difference in government monitoring of phone calls, internet, libraries, etc.? They'll just be more covert about it, I think.
I've actually always had the hardest time searching for "James" because invariably it returns James Brown, James Taylor, and every other person on earth named James, but never just the band named "James".. :/
OK, I'll take the trollbait... But only because there's probably a lot of young people here who don't remember the 90's and I don't want them to get the wrong idea by your trolling. You can go back to your dillo if you like it, but it doesn't change history. Netscape was at version 3 by the time IE was at version 1. And IE wasn't even marginally usable until version 3. Really, it was version 4 where IE finally caught up to Netscape.
And yes, Netscape had better support for standards because they basically set them! It's kind of hard not to have better support for standards when you're the reference implementation! Yes, Netscape added a lot of their own HTML, but it didn't make it any less compatible with the W3C standard. Netscape had better HTML and HTTP support than IE for a long time, and Netscape had invented Javascript, so 100% of websites' Javascript worked on Netscape. No one even bothered making their Javascript work with IE until IE hit 4.0.
As far as crashing less, I will concede that Netscape Navigator was a freaking nightmare on Mac OS, but this probably had a lot to do with Mac OS' limitations as much as it was Netscape's fault. They were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole in porting Navigator to the Mac. But on Windows, Netscape would occasionally die (usually because of a bad plugin) and you'd be able to click on "Close" and move on. With IE, you crashed more often and the crashes tended to bring your whole operating system to BSOD and if you got past that, the system became so unstable you had to reboot. This was even worse with Windows 98 when they decided to make IE essentially the OS shell. One bad website could totally hose Windows. Netscape never did that.
It will develop a religious following more cultic than that of Linux based on just the name alone..
Is the logo even proprietary to the Mozilla organization? I thought it was the logo adopted by the RSS developers. Can anyone clarify?
Right. Netscape ran on just about every platform known to man (and probably a few we haven't discovered yet ), so it wasn't IE that brought people to Windows. It was Windows that brought people to IE. I think it was mostly a matter of most people having 28.8k or slower dialup access and Netscape being something like a 7M download, whereas Internet Explorer was already there, and even though Netscape was a more mature product and had better support for standards and crashed less, IE was "good enough" and didn't cause people to spend time and money (remember also, that unlimited calling plans weren't as ubiquitous in 1996 as they are now) to download Netscape. Or you could buy it in CompUSA for $30. But again, IE was free and it was already installed on your PC.
It was also a radio dish, but without the little "Netscape Communicator" triangle behind it.
What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?
But iTMS is killing the industry! Legal music downloads were down a whopping zero-point-four-four per cent since the previous quarter! (For anyone who can't tell.. that's sarcasm!)
What I want to know, is between GNOME and KDE, what would Brian Boitano do!
Butter side up? Do people really eat it butter side down? Talk about user interface issues.. the dripping, the getting it on your hands.. definitely doesn't conform to the GNOME HIG!
A lot of the issues with stability (and performance) with earlier KDE versions had mostly to do with the really wretched C++ implementation in older versions of GCC. This has been improved by several orders of magnitude on recent versions of the compiler. If you remember SIGSEGV messages whenever you blinked at the wrong moment or applications taking 30 seconds to launch, you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much better KDE is on a modern system.
But, Google, how about working on something really useful, like right-click functionality?
It may have a hundred more lines of resolution, but it flickers like hell. When I was an exchange student in Germany, I used to get headaches if I watched TV for more than 15 minutes. It was nauseating. Interlaced video at 25 Hz is just plain inadequate.
At least Bob Rivers isn't a buttmunch, he's got lyrics right there on the site. :-)
What I want to know is, why hasn't Congress looked into recording industry collusion on pricing that keeps CDs priced at an exceedingly high margin beyond what the market demands!
If Apple put out a mini that came with Front Row and included the remote, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. It would replace my DVD player and I'd get an EyeTV and replace my TiVo as well. I was actually thinking of buying a mini for precisely this purpose, but I'm hesitant to do it without a decent remote control and portal (i.e., Front Row). The beauty of the mini is it's a sub-$600 computer with no frills and takes up next to no space. If they married it to Front Row, they'd easily steal the entry-level (which is, honestly, where average Joe Consumer is) from Windows Media Center, which last I checked, required a behemoth $1000+ PC and is not as simple as FrontRow.
And you must be around what, 12?
First of all, IT professionals don't often use Photoshop. Heck, I barely even used MS Office as an IT professional other than helpdesk support. Sure, I wrote documentation in Word and used Excel for spreadsheets, but it's not like I was doing the kind of stuff that required 10 years of Office experience. I was an administrator, not a secretary. When I was between the ages of 13 and 15, I had a Commodore 64. I'm sure that Bank Street Writer and Koala Paint are what made me a good network administrator. It had nothing to do with the internships I had during college. It was all my C64!
If you're talking about, say, a graphic designer, who might need something as powerful as Photoshop, I dare say that someone that ambitious may very well actually save his money to buy it. After all, most of them are using Macs anyway and have no problem paying the Apple tax (i.e., your hardware costs twice what it should if it were a PC).
Now go back to your l33t w4r3z and leave the discussion to us adults.
Do you really think that most businesses pirate their applications? Perhaps some smaller businesses will buy one copy of Photoshop and install it on everyone's PC, but any business that is even remotely ethical would place the value of not being fined or sued over saving a couple hundred bucks on software. Anyone that needs that many copies of Photoshop anyway is probably in a business where they need to have support for Photoshop because it is essential to their business. There are cheaper programs that you can buy for people who just need to do light graphics work. Photoshop is for professionals. You budget the number of copies that your professional artists need, and everyone else who might just need to view the graphics or make small edits, gets ACDSee or Paint Shop Pro.
Seriously, where do you live that businesses operate this way? China?
I can see how Linux on the desktop could be helpful in an environment where you might just have data entry clerks who need access to a few web-based applications and occasionally a word processor, but for people who do more than that, there really is no viable alternative to Windows, particularly from a time/cost POV.
If you're talking about getting the same level of support and compatibility assurances, you better start making comparisons with RHEL and the like, which are even more expensive than Windows!
Also, how much support do you think you're going to get from your hardware vendor when your Linux box stops working and they can't troubleshoot it because the hardware wasn't designed for it? Sure, Dell will sell you a Linux workstation, but you'll pay more money for it. Business is about making more money than you spend.
Most businesses, for that reason, will continue to buy cheap Dell PCs preloaded with Windows and MS Office, hire the most cost-effective people to run the datacenter (the recent tech school grads with MCSEs, not the Unix geeks from the university), and rely on the fact that they can call Dell or Microsoft at any time to get instant phone support, and actually have some assurance that the other software they buy will be compatible with their operating system because it says so on the box and there is a company a 1-800 phone call away to help if they have trouble. That, like MasterCard says, is priceless!
There are so many companies offering crap antivirus right now that, for users' own protection, it's probably best for Microsoft to put out a good, integrated product. There are a few good ones like F-Secure, Trend, NOD32, and Avast!, but they all cost money except Avast!. Most folks don't want to spend $40+ for antivirus software, especially when they have to buy one for each computer they own. Most of the other free AV packages lack important features like on-access scanning, and so a lot of people buy the garbage $9 no-name-probably-contains-shitloads-of-spyware antivirus they see in the bargain bin at Staples. But if Microsoft were offering one that they stood behind, I'd definitely consider it, and if it were free, especially something that would be an automatic update or included in the next service pack, that would be even better!
Microsoft is not the monopolist in this case. They are providing competition in a market that's becoming dominated by half-assed products that cause more problems than they eliminate. And besides, this is long overdue. Microsoft used to ship MSAV (an MS-branded version of Central Point Antivirus) with DOS 6. They should have kept that up when they shipped Windows 95! It was the only feature of DOS that did not make it into Win95. Disk compression, all the DOS command line utilities, everything else made it into Win95, but no antivirus.
Granted, there's still a lot of nasty stuff that just spreads by looking for open TCP ports, but if you're behind a NAT router, this is not an issue.
If it made sense for spyware companies to target Mac or Linux, they would, but it would generate so little money for them because of the smaller installed base that it wouldn't be worth it for them. Most spyware gets bundled with software that people want, like Kazaa. How hard do you think it is to bundle something with an application for, say, Linux or Mac OS X, and have it place itself as a hidden file in your startup folder? It doesn't have to have root priviledges to make itself autorun in a user's environment.
Actually, the diversity of Linux makes this probably less likely to occur, just because most Linux software doesn't get distributed in binary format because of the incompatibilities between different distributions (dependency and VFS layout issues). If you're distributing source, someone's going to figure out that you're including some nasty stuff in your software. But it is entirely feasible and easy to do in Mac OS X because it is a standard platform. But as I said, with the Mac OS X user community being outnumbered by Windows users something like 20-to-1, it just isn't a big moneymaker and no one's going to bother. You don't make money from spyware unless you're getting hundreds of thousands of installations.
If Mac OS X were to become as ubiquitous as Windows, you bet there'd be a ton of spyware for it. It's because of stupid users, not because the platform is somehow more secure. Spyware typically runs in userspace, no root priviledges needed.
I wasn't making any "wild accusations of impropriety." I was just trying to point out that the mafia has better rackets than operating shady camera and electronic stores. I wasn't trying to tar all Jewish business as being shady either. Obviously, B&H is a good example of a reputable Jewish photo/electronics store. Nobody Beats The Wiz was too, before they were bought up by Cablevision. Also J&R Music World. But for every one of those, there's like a dozen of these little warehouses in Brooklyn or the west side of Manhattan. I'm just speaking from personal experience, being a former Broooklynite (Crown Heights) and having done business with some of these and being able to recognize a Yiddish accent or the fact that a guy named "Moishe Stern" is probably not Italian-American. I'm sure some of these are probably owned by Catholic or Orthodox Poles or Russians, too. There is a major Eastern European element in these businesses, as well. I'm sure some of them are even Indian or West Indian. It really doesn't matter. Someone made an accusation that these were mob fronts, and I wanted to point out that the majority of them probably have absolutely nothing at all to do with the mob. God's Duck has it right, though, it's an issue of demographics more than anything else. I was really just trying to dispel the myth that any kind of foul business based in New York or New Jersey is run by the mafia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Sopranos is probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to our area in terms of public perception. Now everyone thinks it's cool to be a mobster and that everyone, particularly anyone Italian or Russian, in New York is a mafioso. You even have a lot of these rappers and such acting like they're mafiosi and giving themselves Italian pseudonyms. It's very upsetting to see this kind of thing glorified and to have an entire community's and an entire region's reputation sullied by it.