Example: I paid $5 for a boxed set of the Beverly Hillbillies a few years ago at WalMart, and the theme song had been replaced; no Homer and Jethro. Contract issues.
Meanwhile, lately they've been playing it on MeTV with the original music... which anybody can record on DVD or hard drive.
Well, the moon race was purely political. What they're doing now is far more useful and interesting. There's no way to know what kind of technology will come out of their science.
And meanwhile, when I was 20 there were two things I knew would never happen in my life: I'd never be able to see without contacts or glasses, and I'd never go to space. The first I was used to, the second depressing, since I've always been a big SF fan.
But I got an implant in my left eye in 2006 and no longer need corrective lenses, and the way Space-X and other private ventures are going, I may be able to go where no man had gone before I first heard the words "to go where no man has gone before".
You don't think robot Martians are cool? I think they're cool as all getout. I like the way space is going!
With me, it's a matter of having bookshelves full of VHS tapes going back 25 years. I've been transferring them to DVD, just because it probably won't be long before you can't buy a VCR any more.
As to records and audio tapes, LPS are better than CDs, but only if you have VERY good eqipment. CDs are marginally better than cassettes, but again, only if you have a VERY good (read:expensive) deck. Reel to reel? Far better than CD, but again, expensive as hell.
I've been transferring all my analog data, and I doubt I'll ever get it all digitized, especially the music. I have so many LPs and cassettes I don't have a clue how many I have. Boxes and boxes of them.
I do have a very good German turntable, and oddly (and probably unbelievably) some CDs I make from LPs actually sound better than their store-bought counterparts. I chalk this up to poor remastering when they re-released them on CD. Hilariously, often the LP has more dynamics than the factory CD, despite the fact that CDs have a larger dynamic range. Kids... "Dynamic range? Who needs that! Make the whole damned thing as loud as you can!"
VHS? Even the best of my VHS is crap, but there's no way I could afford to rebuy it, and it was good enough new, it's still good enough. Besides, in fifty years my decendants can see what TV was like when I was here. "Uh, Grandpa, what was a TV?"
Most likely he doesn't want to play hardware roulette or keep a second machine with a different OS for Googling why the first machine crapped itself when some DE dev decided he didn't like the way things were and caused his video to take a crap, or the PukeAudio guys gave him a Goatse.
You don't need a second machine, you can install dual-boot. I'd not wipe the OS that came with the machine unless it was ruined beyond repair; say, you've installed too much new hardware and Windows thinks you're a pirate. When I slap Linux on the Acer, Windows will still be there.
if anything Linux is more unstable than a bog standard Windows.
Windows has gotten pretty stable, but I don't understand why you're having instability problems with Linux. What's crapping out on you?
Thanks for the tip on Comoto, there are a few follks I know that sorely need it. The Windows box is running AVG Free, I haven't tried Avast. Which one bogs the machine down more? AVG Free is pretty acceptable.
So while it is pointless to pay for AV it is NOT pointless to pay for Windows.
Windows comes with the computer, but you would actually shell out that hundred bucks for a boxed copy to upgrade? Especially when newer versions of Windows won't run well or at all without a new machine?
Linux is ONLY for those with the skills to do a systematic step by step troubleshooting diagnosis on error
In my experience, that's Windows (at least up to XP, haven't had any problems with 7 except its lack of useability). Back around 2004 or so when the Sony XCP rootkit hit, my daughter installed the damned rootkit never believing that a company like Sony would deliberately vandalize a computer. Win 98 was getting long in the tooth, I'd lost the driver disks in a move, and I couldn't get better than 640x480 video and no audio. So I shelled out $125 at Best Buy for XP, since the Linux video drivers for my video card wouldn't display on the TV with the S-Video (it's working fine now, using the same card in a different machine, someone must have fixed the drivers).
But the audio still wouldn't work in XP. I broke down and spent another hundred bucks on a USB Sound Blaster box (which wouldn't work in Linux) and wiped Linux.
I set it all up, reinstalled all the software, and set it for automatic updates. But there was a problem -- Windows refused to run the CD burning software that had come with my burner, saying it made the system unstable. Odd, I'd used that program for years with no instability. But it refused to let me uninstall it and on every boot (which was as I was installing software) I'd get that annoying balloon telling me that it had disabled the software. I was set to wiipe the drive again and re-reinstall XP.
The next morning I had no internet access. The tech at the cable company thought my LAN chip must have gone out because he could see the card but I couldn't see the network. I tried a new cable thinking maybe that's it... nope. I was ready to wipe the drive to excise the program that windows would neither run nor remove any way, so I thought I'd redo the machine before buying a LAN card (hell, that's only ten or fifteen bucks).
When I reinstalled Windows, I had network access again!
The next morning the internet no longer worked. Again. It turned out the Windows had replaced a perfectly good LAN driver with one that didn't work at all!
If you're installing dual-boot on a wiped drive, you must always install Windows first. Windows doesn't work or play well with other (deliberately, I believe). And don't just install Linux blindly -- these days, every distro I've seen's install CD lets you try it out before you install, running from the CD, so you can see beforehand if there will be problems.
I'm working on an old Dell for a friend, it has the Windows XP and driver disks, but I can NOT get the sound to work on that sucker. Getting networking to work was a PIA as well, but I was finally able to get that driver from the internet. No luck finding
Your lifetime, maybe, I'll be 90 in 30 years. When it does happen, though, the US wil lbe the hardest hit. Europe probably won't have that much of a problem with it.
What good is the free market when you have nothing to sell and nothing to buy?
This news makes me sad. I've always hated gnome, and gnome is what kept me from Ubuntu for years. I've been running kubuntu for a year or so now, but it looks like I may be going back to Mandriva, or hunting for another good distro that supports KDE.
No sweat off their noses, though. It's not as if I'm actually paying for OSes.
But, to be honest, nothing we have today is all that great.
That is ALWAYS true. In twenty years youll look back at Ubuntu and Windows 7 and say "Christ but those were primitive!" And pick up your garglephoner and say "how in the hell did we even SURVIVE without these!"
I was 14 when Star Trek first came out. All the stuff in it was impossible fantasy -- the communicator, doors that opened by themselves, flat screen computer monitors with color graphics, McCoy's sick bay readouts, that thing in Uhura's ear, shuttles to low orbit... they're all commonplace today. Now, the futuristic Enterprise itself looks downright primitive, even McCoy's sick bay. But in 1966 they were still using ether for an anasthetic and the most sophisticated instruments were the thermometer, stethoscope, and sphignometer (which I'm sure I misspelled).
What's even worse is that engineers carry a true responsibility for the success of their project. A personal responsibility. Bankers, when they fail because of their own greed, carry little responsibility as far as I know.
The difference is, when the banker screws up, only money is lost. If you screw up lives could be lost, environments wrecked, all sorts of mayhem. I agree that engineers are underpaid, and also think bankers are WAY overpaid.
When was the last time somebody died from a bank error? OTOH, look at BT and the Gulf. Or Challenger. Or a million other engineering disasters.
Copyright wasn't needed until the invention of moveable type, and moveable type's widespread use. Copyright came about when technology made it necessary.
First impressions MATTER, ease of use MATTERS, intuitiveness MATTERS.
And Windows delivers none of them. If you're impressed by the first impression of "that's pretty" then I'm not sending you to the store for a circular saw.
Now last i checked there wasn't a law that says FOSS software HAS to have a shitty UI, fiddly as fuck controls, and shitty if not non existent help files is there?
But it doesn't have a shitty UI or fiddly controls. Yes, most FOSS help files suck, but they're no more useless than Windows help files. Which is a shame, because MS used to make good help files. They never have had understandable error messages (my favorite was Access: "this error has no message")
Taking five clicks to do what should only take three is my idea of "fiddly controls". Wiondows is REALLY bad about that.
First impressions? I get the Win 7 notebook and try to interface it with another computer, and am informed that I need Windows 7 Professional to network. That was MY first impression. FOSS to the rescue in the form of Samba. I can copy files back and forth from the XP box I'm working on for a friend to the notebook easily, with kubuntu in the middle.
so too is trying to make even a halfway decent GUI suddenly "dumbing down" and making it "for the noobs' like being a fiddly pain in the ass is a GOOD thing one should aspire to!
It's been a long, long time since you've used any FOSS, hasn't it?
You see you seem to think the fact that something is free, both in beer and freedom, is a selling point which it honestly is not to anybody but FOSS nerds.
Yeah? hang a sign outside you bar that says "free beer" and see how people react.
I won't sell Linux in my shop because at $35 an hour it takes only 2 and a half hours of forum hunts or tweaking fixes for Linux to cost MORE than Windows
Odd, I've had that probalem far more often in Windows than Linux, and I've been using MS software since 1982. But I think I see your real problem with Linux -- it doesn't break easily. Not much profit in fixing Linux computers. I don't do it for a living, but for free for friends. When they come with a computer that's so malware ridden it won't even boot and they don't have the Windows CD or driver CDs, I load Linux/KDE. None have had a problem using it, and the only time they come back with problems is when a piece of hardware breaks.
Right now I'm working on an old Dell Dimension 2400. It's going to be running Mandrake, because I can't find the sound drivers for it and newer distros won't work on it (at least kubuntu 11.10 won't load). Linux has the opposite problem than windows when it comes to drivers. You never can find older drivers for Windows, but often have trouble finding drivers for new devices in Linux.
In the end it comes down to a simple question, does FOSS want to be a winner or a loser?
It's not a game. The only losers are businesses that go out of business.
Does FOSS get adopted by the masses or stay nothing but a hobbyist playtoy?
As long as every non-Apple made comes with Windows preinstalled, Linux will never overtake it. That's why Windows sucks so bad -- because it can.
But you'll simply never get those masses if all UIs are frankly a half assed afterthought and you honestly think a "steep learning curve' will be considered worth it to anybody but yourself.
Again, KDE has a far, FAR shallower learning curve than Win 7. If you can use any flavor of Windows at all, KDE will be a breeze to use.
think something so simple your grandma ought to be able to figure it out just by looking and reading the mouse overs. THAT is what you should be shooting for
That's what Microsoft should be shooting for. I mentioned in another comment to you my problems with unsuccessfully copying an image with Windows 7 paint (new program) compared to Oo's paint program (also unfamiliar). 45 minutes and still no results in Microsoft's UI, less than a minute on Oo's.
I wish that were true, but it isn't. Try buying a computer with an open source OS, or even no OS at all so you can install your choice. Of three phone OSes, two are closed source.
Every computer in almost every office is using MS Office on Windows. Almost every home PC is running Windows. How can you possibly think we've won?
This is something I've tried to literally beat over the heads of the FOSS geeks its that making a good UI isn't dumbing down its making your tool actually usable to the masses. How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness
I never used OSX, but Windows 7 easy to use and intuitive? WTF??? It's easier to switch from XP to KDE than it is to switch from XP to Win 7.
Win 7's Control Panel is a useability clusterfuck. Why was the "tap to click" so-called "feature" not under "mouse controls" in the control panel? Took me a month to find it, where nobody would ever think to look (think HHTG's highway planning department) but five minutes in KDE.
And that ribbon, jesus... BAAAAD design. BAAAAd BAAAAd BAAAAAd. I used it exactly once, over the weekend, in Windows paint. Here's useability lesson #1 -- if people are use to the clutch on the left and the brake in the midlle and throttle on the right, don't move the brake to the right just because it's an automatic transmission.
I had an image of an album cover I wanted to use with OGGs. In Winamp, the easiest way is to copy the image in a web page or image manipulation tool and paste it in. So I opened it in Windows Paint, right clicked the image... no "copy". So I look for the "edit" above, and there's no "edit" menu. I start clicking everything trying to find "edit", and they've moved "copy" to:File". WTF? So I copy, go to winamp... and it won't paste.
That is NOT a useable interface. At all. It is completely worthless, and I'm glad they're using old non-ribbon programs at work. I see few comments from anyone saying they like the ribbon, and those few seem to be die-hard Microsoft fans.
Meanwhile I opened Oo's image program, right clicked the image, clicked copy, tabbed to Winamp and had it done in fifteen seconds after struggling with Paint's shitty shitty bad bad interface for forty five minutes without getting what I wanted done, done. First time I used that program, too. And you think Grandma's going to figure that damned ribbon out when I couldn't??
LaTex? never used it either, for all I know its interface sucks as bad as Windows 7. But it would have to try REAL HARD to do that.
I despise Unity for the same reason I hate Win 7. Change for the sake of change is not progress. Change for the sake of improvement is progress. Change for the sake of change is brain dead stupid.
Well, there's at least one lawyer/. likes, NYCL. Oh, I thought of another one -- Lawrence Lessig. Two I personally like are the one who did my divorce, the one who did my bankrupcy, and my wife's lawyer in the divorce (because he was fucking incompetent and thanks to him Evil-X doesn't get any of my pension).
However, I do hate corporate lawyers. But I hate their bosses more.
So you're in favor of legalizing marijuana? Whay should it be a woman's choice to remove a fetus, but not her choice to insert marijuana smoke?
Me, I'm anti-abortion, pro-choice, and pro-life. I'm against abortions but think they should be legal, it's nobody's business but the father's, mother's, and God's. But I'd like the kid's father to have a say in the matter. Men have no reproductive rights whatever. She wants it and you don't? Sorry, you're supporting it. She wants an abotion but you want to raise the kid? Sorry, she gets the abortion. That despite the fact that there is a plethora of birth control choices for women and none whatever for men.
Pro-life -- I'm against both war and capital punishment. Most people who claim to be "pro life" are for both of them.
Death is no penalty, we're all under a death sentence, and most of us will die horribly form cancer, heart disease, accident, or falling down and breaking a hip at age 99. Meanwhile the murderer knows when he will die and has a chance to find God and get to heaven, and then be painlessly put down like a beloved pet. No, let the bastard rot in prison until God Himself decides to take him.
privatize prisons
Some things should NEVER be privatized. Prisons are one of them.
Right to Work? (I support it), Lowering the minimum wage laws? (I support that too - minimum wage hurts the fixed income and elderly and youth.)
I could never vote for you. Food stamps are welfare for the greedy rich who pay minimum wage. Were it not for food stamps, half of McDonald's and WalMart employees would quit tomorrow. Nobody working 40 hours a week should be earning little enough to qualify for food stamps.
I'm all for employed teens, but we need to put folks who aren't being supported by their parents first.
As to your "fixed income elderly", that's just damned sad. It's people like you who made it so that few get pensions any more. God damn it, you should NOT have to work after you've been in the workforce for fifty years! What's wrong with you, man? Are you completely lacking a heart?
Yes, I'll be 60 in two months and am really looking forward to my pension. Raise Social Security and stop stealing from it to balance your budget. SS should have nothing to do with the budget, it should be its own budget.
And "right to work" is a really bad name. You have no right to work. Period. You can work if you can convince someone to hire you, it's no right. But I notice that you guys give lying titles to bad laws all the time (PATRIOT act for starters, real patriots want to defend freedoms, not take them away).
Your "right to work" is really the "right to get rid of that pesky union so you can fuck over your workers." Apologies for the language, but I feel so strongly about it I must. Unions are an employee's only chance to bargain effectively with an employer, and I am completely against you and every other union hater.
If someone else can do my job cheaper than I can, to the same standard or better than I can - I deserve to lose my job - that's the free market people are always raving about, isn't it.
You young people... sheesh. What happened to the old values? What happened to retiring with a generous pension? What happened to good paychecks? What happened to seniority?
I'll tell you -- the goddamned greedy Gen-Xers took over, and convinced the rest of you pups that they were right. I'm glad I'm no longer young, because if things keep going the way they have, America's going to be an intolerably shitty place by the time you kids are my age.
H1B visas are BAD for workers, period. Nobody should get an H1B visa unless there is nobody in the US capable of doing the job. India and China are eating America, and its leaders (political and economic) are letting them.
Now get off my lawn. And no, you can't have your ball back.
It hasn't just gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress, but has gone so far that it inhibits literary progress.
Terry Pratchett could probably sue me for writing this story.
I'd love to have one because it's Linux, but especially because it's not tied to a phone company. But there are a couple of things that keep me from buying it.
1. It's way overpriced (I discussed this at length in another comment)
2. Seven inch screen? Way too small. Make it ten inches, about the size of a hardcover book. A friend brought his iPad 4 to the bar the other day, that thing's about the ideal size. My notebook has a ten inch screen, and it's about right for me. I don't see the sense of lugging around a big seventeen inch laptop.
A question, though, how can installing an OS brick it? I've never seen any other computer bricked by an OS install.
You have to be careful what you say at all times these days. Under my workplaces' "zero tolerance" violence policy, a friend of mine was given a month's suspension for saying he was going to "take down" a co-worker. The message read to me like "take down" meant simply to get a troublemaker in trouble, but the troublemaker was his boss' friend.
Meanwhile I was verbally threatened with violence ("I'll kick you fucking ass you son of a bitch") by a fat old idiot PhD (I never guessed someone as stupid as this guy could get a doctorate), and was overheard by my boss' assistant. He got a verbal reprimand.
Glad I'm retiring in two years. I hate big organizations. You never see this stuff in a small shop
The price of the tablet itself is what holds me back. $265 USD seems pricey with a 1 ghz CPU, only 500 meg of ram, and only 4 Gb of internal storage and no keyboard. That's ten bucks more than an Acer Aspire One that has almost twice the CPU speed, twice the memory, and sixty two times the drive space. Oh, and the Acer has one more USB port, a network port, a monitor port, and not only audio output like the tablet but input as well. What makes the touchscreen so damned expensive? This thing should be at least a hundred bucks cheaper.
Nobody knows everything. I would assume that android apps would work in Linux, since Android is based on Linux, but I'd have to have an Android in my hands to know for sure, or someone who did telling me to have an idea of its truth.
Lots of MS fans at/. or I'd never be modded "flamebait" for complaining about Patch Tuesday and the monthy reboot. Perhaps he's a MS or Apple fan who's never used either Android or Linux but is finally getting curious?
That's a lie propagated by marketers to get you to spend three times on a bottle of Alieve what you'd pay for the exact same drug ins a generic bottle. Buy Alieve and you get 1/3 of what you pay for.
I see you still use Windows. Linux is a superior OS in most ways, yet it is entirely free. What are you paying for when you buy a boxed copy of Windows? A pretty box? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. Often you pay for a lot more than you get.
so think about why your still getting those pop-up porn ad's.
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Example: I paid $5 for a boxed set of the Beverly Hillbillies a few years ago at WalMart, and the theme song had been replaced; no Homer and Jethro. Contract issues.
Meanwhile, lately they've been playing it on MeTV with the original music... which anybody can record on DVD or hard drive.
Well, the moon race was purely political. What they're doing now is far more useful and interesting. There's no way to know what kind of technology will come out of their science.
And meanwhile, when I was 20 there were two things I knew would never happen in my life: I'd never be able to see without contacts or glasses, and I'd never go to space. The first I was used to, the second depressing, since I've always been a big SF fan.
But I got an implant in my left eye in 2006 and no longer need corrective lenses, and the way Space-X and other private ventures are going, I may be able to go where no man had gone before I first heard the words "to go where no man has gone before".
You don't think robot Martians are cool? I think they're cool as all getout. I like the way space is going!
With me, it's a matter of having bookshelves full of VHS tapes going back 25 years. I've been transferring them to DVD, just because it probably won't be long before you can't buy a VCR any more.
As to records and audio tapes, LPS are better than CDs, but only if you have VERY good eqipment. CDs are marginally better than cassettes, but again, only if you have a VERY good (read:expensive) deck. Reel to reel? Far better than CD, but again, expensive as hell.
I've been transferring all my analog data, and I doubt I'll ever get it all digitized, especially the music. I have so many LPs and cassettes I don't have a clue how many I have. Boxes and boxes of them.
I do have a very good German turntable, and oddly (and probably unbelievably) some CDs I make from LPs actually sound better than their store-bought counterparts. I chalk this up to poor remastering when they re-released them on CD. Hilariously, often the LP has more dynamics than the factory CD, despite the fact that CDs have a larger dynamic range. Kids... "Dynamic range? Who needs that! Make the whole damned thing as loud as you can!"
VHS? Even the best of my VHS is crap, but there's no way I could afford to rebuy it, and it was good enough new, it's still good enough. Besides, in fifty years my decendants can see what TV was like when I was here. "Uh, Grandpa, what was a TV?"
Most likely he doesn't want to play hardware roulette or keep a second machine with a different OS for Googling why the first machine crapped itself when some DE dev decided he didn't like the way things were and caused his video to take a crap, or the PukeAudio guys gave him a Goatse.
You don't need a second machine, you can install dual-boot. I'd not wipe the OS that came with the machine unless it was ruined beyond repair; say, you've installed too much new hardware and Windows thinks you're a pirate. When I slap Linux on the Acer, Windows will still be there.
if anything Linux is more unstable than a bog standard Windows.
Windows has gotten pretty stable, but I don't understand why you're having instability problems with Linux. What's crapping out on you?
Thanks for the tip on Comoto, there are a few follks I know that sorely need it. The Windows box is running AVG Free, I haven't tried Avast. Which one bogs the machine down more? AVG Free is pretty acceptable.
So while it is pointless to pay for AV it is NOT pointless to pay for Windows.
Windows comes with the computer, but you would actually shell out that hundred bucks for a boxed copy to upgrade? Especially when newer versions of Windows won't run well or at all without a new machine?
Linux is ONLY for those with the skills to do a systematic step by step troubleshooting diagnosis on error
In my experience, that's Windows (at least up to XP, haven't had any problems with 7 except its lack of useability). Back around 2004 or so when the Sony XCP rootkit hit, my daughter installed the damned rootkit never believing that a company like Sony would deliberately vandalize a computer. Win 98 was getting long in the tooth, I'd lost the driver disks in a move, and I couldn't get better than 640x480 video and no audio. So I shelled out $125 at Best Buy for XP, since the Linux video drivers for my video card wouldn't display on the TV with the S-Video (it's working fine now, using the same card in a different machine, someone must have fixed the drivers).
But the audio still wouldn't work in XP. I broke down and spent another hundred bucks on a USB Sound Blaster box (which wouldn't work in Linux) and wiped Linux.
I set it all up, reinstalled all the software, and set it for automatic updates. But there was a problem -- Windows refused to run the CD burning software that had come with my burner, saying it made the system unstable. Odd, I'd used that program for years with no instability. But it refused to let me uninstall it and on every boot (which was as I was installing software) I'd get that annoying balloon telling me that it had disabled the software. I was set to wiipe the drive again and re-reinstall XP.
The next morning I had no internet access. The tech at the cable company thought my LAN chip must have gone out because he could see the card but I couldn't see the network. I tried a new cable thinking maybe that's it... nope. I was ready to wipe the drive to excise the program that windows would neither run nor remove any way, so I thought I'd redo the machine before buying a LAN card (hell, that's only ten or fifteen bucks).
When I reinstalled Windows, I had network access again!
The next morning the internet no longer worked. Again. It turned out the Windows had replaced a perfectly good LAN driver with one that didn't work at all!
If you're installing dual-boot on a wiped drive, you must always install Windows first. Windows doesn't work or play well with other (deliberately, I believe). And don't just install Linux blindly -- these days, every distro I've seen's install CD lets you try it out before you install, running from the CD, so you can see beforehand if there will be problems.
I'm working on an old Dell for a friend, it has the Windows XP and driver disks, but I can NOT get the sound to work on that sucker. Getting networking to work was a PIA as well, but I was finally able to get that driver from the internet. No luck finding
Your lifetime, maybe, I'll be 90 in 30 years. When it does happen, though, the US wil lbe the hardest hit. Europe probably won't have that much of a problem with it.
What good is the free market when you have nothing to sell and nothing to buy?
How would one shoot one's self without hands?
This news makes me sad. I've always hated gnome, and gnome is what kept me from Ubuntu for years. I've been running kubuntu for a year or so now, but it looks like I may be going back to Mandriva, or hunting for another good distro that supports KDE.
No sweat off their noses, though. It's not as if I'm actually paying for OSes.
But, to be honest, nothing we have today is all that great.
That is ALWAYS true. In twenty years youll look back at Ubuntu and Windows 7 and say "Christ but those were primitive!" And pick up your garglephoner and say "how in the hell did we even SURVIVE without these!"
I was 14 when Star Trek first came out. All the stuff in it was impossible fantasy -- the communicator, doors that opened by themselves, flat screen computer monitors with color graphics, McCoy's sick bay readouts, that thing in Uhura's ear, shuttles to low orbit... they're all commonplace today. Now, the futuristic Enterprise itself looks downright primitive, even McCoy's sick bay. But in 1966 they were still using ether for an anasthetic and the most sophisticated instruments were the thermometer, stethoscope, and sphignometer (which I'm sure I misspelled).
I get everything generic. Even the arthritis I take naproxin for is generic!
What's even worse is that engineers carry a true responsibility for the success of their project. A personal responsibility. Bankers, when they fail because of their own greed, carry little responsibility as far as I know.
The difference is, when the banker screws up, only money is lost. If you screw up lives could be lost, environments wrecked, all sorts of mayhem. I agree that engineers are underpaid, and also think bankers are WAY overpaid.
When was the last time somebody died from a bank error? OTOH, look at BT and the Gulf. Or Challenger. Or a million other engineering disasters.
Good luck with that, especially since you have people arguing against a minimum WAGE.
It will have to come, of course, but there will be mayhem before it does. I sincerely doubt I'll ever see it.
Copyright wasn't needed until the invention of moveable type, and moveable type's widespread use. Copyright came about when technology made it necessary.
Oh, come on, dude...
First impressions MATTER, ease of use MATTERS, intuitiveness MATTERS.
And Windows delivers none of them. If you're impressed by the first impression of "that's pretty" then I'm not sending you to the store for a circular saw.
Now last i checked there wasn't a law that says FOSS software HAS to have a shitty UI, fiddly as fuck controls, and shitty if not non existent help files is there?
But it doesn't have a shitty UI or fiddly controls. Yes, most FOSS help files suck, but they're no more useless than Windows help files. Which is a shame, because MS used to make good help files. They never have had understandable error messages (my favorite was Access: "this error has no message")
Taking five clicks to do what should only take three is my idea of "fiddly controls". Wiondows is REALLY bad about that.
First impressions? I get the Win 7 notebook and try to interface it with another computer, and am informed that I need Windows 7 Professional to network. That was MY first impression. FOSS to the rescue in the form of Samba. I can copy files back and forth from the XP box I'm working on for a friend to the notebook easily, with kubuntu in the middle.
so too is trying to make even a halfway decent GUI suddenly "dumbing down" and making it "for the noobs' like being a fiddly pain in the ass is a GOOD thing one should aspire to!
It's been a long, long time since you've used any FOSS, hasn't it?
You see you seem to think the fact that something is free, both in beer and freedom, is a selling point which it honestly is not to anybody but FOSS nerds.
Yeah? hang a sign outside you bar that says "free beer" and see how people react.
I won't sell Linux in my shop because at $35 an hour it takes only 2 and a half hours of forum hunts or tweaking fixes for Linux to cost MORE than Windows
Odd, I've had that probalem far more often in Windows than Linux, and I've been using MS software since 1982. But I think I see your real problem with Linux -- it doesn't break easily. Not much profit in fixing Linux computers. I don't do it for a living, but for free for friends. When they come with a computer that's so malware ridden it won't even boot and they don't have the Windows CD or driver CDs, I load Linux/KDE. None have had a problem using it, and the only time they come back with problems is when a piece of hardware breaks.
Right now I'm working on an old Dell Dimension 2400. It's going to be running Mandrake, because I can't find the sound drivers for it and newer distros won't work on it (at least kubuntu 11.10 won't load). Linux has the opposite problem than windows when it comes to drivers. You never can find older drivers for Windows, but often have trouble finding drivers for new devices in Linux.
In the end it comes down to a simple question, does FOSS want to be a winner or a loser?
It's not a game. The only losers are businesses that go out of business.
Does FOSS get adopted by the masses or stay nothing but a hobbyist playtoy?
As long as every non-Apple made comes with Windows preinstalled, Linux will never overtake it. That's why Windows sucks so bad -- because it can.
But you'll simply never get those masses if all UIs are frankly a half assed afterthought and you honestly think a "steep learning curve' will be considered worth it to anybody but yourself.
Again, KDE has a far, FAR shallower learning curve than Win 7. If you can use any flavor of Windows at all, KDE will be a breeze to use.
think something so simple your grandma ought to be able to figure it out just by looking and reading the mouse overs. THAT is what you should be shooting for
That's what Microsoft should be shooting for. I mentioned in another comment to you my problems with unsuccessfully copying an image with Windows 7 paint (new program) compared to Oo's paint program (also unfamiliar). 45 minutes and still no results in Microsoft's UI, less than a minute on Oo's.
I think that open source won long ago.
I wish that were true, but it isn't. Try buying a computer with an open source OS, or even no OS at all so you can install your choice. Of three phone OSes, two are closed source.
Every computer in almost every office is using MS Office on Windows. Almost every home PC is running Windows. How can you possibly think we've won?
This is something I've tried to literally beat over the heads of the FOSS geeks its that making a good UI isn't dumbing down its making your tool actually usable to the masses. How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness
I never used OSX, but Windows 7 easy to use and intuitive? WTF??? It's easier to switch from XP to KDE than it is to switch from XP to Win 7.
Win 7's Control Panel is a useability clusterfuck. Why was the "tap to click" so-called "feature" not under "mouse controls" in the control panel? Took me a month to find it, where nobody would ever think to look (think HHTG's highway planning department) but five minutes in KDE.
And that ribbon, jesus... BAAAAD design. BAAAAd BAAAAd BAAAAAd. I used it exactly once, over the weekend, in Windows paint. Here's useability lesson #1 -- if people are use to the clutch on the left and the brake in the midlle and throttle on the right, don't move the brake to the right just because it's an automatic transmission.
I had an image of an album cover I wanted to use with OGGs. In Winamp, the easiest way is to copy the image in a web page or image manipulation tool and paste it in. So I opened it in Windows Paint, right clicked the image... no "copy". So I look for the "edit" above, and there's no "edit" menu. I start clicking everything trying to find "edit", and they've moved "copy" to :File". WTF? So I copy, go to winamp... and it won't paste.
That is NOT a useable interface. At all. It is completely worthless, and I'm glad they're using old non-ribbon programs at work. I see few comments from anyone saying they like the ribbon, and those few seem to be die-hard Microsoft fans.
Meanwhile I opened Oo's image program, right clicked the image, clicked copy, tabbed to Winamp and had it done in fifteen seconds after struggling with Paint's shitty shitty bad bad interface for forty five minutes without getting what I wanted done, done. First time I used that program, too. And you think Grandma's going to figure that damned ribbon out when I couldn't??
LaTex? never used it either, for all I know its interface sucks as bad as Windows 7. But it would have to try REAL HARD to do that.
I despise Unity for the same reason I hate Win 7. Change for the sake of change is not progress. Change for the sake of improvement is progress. Change for the sake of change is brain dead stupid.
Well, there's at least one lawyer /. likes, NYCL. Oh, I thought of another one -- Lawrence Lessig. Two I personally like are the one who did my divorce, the one who did my bankrupcy, and my wife's lawyer in the divorce (because he was fucking incompetent and thanks to him Evil-X doesn't get any of my pension).
However, I do hate corporate lawyers. But I hate their bosses more.
What's the matter, Steve, they took away all the chairs?
I'm pro-choice
So you're in favor of legalizing marijuana? Whay should it be a woman's choice to remove a fetus, but not her choice to insert marijuana smoke?
Me, I'm anti-abortion, pro-choice, and pro-life. I'm against abortions but think they should be legal, it's nobody's business but the father's, mother's, and God's. But I'd like the kid's father to have a say in the matter. Men have no reproductive rights whatever. She wants it and you don't? Sorry, you're supporting it. She wants an abotion but you want to raise the kid? Sorry, she gets the abortion. That despite the fact that there is a plethora of birth control choices for women and none whatever for men.
Pro-life -- I'm against both war and capital punishment. Most people who claim to be "pro life" are for both of them.
Death is no penalty, we're all under a death sentence, and most of us will die horribly form cancer, heart disease, accident, or falling down and breaking a hip at age 99. Meanwhile the murderer knows when he will die and has a chance to find God and get to heaven, and then be painlessly put down like a beloved pet. No, let the bastard rot in prison until God Himself decides to take him.
privatize prisons
Some things should NEVER be privatized. Prisons are one of them.
Right to Work? (I support it), Lowering the minimum wage laws? (I support that too - minimum wage hurts the fixed income and elderly and youth.)
I could never vote for you. Food stamps are welfare for the greedy rich who pay minimum wage. Were it not for food stamps, half of McDonald's and WalMart employees would quit tomorrow. Nobody working 40 hours a week should be earning little enough to qualify for food stamps.
I'm all for employed teens, but we need to put folks who aren't being supported by their parents first.
As to your "fixed income elderly", that's just damned sad. It's people like you who made it so that few get pensions any more. God damn it, you should NOT have to work after you've been in the workforce for fifty years! What's wrong with you, man? Are you completely lacking a heart?
Yes, I'll be 60 in two months and am really looking forward to my pension. Raise Social Security and stop stealing from it to balance your budget. SS should have nothing to do with the budget, it should be its own budget.
And "right to work" is a really bad name. You have no right to work. Period. You can work if you can convince someone to hire you, it's no right. But I notice that you guys give lying titles to bad laws all the time (PATRIOT act for starters, real patriots want to defend freedoms, not take them away).
Your "right to work" is really the "right to get rid of that pesky union so you can fuck over your workers." Apologies for the language, but I feel so strongly about it I must. Unions are an employee's only chance to bargain effectively with an employer, and I am completely against you and every other union hater.
If someone else can do my job cheaper than I can, to the same standard or better than I can - I deserve to lose my job - that's the free market people are always raving about, isn't it.
You young people... sheesh. What happened to the old values? What happened to retiring with a generous pension? What happened to good paychecks? What happened to seniority?
I'll tell you -- the goddamned greedy Gen-Xers took over, and convinced the rest of you pups that they were right. I'm glad I'm no longer young, because if things keep going the way they have, America's going to be an intolerably shitty place by the time you kids are my age.
H1B visas are BAD for workers, period. Nobody should get an H1B visa unless there is nobody in the US capable of doing the job. India and China are eating America, and its leaders (political and economic) are letting them.
Now get off my lawn. And no, you can't have your ball back.
It hasn't just gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress, but has gone so far that it inhibits literary progress.
Terry Pratchett could probably sue me for writing this story.
You've never seen Star Trek? All ships are female. It's always "she was a good ship," never "he was a good ship." Same with cars.
I'd love to have one because it's Linux, but especially because it's not tied to a phone company. But there are a couple of things that keep me from buying it.
1. It's way overpriced (I discussed this at length in another comment)
2. Seven inch screen? Way too small. Make it ten inches, about the size of a hardcover book. A friend brought his iPad 4 to the bar the other day, that thing's about the ideal size. My notebook has a ten inch screen, and it's about right for me. I don't see the sense of lugging around a big seventeen inch laptop.
A question, though, how can installing an OS brick it? I've never seen any other computer bricked by an OS install.
You have to be careful what you say at all times these days. Under my workplaces' "zero tolerance" violence policy, a friend of mine was given a month's suspension for saying he was going to "take down" a co-worker. The message read to me like "take down" meant simply to get a troublemaker in trouble, but the troublemaker was his boss' friend.
Meanwhile I was verbally threatened with violence ("I'll kick you fucking ass you son of a bitch") by a fat old idiot PhD (I never guessed someone as stupid as this guy could get a doctorate), and was overheard by my boss' assistant. He got a verbal reprimand.
Glad I'm retiring in two years. I hate big organizations. You never see this stuff in a small shop
The price of the tablet itself is what holds me back. $265 USD seems pricey with a 1 ghz CPU, only 500 meg of ram, and only 4 Gb of internal storage and no keyboard. That's ten bucks more than an Acer Aspire One that has almost twice the CPU speed, twice the memory, and sixty two times the drive space. Oh, and the Acer has one more USB port, a network port, a monitor port, and not only audio output like the tablet but input as well. What makes the touchscreen so damned expensive? This thing should be at least a hundred bucks cheaper.
I'd buy one if I didn't think I was being robbed.
Nobody knows everything. I would assume that android apps would work in Linux, since Android is based on Linux, but I'd have to have an Android in my hands to know for sure, or someone who did telling me to have an idea of its truth.
Lots of MS fans at /. or I'd never be modded "flamebait" for complaining about Patch Tuesday and the monthy reboot. Perhaps he's a MS or Apple fan who's never used either Android or Linux but is finally getting curious?
You get what you pay for
That's a lie propagated by marketers to get you to spend three times on a bottle of Alieve what you'd pay for the exact same drug ins a generic bottle. Buy Alieve and you get 1/3 of what you pay for.
I see you still use Windows. Linux is a superior OS in most ways, yet it is entirely free. What are you paying for when you buy a boxed copy of Windows? A pretty box? No, you do NOT always get what you pay for. Often you pay for a lot more than you get.
so think about why your still getting those pop-up porn ad's.
Well, I see why you're getting them.