One thing -- I see the link I posted will get you to install the 2.4 version, which I believe was the version used in 8.10. That version also didn't work out so well for my Intel video chip (it didn't work when I was actually running 8.10 either).
So, then I went to 2.2, which was the version in 8.04. And that's the one that worked for me. But I say try 2.4 first. If for some reason you have trouble pulling from the repositories they're asking you to use (I don't think they're official), try just installing the driver manually from here:
I never mentioned Windows in my original post, yet all the responses cite it as the "one to beat".
An interesting point, and probably indicative of some bias around here -- but it's not without grounding. Since we're talking about desktop systems, not servers, we're pretty much talking about Windows, OS X, and a Unix derivative, usually Linux. And as comparisions of OS X to Linux are pretty rare, Windows is the logical assumption -- unless there's some additional closed desktop system out there of which I've not heard. (And I do mean one that has a userbase. The guy still using his Amiga doesn't count.) So yes, I naturally assumed you were talking about Windows. I could have been mistaken.
Your anecdote about OO is all well and good, but anecdotes are just that. I can't count the number of times I've been called down to the sales floor because someone whined "my email doesn't work" and it's because Outlook inexplicably won't connect to Exchange, or has locked the mailstore for no discernable reason, and Microsoft's KBs suggest running all kinds of useless tools which take an hour to "fix" the store and end up accomplishing nothing, etc, etc, etc. No useful error messages or logs, of course, because it's Microsoft. Hours and hours of my time wasted.
So there's how Office loses me time and money. As far as I'm concerned, the dubious "benefit" of being able to share calendars so managers can bicker about who gets to schedule a conference room is vastly overshadowed by what a miserable failure Outlook and Exchange truly are, and how poorly they work, and how few solutions exist to solve problems when they inevitably occur.
I'm not trying to claim Linux is perfect (yet..!) but to suggest that its ship has sailed is really jumping the gun. Just in the past few years, Ubuntu itself has come from a total unknown to something that OEMs are starting to support and offer pre-installed. It's come from something where you had to understand the CLI to something your mom could install as easily, if not easier, than Windows. Microsoft considers it to be more of a threat than OS X. You're starting to see it mentioned in magazines. All that in just a couple of years (I contend that end-user desktop-usability wasn't really much of a goal for anyone before a few years ago). The momentum behind it is large and growing.
Finally, although you might not have mentioned Windows specifically, your post did state that Linux wasn't "stable", "secure", "standards compliant", and so forth. This just isn't so. Now, we can trade anecdotes all day about how this OS or that failed one of us at one point or another, but no OS is perfect and such stories get us nowhere. I'm simply saying that your commentary on the state of Linux seems off the mark in some cases and wildly inaccurate in others. Maybe some of the applications don't work for your specific needs, but that's nothing to do with the condition of the OS as a whole.
Simple: one that is reliable, cheap (talking about TCO, not "free"ness[1]).
Windows' "reliability" is questionable -- it's come a way since XP, but Vista isn't what I'd call reliable yet. And spare us the TCO garbage. One day of my trying to hunt down a missing dll and then resolving the conflicting versions, or scrubbing a salesperson's machine of yet another couple of trojans and viruses, outweighs the "productivity" gains from Microsoft's offering.
Is integrated - so I can work quickly and efficiently.
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect I'm not alone. Next "point".
Is secure, so I can prevent unauthorised access to my resources.
Oh, yeah, Windows is highly secure and never lets unauthorised persons crack it. I'm not even going to bother providing links on such a laughable statement.
That I can rely on to support the hardware I need/want to use.
Agreed, Windows is pretty good about that these days, but no better than a modern Linux distro, particularly something like Ubuntu. I also note that Ubuntu usually gets things right out of the box, whereas on any fresh Windows install I have to spend an extra hour or two hunting down drivers from manufacturer's websites, installing them, and cleaning up the party favors they leave behind. Even then I was never able to get my Creative soundcard working under Vista, though it worked fine in Ubuntu (and, to be fair, XP as well, so I have no idea what the deal is). I ended up having to use the onboard sound because I just couldn't get it to work.
Is stable, so I have the confidence that in 3 or 5 years time, the same applications will work.
"Stable" can mean a few things, but it's certainly not "stable" by your definition. Tell that to all the people who won't migrate from XP to Vista, because their applications won't function properly under Vista. I guess you could argue that they can continue running XP but the counterargument is that they're nine years behind the times.
"Stable" also means, to me, that the OS remains relatively cruft-free over time, and doesn't lose performance over time. Microsoft is among the first to tell you to reinstall the OS every so often because Windows is guaranteed to slow down over time, regardless of what you do or how well you try to manage it.
Works well with the other systems I interface with.
Windows works well with other Windows systems. It doesn't work well with anything else. If you're strictly an all-Windows shop, great, but some of us are trying to get real work done.
Complies with standards so they will continue to work together in the future.
What standards would those be, exactly? Microsoft's own that are followed by nobody else? Frankly, Microsoft can't even maintain compatibility with its own stuff -- documents written under previous versions of Office won't open properly in newer versions half the time for example, then they introduced this docx and xlsx crapola to break even their own "standards". Microsoft dragged its heels in supporting ODF and then offered a completely half-assed add-on solution. Their HTML and CSS compliance still sucks as far as I can tell. POSIX compliance is unavailable in any version of Vista except Ultimate, and is only sort-kinda acheived in Server 2003. The list goes on. "Microsoft" and "standards compliance" are almost mutually exclusive terms.
Maybe I've been trolled, but I just can't make sense of your statements.
These days I'd be okay giving my mother an Ubuntu CD and knowing she could install it and use it with very minimal assistance from me. There is no way in Hell she could set up Windows on her own, and if she somehow managed, it'd be nearly unusable a week later with all the extraneous crap she'd have to install to get her day-to-day stuff done. And securing that puppy is a task unto itself.
As an aside, the Intel driver thing was about to be a deal-breaker for me also, after two days of using 9.04. Then I thought there must be a way to load the 8.04 video drivers for it, and lo, there is!
Give that a try. I bet it fixes your problem; it worked awesome for me.
(I ran into an intractable network card issue with 9.04 though, which forced me to go back to 8.04 entirely, but at least this solved my video problem...)
Okay. I read it. The guy makes his arguments, but then glosses over the last question which was basically "What's wrong with trying?" Here's his answer:
The problem is that the solutions being offered don't provide any detectable relief from this so-called catastrophe. Congress is now discussing an 80% reduction in U.S. greenhouse emissions by 2050. That's basically the equivalent of building 1,000 new nuclear power plants all operating by 2020. Now I'm all in favor of nuclear energy, but that would affect the global temperature by only seven-hundredths of a degree by 2050 and fifteen hundredths by 2100. We wouldn't even notice it.
What the hell is that? We wouldn't notice the temperature decrease? Here are things we'd notice:
Improved quality of air. Very little smog and pollution.
Same with water.
Factor in the health benefits of the above and the reduced cost of healthcare.
Little to no dependence on fossil fuels, which are finite resources and nobody knows how much longer they'll last.
Little to no dependence on usually foreign, sometimes hostile nations for our energy needs.
There are dozens of other benefits that I'm not covering. But it astonishes me when people argue about global warming and the detractors -- usually conservative -- deride it all as a myth, shrouded in veils of anti-capitalism.
Let's assume global warming is total BS -- there are still huge, tangible beneefits to taking steps to reduce greenhouse emissions, fossil fuel usage, and step up nuclear power generation. On top of all that is a "green market" economy waiting in the wings. Do anti-global-warming types think all this stuff is going to magically appear? Companies will have to design, maintain, and install the air scrubbers, the newer and better engines, the nuclear power plants, the power transmission infrastructure, and all the other things that could be done, employing hundreds of thousands, or millions in the process. Then all the companies that would make money doing business with them for materials, office supplies, labor, transportation, R&D, marketing, and so forth.
To do all that and be energy independent, and he's saying we shouldn't bother because it won't lower the temperature. Please.
Should someone who committed a crime be let go because some did not follow procedures NO,
Look, the rights of the accused are some of the most powerful outlined in the Bill of Rights for a good reason. If the government is going to accuse and attempt to convict and punish you for a crime, they are obligated to do so within the framework of the law they are enforcing. If they can't play by their own rules, they don't get to be in the game at all.
In a case like this it's pretty clear-cut, too. Getting a warrant is dead simple in most jurisdictions and judges will hand them out like candy on the flimsiest of pretexts. If the cops couldn't come up with a decent enough reason to convince a judge that this guy needs to be monitored, then what business did they have monitoring him anyway?
Punishing the police after the fact would do nothing for the guy whose rights were violated, either, and sets dangerous precedent. "Oh yeah, sorry we forced an illegal confession out of you and you're going to spend the next ten years in the slammer, but don't worry, we put the offending officer on a week of paid vacation -- er, 'administrative leave'." Why even have a Bill of Rights at that point?
Maybe they should take the hint and stop leaving me messages. After five years of my telling them I will not check them and all messages will be deleted without my listening to them, leaving me a message is rude -- it means I have to take time to delete all the stupid messages, which with modern systems, takes a while.
Voicemail as a concept is just maddening to me. In my day -- I'm in my late twenties -- we had "answering machines". You'd leave the house, come back, and maybe there was a message. It didn't record the time but who cares if they left the message at 2:30 or 3:12? It makes no difference. You know it was left during the time you were away and that's the only important part. You'd listen, and then delete the message.
Nowadays you have several different notifications on your phone alerting you that you have voicemail -- maybe an icon, a blinking light, a message that says "New Voicemail", a stuttered ringtone, an email alert, or all of the above, because evidently it's so important that you know about it that you need fifteen different reminders.
So you call your voicemail and listen to an idiotic series of instructions you've heard ten thousand times before. "You have.. three.. new messages and zero.. saved messages. To listen to.. new.. messages, press one.. to listen to--" One. "Message.. one.. left.. Tuesday.. November.. third.. at.. three.. twenty.. eight.. pm.. from.. three.. zero.. three.. two.. seven.. six.. five.. nine.. four.. five.." SHUT UP. Just play the damned message so I can move along with my life, please?
"Message.. deleted. To undelete.. press.. one. For the next message, press--" SHUT UP.
Leaving a message for someone else is even worse. "Hi, this is Joe Peschi, I'm can't answer the phone right now, leave a message, thanks!....To page this person, press.. one. To leave a message.. press.. two.. or stay on the line. To hear your horoscope, press.. three.." SHUT UP.
The hassle of leaving and retrieving voicemail is bad enough, but that's not the reason I refuse to check it. It's because it just doesn't matter. If I wanted to speak to whoever is calling me, I'd answer the phone -- if I don't, it's because I don't want to talk to them or I wasn't available. If I didn't want to talk to them, leaving a message isn't going to make me want to talk to them, and if I wasn't available and it's important, they'll call back later. And most importantly, if I think it's important, I have a record that they called, right there on the phone -- I know they called, and I don't need a voicemail to tell me about it. If I want to call them back I will.
I realise there are any number of situations where this attitude wouldn't work, but that's the other thing I can't stand about voicemail. If you're going to leave a message, a simple "Hey, this is Mark, call me back," or "Joe. 555-1212," will do nicely. People tend to leave seven-minute dissertations full of half-completed thoughts, usually ending them with "Give me a call back," making me wonder why they bothered leaving such a lengthy message in the first place since we're going to have to rehash it all in conversation anyway.
The price is probably set high enough that people won't try to use this as their primary connection, but low enough that it'll work for what I suspect is their target market -- business types who can put this on their expense account. Another sixty dollars a month for your road warriors is nothing to a large corporation if they can justify it with "I'll be able to interface with the clients from a taxi, from a restaurant, from anywhere!"
Windows is a huge hassle out of the box. It takes ages to set up and get your programs installed and if something goes wrong it takes ages to diagnose and fix - else the solution is a re-install.
What you say is 100% correct. Out of the box, Windows itself does absolutely nothing and everything requires you to go find and install third party applications yourself. The thing can't even send email for crissake. And Microsoft will be among the first to suggest a bloody "format and reinstall" solution at the first hint of trouble, because actually figuring out what's wrong and fixing it is too hard, and in many cases, impossible.
However, none of this matters to the average Joe, since much of the software he wants will be pre-installed by the OEM, and to him that's "Windows". As long as it does what he wants when he powers it on, he's fine with it, and he has been conditioned to think "find, download, and run random untrusted installers from the web" is a normal thing. When Windows inevitably comes grinding to a halt in a few months, Joe is also fine with reinstalling -- because he's been conditioned to believe that's just how computers are.
And so it really comes down to the Devil you know versus the Devil you don't, in Joe's eyes. He knows that Windows is a pain and a half to use, but at least he thinks he knows what to expect. Linux may be far superior, and have an easy learning curve these days, but Joe doesn't want to find out because he's not sure what it'll do or how to handle any problems that arise. He doesn't really know how to handle Windows problems either, but he has the illusion that he does, because he's so used to it.
I think the other big portion of "Joe's" problem is that he has a misguided notion of what he "needs" on a computer. For the past decade Joe has been using MS Word to write documents, and to him that's simply how it's done. He thinks he needs Word, and when he finds out you can't run Word in Linux, he believes Linux is a waste of time. I say this is misguided because what Joe really needs is to be able to write documents -- and it doesn't matter if he's doing that in Word or Openoffice Writer. He'd be okay with either once he started, but again, it's the Devil he knows versus the Devil he doesn't.
He can order a free CD, or he can mention it in the presence of some nerds at any coffee shop, library, computer lab, bus stop, restaurant, sidewalk hotdog cart, movie theatre, bar, or anywhere else, and the nerds will crawl over themselves to be the first to burn him a copy.
Honestly, I can't imagine why any "average" user would want Windows anymore. 400 dollars and a bunch of driver downloads later, and you have an OS. Whooptee do. It doesn't even come with a mail client -- it literally cannot do anything except kinda-sorta play music, and make you tear your hair out while web surfing with IE. If you want to do anything else, whatsoever, you'll have to get a bunch of third-party applications.
Things like send mail. Burn music (no, WMP doesn't actually do it). Write a letter or paper. Open a powerpoint presentation. Watch a DVD (WMP will do this sorta, sometimes). Retouch some pictures for the Christmas newsletter. You know.. all the stuff the average Joe wants to do with his computer? Windows won't do them. Not without more software. How you like them four hundred dollars?
So now Joe's choices become:
1. Pay even more for all this stuff. Office alone will run him 300 dollars. That's a total of 700 dollars worth of software so far, just to open a spreadsheet. And he can pay for all the rest of the stuff he'll need, too, like Photoshop, PowerDVD, Roxio, and whatever else. Have fun, Joe.
2. Pirate the applications. While some will take this route, I wonder how many "average Joes" out there really know how to mount an ISO and get appropriate cracks. And most of them will be rewarded with god-knows-what malware and trojans for their effort and end up having to reinstall the OS anyway, back to square one. This isn't really a great options.
3. Use cross platform open source applications: vlc, Thunderbird, Firefox, Open Office, Gimp, et al. This seems to be an increasingly popular option, as far as I can tell. And once Joe is already running primarily open source applications, it isn't a big leap for him to wonder why he's using Windows at all.
I don't think I'm being too starry-eyed about it -- entire government agencies are able to move to Linux on the desktop, and more and more people are using and hearing about this "Ubuntu" thing to get them interested. Considering that Windows really does not do anything out of the box, I wonder how much longer Microsoft will be able to convince people that 400 dollars is a fair price for what is little more than an application launcher (and gaming platform, if you want to look at it that way).
After previewing my comment I see I used a lot of bold but, hell, I'm keeping it there for that comic book style.
Indeed, which is why I loathe the "pedestrian right of way" concept. People blindly walk out into intersections all the time in Atlanta because they have the "right of way", which is bloody idiotic. The laws of physics overrule the laws of man, and a 40mph, 3000 pound car isn't going to come to a dead halt in the space of twenty feet just because you have the "right of way", nor is your "right of way" going to help you when you're a smear across the asphalt because someone didn't see you or couldn't stop in time.
On foot, at a crosswalk where I have the right of way I will stand there until traffic is clear, no matter how long it takes -- not just stroll across hoping people will stop. My parents taught me not to walk into traffic when I was three.
Many Windows users are perfectly willing to give spyware/viruses permissions to run. No matter how many protections are in Windows (and other OSes), eventually you're going to have to give users the ability to install new software
I think part of the issue is that Windows' model of software installation means that downloading and running random, untrusted executables from god-knows-where is simply The Way Things Are Done. There are no vetted-and-verified repositories of software -- you're expected to just download random garbage and run it.
Besides the malware that much of it comes with, it also conditions users to not think about what they're doing, because downloading and running random stuff is completely normal to them.
Who cares if the "print quality" is good, considering the drivel most people print? Does it really matter if some middle manager's inexplicably printed email isn't as "good" as the laser printer? He's going to throw it out within the next few days anyway. Most of the stuff people print is for one-off nonsense where it doesn't need to look good or last any significant period of time. If you're printing product brochures or marketing material, your office printer isn't what you should be using in the first place. I'm not really sure I understand the problem.
I realise this is totally offtopic, but it did catch my eye that the vogue phrase is "animal models" instead of "animal experiments". I don't want to even start a battle about the ethics of animal experimentation, but I just found it interesting that they seem to try to sidestep the issue altogether by cushioning their words. Sounds like politics as usual.. so hey, maybe it's not all that off-topic after all.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled Slashdot mayhem.
At first they came for the hostile bloggers but I said nothing, for I was not a hostile blogger...
Then they came for the annoying myspacers, but I said nothing, for I was not an annoying myspacer...
Then they came for the Fark photoshoppers, but I said nothing, for I was not a Fark photoshopper...
Then they came for the vapid Tweeters, but I said nothing, for I was not a vapid Tweeter...
Then they came for the Slashdotters, and there was no one left to say anything.
I'm not sure twitter has any realistic way to generate revenue, nevermind your speculative "millions over the course of decades". If I developed an application like that, which had very little future, and someone offered me a few million for it, I'd take it and run.
Google, Red Hat, and Amazon all had business models that were/are generating revenue, and it was only a matter of increasing that revenue. Twitter has no revenue, nobody has any realistic idea how it ever can, and any cash offer is infinitely more valuable than twitter itself is worth.
Let's not overstate things. In any OS you're going to have something go wrong at some point and turn to the mighty Google. I find it happens a lot less in Linux, where it will often TELL you what the problem is, but it does happen.
Still, I do agree it's leaps and bounds ahead of googling for "windows 0xDEADBEEF error" and getting zero information, not having access to any logs, and so forth.
If I had mod points I'd mod you way up for the rest of your post though. The advantages of Linux over Windows are too numerous to cover, but unfortunately people think that "format and reinstall", having to defrag, run antivirus and antispyware, and all the rest are "just how computers work". It's sad, but true.. for now.
Ubuntu's "Add/Remove" goes a long way to solving this, but it's not perfect. Still, for the average novice, it provides much better, friendlier descriptions than what you see in apt, with a scoring system to tell you how popular it is, and overall it's just "nicer" to a newb. It also filters very well, so the user running the search will just see that this is a DVD player or whatever, and not all the associated libraries and stuff they don't need to care about. The scoring system also helps them decide (rightly or wrongly), so they can see that plenty of people use option A and only a few use option B, so they might try option A first.
Screenshots would be nice, I guess.
But look at the flip side -- you want some new software in Windows? You have to find it yourself, sift through pages and pages of Google results, find one that actually does what you want and isn't a crippled version, a trial version, or costs an arm and a leg. Then download and run an untrusted executable that came from god-knows-where, then clean up the systray icons and desktop shortcuts and other party favors. And half the time it still won't run properly because you need some codec or dll or something, so you have to go hunt that down.
OVerall, the package management system needs work to be user-friendly but I still say it's lightyears ahead of where Windows is. And once a user feels comfortable with it they can dive into synaptic or apt for more packages and better control of what's going on -- whereas in Windowsland you're stuck doing it one way, or no way at all.
I *DO* have my desktop in 15 seconds. I've never had that with any previous version of Windows. Much of the "pre-loading" is actually done post boot.
Right, which I find annoying. As soon as I have my desktop up I want to open my usual host of applications, and I'm stuck waiting forever for them because the system is thrashing about trying to load a bunch of other crap Windows thinks I might possibly want to load at some unspecified point in the future.
Besides, I have no idea what criteria Windows uses to determine what my "likely" programs are, but if it's even remotely like the criteria it uses to display "Often Used" and "Rarely Used" in the Add/Remove Programs applet, I have zero faith in it whatsoever.
I agree with the parent poster. Windows should focus on being stable, not trying to predict what I might want to do, because it's never been good at that and the performance benefits are dubious at best and counterproductive at worst.
No, he was confused and thought the poster was his computer illiterate aunt, and so he was addressing her and saying that he purchased Windows ME, the way John McCain might say "I did such and such, my friends..."
He's still right. What you're saying is basically akin to saying that the air in a car is "recycled" because it's not moving 100% of the air mass at all times. For a good duration of the time you spend in a car with closed windows, you're breathing in the same air you breathed out a moment ago. But it isn't airtight, and there are vents, so 100% of it gets cycled out eventually.
When people speak of "recycled air" on an airplane they seem to think that aircraft are like submarines, completely airtight, and the only air is that which you had when you took off from the runway. This simply isn't the case -- it's all going to get cycled out and continuously refreshed. Of course a certain amount is getting recirculated, just as in a closed car, but sooner or later it's all fresh air. You're not landing with the same air molecules you had when you took off.
In commercial aircraft (I don't know about small craft like Cessnas), there are one or more apertures, usually near the rear of the plane, which can open and close to variable diameters, and that's part of how cabin pressure is regulated. You pump more air into the cabin than you let out through the aperture, and the result is a higher air pressure than what's outside -- and that air is indeed being pumped in from the outside, through the engines (which are basically doing nothing but forcing air around at high velocity anyway).
Incidentally this is also why shooting a gun in an aircraft and blowing a hole through the hull isn't the huge deal everyone thinks it is, resulting in decompression and a big crisis. If such a thing occured, the apertures would simply close a bit more to compensate for the drop in pressure, and all would be well -- at least as far as cabin pressure is concerned.
Laptops also make great little servers (for non corporate applications of course!), when you think about it -- low power, no extra cooling needed, and built-in UPS. I have a Dell 1.4ghz P4 laptop with a screen that was too flaky to use, so it just sits quietly on the corner of my desk with the lid closed, running Debian, and is my development/test webserver, mailserver, screened IRC session, nagios monitoring, file server, ftp drop for friends to send me stuff, ssh gateway to the rest of my home network, and a few other random little things as needed. Hardly creative, I admit, but it's always been useful. I only needed to plug in an external monitor once, for the initial installation.
I guess the point is that the candidate who interviewed and didn't get the job will just receive a stock answer like "Thanks for your time, but we've filled the position." That candidate has absolutely no way of knowing whether he didn't get the job because his Facebook profile said something the employer didn't like, or if the employer really did find a better person for the position, or what.
He can rant and rave all he likes about how it must be because he's Mormon, or gay, or likes dogs when the HR person likes cats, or whatever, but he has no way of proving that. Even if he somehow managed to get it to court, the employer just has to say "We found someone else, that's all," and that's the end of it.
You say it's easy to convince a courtroom that you were the subject of discrimination, but I disagree. I think it'd be nearly impossible to prove, because the employer can come up with any number of reasons you didn't get the job. Honestly, they can say something like "Well, I didn't like the color of the shirt he was wearing in the interview." They'd look like loonies, but there'd be nothing illegal about it, and I can't see a legal way to argue against it.
I agree that games don't work well under Linux -- though ones that install natively, like Doom 3, work well. However, my conclusion was totally different from yours. I use Linux exclusively for doing anything, and my Windows machine has become relegated to little more than a game platform.:) I hardly ever touch it except for that.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing -- I see the link I posted will get you to install the 2.4 version, which I believe was the version used in 8.10. That version also didn't work out so well for my Intel video chip (it didn't work when I was actually running 8.10 either).
So, then I went to 2.2, which was the version in 8.04. And that's the one that worked for me. But I say try 2.4 first. If for some reason you have trouble pulling from the repositories they're asking you to use (I don't think they're official), try just installing the driver manually from here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/xserver-xorg-video-intel
Good luck.
I never mentioned Windows in my original post, yet all the responses cite it as the "one to beat".
An interesting point, and probably indicative of some bias around here -- but it's not without grounding. Since we're talking about desktop systems, not servers, we're pretty much talking about Windows, OS X, and a Unix derivative, usually Linux. And as comparisions of OS X to Linux are pretty rare, Windows is the logical assumption -- unless there's some additional closed desktop system out there of which I've not heard. (And I do mean one that has a userbase. The guy still using his Amiga doesn't count.) So yes, I naturally assumed you were talking about Windows. I could have been mistaken.
Your anecdote about OO is all well and good, but anecdotes are just that. I can't count the number of times I've been called down to the sales floor because someone whined "my email doesn't work" and it's because Outlook inexplicably won't connect to Exchange, or has locked the mailstore for no discernable reason, and Microsoft's KBs suggest running all kinds of useless tools which take an hour to "fix" the store and end up accomplishing nothing, etc, etc, etc. No useful error messages or logs, of course, because it's Microsoft. Hours and hours of my time wasted.
So there's how Office loses me time and money. As far as I'm concerned, the dubious "benefit" of being able to share calendars so managers can bicker about who gets to schedule a conference room is vastly overshadowed by what a miserable failure Outlook and Exchange truly are, and how poorly they work, and how few solutions exist to solve problems when they inevitably occur.
I'm not trying to claim Linux is perfect (yet..!) but to suggest that its ship has sailed is really jumping the gun. Just in the past few years, Ubuntu itself has come from a total unknown to something that OEMs are starting to support and offer pre-installed. It's come from something where you had to understand the CLI to something your mom could install as easily, if not easier, than Windows. Microsoft considers it to be more of a threat than OS X. You're starting to see it mentioned in magazines. All that in just a couple of years (I contend that end-user desktop-usability wasn't really much of a goal for anyone before a few years ago). The momentum behind it is large and growing.
Finally, although you might not have mentioned Windows specifically, your post did state that Linux wasn't "stable", "secure", "standards compliant", and so forth. This just isn't so. Now, we can trade anecdotes all day about how this OS or that failed one of us at one point or another, but no OS is perfect and such stories get us nowhere. I'm simply saying that your commentary on the state of Linux seems off the mark in some cases and wildly inaccurate in others. Maybe some of the applications don't work for your specific needs, but that's nothing to do with the condition of the OS as a whole.
Cheers.
Simple: one that is reliable, cheap (talking about TCO, not "free"ness[1]).
Windows' "reliability" is questionable -- it's come a way since XP, but Vista isn't what I'd call reliable yet. And spare us the TCO garbage. One day of my trying to hunt down a missing dll and then resolving the conflicting versions, or scrubbing a salesperson's machine of yet another couple of trojans and viruses, outweighs the "productivity" gains from Microsoft's offering.
Is integrated - so I can work quickly and efficiently.
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect I'm not alone. Next "point".
Is secure, so I can prevent unauthorised access to my resources.
Oh, yeah, Windows is highly secure and never lets unauthorised persons crack it. I'm not even going to bother providing links on such a laughable statement.
That I can rely on to support the hardware I need/want to use.
Agreed, Windows is pretty good about that these days, but no better than a modern Linux distro, particularly something like Ubuntu. I also note that Ubuntu usually gets things right out of the box, whereas on any fresh Windows install I have to spend an extra hour or two hunting down drivers from manufacturer's websites, installing them, and cleaning up the party favors they leave behind. Even then I was never able to get my Creative soundcard working under Vista, though it worked fine in Ubuntu (and, to be fair, XP as well, so I have no idea what the deal is). I ended up having to use the onboard sound because I just couldn't get it to work.
Is stable, so I have the confidence that in 3 or 5 years time, the same applications will work.
"Stable" can mean a few things, but it's certainly not "stable" by your definition. Tell that to all the people who won't migrate from XP to Vista, because their applications won't function properly under Vista. I guess you could argue that they can continue running XP but the counterargument is that they're nine years behind the times.
"Stable" also means, to me, that the OS remains relatively cruft-free over time, and doesn't lose performance over time. Microsoft is among the first to tell you to reinstall the OS every so often because Windows is guaranteed to slow down over time, regardless of what you do or how well you try to manage it.
Works well with the other systems I interface with.
Windows works well with other Windows systems. It doesn't work well with anything else. If you're strictly an all-Windows shop, great, but some of us are trying to get real work done.
Complies with standards so they will continue to work together in the future.
What standards would those be, exactly? Microsoft's own that are followed by nobody else? Frankly, Microsoft can't even maintain compatibility with its own stuff -- documents written under previous versions of Office won't open properly in newer versions half the time for example, then they introduced this docx and xlsx crapola to break even their own "standards". Microsoft dragged its heels in supporting ODF and then offered a completely half-assed add-on solution. Their HTML and CSS compliance still sucks as far as I can tell. POSIX compliance is unavailable in any version of Vista except Ultimate, and is only sort-kinda acheived in Server 2003. The list goes on. "Microsoft" and "standards compliance" are almost mutually exclusive terms.
Maybe I've been trolled, but I just can't make sense of your statements.
Here's my "article" on why Windows is not ready for the desktop.
And here's the tl;dr version.
These days I'd be okay giving my mother an Ubuntu CD and knowing she could install it and use it with very minimal assistance from me. There is no way in Hell she could set up Windows on her own, and if she somehow managed, it'd be nearly unusable a week later with all the extraneous crap she'd have to install to get her day-to-day stuff done. And securing that puppy is a task unto itself.
As an aside, the Intel driver thing was about to be a deal-breaker for me also, after two days of using 9.04. Then I thought there must be a way to load the 8.04 video drivers for it, and lo, there is!
Give that a try. I bet it fixes your problem; it worked awesome for me.
(I ran into an intractable network card issue with 9.04 though, which forced me to go back to 8.04 entirely, but at least this solved my video problem...)
What the hell is that? We wouldn't notice the temperature decrease? Here are things we'd notice:
There are dozens of other benefits that I'm not covering. But it astonishes me when people argue about global warming and the detractors -- usually conservative -- deride it all as a myth, shrouded in veils of anti-capitalism.
Let's assume global warming is total BS -- there are still huge, tangible beneefits to taking steps to reduce greenhouse emissions, fossil fuel usage, and step up nuclear power generation. On top of all that is a "green market" economy waiting in the wings. Do anti-global-warming types think all this stuff is going to magically appear? Companies will have to design, maintain, and install the air scrubbers, the newer and better engines, the nuclear power plants, the power transmission infrastructure, and all the other things that could be done, employing hundreds of thousands, or millions in the process. Then all the companies that would make money doing business with them for materials, office supplies, labor, transportation, R&D, marketing, and so forth.
To do all that and be energy independent, and he's saying we shouldn't bother because it won't lower the temperature. Please.
Should someone who committed a crime be let go because some did not follow procedures NO,
Look, the rights of the accused are some of the most powerful outlined in the Bill of Rights for a good reason. If the government is going to accuse and attempt to convict and punish you for a crime, they are obligated to do so within the framework of the law they are enforcing. If they can't play by their own rules, they don't get to be in the game at all.
In a case like this it's pretty clear-cut, too. Getting a warrant is dead simple in most jurisdictions and judges will hand them out like candy on the flimsiest of pretexts. If the cops couldn't come up with a decent enough reason to convince a judge that this guy needs to be monitored, then what business did they have monitoring him anyway?
Punishing the police after the fact would do nothing for the guy whose rights were violated, either, and sets dangerous precedent. "Oh yeah, sorry we forced an illegal confession out of you and you're going to spend the next ten years in the slammer, but don't worry, we put the offending officer on a week of paid vacation -- er, 'administrative leave'." Why even have a Bill of Rights at that point?
Maybe they should take the hint and stop leaving me messages. After five years of my telling them I will not check them and all messages will be deleted without my listening to them, leaving me a message is rude -- it means I have to take time to delete all the stupid messages, which with modern systems, takes a while.
....To page this person, press.. one. To leave a message.. press.. two.. or stay on the line. To hear your horoscope, press.. three.." SHUT UP.
Voicemail as a concept is just maddening to me. In my day -- I'm in my late twenties -- we had "answering machines". You'd leave the house, come back, and maybe there was a message. It didn't record the time but who cares if they left the message at 2:30 or 3:12? It makes no difference. You know it was left during the time you were away and that's the only important part. You'd listen, and then delete the message.
Nowadays you have several different notifications on your phone alerting you that you have voicemail -- maybe an icon, a blinking light, a message that says "New Voicemail", a stuttered ringtone, an email alert, or all of the above, because evidently it's so important that you know about it that you need fifteen different reminders.
So you call your voicemail and listen to an idiotic series of instructions you've heard ten thousand times before. "You have.. three.. new messages and zero.. saved messages. To listen to.. new.. messages, press one.. to listen to--" One. "Message.. one.. left.. Tuesday.. November.. third.. at.. three.. twenty.. eight.. pm.. from.. three.. zero.. three.. two.. seven.. six.. five.. nine.. four.. five.." SHUT UP. Just play the damned message so I can move along with my life, please?
"Message.. deleted. To undelete.. press.. one. For the next message, press--" SHUT UP.
Leaving a message for someone else is even worse. "Hi, this is Joe Peschi, I'm can't answer the phone right now, leave a message, thanks!
The hassle of leaving and retrieving voicemail is bad enough, but that's not the reason I refuse to check it. It's because it just doesn't matter. If I wanted to speak to whoever is calling me, I'd answer the phone -- if I don't, it's because I don't want to talk to them or I wasn't available. If I didn't want to talk to them, leaving a message isn't going to make me want to talk to them, and if I wasn't available and it's important, they'll call back later. And most importantly, if I think it's important, I have a record that they called, right there on the phone -- I know they called, and I don't need a voicemail to tell me about it. If I want to call them back I will.
I realise there are any number of situations where this attitude wouldn't work, but that's the other thing I can't stand about voicemail. If you're going to leave a message, a simple "Hey, this is Mark, call me back," or "Joe. 555-1212," will do nicely. People tend to leave seven-minute dissertations full of half-completed thoughts, usually ending them with "Give me a call back," making me wonder why they bothered leaving such a lengthy message in the first place since we're going to have to rehash it all in conversation anyway.
The price is probably set high enough that people won't try to use this as their primary connection, but low enough that it'll work for what I suspect is their target market -- business types who can put this on their expense account. Another sixty dollars a month for your road warriors is nothing to a large corporation if they can justify it with "I'll be able to interface with the clients from a taxi, from a restaurant, from anywhere!"
Windows is a huge hassle out of the box. It takes ages to set up and get your programs installed and if something goes wrong it takes ages to diagnose and fix - else the solution is a re-install.
What you say is 100% correct. Out of the box, Windows itself does absolutely nothing and everything requires you to go find and install third party applications yourself. The thing can't even send email for crissake. And Microsoft will be among the first to suggest a bloody "format and reinstall" solution at the first hint of trouble, because actually figuring out what's wrong and fixing it is too hard, and in many cases, impossible.
However, none of this matters to the average Joe, since much of the software he wants will be pre-installed by the OEM, and to him that's "Windows". As long as it does what he wants when he powers it on, he's fine with it, and he has been conditioned to think "find, download, and run random untrusted installers from the web" is a normal thing. When Windows inevitably comes grinding to a halt in a few months, Joe is also fine with reinstalling -- because he's been conditioned to believe that's just how computers are.
And so it really comes down to the Devil you know versus the Devil you don't, in Joe's eyes. He knows that Windows is a pain and a half to use, but at least he thinks he knows what to expect. Linux may be far superior, and have an easy learning curve these days, but Joe doesn't want to find out because he's not sure what it'll do or how to handle any problems that arise. He doesn't really know how to handle Windows problems either, but he has the illusion that he does, because he's so used to it.
I think the other big portion of "Joe's" problem is that he has a misguided notion of what he "needs" on a computer. For the past decade Joe has been using MS Word to write documents, and to him that's simply how it's done. He thinks he needs Word, and when he finds out you can't run Word in Linux, he believes Linux is a waste of time. I say this is misguided because what Joe really needs is to be able to write documents -- and it doesn't matter if he's doing that in Word or Openoffice Writer. He'd be okay with either once he started, but again, it's the Devil he knows versus the Devil he doesn't.
He can order a free CD, or he can mention it in the presence of some nerds at any coffee shop, library, computer lab, bus stop, restaurant, sidewalk hotdog cart, movie theatre, bar, or anywhere else, and the nerds will crawl over themselves to be the first to burn him a copy.
Honestly, I can't imagine why any "average" user would want Windows anymore. 400 dollars and a bunch of driver downloads later, and you have an OS. Whooptee do. It doesn't even come with a mail client -- it literally cannot do anything except kinda-sorta play music, and make you tear your hair out while web surfing with IE. If you want to do anything else, whatsoever, you'll have to get a bunch of third-party applications.
Things like send mail. Burn music (no, WMP doesn't actually do it). Write a letter or paper. Open a powerpoint presentation. Watch a DVD (WMP will do this sorta, sometimes). Retouch some pictures for the Christmas newsletter. You know.. all the stuff the average Joe wants to do with his computer? Windows won't do them. Not without more software. How you like them four hundred dollars?
So now Joe's choices become:
1. Pay even more for all this stuff. Office alone will run him 300 dollars. That's a total of 700 dollars worth of software so far, just to open a spreadsheet. And he can pay for all the rest of the stuff he'll need, too, like Photoshop, PowerDVD, Roxio, and whatever else. Have fun, Joe.
2. Pirate the applications. While some will take this route, I wonder how many "average Joes" out there really know how to mount an ISO and get appropriate cracks. And most of them will be rewarded with god-knows-what malware and trojans for their effort and end up having to reinstall the OS anyway, back to square one. This isn't really a great options.
3. Use cross platform open source applications: vlc, Thunderbird, Firefox, Open Office, Gimp, et al. This seems to be an increasingly popular option, as far as I can tell. And once Joe is already running primarily open source applications, it isn't a big leap for him to wonder why he's using Windows at all.
I don't think I'm being too starry-eyed about it -- entire government agencies are able to move to Linux on the desktop, and more and more people are using and hearing about this "Ubuntu" thing to get them interested. Considering that Windows really does not do anything out of the box, I wonder how much longer Microsoft will be able to convince people that 400 dollars is a fair price for what is little more than an application launcher (and gaming platform, if you want to look at it that way).
After previewing my comment I see I used a lot of bold but, hell, I'm keeping it there for that comic book style.
Indeed, which is why I loathe the "pedestrian right of way" concept. People blindly walk out into intersections all the time in Atlanta because they have the "right of way", which is bloody idiotic. The laws of physics overrule the laws of man, and a 40mph, 3000 pound car isn't going to come to a dead halt in the space of twenty feet just because you have the "right of way", nor is your "right of way" going to help you when you're a smear across the asphalt because someone didn't see you or couldn't stop in time.
On foot, at a crosswalk where I have the right of way I will stand there until traffic is clear, no matter how long it takes -- not just stroll across hoping people will stop. My parents taught me not to walk into traffic when I was three.
Many Windows users are perfectly willing to give spyware/viruses permissions to run. No matter how many protections are in Windows (and other OSes), eventually you're going to have to give users the ability to install new software
I think part of the issue is that Windows' model of software installation means that downloading and running random, untrusted executables from god-knows-where is simply The Way Things Are Done. There are no vetted-and-verified repositories of software -- you're expected to just download random garbage and run it.
Besides the malware that much of it comes with, it also conditions users to not think about what they're doing, because downloading and running random stuff is completely normal to them.
Who cares if the "print quality" is good, considering the drivel most people print? Does it really matter if some middle manager's inexplicably printed email isn't as "good" as the laser printer? He's going to throw it out within the next few days anyway. Most of the stuff people print is for one-off nonsense where it doesn't need to look good or last any significant period of time. If you're printing product brochures or marketing material, your office printer isn't what you should be using in the first place. I'm not really sure I understand the problem.
I realise this is totally offtopic, but it did catch my eye that the vogue phrase is "animal models" instead of "animal experiments". I don't want to even start a battle about the ethics of animal experimentation, but I just found it interesting that they seem to try to sidestep the issue altogether by cushioning their words. Sounds like politics as usual.. so hey, maybe it's not all that off-topic after all.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled Slashdot mayhem.
At first they came for the hostile bloggers but I said nothing, for I was not a hostile blogger...
Then they came for the annoying myspacers, but I said nothing, for I was not an annoying myspacer...
Then they came for the Fark photoshoppers, but I said nothing, for I was not a Fark photoshopper...
Then they came for the vapid Tweeters, but I said nothing, for I was not a vapid Tweeter...
Then they came for the Slashdotters, and there was no one left to say anything.
I'm not sure twitter has any realistic way to generate revenue, nevermind your speculative "millions over the course of decades". If I developed an application like that, which had very little future, and someone offered me a few million for it, I'd take it and run.
Google, Red Hat, and Amazon all had business models that were/are generating revenue, and it was only a matter of increasing that revenue. Twitter has no revenue, nobody has any realistic idea how it ever can, and any cash offer is infinitely more valuable than twitter itself is worth.
Everything you said is 100% correct except this:
no googling forum after forum looking for answers
Let's not overstate things. In any OS you're going to have something go wrong at some point and turn to the mighty Google. I find it happens a lot less in Linux, where it will often TELL you what the problem is, but it does happen.
Still, I do agree it's leaps and bounds ahead of googling for "windows 0xDEADBEEF error" and getting zero information, not having access to any logs, and so forth.
If I had mod points I'd mod you way up for the rest of your post though. The advantages of Linux over Windows are too numerous to cover, but unfortunately people think that "format and reinstall", having to defrag, run antivirus and antispyware, and all the rest are "just how computers work". It's sad, but true.. for now.
Ubuntu's "Add/Remove" goes a long way to solving this, but it's not perfect. Still, for the average novice, it provides much better, friendlier descriptions than what you see in apt, with a scoring system to tell you how popular it is, and overall it's just "nicer" to a newb. It also filters very well, so the user running the search will just see that this is a DVD player or whatever, and not all the associated libraries and stuff they don't need to care about. The scoring system also helps them decide (rightly or wrongly), so they can see that plenty of people use option A and only a few use option B, so they might try option A first.
Screenshots would be nice, I guess.
But look at the flip side -- you want some new software in Windows? You have to find it yourself, sift through pages and pages of Google results, find one that actually does what you want and isn't a crippled version, a trial version, or costs an arm and a leg. Then download and run an untrusted executable that came from god-knows-where, then clean up the systray icons and desktop shortcuts and other party favors. And half the time it still won't run properly because you need some codec or dll or something, so you have to go hunt that down.
OVerall, the package management system needs work to be user-friendly but I still say it's lightyears ahead of where Windows is. And once a user feels comfortable with it they can dive into synaptic or apt for more packages and better control of what's going on -- whereas in Windowsland you're stuck doing it one way, or no way at all.
I *DO* have my desktop in 15 seconds. I've never had that with any previous version of Windows. Much of the "pre-loading" is actually done post boot.
Right, which I find annoying. As soon as I have my desktop up I want to open my usual host of applications, and I'm stuck waiting forever for them because the system is thrashing about trying to load a bunch of other crap Windows thinks I might possibly want to load at some unspecified point in the future.
Besides, I have no idea what criteria Windows uses to determine what my "likely" programs are, but if it's even remotely like the criteria it uses to display "Often Used" and "Rarely Used" in the Add/Remove Programs applet, I have zero faith in it whatsoever.
I agree with the parent poster. Windows should focus on being stable, not trying to predict what I might want to do, because it's never been good at that and the performance benefits are dubious at best and counterproductive at worst.
No, he was confused and thought the poster was his computer illiterate aunt, and so he was addressing her and saying that he purchased Windows ME, the way John McCain might say "I did such and such, my friends..."
He's still right. What you're saying is basically akin to saying that the air in a car is "recycled" because it's not moving 100% of the air mass at all times. For a good duration of the time you spend in a car with closed windows, you're breathing in the same air you breathed out a moment ago. But it isn't airtight, and there are vents, so 100% of it gets cycled out eventually.
When people speak of "recycled air" on an airplane they seem to think that aircraft are like submarines, completely airtight, and the only air is that which you had when you took off from the runway. This simply isn't the case -- it's all going to get cycled out and continuously refreshed. Of course a certain amount is getting recirculated, just as in a closed car, but sooner or later it's all fresh air. You're not landing with the same air molecules you had when you took off.
In commercial aircraft (I don't know about small craft like Cessnas), there are one or more apertures, usually near the rear of the plane, which can open and close to variable diameters, and that's part of how cabin pressure is regulated. You pump more air into the cabin than you let out through the aperture, and the result is a higher air pressure than what's outside -- and that air is indeed being pumped in from the outside, through the engines (which are basically doing nothing but forcing air around at high velocity anyway).
Incidentally this is also why shooting a gun in an aircraft and blowing a hole through the hull isn't the huge deal everyone thinks it is, resulting in decompression and a big crisis. If such a thing occured, the apertures would simply close a bit more to compensate for the drop in pressure, and all would be well -- at least as far as cabin pressure is concerned.
Laptops also make great little servers (for non corporate applications of course!), when you think about it -- low power, no extra cooling needed, and built-in UPS. I have a Dell 1.4ghz P4 laptop with a screen that was too flaky to use, so it just sits quietly on the corner of my desk with the lid closed, running Debian, and is my development/test webserver, mailserver, screened IRC session, nagios monitoring, file server, ftp drop for friends to send me stuff, ssh gateway to the rest of my home network, and a few other random little things as needed. Hardly creative, I admit, but it's always been useful. I only needed to plug in an external monitor once, for the initial installation.
I guess the point is that the candidate who interviewed and didn't get the job will just receive a stock answer like "Thanks for your time, but we've filled the position." That candidate has absolutely no way of knowing whether he didn't get the job because his Facebook profile said something the employer didn't like, or if the employer really did find a better person for the position, or what.
He can rant and rave all he likes about how it must be because he's Mormon, or gay, or likes dogs when the HR person likes cats, or whatever, but he has no way of proving that. Even if he somehow managed to get it to court, the employer just has to say "We found someone else, that's all," and that's the end of it.
You say it's easy to convince a courtroom that you were the subject of discrimination, but I disagree. I think it'd be nearly impossible to prove, because the employer can come up with any number of reasons you didn't get the job. Honestly, they can say something like "Well, I didn't like the color of the shirt he was wearing in the interview." They'd look like loonies, but there'd be nothing illegal about it, and I can't see a legal way to argue against it.
I agree that games don't work well under Linux -- though ones that install natively, like Doom 3, work well. However, my conclusion was totally different from yours. I use Linux exclusively for doing anything, and my Windows machine has become relegated to little more than a game platform. :) I hardly ever touch it except for that.