Why in god's name are you running Winamp in a VM? Just get audacious, which is almost the exact same thing, but comes with a few extras that make it nicer.
You don't know me, and you're posting anonymously so I sure as hell don't know you.
But more to the point, as Carly Simon might say, this song ain't about me.
I used myself only as an example of the sort of trouble people may find themselves in without really meaning to, or even knowing how they got there.
But your three points are so oft-repeated and so tired that I'll address them briefly.
1) not move out of your parents' house at 19 years of age.
Wasn't my choice. I was kicked out. Like thousands of others. Not everyone has the luxury of choice here. Sometimes, people find themselves in situations they'd rather not be, and that's that.
2) start working at a younger age than 19 while you still lived at your parents' house
That's great advice, except that it doesn't do any good to tell it to someone once they've already left. Plus, try to explain to a seventeen year old that "don't take out that girl, you should save your money because in four years you might need it!" and see how far you get. So, on second thought, your advice is full of good intentions but complete horsebull.
3) move to a different town
Asking someone who can barely afford rent as is to "move to a different town" is like asking the rain to fall up. It's not happening. Moving takes resources, possibly credit, certainly capital. In addition, you're asking them to move away from what little base they have, and be completely on their own, and,. do what? Be stuck with basically the same dead-end job prospects they had before but oh.. now at least maybe they can walk to their minimum wage job instead of drive illegally to their higher-paid job they had before. Yeah, that's going to advance them, and society.
It's easy to have all the answers, until you've been there. I'm not saying it can't be done -- I made it out of that quagmire -- but tossing out canned responses isn't helping anyone.
You could even have the insurance company notify the state when you drop insurance.
Yeah, I think my insurance company/state does this. The problem is, they're really quick to notify the state (but not you) that you're now uninsured because you paid the bill one day late. They're not so great at telling the state that you paid up the next day and are all good now. The state then immediately and silently suspends your tag, so months or even years later some cop runs your tag, finds it's suspended, which means a ticket and mandatory court appearance, where you'll be forced to explain why you paid your insurance a day late, three years ago, and didn't pay the 20 dollare tag-reactivation fee nobody told you about.
That's how it works around here, anyway, and I have no reason to believe any other local government is any more rational or sane.
There was your solution, had you chosen it: a bicycle.
Not sure where you think I was supposed to get the money for that; guess I could have sold my car, but then that'd be another couple thousand dollar thing I'd have to replace when I eventually did pull myself back out of the hole. Of course, things within biking distance were basically just minimum-wage jobs with no hope of ever getting out. Lots of people are in similar situations and making generalisations is pretty short-sighted.
It's trying to live beyond your means before you're able. We'd like to own a dog, for example, but with bills being tight, we're responsible enough to make the choice to wait until we can AFFORD...
It wasn't really a choice; I was kicked out, like many are. It wasn't my idea to get a shithole apartment in the middle of nowhere, with no job skills or education. I was doing what I could to get by. Lots of people are in similar situations. You're honestly trying to compare that to waiting a while to get a dog?.
which means that I have the responsibility to NOT operate my car in a manner that'll get me a ticket
Your choice seems to be whether to drive like a jackass or not. It's not a hard choice to make. For some people, the choice is whether to drive at all or not; that's a much harder choice to have to make. Don't try to equate the two.
Understand: I'm not saying that driving without insurance is a bright move. I'm saying that many people feel forced to go that route for one reason or another, and a broad sweeping statement like "If you can afford a car you can afford insurance" isn't as black-and-white as some seem to think.
In a situation like that, which is not at all uncommon, it comes down to a risk-reward sort of equation: "I can keep my slightly higher-paid job, and risk driving there, or I can obey the law by not driving, which means I'd have to take a much lower-paid job." Is it really hard to fathom why many people will choose the first option? Especially younger people, who think they're invincible, won't get in an accident, and won't get pulled over?
Like I said, it's not necessarily a bright move but it's easy to see why people do it.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the fairness of such a doctrine, there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that'll you'll ever get it implemented.
You're right, but I was pointing out an aspect of how traffic laws are prosecuted and penalized, which disproportionaly impacts the poor.
Okay, some people will be stubborn out of pure ignorance, but the truth is, for the majority of these people, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference if you didn't point it out to them. Someone like you just described would probably never say a word if you installed Open Office and said it was "the new version of Office 2009" or, like, "Microsoft Office Mojave".:P They'd just get on with it.
The person in your story sounds typical -- they don't really know, or care, which is why they can't explain why they dislike "the new system". The reason they dislike it is because it's slightly different -- and they'd bitch just as much if you took their Windows computer and rearranged the icons and cleaned up the start menu. Suddenly they wouldn't be able to find anything and they'd be griping that they miss how it was before. We all laugh at the bit at the end of "The Website is Down" where the guy alphabetizes the sales guy's desktop and the sales guy flips out -- we laugh because we've all encountered that guy.
It's not an OS preference, or even an application preference -- I'm convinced that it is, like I said, a problem of people learning just enough, by sheer repetition, to get by. And anything which disrupts their muscle-memory ability to click "Microsoft Word" in exactly the place they expect it to be, is unacceptable to them.
While they're an annoying bunch, they're also a minority, and I really see no reason to let a few whiners be used as an excuse for companies not to consider switching. That's why it irks me so much when the alternative is right in front of them, but the drone of "But we'd have to retrain..." sets in.
I don't understand why community colleges focus on teaching specific applications
Yes, you do -- you just can't believe how stupid the answer is, and neither can I. They do this because "everyone uses Microsoft" and so they conclude that it's only worthwhile to teach those programs, since that's what the students will be seeing in the workplace. The sad part is, it works -- just well enough for people to get by, and that's all that counts short-term. Long-term, they're completely crippling themselves, of course: they're completely helpless when faced with any application they haven't explicitly been shown before, whereas someone with a general overview of "word processors" can sit at any word processor app, take a hot minute to flip through the menus, and get back to work. Guess which person is more productive, and which I'd rather employ?
it's the poor trying to live beyond their means by operating a car before they're financially able
That's not always true, and I'd go so far as to speculate it probably isn't even usually true. A lot of them probably had cars when they could afford it, then fell on hard times, and still have the car.
I'm a decent example. When I left my parents' house at 19, I had an old 1986 Volvo, then a fourteen-year-old car -- a total beater, but it worked. The only place I could afford was on the ass-end of town with nowhere to work within walking distance and the busses were too infrequent to realistically use. So, since I had a car, I was able to get a really lame, low-paying job, but the place was far enough that driving there was the only option.
Being young and stupid and poor, I drove uninsured for much of the time. I felt I didn't have a choice -- I couldn't afford insurance (especially at the rates they charge young males), but I had to get to work somehow. Even looking back, the only "option" I can see was maybe quitting my job, getting an even lower-paying job at the Wendy's three miles away, and somehow scraping together enough money to get a bike. With the reduction in income there I'd never have been able to pull myself out.
The point is, having a car and being poor doesn't mean one purchased a car one couldn't afford; this isn't analogous to the idiots extending credit they don't have to buy houses they can't afford.
And in many ways, the current traffic laws are discriminatory against the poor: Even a simple, non-moving violation can run a few hundred dollars, which is disasterous for someone who can barely afford rent. Yet someone pulling in six figures gets charged the exact same amount for that same violation, and it's practically pocket change to them.
If the point is deterrence, then the fine should scale to the person's income. A $200 dollar ticket would ruin many low-income people, and be barely noticed by someone more wealthy. Of course, many higher-income types can afford a lawyer for an hour to get the ticket reduced or thrown out entirely before it ever goes to court -- an option poor people don't have, and there are no court-appointed attorneys during the pre-trial shenanigans in traffic court.
Ah yeah, the ol' "retraining" argument. That one's always been hilarious to me. Like users "know" Windows either?
They don't. The vast majority of people don't "know" Windows -- they know how to click a few icons, the locations of which they've memorized, so they can launch applications -- usually really generic ones. If you move their icons around suddenly it's "HEY MY OUTLOOK DISAPPEARED" and "I CAN'T FIND THE H DRIVE!" And if you ask them to do anything in Windows beyond opening and using those few applications, they're hopeless.
Saying these people "know" Windows is absurd. They don't want to use "Windows" or "Linux" -- they want to write an email to a client and type a sales proposal. Do you think they care if they're emailing in Outlook or Evolution? Do you think they care if they're writing in Office or Open Office? They just care if it works or not.
Yeah, you're always going to find that one Windows-only application that one doofus in one department absolutely must have, or the accountants still hanging onto the macros they wrote in 1997, without which they can't do their jobs. Fine. But the huge sales and HR staff? These days most of that type of work is done with web-based CRMs and suchlike, so switching to a new OS wouldn't even really be much of a switch for them. This also eliminates "compatability problems", which is something that's becoming less and less of an issue every year anyway.
The rest of the applications, most people are so clueless they wouldn't realise much had changed, and getting someone up to speed on how to change fonts in OO instead of Office isn't some huge challenge.
So, the way I see it, you can spend an hour "training" people about how their icons look different and are in a different place now, or you can keep throwing wave after wave of employees at the problem of trying to secure an inherently insecure OS, or re-imaging it every three days.
No, they don't, unless you can find a significant number of people who live in North or South America, are not citizens of the United States, and who take offense at the word "American" not being applied to them as well. I don't imagine many people in Ecudor or Brasil are going "But.. I'm an American toooooooooooo!"
Or are you suggesting that when the word "American" is used, there's some confusion as to what nationality is being described?
The term "American" may not be absolutely and completely accurate, but language rarely is, and the term is understood all over the world to mean "of or pertaining to the United States". The nonsense utterance "USian" was never about increasing linguistic accuracy; it was, is, and always will be about smartasses thinking they're being clever on the internet. These are the same dips who use words like "virii" and "boxen".
I've installed dozens of applications via the debs and rpms, or compiled them myself, and the only part I can say I agree with is the annoying bit where it doesn't create a launcher in the Applications menu, but it almost always does and this is easily rectified in any case. Actually, the only application I can think of offhand which should have created a launcher and didn't was lmms.
In three years I've yet to see a single deb, rpm, or compiled-from-source package install retarded system tray crap that starts on boot, dumbass desktop icons, and unless I specify otherwise, they all install things into sane places according to the standards. And you DO know where the file came from if you're downloading random debs and rpms -- not that I do this, but the option is there to check md5 if you want. You can tell exactly what's installing and where it's installing, too.
I'm sure you can find a few exceptions but they're just that -- exceptions, whereas in Windows they're the normal way of things.
Finally, let's be real -- how many users are installing from debs and rpms? The only time I've ever had to do that is when I'm doing something really specific and unusual -- 99% of the time I'm just getting whatever is in the repository, and "users" will do that almost 100% of the time as well. Users aren't opening terminals any more than they're using the command shell in Windows. In my three years of being "the guy who knows Linux" I've only seen a user have to do this once, when he downloaded a.deb for some USB printer driver. Which he double clicked, and gdebi installed for him. Easy.
Seriously. Your fifty dollar a month account is worth nothing to a huge corporation, and you can make all the threats you like and usually not get anywhere. If you ever do, it's only because they're humoring you, not because they actually care about the ramifications of your cancellation threats, which most people never actually bother carrying out anyway. If a company has already determined -- whether or not their determination is correct -- that people running asterisk or trixbox servers is costing them more than it's worth, then do you think they care if you leave? To them you just became a financial liability and they're all too happy to let you become someone else's problem.
And in many areas you've only got the local DSL or cable company anyway. What are you going to do with your threats then?
Then things must have changed a whole lot in the past 2.5 years, since I gave up on Linux.... Unix command-line stuff I love, without the driver problems or dependency hell.
When you start talking about driver problems and dependency hell it's clear you haven't really used Linux in years -- probably more than the 2.5 you're quoting. Old-timers just love to bring up ye olde chase-the-dependency game, which nobody has had to do in a modern distro in forever. The worst driver problem I've had since Ubuntu 6.06 has been having to click "Enable Restricted Drivers" to get a Broadcom wireless chip and ATI drivers loaded. That's all there was to it. And apt works better than any "App Store" for Mac or "search the web" solutions for Windows. The only time I've ever had to screw with dependencies has been when I'm deliberately compiling something myself for, as the parent poster mentioned, obscure reasons. The days of a normal user actually having to worry about dependencies, or even know what they are, are long, long gone.
The average yob is going to find everything he needs in the repositories with one-click access-and-install simplicity. There are even hundreds of free games and console emulators available. I don't know about trying to install the latest games or anything, but for those I'd want all the fancy DX10 stuff anyway, which is why I even bother keeping Vista around.
Someone is always going to be able to find a few examples that contradict what I'm saying, of course. My friend is fond of pointing out that the Doomsday game engine won't compile properly on a 64-bit install of Linux (works great in 32-bit) and using that as his sticking point. I can't say it matters any more than your "what about things that aren't in the repo" question matters. 99.x% of people will find what they're looking for in the repositories, and the remainder is just a reality of life: nothing's perfect, and finding fringe cases where things don't work is true of any OS.
How is this harder than having to switch to a paradigm in which they're not familiar with in order to install software that must also have separate packages installed with it in order to properly decode the DVDs for playback?
In my scenario the guy sits on his butt and clicks a checkbox which is clearly labelled "Media player which plays AVI, MPG, and DVD". He's done.
In your scenario he drives somewhere, asks some idiot, pays for something he has no guarantee of working (because he asked some idiot). If it works it also installs a bunch of useless party favors which degrade his system performance and enforces stupid crap like regions and drm.
So yeah, I think the repository system is easier.
How will they know where to find "Add/Remove", or know TO FIND "Add/Remove" when all they want to do is play a DVD. ("What, it can't do that? But it has a DVD drive in it...")
They don't need to. Ubuntu already comes with something that'll play DVDs. In theory Windows does too but WMP will refuse to play most of them because it doesn't have codecs or because of some regional BS. Does the average yob know how to deal with that? (I've seen Ubuntu whine about codecs too... and then ask if you want to install them. Click "Yes" and it's done. Have fun finding codec packs in Windows!)
As for "finding" the Add/Remove thing, it's right there in their face every time they click the Applications menu. Why is that hard? Do you think they were born with the knowledge of how to search Google and install crap? Most people can't do that either, so what's your point?
If Linux is to go mainstream it is indeed mandatory that more steps are taken so that Grandma can truly run Linux on her computer and not take two shakes about it.
She wants to play a DVD? It'll do that. She wants to check email? It'll do that. She wants to IM her grandkids? No problem, it'll do that. She wants to surf the web? It'll do that. She wants to burn a DVD of the last family reunion pictures? It'll do that. She wants to write a letter? It'll do that. And all of that works out of the box. Windows won't do any of that out of the box, with the possible exception of email. Anything else Grandma wants to do will require her searching Google for applications that might do what she wants, but might not. This is why you're always playing Tech Support every time you go over to her house and quietly sighing at all the crap she has installed.
My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice
Because you took the initiative to go find the latest version and install it yourself. This is madness. Why should the user have to do this for all the dozens or hundreds of programs on his system? How many even know how, or care in the first place?
You state that this is because you demand the latest and greatest and have specific needs for your applications. That's fine; I'm the same way for a lot of the things I run. But neither of us is in the majority. The majority of people don't give a damn and are still using whatever crap came with their computer three years ago. People like you and I, who have specific needs, are already a step ahead of the curve and know how to get our own stuff if we need it.
The beauty of the package management system is that the user doesn't have to care, or know how. Every couple of days it'll say that updates are available, he types in the password and clicks "install updates" and it's done. So what if he doesn't have the absolute latest version of Open Office? Most people will neither know nor care, and those that do will go find it themselves -- just like you do on Windows. The difference is that on Windows you're forced to do this for every single little app you've got. In a distro with a repository, you can almost completely forget about it and it'll still be updated.
You also seem to have forgotten what a pain installing something in Windows really is, because you're used to the stupidity. You didn't just go download something and install it -- that's the condensed version.
In reality, you searched for some app to get a specific task done, found a dozen results, sifted through the crud, the crippleware, the trialware, the ones that looked sketchy, the ones for which you had to pay. You downloaded it -- if you're like most users the downloaded executable is still sitting on your desktop -- and ran it. You really don't know what it is, what it's going to do, or where it came from, but you ran it anyway. You selected a bunch of options (from experience, most users have no idea what the options are and just click "next" hoping for sane defaults), agreed to some EULA you didn't read, and then wound up with the application...somewhere. Maybe it's in the Start menu under the developer's name, but maybe it's grouped with something else, or labelled by the name of the program. Who knows? And you got a few little freebies, didn't you? Like horseshit little systray icons hogging resources, quicklaunch icons, extraneous desktop shortcuts, unnecessary folders created in the root of C:, perhaps some stupid thing that's going to nag you for updates and registrations every single day, and maybe some silently-installed malware, depending on what you just installed.
Yeah, that's ready for the desktop, alright.
The open source community could have made a standard install system. Something nice for a front end, something reliable.
And so they have. If granny wants to use this "instant message" thing she's heard about to chat with her kids and grandkids, she can click "Add/Remove" and type "instant message". Pidgin is the only option that'll come up, along with a helpful, friendly description about what it does (not at all cryptic like using apt-get search). She checks the box next to it and a few seconds later she has instant messaging ready to go. It'll install to an obvious place (Applications > Internet) and she won't have to wonder where the hell it installed, where the shortcut is, or anything else. For the power users that want more options, there's Synaptic. And for the gurus, there's apt. But the point is there's a way to do it for anyone at any level of computer literacy.
Well, the names may suck, but it's not like "Winamp" tells me that this is a music player, or that "Gom" is some sort of media player, you know?
But indeed, "apt-cache search instant message" returns (among other results):
pidgin - graphical multi-protocol instant messaging client for X
And that's just because I do it the CLI way. If you want point-and-click easy, click "Add/Remove" and type "instant message". The only result is Pidgin, along with a few nice, friendly sentence about what it is and how you can use it to talk on MSN, AIM, ICQ, whatever. It's easy enough for your grandmother to understand.
Similarly, using "Add/Remove" and searching "media player" gives me a few results, all of which will do the job of playing videos and DVDs, all of which come with friendly descriptions of themselves. Check the box next to the one you want and you have it three seconds later. If you decide you don't like it, uncheck the box and it's gone forever. Do this as many times as you like.
A chimpanzee could do this, but somehow, searching through reams of unknown websites for untrusted executables to cruft the living hell out of your Windows system is considered "easier".
However, as an aside, Ubuntu already comes with Pidgin, which is labelled very clearly in the menu "Pidgin Instant Messenger". You don't have to go find it because it's already there. It also comes with a music player, video and DVD player, CD and DVD burner, office suite, graphics manipulation program, and a bunch of other stuff. Basically, it does out of the box 90% of what Joe Average wants to do with a computer, and the rest is one-click easy to get.
Windows comes with basically nothing, so you're forced to go find, on your own, third-party apps for nearly everything you want to do.
In Windows, you want to install something? First you have to search the web for it, come up with dozens of results that may or may not be what you want. Of the ones that will do what you want, half of them are crippleware with only half the features, or come bundled with spyware, or is some kind of trial-only nonsense, or you have to pay for it.
Once you find something that fits your needs, you download a completely untrusted executable from god-knows-where, and run it. Windows is all too happy to let even the most simple program install things in half a dozen different folders it has no business touching or creating. Then it'll clutter up your setup -- create new start menu folders that have nothing to do with anything (Start > Programs > Manufactuer > Developer > Program Name > Run program.exe ? WTF IS THAT?), a quicklaunch icon, a desktop shortcut, and helpfully installs yet another systray party favor to start on boot and hog memory for no reason.
When all is said and done you have the program but unless you're really on top of things, your computer slows down under the weight of all the extraneous garbage and malware that comes from doing things this way. Which is why salespeople are always whining about how slow their 2ghz dual core setups are.
Oh yeah, and each program will insist on having its own little update system, so pretty soon you've got forty seven different applications all bitching that they want to update individually.
Woo! That's easy and convenient!
Let's look at the complicated Linux way using Synaptic and Gnome. First, click "Add Programs". Type in a keyword or two to search the repository. Results come back with names and descriptions. Put a checkbox next to the one you want, click "install", and a few seconds later it's on your system, in a sane folder under "Applications", and didn't leave any horsebull behind afterwards. Full featured, no registration, no nagging. For free.
Oh, and it'll update from a central update panel, along with everything else. One click to update everything at once.
Man, that's so hard. Only a true IT God could ever master this process!
I'm reminded of the scene in Back to the Future 2. They had this huge, high-res screen in the living room which was used for a variety of things, like displaying scenery and watching shows, either of which you might call TV.
But later, Marty used that same screen to have an interactive video phone call (which displayed vital statistics about the person to whom you were speaking) and the screen was clearly tied into some of his office equipment including a card reader and fax machine. His boss, using a similar setup, was able to type text that appeared on Marty's screen.
Sounds to me like a computer. Video chat with some facebook-style information showing, printing, office gear, IM.
Why is it so hard to believe that the television as we know it -- a large screen essentially dedicated to one thing and one thing only -- will vanish, and be replaced by a computer which can display passive shows if that's what you want it to do, but also do all the things you'd use a computer to do?
It's not as though the technology isn't around, unlike the flying cars and holographic Jaws. Large-screen, high-resolution screens are extremely commonplace. The bandwidth to stream high-definition video is available, since that's essentially all the cable companies are doing now. The only missing piece of the puzzle is for someone to step up and provide a service that feeds to a computer, rather than a TV or converter box, and that's a matter of waiting for corporate politics -- the technology to do it has been around for years.
Hell, something like youtube could do more or less what you want from a TV. You come home, flip the remote, and see your selection of channels. Pick one, select the stream, and now you're watching Fresh Prince, or whatever the hell you people watch today. And later you'll be able to pause or stop the show, and get some work done, or play a video game, or whatever else.
Nothing compares to being able to flop onto the couch, press the "On" button on a television remote, and immediately have my regularly scheduled prime time show on the screen.
What's the problem? That can be done today, easily. Your computer is always on. It's always connected to the internet. Come home, click an IR remote, and your computer streams from whatever online service and displays it on your nice big HD screen. The difference is that the "TV" in this case will be able to do a lot more than just display streaming video from a service provider. No one's bothered to mass-market anything like this yet because it'd be pointless as long as cable providers operate the way they do currently, but again, that's just politics and corporate procedure. From a technology standpoint there's nothing stopping this from happening.
Yes, but why did they run as administrator? Microsoft shipped the OS to run as administrator by default, because their *buggy* Windows 98 applications* simply did not work correctly.
Fine, but why is that the case for MS and not for anyone else? Could it be, perhaps, that it's because Microsoft never really had or enforced any standards about how development should be done, where things should be written, and so on? Why does one installer want to create C:\ATI\Drivers while another dumps everything into the main Program Files folder, for example?
And frankly, unless you have a good understanding of why NT is designed the way it is, bring up a UAC prompt like: "this program is attempting to write into the Program Files folder" would just result in most users saying, "so what!?"
Agreed but that's half the problem, isn't it? The users who are savvy enough to understand how things work probably aren't putting their machines at risk. The users who need to be warned every five seconds don't understand the fuss. If the user is incapable of understanding security problems then why is it helpful for them to authorize this kind of thing? Might as well just not ask them at all, since they're not going to understand. Meanwhile, the Microsoft approach puts clued people at a disadvantage -- I could probably understand most of what UAC is whinging about if it told me, but it doesn't, so I'm at the same level as everyone else, blindly clicking "Continue" because I have no information.
Yeah, but it asks your permission first [before allowing installers to vomit everywhere].
Realistically there should be standards about what is allowed to put things where. See above. I can't think of a program that needs to touch the root of C: but half of them want to, and Windows lets them. It also lets them install useless systray garbage to hog memory, cruft up the Start menu with a dozen worthless entries, and so on. UAC asking if I want to install something does not address this problem. I want it to install -- that doesn't mean I want it to go Pompeii all over my system.
I don't have much faith in the "many eyes" concept to improve security, personally. I understand the theory, but it seems that Firefox has just as many security problems as any other (closed source) application.
Firefox is a fortress compared to IE, but then let's look at some other applications. Apache versus IIS? Apache has known flaws, it's true -- but despite being a much larger target it suffers substantially fewer breakins compared to IIS, simply because IIS is an insecure pile of garbage and there's nothing you or I or anyone else but Microsoft can do about it. And Microsoft only wants to do something about it after enough people have had an issue and start making noise -- and then they might get off their asses and do something, but they might not. When they do it's usually after several weeks of protesting that it isn't really a problem at all.
If I have a problem with an open source application I have options -- I could fix it myself, I could hire someone to fix it, I could submit a bug report to the package maintainers, etcetera. None of these are options with Microsoft. If it's broken, that's it, too bad. Wait until we release a patch, if we ever do.
As for MITM attacks, you actually check the MD5 checksums?
No, I never do either. But the option is there if I wanted to, you see the difference? The package manager alone does a pretty good job of this anyway, so no user intervention is required unless you're really paranoid.
Ok, but we're talking about Windows, not Excel. That's a completely different product team.
Understood, but it's extremely representative of Microsoft's attitude towards supporting their products. Problems are brought to their attention -- usually things that should have been caught in QA in the first place -- and they sit on their thumb
For one, I don't believe Windows was originally designed to be a multi-user OS, was it? Everything it does that pretends to be has been an afterthought kludge. I honestly don't know if this is the case with NT-based systems so feel free to correct me.
But let's not pretend that it's the "exact same", either. In 2000 and XP none of it mattered because everyone ran as Administrator and did whatever the hell they wanted, which resulted in just about every Windows machine you'd ever come across being infested with malware and trash. In Vista, UAC hassles people to the point where they either get trained to just click "yes" to everything, or turn it off completely -- and it almost never tells you exactly what it's whining about either. I usually just see some vague message about how "Windows needs your permission to continue! If you started this action, continue. 'File Operation, Microsoft Windows." What the hell does that mean? I know what I'm doing and even I just blindly click "continue" to that because I have no idea what it actually means and I don't really have a choice.
And that's just one of Microsoft's many problems with security. Here's another. The expected method of installing new software on a Microsoft system is to download an untrusted executable and run it. You have no way of knowing where it's coming from, no means of defeating MITM compromises, and no way of knowing what the installer is really going to do. Windows then happily lets the installer vomit anywhere it wants, make registry changes, dump files into important system folders, and so on.
In any modern distro, the Linux method is to pull applications from the repositories of whatever package management system that distro uses. MD5 checksums prevent MITM attacks. The code has been examined and vetted by people who know what they're doing, and used by thousands more, so if there was some problem -- and there can be -- it quickly gets noticed, fixed, and pushed out as an update.
(Yes, yes, on a Unix system you can go get source code and compile and install it yourself, potentially compromising your system, but that takes some know-how and isn't something the average yob is ever going to do. And doing this isn't the expected way of doing things anymore except in very specific, rare circumstances. Anyone doing this is also presumably a bit more knowledgable about what they're doing, as well. The average dope isn't opening a terminal any more than they're using the command shell in Windows; most people don't even know it's there.)
Meanwhile we're all still waiting around for Microsoft to deal with known security holes; there was an article here on Slashdot yesterday mentioning the zero-day Excel problem, but it also talked about how two other crucial Excel holes, known since last April, are still open and it doesn't look like Microsoft intends to do anything about those. And no one else can do anything about it either since it's a closed-source system. That's just one recent example -- we see articles about major security problems all the time around here.
This kind of garbage is what I mean by "Microsoft security is flawed from the ground up." Virtually everything it does, or expects a user to do, leaves gaping security holes, and the only way anyone can ever find out about them is by becoming a victim. Then, when enough noise gets made about the problem, Microsoft might, possibly, get off its ass and do something about it, but maybe not, and almost certainly never within a reasonable timeframe.
UAC was a poorly-implemented band-aid to just one of Microsoft's many, many security problems, all of which are, as I said, from the ground up. Given that I think that using a different OS is a completely realistic and reasonable option. Maybe someday Microsoft will get their act together and release an OS that isn't poisoned by this kind of stupidity, but in the meantime, why stick with them?
If you ask that on Slashdot, you get either "switch to Linux hur hur" or "they should write a new OS from scratch and run NT in a VM." Neither of those is a realistic option.
How are these not realistic options? If you had a car that simply broke down every couple of days for no discernable reason, "get a different car" is a perfectly valid and realistic option -- a hell of a lot more reasonable than "continue with the car you have and make mostly random, incremental repairs hoping it'll get better."
To make things worse, when Microsoft makes UAC comprehensive (like in Vista) people whine that it's too annoying. When they make it looser (like in Windows 7) people whine that the protection on rundll isn't sufficient.
That's because Windows security is fundamentally flawed from the ground up and bolting on garbage like UAC isn't the answer, nor was it ever. If Microsoft can't get their stuff together, using a different OS is a perfectly reasonable answer.
That's absurd. "Erotic services" can range all over the place, and do not have to involve sex, or payment. There are many things that could be categorized as "erotic services", all of which are perfectly legal. BDSM sessions and stripping or exotic dancing come to mind.
If I own a building and advertise it as a place where people can show up to trade things -- sort of a bazaar or flea market -- you can bet that at least a few of the people who show up will be looking to deal or score drugs. Does that mean that I, as the owner of the building, am responsible for that?
Of course, the bigger question is why prostitution is illegal in the first place, but that's perhaps another gripe for another time.
The fallback driver should have worked for these 2. It did work for the VGA card.
Woulda coulda shoulda, but didna. Yeah, the VGA fallback worked since I was able to see, but.. so effing what? Ubuntu had the proper resolution and fully accelerated out of the box.
Now with this, I had to go download the video driver and install them manually. If Linux ever doesn't have the right video drvier out of the box -- and I freely admit this happens from time to time -- then it's "OH HA HA HA READY FOR THE DESKTOP, YOU HAD TO DO SOMETHING YOURSELF, LINUX SUCKS!"
The Windows XP install CD was made in 2001. None of the hardware you mentioned pre-dates 2001. Why did you think the drivers would be on the CD?br>
Not to be able to install some kind of generic NIC driver so I can at least get online and deal with the probilem is inexcusable. And maybe you missed the part where I said -- and documented -- the exact same problem with Vista?
All 4 of the devices you mention have drivers on Windows Update. Your refusal to get these drivers off Windows Update doesn't mean they aren't there.
I'm waiting to hear how I was supposed to do that without any way of getting online, champ.
And I reiterate: Though Windows will helpfully say "New hardware detected! Search online for drivers?" this has never worked for anyone as far as I know. If you already have drivers, Windows will update them for you -- it tries to update my damned nvidia drivers all the time, to my annoyance -- but I've never seen anyone get new drivers using Windows' built-in "driver wizard" or whatever they call it.
How can Ubuntu be your only OS in a "mixed-platform" environment? Those statements are contradictory.
In the hopes that you're not being intentionally obtuse, I clearly meant it was my only OS, as in, the one I use for my computer. Which I use to connect to other machines running Windows, Redhat, Fedora, and Debian. I run all my local apps on my Ubuntu laptop. In other words, I've been doing absolutely everything I've needed to do for three years, from a single laptop running Ubuntu. Sort of flies in the face of your "You're not doing anything with Ubuntu" remark.
Print queuing, watermarking, resizing, choosing the correct output tray, choosing color vs greyscale, etc. You might not care about these features and they might not see much use in a small printer, but there you go.
Like those work out of the box in Windows. Except for print queuing -- but what makes you think Linux doesn't have that? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Your'e right -- I don't care, at all, about any of that stuff, and most other people wouldn't either. They just want to print or scan something.
So, while I've never tried watermarking using a Linux print driver, you know what? I will gladly forgo that feature for all the advantages Linux gives me that Windows can never touch. At some point you're going to have to make that decision about any system.
But if you're willing to put up with Windows' constant annoyances, getting in your face with alerts about everything, "send error report to Microsoft?", inability to do much of anything natively, insecure system of installing and maintaining applications, the registry, thousands of noted viruses, worms, trojans, adware, spyware, and other horsebull, all on a closed system that costs a metric buttload, just so you can sneer about how you can make watermarks with a printer.. well, be my guest. The rest of us will be here in the 21st century.
Sure, but at least part of the problem isn't what you put out there -- it's what other people put out there. Sites exist which have no purpose than to write absurd tripe about people, often naming names. The idiocy that is 4chan or encyclopediadramatica or any of a dozen others come to mind. This might not be a big deal but all it takes is one fairly clueless manager who can't seperate fact from fiction, and who really does think the internet is "serious business", to muck things up.
And there's really no recourse either. The amount of time and money involved in getting something taken down against the server admin's wishes is astronomical, and that's assuming it can be done at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, okay. I just want to listen to some music. Enjoy your custom views, or something.
Why in god's name are you running Winamp in a VM? Just get audacious, which is almost the exact same thing, but comes with a few extras that make it nicer.
You don't know me, and you're posting anonymously so I sure as hell don't know you.
But more to the point, as Carly Simon might say, this song ain't about me.
I used myself only as an example of the sort of trouble people may find themselves in without really meaning to, or even knowing how they got there.
But your three points are so oft-repeated and so tired that I'll address them briefly.
1) not move out of your parents' house at 19 years of age.
Wasn't my choice. I was kicked out. Like thousands of others. Not everyone has the luxury of choice here. Sometimes, people find themselves in situations they'd rather not be, and that's that.
2) start working at a younger age than 19 while you still lived at your parents' house
That's great advice, except that it doesn't do any good to tell it to someone once they've already left. Plus, try to explain to a seventeen year old that "don't take out that girl, you should save your money because in four years you might need it!" and see how far you get. So, on second thought, your advice is full of good intentions but complete horsebull.
3) move to a different town
Asking someone who can barely afford rent as is to "move to a different town" is like asking the rain to fall up. It's not happening. Moving takes resources, possibly credit, certainly capital. In addition, you're asking them to move away from what little base they have, and be completely on their own, and,. do what? Be stuck with basically the same dead-end job prospects they had before but oh.. now at least maybe they can walk to their minimum wage job instead of drive illegally to their higher-paid job they had before. Yeah, that's going to advance them, and society.
It's easy to have all the answers, until you've been there. I'm not saying it can't be done -- I made it out of that quagmire -- but tossing out canned responses isn't helping anyone.
You could even have the insurance company notify the state when you drop insurance.
Yeah, I think my insurance company/state does this. The problem is, they're really quick to notify the state (but not you) that you're now uninsured because you paid the bill one day late. They're not so great at telling the state that you paid up the next day and are all good now. The state then immediately and silently suspends your tag, so months or even years later some cop runs your tag, finds it's suspended, which means a ticket and mandatory court appearance, where you'll be forced to explain why you paid your insurance a day late, three years ago, and didn't pay the 20 dollare tag-reactivation fee nobody told you about.
That's how it works around here, anyway, and I have no reason to believe any other local government is any more rational or sane.
There was your solution, had you chosen it: a bicycle.
.
Not sure where you think I was supposed to get the money for that; guess I could have sold my car, but then that'd be another couple thousand dollar thing I'd have to replace when I eventually did pull myself back out of the hole. Of course, things within biking distance were basically just minimum-wage jobs with no hope of ever getting out. Lots of people are in similar situations and making generalisations is pretty short-sighted.
It's trying to live beyond your means before you're able. We'd like to own a dog, for example, but with bills being tight, we're responsible enough to make the choice to wait until we can AFFORD...
It wasn't really a choice; I was kicked out, like many are. It wasn't my idea to get a shithole apartment in the middle of nowhere, with no job skills or education. I was doing what I could to get by. Lots of people are in similar situations. You're honestly trying to compare that to waiting a while to get a dog?
which means that I have the responsibility to NOT operate my car in a manner that'll get me a ticket
Your choice seems to be whether to drive like a jackass or not. It's not a hard choice to make. For some people, the choice is whether to drive at all or not; that's a much harder choice to have to make. Don't try to equate the two.
Understand: I'm not saying that driving without insurance is a bright move. I'm saying that many people feel forced to go that route for one reason or another, and a broad sweeping statement like "If you can afford a car you can afford insurance" isn't as black-and-white as some seem to think.
In a situation like that, which is not at all uncommon, it comes down to a risk-reward sort of equation: "I can keep my slightly higher-paid job, and risk driving there, or I can obey the law by not driving, which means I'd have to take a much lower-paid job." Is it really hard to fathom why many people will choose the first option? Especially younger people, who think they're invincible, won't get in an accident, and won't get pulled over?
Like I said, it's not necessarily a bright move but it's easy to see why people do it.
While I wholeheartedly agree with the fairness of such a doctrine, there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that'll you'll ever get it implemented.
You're right, but I was pointing out an aspect of how traffic laws are prosecuted and penalized, which disproportionaly impacts the poor.
Okay, some people will be stubborn out of pure ignorance, but the truth is, for the majority of these people, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference if you didn't point it out to them. Someone like you just described would probably never say a word if you installed Open Office and said it was "the new version of Office 2009" or, like, "Microsoft Office Mojave". :P They'd just get on with it.
The person in your story sounds typical -- they don't really know, or care, which is why they can't explain why they dislike "the new system". The reason they dislike it is because it's slightly different -- and they'd bitch just as much if you took their Windows computer and rearranged the icons and cleaned up the start menu. Suddenly they wouldn't be able to find anything and they'd be griping that they miss how it was before. We all laugh at the bit at the end of "The Website is Down" where the guy alphabetizes the sales guy's desktop and the sales guy flips out -- we laugh because we've all encountered that guy.
It's not an OS preference, or even an application preference -- I'm convinced that it is, like I said, a problem of people learning just enough, by sheer repetition, to get by. And anything which disrupts their muscle-memory ability to click "Microsoft Word" in exactly the place they expect it to be, is unacceptable to them.
While they're an annoying bunch, they're also a minority, and I really see no reason to let a few whiners be used as an excuse for companies not to consider switching. That's why it irks me so much when the alternative is right in front of them, but the drone of "But we'd have to retrain..." sets in.
I don't understand why community colleges focus on teaching specific applications
Yes, you do -- you just can't believe how stupid the answer is, and neither can I. They do this because "everyone uses Microsoft" and so they conclude that it's only worthwhile to teach those programs, since that's what the students will be seeing in the workplace. The sad part is, it works -- just well enough for people to get by, and that's all that counts short-term. Long-term, they're completely crippling themselves, of course: they're completely helpless when faced with any application they haven't explicitly been shown before, whereas someone with a general overview of "word processors" can sit at any word processor app, take a hot minute to flip through the menus, and get back to work. Guess which person is more productive, and which I'd rather employ?
it's the poor trying to live beyond their means by operating a car before they're financially able
That's not always true, and I'd go so far as to speculate it probably isn't even usually true. A lot of them probably had cars when they could afford it, then fell on hard times, and still have the car.
I'm a decent example. When I left my parents' house at 19, I had an old 1986 Volvo, then a fourteen-year-old car -- a total beater, but it worked. The only place I could afford was on the ass-end of town with nowhere to work within walking distance and the busses were too infrequent to realistically use. So, since I had a car, I was able to get a really lame, low-paying job, but the place was far enough that driving there was the only option.
Being young and stupid and poor, I drove uninsured for much of the time. I felt I didn't have a choice -- I couldn't afford insurance (especially at the rates they charge young males), but I had to get to work somehow. Even looking back, the only "option" I can see was maybe quitting my job, getting an even lower-paying job at the Wendy's three miles away, and somehow scraping together enough money to get a bike. With the reduction in income there I'd never have been able to pull myself out.
The point is, having a car and being poor doesn't mean one purchased a car one couldn't afford; this isn't analogous to the idiots extending credit they don't have to buy houses they can't afford.
And in many ways, the current traffic laws are discriminatory against the poor: Even a simple, non-moving violation can run a few hundred dollars, which is disasterous for someone who can barely afford rent. Yet someone pulling in six figures gets charged the exact same amount for that same violation, and it's practically pocket change to them.
If the point is deterrence, then the fine should scale to the person's income. A $200 dollar ticket would ruin many low-income people, and be barely noticed by someone more wealthy. Of course, many higher-income types can afford a lawyer for an hour to get the ticket reduced or thrown out entirely before it ever goes to court -- an option poor people don't have, and there are no court-appointed attorneys during the pre-trial shenanigans in traffic court.
They're likely photosynthetic, deriving energy from light the same way plants and many other bacteria do.
Ah yeah, the ol' "retraining" argument. That one's always been hilarious to me. Like users "know" Windows either?
They don't. The vast majority of people don't "know" Windows -- they know how to click a few icons, the locations of which they've memorized, so they can launch applications -- usually really generic ones. If you move their icons around suddenly it's "HEY MY OUTLOOK DISAPPEARED" and "I CAN'T FIND THE H DRIVE!" And if you ask them to do anything in Windows beyond opening and using those few applications, they're hopeless.
Saying these people "know" Windows is absurd. They don't want to use "Windows" or "Linux" -- they want to write an email to a client and type a sales proposal. Do you think they care if they're emailing in Outlook or Evolution? Do you think they care if they're writing in Office or Open Office? They just care if it works or not.
Yeah, you're always going to find that one Windows-only application that one doofus in one department absolutely must have, or the accountants still hanging onto the macros they wrote in 1997, without which they can't do their jobs. Fine. But the huge sales and HR staff? These days most of that type of work is done with web-based CRMs and suchlike, so switching to a new OS wouldn't even really be much of a switch for them. This also eliminates "compatability problems", which is something that's becoming less and less of an issue every year anyway.
The rest of the applications, most people are so clueless they wouldn't realise much had changed, and getting someone up to speed on how to change fonts in OO instead of Office isn't some huge challenge.
So, the way I see it, you can spend an hour "training" people about how their icons look different and are in a different place now, or you can keep throwing wave after wave of employees at the problem of trying to secure an inherently insecure OS, or re-imaging it every three days.
But they do have a point regardless.
No, they don't, unless you can find a significant number of people who live in North or South America, are not citizens of the United States, and who take offense at the word "American" not being applied to them as well. I don't imagine many people in Ecudor or Brasil are going "But.. I'm an American toooooooooooo!"
Or are you suggesting that when the word "American" is used, there's some confusion as to what nationality is being described?
The term "American" may not be absolutely and completely accurate, but language rarely is, and the term is understood all over the world to mean "of or pertaining to the United States". The nonsense utterance "USian" was never about increasing linguistic accuracy; it was, is, and always will be about smartasses thinking they're being clever on the internet. These are the same dips who use words like "virii" and "boxen".
I've installed dozens of applications via the debs and rpms, or compiled them myself, and the only part I can say I agree with is the annoying bit where it doesn't create a launcher in the Applications menu, but it almost always does and this is easily rectified in any case. Actually, the only application I can think of offhand which should have created a launcher and didn't was lmms.
.deb for some USB printer driver. Which he double clicked, and gdebi installed for him. Easy.
In three years I've yet to see a single deb, rpm, or compiled-from-source package install retarded system tray crap that starts on boot, dumbass desktop icons, and unless I specify otherwise, they all install things into sane places according to the standards. And you DO know where the file came from if you're downloading random debs and rpms -- not that I do this, but the option is there to check md5 if you want. You can tell exactly what's installing and where it's installing, too.
I'm sure you can find a few exceptions but they're just that -- exceptions, whereas in Windows they're the normal way of things.
Finally, let's be real -- how many users are installing from debs and rpms? The only time I've ever had to do that is when I'm doing something really specific and unusual -- 99% of the time I'm just getting whatever is in the repository, and "users" will do that almost 100% of the time as well. Users aren't opening terminals any more than they're using the command shell in Windows. In my three years of being "the guy who knows Linux" I've only seen a user have to do this once, when he downloaded a
Seriously. Your fifty dollar a month account is worth nothing to a huge corporation, and you can make all the threats you like and usually not get anywhere. If you ever do, it's only because they're humoring you, not because they actually care about the ramifications of your cancellation threats, which most people never actually bother carrying out anyway. If a company has already determined -- whether or not their determination is correct -- that people running asterisk or trixbox servers is costing them more than it's worth, then do you think they care if you leave? To them you just became a financial liability and they're all too happy to let you become someone else's problem.
And in many areas you've only got the local DSL or cable company anyway. What are you going to do with your threats then?
Then things must have changed a whole lot in the past 2.5 years, since I gave up on Linux. ... Unix command-line stuff I love, without the driver problems or dependency hell.
When you start talking about driver problems and dependency hell it's clear you haven't really used Linux in years -- probably more than the 2.5 you're quoting. Old-timers just love to bring up ye olde chase-the-dependency game, which nobody has had to do in a modern distro in forever. The worst driver problem I've had since Ubuntu 6.06 has been having to click "Enable Restricted Drivers" to get a Broadcom wireless chip and ATI drivers loaded. That's all there was to it. And apt works better than any "App Store" for Mac or "search the web" solutions for Windows. The only time I've ever had to screw with dependencies has been when I'm deliberately compiling something myself for, as the parent poster mentioned, obscure reasons. The days of a normal user actually having to worry about dependencies, or even know what they are, are long, long gone.
The average yob is going to find everything he needs in the repositories with one-click access-and-install simplicity. There are even hundreds of free games and console emulators available. I don't know about trying to install the latest games or anything, but for those I'd want all the fancy DX10 stuff anyway, which is why I even bother keeping Vista around.
Someone is always going to be able to find a few examples that contradict what I'm saying, of course. My friend is fond of pointing out that the Doomsday game engine won't compile properly on a 64-bit install of Linux (works great in 32-bit) and using that as his sticking point. I can't say it matters any more than your "what about things that aren't in the repo" question matters. 99.x% of people will find what they're looking for in the repositories, and the remainder is just a reality of life: nothing's perfect, and finding fringe cases where things don't work is true of any OS.
How is this harder than having to switch to a paradigm in which they're not familiar with in order to install software that must also have separate packages installed with it in order to properly decode the DVDs for playback?
In my scenario the guy sits on his butt and clicks a checkbox which is clearly labelled "Media player which plays AVI, MPG, and DVD". He's done.
In your scenario he drives somewhere, asks some idiot, pays for something he has no guarantee of working (because he asked some idiot). If it works it also installs a bunch of useless party favors which degrade his system performance and enforces stupid crap like regions and drm.
So yeah, I think the repository system is easier.
How will they know where to find "Add/Remove", or know TO FIND "Add/Remove" when all they want to do is play a DVD. ("What, it can't do that? But it has a DVD drive in it...")
They don't need to. Ubuntu already comes with something that'll play DVDs. In theory Windows does too but WMP will refuse to play most of them because it doesn't have codecs or because of some regional BS. Does the average yob know how to deal with that? (I've seen Ubuntu whine about codecs too... and then ask if you want to install them. Click "Yes" and it's done. Have fun finding codec packs in Windows!)
As for "finding" the Add/Remove thing, it's right there in their face every time they click the Applications menu. Why is that hard? Do you think they were born with the knowledge of how to search Google and install crap? Most people can't do that either, so what's your point?
If Linux is to go mainstream it is indeed mandatory that more steps are taken so that Grandma can truly run Linux on her computer and not take two shakes about it.
She wants to play a DVD? It'll do that. She wants to check email? It'll do that. She wants to IM her grandkids? No problem, it'll do that. She wants to surf the web? It'll do that. She wants to burn a DVD of the last family reunion pictures? It'll do that. She wants to write a letter? It'll do that. And all of that works out of the box. Windows won't do any of that out of the box, with the possible exception of email. Anything else Grandma wants to do will require her searching Google for applications that might do what she wants, but might not. This is why you're always playing Tech Support every time you go over to her house and quietly sighing at all the crap she has installed.
My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice
Because you took the initiative to go find the latest version and install it yourself. This is madness. Why should the user have to do this for all the dozens or hundreds of programs on his system? How many even know how, or care in the first place?
You state that this is because you demand the latest and greatest and have specific needs for your applications. That's fine; I'm the same way for a lot of the things I run. But neither of us is in the majority. The majority of people don't give a damn and are still using whatever crap came with their computer three years ago. People like you and I, who have specific needs, are already a step ahead of the curve and know how to get our own stuff if we need it.
The beauty of the package management system is that the user doesn't have to care, or know how. Every couple of days it'll say that updates are available, he types in the password and clicks "install updates" and it's done. So what if he doesn't have the absolute latest version of Open Office? Most people will neither know nor care, and those that do will go find it themselves -- just like you do on Windows. The difference is that on Windows you're forced to do this for every single little app you've got. In a distro with a repository, you can almost completely forget about it and it'll still be updated.
You also seem to have forgotten what a pain installing something in Windows really is, because you're used to the stupidity. You didn't just go download something and install it -- that's the condensed version.
In reality, you searched for some app to get a specific task done, found a dozen results, sifted through the crud, the crippleware, the trialware, the ones that looked sketchy, the ones for which you had to pay. You downloaded it -- if you're like most users the downloaded executable is still sitting on your desktop -- and ran it. You really don't know what it is, what it's going to do, or where it came from, but you ran it anyway. You selected a bunch of options (from experience, most users have no idea what the options are and just click "next" hoping for sane defaults), agreed to some EULA you didn't read, and then wound up with the application...somewhere. Maybe it's in the Start menu under the developer's name, but maybe it's grouped with something else, or labelled by the name of the program. Who knows? And you got a few little freebies, didn't you? Like horseshit little systray icons hogging resources, quicklaunch icons, extraneous desktop shortcuts, unnecessary folders created in the root of C:, perhaps some stupid thing that's going to nag you for updates and registrations every single day, and maybe some silently-installed malware, depending on what you just installed.
Yeah, that's ready for the desktop, alright.
The open source community could have made a standard install system. Something nice for a front end, something reliable.
And so they have. If granny wants to use this "instant message" thing she's heard about to chat with her kids and grandkids, she can click "Add/Remove" and type "instant message". Pidgin is the only option that'll come up, along with a helpful, friendly description about what it does (not at all cryptic like using apt-get search). She checks the box next to it and a few seconds later she has instant messaging ready to go. It'll install to an obvious place (Applications > Internet) and she won't have to wonder where the hell it installed, where the shortcut is, or anything else. For the power users that want more options, there's Synaptic. And for the gurus, there's apt. But the point is there's a way to do it for anyone at any level of computer literacy.
Well, the names may suck, but it's not like "Winamp" tells me that this is a music player, or that "Gom" is some sort of media player, you know?
But indeed, "apt-cache search instant message" returns (among other results): pidgin - graphical multi-protocol instant messaging client for X
And that's just because I do it the CLI way. If you want point-and-click easy, click "Add/Remove" and type "instant message". The only result is Pidgin, along with a few nice, friendly sentence about what it is and how you can use it to talk on MSN, AIM, ICQ, whatever. It's easy enough for your grandmother to understand.
Similarly, using "Add/Remove" and searching "media player" gives me a few results, all of which will do the job of playing videos and DVDs, all of which come with friendly descriptions of themselves. Check the box next to the one you want and you have it three seconds later. If you decide you don't like it, uncheck the box and it's gone forever. Do this as many times as you like.
A chimpanzee could do this, but somehow, searching through reams of unknown websites for untrusted executables to cruft the living hell out of your Windows system is considered "easier".
However, as an aside, Ubuntu already comes with Pidgin, which is labelled very clearly in the menu "Pidgin Instant Messenger". You don't have to go find it because it's already there. It also comes with a music player, video and DVD player, CD and DVD burner, office suite, graphics manipulation program, and a bunch of other stuff. Basically, it does out of the box 90% of what Joe Average wants to do with a computer, and the rest is one-click easy to get.
Windows comes with basically nothing, so you're forced to go find, on your own, third-party apps for nearly everything you want to do.
Yeah, I don't get it.
In Windows, you want to install something? First you have to search the web for it, come up with dozens of results that may or may not be what you want. Of the ones that will do what you want, half of them are crippleware with only half the features, or come bundled with spyware, or is some kind of trial-only nonsense, or you have to pay for it.
Once you find something that fits your needs, you download a completely untrusted executable from god-knows-where, and run it. Windows is all too happy to let even the most simple program install things in half a dozen different folders it has no business touching or creating. Then it'll clutter up your setup -- create new start menu folders that have nothing to do with anything (Start > Programs > Manufactuer > Developer > Program Name > Run program.exe ? WTF IS THAT?), a quicklaunch icon, a desktop shortcut, and helpfully installs yet another systray party favor to start on boot and hog memory for no reason.
When all is said and done you have the program but unless you're really on top of things, your computer slows down under the weight of all the extraneous garbage and malware that comes from doing things this way. Which is why salespeople are always whining about how slow their 2ghz dual core setups are.
Oh yeah, and each program will insist on having its own little update system, so pretty soon you've got forty seven different applications all bitching that they want to update individually.
Woo! That's easy and convenient!
Let's look at the complicated Linux way using Synaptic and Gnome. First, click "Add Programs". Type in a keyword or two to search the repository. Results come back with names and descriptions. Put a checkbox next to the one you want, click "install", and a few seconds later it's on your system, in a sane folder under "Applications", and didn't leave any horsebull behind afterwards. Full featured, no registration, no nagging. For free.
Oh, and it'll update from a central update panel, along with everything else. One click to update everything at once.
Man, that's so hard. Only a true IT God could ever master this process!
I'm reminded of the scene in Back to the Future 2. They had this huge, high-res screen in the living room which was used for a variety of things, like displaying scenery and watching shows, either of which you might call TV.
But later, Marty used that same screen to have an interactive video phone call (which displayed vital statistics about the person to whom you were speaking) and the screen was clearly tied into some of his office equipment including a card reader and fax machine. His boss, using a similar setup, was able to type text that appeared on Marty's screen.
Sounds to me like a computer. Video chat with some facebook-style information showing, printing, office gear, IM.
Why is it so hard to believe that the television as we know it -- a large screen essentially dedicated to one thing and one thing only -- will vanish, and be replaced by a computer which can display passive shows if that's what you want it to do, but also do all the things you'd use a computer to do?
It's not as though the technology isn't around, unlike the flying cars and holographic Jaws. Large-screen, high-resolution screens are extremely commonplace. The bandwidth to stream high-definition video is available, since that's essentially all the cable companies are doing now. The only missing piece of the puzzle is for someone to step up and provide a service that feeds to a computer, rather than a TV or converter box, and that's a matter of waiting for corporate politics -- the technology to do it has been around for years.
Hell, something like youtube could do more or less what you want from a TV. You come home, flip the remote, and see your selection of channels. Pick one, select the stream, and now you're watching Fresh Prince, or whatever the hell you people watch today. And later you'll be able to pause or stop the show, and get some work done, or play a video game, or whatever else.
Nothing compares to being able to flop onto the couch, press the "On" button on a television remote, and immediately have my regularly scheduled prime time show on the screen.
What's the problem? That can be done today, easily. Your computer is always on. It's always connected to the internet. Come home, click an IR remote, and your computer streams from whatever online service and displays it on your nice big HD screen. The difference is that the "TV" in this case will be able to do a lot more than just display streaming video from a service provider. No one's bothered to mass-market anything like this yet because it'd be pointless as long as cable providers operate the way they do currently, but again, that's just politics and corporate procedure. From a technology standpoint there's nothing stopping this from happening.
Yes, but why did they run as administrator? Microsoft shipped the OS to run as administrator by default, because their *buggy* Windows 98 applications* simply did not work correctly.
Fine, but why is that the case for MS and not for anyone else? Could it be, perhaps, that it's because Microsoft never really had or enforced any standards about how development should be done, where things should be written, and so on? Why does one installer want to create C:\ATI\Drivers while another dumps everything into the main Program Files folder, for example?
And frankly, unless you have a good understanding of why NT is designed the way it is, bring up a UAC prompt like: "this program is attempting to write into the Program Files folder" would just result in most users saying, "so what!?"
Agreed but that's half the problem, isn't it? The users who are savvy enough to understand how things work probably aren't putting their machines at risk. The users who need to be warned every five seconds don't understand the fuss. If the user is incapable of understanding security problems then why is it helpful for them to authorize this kind of thing? Might as well just not ask them at all, since they're not going to understand. Meanwhile, the Microsoft approach puts clued people at a disadvantage -- I could probably understand most of what UAC is whinging about if it told me, but it doesn't, so I'm at the same level as everyone else, blindly clicking "Continue" because I have no information.
Yeah, but it asks your permission first [before allowing installers to vomit everywhere].
Realistically there should be standards about what is allowed to put things where. See above. I can't think of a program that needs to touch the root of C: but half of them want to, and Windows lets them. It also lets them install useless systray garbage to hog memory, cruft up the Start menu with a dozen worthless entries, and so on. UAC asking if I want to install something does not address this problem. I want it to install -- that doesn't mean I want it to go Pompeii all over my system.
I don't have much faith in the "many eyes" concept to improve security, personally. I understand the theory, but it seems that Firefox has just as many security problems as any other (closed source) application.
Firefox is a fortress compared to IE, but then let's look at some other applications. Apache versus IIS? Apache has known flaws, it's true -- but despite being a much larger target it suffers substantially fewer breakins compared to IIS, simply because IIS is an insecure pile of garbage and there's nothing you or I or anyone else but Microsoft can do about it. And Microsoft only wants to do something about it after enough people have had an issue and start making noise -- and then they might get off their asses and do something, but they might not. When they do it's usually after several weeks of protesting that it isn't really a problem at all.
If I have a problem with an open source application I have options -- I could fix it myself, I could hire someone to fix it, I could submit a bug report to the package maintainers, etcetera. None of these are options with Microsoft. If it's broken, that's it, too bad. Wait until we release a patch, if we ever do.
As for MITM attacks, you actually check the MD5 checksums?
No, I never do either. But the option is there if I wanted to, you see the difference? The package manager alone does a pretty good job of this anyway, so no user intervention is required unless you're really paranoid.
Ok, but we're talking about Windows, not Excel. That's a completely different product team.
Understood, but it's extremely representative of Microsoft's attitude towards supporting their products. Problems are brought to their attention -- usually things that should have been caught in QA in the first place -- and they sit on their thumb
For one, I don't believe Windows was originally designed to be a multi-user OS, was it? Everything it does that pretends to be has been an afterthought kludge. I honestly don't know if this is the case with NT-based systems so feel free to correct me.
But let's not pretend that it's the "exact same", either. In 2000 and XP none of it mattered because everyone ran as Administrator and did whatever the hell they wanted, which resulted in just about every Windows machine you'd ever come across being infested with malware and trash. In Vista, UAC hassles people to the point where they either get trained to just click "yes" to everything, or turn it off completely -- and it almost never tells you exactly what it's whining about either. I usually just see some vague message about how "Windows needs your permission to continue! If you started this action, continue. 'File Operation, Microsoft Windows." What the hell does that mean? I know what I'm doing and even I just blindly click "continue" to that because I have no idea what it actually means and I don't really have a choice.
And that's just one of Microsoft's many problems with security. Here's another. The expected method of installing new software on a Microsoft system is to download an untrusted executable and run it. You have no way of knowing where it's coming from, no means of defeating MITM compromises, and no way of knowing what the installer is really going to do. Windows then happily lets the installer vomit anywhere it wants, make registry changes, dump files into important system folders, and so on.
In any modern distro, the Linux method is to pull applications from the repositories of whatever package management system that distro uses. MD5 checksums prevent MITM attacks. The code has been examined and vetted by people who know what they're doing, and used by thousands more, so if there was some problem -- and there can be -- it quickly gets noticed, fixed, and pushed out as an update.
(Yes, yes, on a Unix system you can go get source code and compile and install it yourself, potentially compromising your system, but that takes some know-how and isn't something the average yob is ever going to do. And doing this isn't the expected way of doing things anymore except in very specific, rare circumstances. Anyone doing this is also presumably a bit more knowledgable about what they're doing, as well. The average dope isn't opening a terminal any more than they're using the command shell in Windows; most people don't even know it's there.)
Meanwhile we're all still waiting around for Microsoft to deal with known security holes; there was an article here on Slashdot yesterday mentioning the zero-day Excel problem, but it also talked about how two other crucial Excel holes, known since last April, are still open and it doesn't look like Microsoft intends to do anything about those. And no one else can do anything about it either since it's a closed-source system. That's just one recent example -- we see articles about major security problems all the time around here.
This kind of garbage is what I mean by "Microsoft security is flawed from the ground up." Virtually everything it does, or expects a user to do, leaves gaping security holes, and the only way anyone can ever find out about them is by becoming a victim. Then, when enough noise gets made about the problem, Microsoft might, possibly, get off its ass and do something about it, but maybe not, and almost certainly never within a reasonable timeframe.
UAC was a poorly-implemented band-aid to just one of Microsoft's many, many security problems, all of which are, as I said, from the ground up. Given that I think that using a different OS is a completely realistic and reasonable option. Maybe someday Microsoft will get their act together and release an OS that isn't poisoned by this kind of stupidity, but in the meantime, why stick with them?
If you ask that on Slashdot, you get either "switch to Linux hur hur" or "they should write a new OS from scratch and run NT in a VM." Neither of those is a realistic option.
How are these not realistic options? If you had a car that simply broke down every couple of days for no discernable reason, "get a different car" is a perfectly valid and realistic option -- a hell of a lot more reasonable than "continue with the car you have and make mostly random, incremental repairs hoping it'll get better."
To make things worse, when Microsoft makes UAC comprehensive (like in Vista) people whine that it's too annoying. When they make it looser (like in Windows 7) people whine that the protection on rundll isn't sufficient.
That's because Windows security is fundamentally flawed from the ground up and bolting on garbage like UAC isn't the answer, nor was it ever. If Microsoft can't get their stuff together, using a different OS is a perfectly reasonable answer.
That's absurd. "Erotic services" can range all over the place, and do not have to involve sex, or payment. There are many things that could be categorized as "erotic services", all of which are perfectly legal. BDSM sessions and stripping or exotic dancing come to mind.
If I own a building and advertise it as a place where people can show up to trade things -- sort of a bazaar or flea market -- you can bet that at least a few of the people who show up will be looking to deal or score drugs. Does that mean that I, as the owner of the building, am responsible for that?
Of course, the bigger question is why prostitution is illegal in the first place, but that's perhaps another gripe for another time.
The fallback driver should have worked for these 2. It did work for the VGA card.
Woulda coulda shoulda, but didna. Yeah, the VGA fallback worked since I was able to see, but.. so effing what? Ubuntu had the proper resolution and fully accelerated out of the box.
Now with this, I had to go download the video driver and install them manually. If Linux ever doesn't have the right video drvier out of the box -- and I freely admit this happens from time to time -- then it's "OH HA HA HA READY FOR THE DESKTOP, YOU HAD TO DO SOMETHING YOURSELF, LINUX SUCKS!"
The Windows XP install CD was made in 2001. None of the hardware you mentioned pre-dates 2001. Why did you think the drivers would be on the CD?br>
Not to be able to install some kind of generic NIC driver so I can at least get online and deal with the probilem is inexcusable. And maybe you missed the part where I said -- and documented -- the exact same problem with Vista?
All 4 of the devices you mention have drivers on Windows Update. Your refusal to get these drivers off Windows Update doesn't mean they aren't there.
I'm waiting to hear how I was supposed to do that without any way of getting online, champ.
And I reiterate: Though Windows will helpfully say "New hardware detected! Search online for drivers?" this has never worked for anyone as far as I know. If you already have drivers, Windows will update them for you -- it tries to update my damned nvidia drivers all the time, to my annoyance -- but I've never seen anyone get new drivers using Windows' built-in "driver wizard" or whatever they call it.
How can Ubuntu be your only OS in a "mixed-platform" environment? Those statements are contradictory.
In the hopes that you're not being intentionally obtuse, I clearly meant it was my only OS, as in, the one I use for my computer. Which I use to connect to other machines running Windows, Redhat, Fedora, and Debian. I run all my local apps on my Ubuntu laptop. In other words, I've been doing absolutely everything I've needed to do for three years, from a single laptop running Ubuntu. Sort of flies in the face of your "You're not doing anything with Ubuntu" remark.
Print queuing, watermarking, resizing, choosing the correct output tray, choosing color vs greyscale, etc. You might not care about these features and they might not see much use in a small printer, but there you go.
Like those work out of the box in Windows. Except for print queuing -- but what makes you think Linux doesn't have that? Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Your'e right -- I don't care, at all, about any of that stuff, and most other people wouldn't either. They just want to print or scan something.
So, while I've never tried watermarking using a Linux print driver, you know what? I will gladly forgo that feature for all the advantages Linux gives me that Windows can never touch. At some point you're going to have to make that decision about any system.
But if you're willing to put up with Windows' constant annoyances, getting in your face with alerts about everything, "send error report to Microsoft?", inability to do much of anything natively, insecure system of installing and maintaining applications, the registry, thousands of noted viruses, worms, trojans, adware, spyware, and other horsebull, all on a closed system that costs a metric buttload, just so you can sneer about how you can make watermarks with a printer.. well, be my guest. The rest of us will be here in the 21st century.
Assuming no network connectivity, it has no problems staying up for years just like your oh-so-godly Linux.
So Windows is stable and reliable as long as it's not connected to anything. That is awesome. And makes a hell of a server too, I imagine.
Sure, but at least part of the problem isn't what you put out there -- it's what other people put out there. Sites exist which have no purpose than to write absurd tripe about people, often naming names. The idiocy that is 4chan or encyclopediadramatica or any of a dozen others come to mind. This might not be a big deal but all it takes is one fairly clueless manager who can't seperate fact from fiction, and who really does think the internet is "serious business", to muck things up.
And there's really no recourse either. The amount of time and money involved in getting something taken down against the server admin's wishes is astronomical, and that's assuming it can be done at all.