Because Wine is faster for a lot of things. An example I encounter all the time at work: Sometimes I need to use copilot or similar tools to access a user's machine and screw around with whatever. It only runs on Windows and OSX, though. Now, I could open a VM, wait a few minutes for my virtual XP install to boot, and run the program from there, or I could just run the damn thing under wine in three seconds. In addition, I now have the ability to cut and paste between that application and my desktop, whereas you don't always get that in a VM. (I'm aware of VMtools but it seems to not want to install sometimes and I have no idea why.)
So unless you're proposing I leave a VM running all the time, which I think is a silly and needless waste of computing power, Wine is still my choice for running some Windows program quickly. It also handles accelerated graphics fairly well, and my VMs don't.
I guess it's because one of the biggest perceived obstacles to adoption of Linux on the desktop for the masses is that it's "too hard" to use for the average yob, and Windows is much easier. Now we have Bill Gates himself pointing out that Windows really isn't all that easy to use, even if you know what you're doing.
This sort of admission, from a name everyone knows, can be used to point people at alternatives. "Look, I know you're concerned about Ubuntu being hard to use, but it's easier than Windows in many ways. See, even Bill Gates thinks Windows is hard to use. Also, Linux is constantly updated and kept modern, whereas this memo from Gates was written five years ago and Microsoft still hasn't fixed any of the problems he's talking about. You might be better off going with something you know will be maintained."
I can't remember the last time I've "had to" compile anything from source under Linux. That's what apt (or whatever package manager) is for. The only times I compile things from source are when I feel like it because I'm being geeky, or when it's some really esoteric package that, frankly, you wouldn't even have under Windows (hydra comes to mind).
Nor do you "have to" use the command line in Linux these days for 99% of what I'll call "user operations". Things a typical user would do -- check email, use the web, chat online, watch a movie, write a paper, work on a spreadsheet. You know. Gnome and KDE both make it as point and click simple as Windows. The command line is only "necessary" when you're performing certain operations that a typical user would never, ever, ever do -- for example I use it for running network diagnostics and packet captures and so forth.
It seems to me, most Linux distro's only come with the bare necessities (Browser, Productivity Software, Media Player, Etc.). Windows typically has all of these,
You've got it backwards. A fresh install of, say, Ubuntu, has a nice mp3/music player, mail client, web browser, Office suite, multiprotocol IM client, photo manipulation program, and a bunch of other useful stuff already there, out of the box, ready to go. Most of it will serve the average user's needs already, without the need to go hunting around for additional software. If they do need something else, it's a few mouse clicks to get it installed, and you know it'll work. You don't have to search the web, find a boatload of corporate software that makes you register, pay, dance, and swear off your first born, then leaves all kinds of horseshit little icons, shortcuts, systray "helpers", and additional programs you don't want.
A fresh install of Windows has, well, nothing really. Windows Media Player is a freaking joke, but I guess it plays music. Outlook Express is also a joke, but okay, I guess it checks mail, sorta. Other than that, where's the "Office suite" -- Wordpad? Where's the DVD player? Where's the IM client? If you consider IE to be a viable browser, that's your own lookout, but really, Windows on a fresh install is about as bare-bones, minimally usable as can be. Anything you want, you have to go find for yourself, download, install, register, pay, crack, steal, and then clean up the mess each installer leaves behind.
Finally, you say "Installations are pretty intuitive in Windows." I had to laugh. Let me plug myself a moment and explain why Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows, both the OS and the applications. These are side-by-side comparisions I did while installing each, with what I hope are reasonable expectations.
But if you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why are users always bitching that their computers are "slow" and so forth? Because Windows lets any application install anything it wants, anywhere it wants, screw with the registry however it wants, load whatever memory-hogging additional "features" it wants, and within short order, the user -- not knowing how to clean up -- ends up with a machine bogged down with ungodly amounts of crapware.
Linux distros, on the other hand, do not have this problem and never will. To screw up a modern Linux system in the same way you really, really have to know what you're doing, and go out of your way to do it.
"What do we do with the waste?" is a common outcry from anti-nuclear sorts, or even just those who want to know more, but I find it curious that those same people don't seem to ask that question about coal-fired plants, or whatever other type of polluting power generator is around. Don't worry about that waste, guys -- we can just dump that into the atmosphere!
I haven't researched this too thoroughly, but hasn't the US been test detonating nuclear weaponry in the New Mexico and Nevada desert for freaking decades? Wouldn't those sites already be contaminated? What's a little more? Carve out a huge hole in the desert, eight miles deep, whatever. Line it with concrete. Dump the waste in there. It's not going anywhere and if it does, so what, it's ten miles underground in a site that's already been nuked to hell and back.
That is such a silly and tired argument. Here on slashdot we all understand how it works -- the computer asks for a dhcp lease and the router gives it one. Fine. But does anyone here really think that an unsecured wireless signal is really a reflection of the owner's intention, or is it just that the owner is ignorant of how to secure their stuff?
I'm not going to get on a high horse about the ethics of it, because I've deliberately leeched off my neighbor's connection when my DSL got cut off while I was unemployed. And last week I deliberately cracked a WEP key for a friend so she could use the internet in her new apartment while waiting for the cable monkeys.
That having been said, to pretend like an insecure WAP is an open invitation by the owner to help yourself is inane at best and dishonest at worst.
Around here we're fond of mocking ignorant users who make us fix their silly self-caused IT issues. Yet it's those same users who trot down to the store, grab a wireless router, plug it in, and call it a day because hey, now they have wireless. And we expect them to suddenly be cognizent enough to set up WEP or WPA encryption? They don't know any better.
Unless the SSID is something obvious like "Free Wireless", merely having an open WAP means nothing. If I forget to lock my door, are you going to argue that you asked the door "permission" to enter my house by turning the knob, and the door "granted" permission by obligingly moving the bolt out of the way and swinging open?
The user's ignorance is not something to be protected or lauded by any means. But don't try to blur that ignorance into intention, because it doesn't work.
Now, if wireless routers started coming with *some* form of encryption by default, that'd make the entire issue go away. Unfortunately, very few do these days.
bash doesn't tab complete unless I explicitly tell it to do so -- by pressing tab. So let me amend myself by saying I hate anything that tries to tell me what I want to do without my asking. Same with, say, spellcheck; I can run that manually when I'm done writing whatever it is, but don't have your program start cluttering up my screen with stupid red underlines or other markings. As I said, I will deal with it, so let me do my thing and stay outta my face.
Furthermore, the "awesome bar" doesn't tab complete like bash does. If I try to tab something out in bash, it gives me the only possible results, or none at all. Unlike the "awesome bar" which gives me a huge list of garbage that's completely unrelated to what I wanted, but might conceivably contain the word somewhere in the title. It's wrong and ridiculous.
To be fair that's as much Adobe's fault for loading Acrobat with twenty times more extraneous BS than is needed to render a PDF. Mozilla should handle it more gracefully, maybe, but if you've ever tried opening Acrobat by itself, you know it takes bloody ages. And then nags you to update or register or update your registration or register your updates.
You might want to consider using a PDF reader that sucks less. Foxit is pretty decent for Windows.
Ah, bless you. I detest the "awesome bar" also, as I detest and loathe pretty much any application which tries to suggest to me what I want to do. Don't autocomplete my words. Don't underline words you think are spelled incorrectly. Don't mark up my grammar, don't suggest what sites I might be trying to visit. Just let me handle it and stay out of my face.
I will disable that piece of crap as soon as I get my hands on it.
Their SIP implementation is a horrible mishmash of nonstandard garbage.:) The other annoying thing, at least for someone like me who works in a SIP environment, is that Cisco's SIP stack is basically an afterthought. It'll function as a bare-bones SIP client but it won't do all the fancy crap people buy Skinny Cisco systems for, and then the users get all pissy, and then they whine at me, and then I die a little inside.
I am not a huge fan of web interfaces (hello, commandline!) but they're leaps and bounds better than tapping keys five times to make a lowercase J or whatever. I too deal primarily with 7940s and 60s, but they're such a pain.
The environment you're in probably mitigates the tftp issues, but having to specify an external tftp server and letting the phone handle it by itself is maddeningly inconsistent. On top of that, tftp is just a dumb protocol to use in many situations, and there should be other available means to do this.
Likewise for the firmware. On a Linksys phone for example, you download an executable, point it at the phone's IP, and it works. Most other phones have similarly easy methods. On a Cisco, I've never, ever had one successfully pull firmware images from a remote server, so if you're not on site then you have to walk the user through setting up a local tftp server and all the headaches that go along with that. It's just an unnecessary complication imposed by Cisco who can't seem to get it through their heads that not everyone is an engineer. (And it will still fail 50% of the time because the phone requests things very differently from what the documentation claims.)
There's plenty of things under the sun that aren't yet known. And in the end, no matter how much science explains of *how* things are done (gravity makes things fall, not angels; evolution created man, not God in 6 days), it will never explain *why*.
Maybe not, but it can take a much better stab at it than most people think. If you accept it as axiomatic that once you accept that something exists, you accept that it exists as something as opposed to nothing. You might then say that to be "something" means to have a set of characteristics which define what the thing can and cannot do. In other words, "A = A" -- a thing is what it is and will behave thusly.
So "why" does, say, a free electron bond to a free proton? Because that's what it means to be an electron. If it didn't do this, it wouldn't be an electron -- it would be something else.
So that's not exactly science as such -- more like logic -- and delves into the anthropomorphic argument a bit, but it is at least an explanation of "why" that doesn't involve religion or philosophy.
The thing is, revealed religions don't explain why either. Why does the electron attract to the proton? Because an unknowable being, using unknowable means for unknowable reasons, caused it to be that way through an unknowable process. I would hardly call that a satisfactory explanation of "why".
Then you'd be losing the point of compression, in which case you could bypass the problem entirely since the attack relies on examining the compression.:)
In fact, you might be making it worse at that point, since now it's not compressed and you're splitting things into more packets than you were before, which could compound any latency-related issues that may be present.
haha, what? You like Cisco phones over the others? Ciscos are a pain and a half to deal with. Just getting SIP firmware loaded on them is an undertaking that never, ever goes according to Cisco's documentation, and only certain versions are upgradable to certain other versions, but not the ones that are in the documents, and so on.
To configure the damn thing you either have to set up a tftp server with the config files, and then pray that it works (because it won't half the time), or enter SIP information into it manually like you're sending a text message, because unlike every other consumer-level phone on the market that I've ever worked with, Ciscos doesn't have any kind of web interface. Which means that once it's configured, changing anything -- even, say, the time -- requires you to poke at the keypad as you unlock it several different times, scroll through interminable lists of poorly-documented options, some of which will be inexplicably grayed out for no reason...
On top of all that, they're ugly, clunky devices, uncomfortable to use for any length of time, and have horrendous speakers and microphones that sound like shit. I cannot find enough bad things to say about Cisco phones. They are designed by engineers, for engineers, and Cisco really needs to stop pretending they can make consumer-level devices. Leave that to their Linksys division, whose SPA series phones, while not perfect, are orders of magnitude more reliable and easy to use than those godawful Cisco deskweights.
Polycoms are okay, even if they do a lot of stupid things. You will learn to hate Aastras if you ever have to deal with more than one of them behind certain NAT implementations.
Why do we have this idea that politicians are "leaders", like this is some sort of feudal system? The president isn't supposed to "lead" anything -- his job is essentially an administrative one, the same as any manager. The representatives are supposed to do just that -- represent the desires and needs of their constituents.
I really don't understand the notion that we're supposed to elect people and then turn them loose to operate completely autonomously (and the threat of not being re-elected isn't a very powerful one, given people's apathy and reluctance to vote against incumbants).
You're right that Clinton was derided for being a "poll follower", but I don't see how that's a bad thing. Gasp shock, you mean our elected officials listened to what we said we wanted, and then did it? How horrible! We must straight away get someone who ignores everything we say and lords over us serfs because Big Brother knows best!
The war will be over when terror's governing body signs a formal surrender, or when we have crippled terror's troop count or logistical train to the point where terror cannot go on fighting. Don't you know anything about how this stuff works? I swear.
I've got news -- your complaints apply equally well to just about every adult I work with, most of whom are considered "successful" by the usual standards of society, meaning they have decent-paying jobs (some own their own businesses), nice homes, and all the other standard things that let them keep up with the Joneses.
The emails I get from these allegedly normal, successful people are a miserable, dreary mess of incoherent run-on sentences that go nowhere. The topics of these emails vary, but they're usually questions that should be patently ridiculous to anyone who has been concious in modern society for more than a year. Things like complaining that they can't figure out where to plug in an electrical cord. Or they'll forward their phone to itself and gripe that it doesn't work. Even if the notion of this weren't dumb enough, you'd think they'd at least be capable of reasoning that "It worked before I did X, and now it doesn't, so X must be the problem." But they aren't.
This is not limited to some bizarre inability to write, either. On the phone they are just as bad, if not worse. Their idea of a useful description of a problem is "it doesn't work", and they will repeatedly call asking about the same thing over and over, having no ability to extrapolate what they did before to what they're trying to do now, because it's just a little different. They're incapable of reading and following simple instructions, comprehending the concept of "example" or "causality", and describe symptoms in childish terms.
These are not fringe cases, either. Quite literally 70 to 80% of our userbase (yes, I have gone so far as to correlate the number of tickets with the number of accounts) calls in with these types of "problems", and these are all average Joes and Janes. Many of them are professionals, including quite a number of doctors and lawyers. Nor are these limited to just those ignorant of technology -- it is not a technical matter to be capable of understanding cause and effect, or basic information extrapolation. Things your average lab rat is more than capable of doing.
I'm well aware that this is just one man's anecdote and I'm providing no hard data, but I'm obviously not going to start pasting emails and recorded phone conversations (of which I have many), so that's just kind of the way it is. Nevertheless, the "average person" is quite incapable of doing much that would be considered intelligent.
That's true to an extent. Almost exactly one year ago I put together my first "new" computer (as opposed to ones I'd cobbled together from random discarded or donated hardware). I wanted to keep the price down but have gaming performance since I do love my FPS games.
The final cost was about 1100 dollars for a dual-core e6600, GTS8800 768, two gigs of RAM, 500 gig SATA drive, motherboard, case, power supply, fans, and a very nice 21" 1680x1050 LCD. It's not a completely top-of-the-line machine (though at the time, it almost was), but who cares?
(To my dismay, two weeks later, Intel dropped the price of the quad core q6600 to exactly what I'd just paid for the dual core. Ah, well, it was bound to happen..)
Anyway, this machine runs Crysis beautifully with everything except antialiasing maxed out. It slows down in a few parts but never below playability level, and not often enough for me to really care. Bioshock, Quake 4, Doom 3, and all the others run at ridiculously high rates with everything maxed.
If you know where to shop and consider your options, it's easy to get a nice gaming rig without spending a truly insane amount of money. I have friends that spent twice what I did, and only get marginally better performance; there comes a point of diminishing returns, so to speak.
They'd probably argue that their machines are more "future proof" than mine, but really, that's kind of ridiculous. By the time the "next gen" of games after Crysis come out, all this stuff will be considered mid-level or lower anyway. Plus, with today's architecture, it's easy to drop in a quad core down the road if you need it, when the price will be cheaper anyway, or SLI your video card, again, much later, when you need it, when the price is cheaper anyway.
First, jury nullification and related concepts, while technically legal in the US, are hindered through the entire court process. Judges may expel jurors for trying it, or word their instructions such that the jury believes it doesn't have that power, and so forth. There's actually quite a lot they can do to discourage or prevent juries from nullifying the law.
Second, a jury's job is not really to determine the defendant's guilt or innocence, despite what a thousand movies and television shows would have us think. A jury's job is to determine whether or not the prosecution proved its case against the defendant.
The whole thing is even more silly when you consider that many of the "fax machines" in use today aren't even fax machines at all, but some sort of fax-to-email service. In my industry I see a lot of this sort of thing. People get all worked up over how email won't do, they must fax whatever it is -- and they end up using an e-fax service which probably ends up in some other guy's email box anyway through his own e-fax service.:)
Yet both sides are convinced that this is somehow better than just scanning the document and emailing it normally. Truly bizarre, if you ask me.
He's not saying Win95 was the best OS that Microsoft ever released. I think we can all agree that 2k and XP are far superior, and really, Vista is as well.
But Windows 95 was a high point, a nice milestone, any way you slice it. It was the first OS that was readily accepted by the masses, I believe -- before that, consumer-level computers, whether at home or at the office, were basically limited to DOS or 3.1 (which was DOS anyway), and a few random cranks with these "Mac" things nobody paid attention to. They were a pain to set up and a pain to use and except for those of us who grew up to be Slashdot users, nobody wanted 'em if they didn't need 'em.
Then here comes Windows 95, which for all its retrospective faults, was astonishing at the time. Want a hardware upgrade? Jam the hardware inside the box and let Windows figure out the drivers, IRQ settings, and everything else. Maybe use an installation disk or CD for drivers. It didn't always do it perfectly, but it was decent, and leaps and bounds ahead of toggling jumpers with toothpicks and trying to remember which comm port mapped where.
It brought the PC up to date and made it accessible to the masses, who by now have made "Windows" synonymous with "computer", at least to them. It came out at a time when the internet (and the Web) were becoming to seep into the conciousness of society at large, and made it possible for any schmuck to experience it without knowing a lot about computers. Business was booming, people liked the product for the most part, and the main competitor, Apple, was a nobody. A huge economy was growing around Windows 95, from games to business applications to support, and market penetration was off the scale.
Definitely sounded like a good time to be in Gates' position, or to be involved with Microsoft at all.
I call dual monitor setups unusual because the majority of people don't know and don't care. Salespeople use whatever the hell is on their desk when they sit down. If there wasn't a second monitor on their desk provided by the company, they wouldn't have missed it. You're absolutely right that they didn't adjust the resolution, but it's because they don't know how, so it's not like Windows is somehow easier than Linux for them in this regard.
You can decry my penchant for embellishment in my offhand Slashdot post all you want, but I asked you to point out where in my little table-of-installs I did such a thing. As far as I can tell, I didn't.
Windows tells me to reboot after an update. Fine, I understand why. Never said it shouldn't. Ubuntu does that too. But I can tell Ubuntu to piss off if I'm in the middle of something and dont' want to restart right now. Windows will nag me about it every ten minutes, or worse, just do it for me if I'm not there to tell it to go away. Many a morning I've woken up to discover my machine had rebooted overnight because Windows wanted to update. No, that's cool, the number-crunching and downloading I was doing overnight didn't matter anyway!
I suppose you get pissed off when your car beeps at you to tell you that you've left your keys in teh ignition or the lights on.
I think those are things that I should be made aware of. I don't need to be told how to take a tour of XP, or that I can safely unplug hardware with this icon. I don't need a multitude of applications all running their own little updaters and having to tell me about it. I don't need to be told that the firewall is turned off after I just turned it off, or that UAC is disabled after I just disabled it. I could go on and on like this. None of it is information that should be brought to my attention.
In the end, if you're going to stick to your stance that little things popping up all the time to notify you of this or that doesn't bother you, I can't change your mind. I personally find it infuriating -- and echoing your earlier sentiment, a quick look through the internet's many forums will show that many others do, too. There are entire websites devoted to the topic of Windows annoyances from a UI standpoint.
But don't act like my position of "I don't want popups and balloon thingers and notifications and the rest" is somehow ludicrous and unique. It's completely reasonable to want an OS that stays out of my face. So again, if you want to show me where my horrendous exaggerations were in the original link, I'm listening.
What "unique circumstances" would those be, exactly? If you can point out the "unique circumstances", I'm listening. Really, I am, because I want this to be accurate.
As far as I can tell these were all about as plain vanilla installs as you can possibly do. My requirements were extremely minimal -- a usable OS that doesn't get in your way, is reasonably secure, and doesn't have a bunch of useless stuff cluttering the machine and eating resources. You're calling that "unique"?
If I'd wanted to, I could have demanded unusual requirements like dual monitors (Vista doesn't exactly handle that very well, as evidenced by the legion of salespeople at my office with the same resolution on both screens despite the screens having different dimensions and resolutions), or some esoteric hardware, or demands that my Wacom thing absolutely must work, or whatever. But I didn't. I set out to get an OS installed on a laptop, to be used as a laptop, and that's it.
The difference is that, for the majority of people, Ubuntu will install cleanly, quickly, and when it's done, it's done -- you don't have to babysit the installer, because it won't ask you for information. It won't reboot a thousand times between phases of the install or updates (except kernel updates, but even then you can dismiss it and it will not ask again). It won't shove notifications in your face about everything under the sun. It won't have a bunch of useless garbage running on startup. It won't have dangerous and/or useless services enabled by default.
So, yes, the way Windows behaves annoys me. If you think that's unique, I can't convince you otherwise, but I'm finding it hard to believe that you really, really don't have a problem with ten thousand balloon tips and icons and systray helpers and all sorts of dumbass services. My guess is, you disable those things too, but you gloss over it with "install Windows" like it's a one-click operation. I may as well have said "Install Linux" and have been done with it.
And I also find it hard to believe that you've never gone through the crap where Windows simply fails to install critical drivers. You can complain all you want about how your second monitor didn't have Compiz, but Compiz on a second monitor is a really minor thing compared to XP and Vista both completely failing to load ethernet, wireless, sound, and accelerated video even on ONE monitor.
So chill. If you actually want to point out what I was doing that was so bizarre and wacky, again, I'm all ears -- but I think you're just being a bit defensive, and I can't figure out why.
Heh, I don't think so. I recently did a comparative install of XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on identical hardware. You can read all about it if you want (with a handy side by side chart).
Glossing over a Windows install with "Step one, install Windows" is absolutely absurd. Getting XP or Vista to a usable state (which I define in the "article") takes a tremendous amount of time, fidgeting with all kinds of settings, disabling all kinds of useless garbage and services, turning off notifications about everything, etc. And, as I state in my preamble, I don't believe these things are silly -- I don't consider an OS usable if it's nagging me about something every thirty seconds, has ten thousand startup services and systray helpers, gaping security holes, and the rest.
I'd give an Ubuntu CD to my mother any day of the week, confident that she could install it. There's no way in Hell she'd ever be able to get XP or Vista running without my help.
What credit were you looking for, exactly? This is how these things go:
BOSS:...and so this is the project our department completed last week.
BIG BOSS: Ah, good, very nice.. hm, this looks excellent. Good work, Johnson. I'll show the executives at tomorrow's meeting.
BOSS: Thank you.
And at tomorrow's meeting, it'll go like this:
BIG BOSS: And then last week we completed this project here, so that should increase revenue synergy paradigms across end-to-end B2B logistical e-markets.
EXECUTIVE: Great work, we'll announce it in the press release next week. Nicely done, Smith.
BIG BOSS: Thank you.
You get the point? Credit always goes to the person who finally presents it to the next link in the chain, which makes sense, as that person is also usually the one who masterminded the project and managed it to completion. It's a given that he didn't do it all by himself and that there were people under him who did most of the actual grunt work; everyone's aware of it but it isn't necessary to declare each and every individual.
It'd be like a military commander getting accolades from his commanding officer about some victory or other. The commander accepts it on behalf of everyone -- he doesn't need to name each and every damn grunt under his command, even though they were all instrumental in helping to win.
Relax, man. It doesn't matter who got credit for it to the higher-ups, who probably have no idea who you are anyway. Your boss knows what you did, and when it comes time to ask for a raise or whatever, he's the one you're going to be asking, and he'll remember.
(If you'd actually be asking someone above him, same deal. You can still put the project into your "List of good things I've done" when asking whoever and nobody will question you -- or if they want to check, your boss will confirm that yes, you were on that project.)
This isn't some species from the ancient past that went extinct through the normal course of things. This is an animal that was doing just fine until humans showed up and hunted them into near-extinction over a period of about a thousand years.
By the 30s there weren't many left, and only in Tasmania, and we finished them off by placing bounties on them to keep them from attacking sheep. Not to mention the ever-growing destruction of habitat by our farming efforts, competition with the dogs we brought with us, and so forth.
Humans are almost entirely responsible for wiping out the Tasmanian tigers. If we could bring them back, I think we have an ethical obligation to do so, and I'd argue that for any species whose extinction can be directly attributed to human meddling.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Wine is faster for a lot of things. An example I encounter all the time at work: Sometimes I need to use copilot or similar tools to access a user's machine and screw around with whatever. It only runs on Windows and OSX, though. Now, I could open a VM, wait a few minutes for my virtual XP install to boot, and run the program from there, or I could just run the damn thing under wine in three seconds. In addition, I now have the ability to cut and paste between that application and my desktop, whereas you don't always get that in a VM. (I'm aware of VMtools but it seems to not want to install sometimes and I have no idea why.)
So unless you're proposing I leave a VM running all the time, which I think is a silly and needless waste of computing power, Wine is still my choice for running some Windows program quickly. It also handles accelerated graphics fairly well, and my VMs don't.
I guess it's because one of the biggest perceived obstacles to adoption of Linux on the desktop for the masses is that it's "too hard" to use for the average yob, and Windows is much easier. Now we have Bill Gates himself pointing out that Windows really isn't all that easy to use, even if you know what you're doing.
This sort of admission, from a name everyone knows, can be used to point people at alternatives. "Look, I know you're concerned about Ubuntu being hard to use, but it's easier than Windows in many ways. See, even Bill Gates thinks Windows is hard to use. Also, Linux is constantly updated and kept modern, whereas this memo from Gates was written five years ago and Microsoft still hasn't fixed any of the problems he's talking about. You might be better off going with something you know will be maintained."
I've never had to compile anything from source
I can't remember the last time I've "had to" compile anything from source under Linux. That's what apt (or whatever package manager) is for. The only times I compile things from source are when I feel like it because I'm being geeky, or when it's some really esoteric package that, frankly, you wouldn't even have under Windows (hydra comes to mind).
Nor do you "have to" use the command line in Linux these days for 99% of what I'll call "user operations". Things a typical user would do -- check email, use the web, chat online, watch a movie, write a paper, work on a spreadsheet. You know. Gnome and KDE both make it as point and click simple as Windows. The command line is only "necessary" when you're performing certain operations that a typical user would never, ever, ever do -- for example I use it for running network diagnostics and packet captures and so forth.
It seems to me, most Linux distro's only come with the bare necessities (Browser, Productivity Software, Media Player, Etc.). Windows typically has all of these,
You've got it backwards. A fresh install of, say, Ubuntu, has a nice mp3/music player, mail client, web browser, Office suite, multiprotocol IM client, photo manipulation program, and a bunch of other useful stuff already there, out of the box, ready to go. Most of it will serve the average user's needs already, without the need to go hunting around for additional software. If they do need something else, it's a few mouse clicks to get it installed, and you know it'll work. You don't have to search the web, find a boatload of corporate software that makes you register, pay, dance, and swear off your first born, then leaves all kinds of horseshit little icons, shortcuts, systray "helpers", and additional programs you don't want.
A fresh install of Windows has, well, nothing really. Windows Media Player is a freaking joke, but I guess it plays music. Outlook Express is also a joke, but okay, I guess it checks mail, sorta. Other than that, where's the "Office suite" -- Wordpad? Where's the DVD player? Where's the IM client? If you consider IE to be a viable browser, that's your own lookout, but really, Windows on a fresh install is about as bare-bones, minimally usable as can be. Anything you want, you have to go find for yourself, download, install, register, pay, crack, steal, and then clean up the mess each installer leaves behind.
Finally, you say "Installations are pretty intuitive in Windows." I had to laugh. Let me plug myself a moment and explain why Ubuntu is easier to install than Windows, both the OS and the applications. These are side-by-side comparisions I did while installing each, with what I hope are reasonable expectations.
But if you don't believe me, ask yourself this: Why are users always bitching that their computers are "slow" and so forth? Because Windows lets any application install anything it wants, anywhere it wants, screw with the registry however it wants, load whatever memory-hogging additional "features" it wants, and within short order, the user -- not knowing how to clean up -- ends up with a machine bogged down with ungodly amounts of crapware.
Linux distros, on the other hand, do not have this problem and never will. To screw up a modern Linux system in the same way you really, really have to know what you're doing, and go out of your way to do it.
"What do we do with the waste?" is a common outcry from anti-nuclear sorts, or even just those who want to know more, but I find it curious that those same people don't seem to ask that question about coal-fired plants, or whatever other type of polluting power generator is around. Don't worry about that waste, guys -- we can just dump that into the atmosphere!
I haven't researched this too thoroughly, but hasn't the US been test detonating nuclear weaponry in the New Mexico and Nevada desert for freaking decades? Wouldn't those sites already be contaminated? What's a little more? Carve out a huge hole in the desert, eight miles deep, whatever. Line it with concrete. Dump the waste in there. It's not going anywhere and if it does, so what, it's ten miles underground in a site that's already been nuked to hell and back.
That is such a silly and tired argument. Here on slashdot we all understand how it works -- the computer asks for a dhcp lease and the router gives it one. Fine. But does anyone here really think that an unsecured wireless signal is really a reflection of the owner's intention, or is it just that the owner is ignorant of how to secure their stuff?
I'm not going to get on a high horse about the ethics of it, because I've deliberately leeched off my neighbor's connection when my DSL got cut off while I was unemployed. And last week I deliberately cracked a WEP key for a friend so she could use the internet in her new apartment while waiting for the cable monkeys.
That having been said, to pretend like an insecure WAP is an open invitation by the owner to help yourself is inane at best and dishonest at worst.
Around here we're fond of mocking ignorant users who make us fix their silly self-caused IT issues. Yet it's those same users who trot down to the store, grab a wireless router, plug it in, and call it a day because hey, now they have wireless. And we expect them to suddenly be cognizent enough to set up WEP or WPA encryption? They don't know any better.
Unless the SSID is something obvious like "Free Wireless", merely having an open WAP means nothing. If I forget to lock my door, are you going to argue that you asked the door "permission" to enter my house by turning the knob, and the door "granted" permission by obligingly moving the bolt out of the way and swinging open?
The user's ignorance is not something to be protected or lauded by any means. But don't try to blur that ignorance into intention, because it doesn't work.
Now, if wireless routers started coming with *some* form of encryption by default, that'd make the entire issue go away. Unfortunately, very few do these days.
bash doesn't tab complete unless I explicitly tell it to do so -- by pressing tab. So let me amend myself by saying I hate anything that tries to tell me what I want to do without my asking. Same with, say, spellcheck; I can run that manually when I'm done writing whatever it is, but don't have your program start cluttering up my screen with stupid red underlines or other markings. As I said, I will deal with it, so let me do my thing and stay outta my face.
Furthermore, the "awesome bar" doesn't tab complete like bash does. If I try to tab something out in bash, it gives me the only possible results, or none at all. Unlike the "awesome bar" which gives me a huge list of garbage that's completely unrelated to what I wanted, but might conceivably contain the word somewhere in the title. It's wrong and ridiculous.
To be fair that's as much Adobe's fault for loading Acrobat with twenty times more extraneous BS than is needed to render a PDF. Mozilla should handle it more gracefully, maybe, but if you've ever tried opening Acrobat by itself, you know it takes bloody ages. And then nags you to update or register or update your registration or register your updates.
You might want to consider using a PDF reader that sucks less. Foxit is pretty decent for Windows.
Ah, bless you. I detest the "awesome bar" also, as I detest and loathe pretty much any application which tries to suggest to me what I want to do. Don't autocomplete my words. Don't underline words you think are spelled incorrectly. Don't mark up my grammar, don't suggest what sites I might be trying to visit. Just let me handle it and stay out of my face.
I will disable that piece of crap as soon as I get my hands on it.
Their SIP implementation is a horrible mishmash of nonstandard garbage. :) The other annoying thing, at least for someone like me who works in a SIP environment, is that Cisco's SIP stack is basically an afterthought. It'll function as a bare-bones SIP client but it won't do all the fancy crap people buy Skinny Cisco systems for, and then the users get all pissy, and then they whine at me, and then I die a little inside.
I am not a huge fan of web interfaces (hello, commandline!) but they're leaps and bounds better than tapping keys five times to make a lowercase J or whatever. I too deal primarily with 7940s and 60s, but they're such a pain.
The environment you're in probably mitigates the tftp issues, but having to specify an external tftp server and letting the phone handle it by itself is maddeningly inconsistent. On top of that, tftp is just a dumb protocol to use in many situations, and there should be other available means to do this.
Likewise for the firmware. On a Linksys phone for example, you download an executable, point it at the phone's IP, and it works. Most other phones have similarly easy methods. On a Cisco, I've never, ever had one successfully pull firmware images from a remote server, so if you're not on site then you have to walk the user through setting up a local tftp server and all the headaches that go along with that. It's just an unnecessary complication imposed by Cisco who can't seem to get it through their heads that not everyone is an engineer. (And it will still fail 50% of the time because the phone requests things very differently from what the documentation claims.)
There's plenty of things under the sun that aren't yet known. And in the end, no matter how much science explains of *how* things are done (gravity makes things fall, not angels; evolution created man, not God in 6 days), it will never explain *why*.
Maybe not, but it can take a much better stab at it than most people think. If you accept it as axiomatic that once you accept that something exists, you accept that it exists as something as opposed to nothing. You might then say that to be "something" means to have a set of characteristics which define what the thing can and cannot do. In other words, "A = A" -- a thing is what it is and will behave thusly.
So "why" does, say, a free electron bond to a free proton? Because that's what it means to be an electron. If it didn't do this, it wouldn't be an electron -- it would be something else.
So that's not exactly science as such -- more like logic -- and delves into the anthropomorphic argument a bit, but it is at least an explanation of "why" that doesn't involve religion or philosophy.
The thing is, revealed religions don't explain why either. Why does the electron attract to the proton? Because an unknowable being, using unknowable means for unknowable reasons, caused it to be that way through an unknowable process. I would hardly call that a satisfactory explanation of "why".
Then you'd be losing the point of compression, in which case you could bypass the problem entirely since the attack relies on examining the compression. :)
In fact, you might be making it worse at that point, since now it's not compressed and you're splitting things into more packets than you were before, which could compound any latency-related issues that may be present.
haha, what? You like Cisco phones over the others? Ciscos are a pain and a half to deal with. Just getting SIP firmware loaded on them is an undertaking that never, ever goes according to Cisco's documentation, and only certain versions are upgradable to certain other versions, but not the ones that are in the documents, and so on.
To configure the damn thing you either have to set up a tftp server with the config files, and then pray that it works (because it won't half the time), or enter SIP information into it manually like you're sending a text message, because unlike every other consumer-level phone on the market that I've ever worked with, Ciscos doesn't have any kind of web interface. Which means that once it's configured, changing anything -- even, say, the time -- requires you to poke at the keypad as you unlock it several different times, scroll through interminable lists of poorly-documented options, some of which will be inexplicably grayed out for no reason...
On top of all that, they're ugly, clunky devices, uncomfortable to use for any length of time, and have horrendous speakers and microphones that sound like shit. I cannot find enough bad things to say about Cisco phones. They are designed by engineers, for engineers, and Cisco really needs to stop pretending they can make consumer-level devices. Leave that to their Linksys division, whose SPA series phones, while not perfect, are orders of magnitude more reliable and easy to use than those godawful Cisco deskweights.
Polycoms are okay, even if they do a lot of stupid things. You will learn to hate Aastras if you ever have to deal with more than one of them behind certain NAT implementations.
End of rant..
Why do we have this idea that politicians are "leaders", like this is some sort of feudal system? The president isn't supposed to "lead" anything -- his job is essentially an administrative one, the same as any manager. The representatives are supposed to do just that -- represent the desires and needs of their constituents.
I really don't understand the notion that we're supposed to elect people and then turn them loose to operate completely autonomously (and the threat of not being re-elected isn't a very powerful one, given people's apathy and reluctance to vote against incumbants).
You're right that Clinton was derided for being a "poll follower", but I don't see how that's a bad thing. Gasp shock, you mean our elected officials listened to what we said we wanted, and then did it? How horrible! We must straight away get someone who ignores everything we say and lords over us serfs because Big Brother knows best!
The war will be over when terror's governing body signs a formal surrender, or when we have crippled terror's troop count or logistical train to the point where terror cannot go on fighting. Don't you know anything about how this stuff works? I swear.
I've got news -- your complaints apply equally well to just about every adult I work with, most of whom are considered "successful" by the usual standards of society, meaning they have decent-paying jobs (some own their own businesses), nice homes, and all the other standard things that let them keep up with the Joneses.
The emails I get from these allegedly normal, successful people are a miserable, dreary mess of incoherent run-on sentences that go nowhere. The topics of these emails vary, but they're usually questions that should be patently ridiculous to anyone who has been concious in modern society for more than a year. Things like complaining that they can't figure out where to plug in an electrical cord. Or they'll forward their phone to itself and gripe that it doesn't work. Even if the notion of this weren't dumb enough, you'd think they'd at least be capable of reasoning that "It worked before I did X, and now it doesn't, so X must be the problem." But they aren't.
This is not limited to some bizarre inability to write, either. On the phone they are just as bad, if not worse. Their idea of a useful description of a problem is "it doesn't work", and they will repeatedly call asking about the same thing over and over, having no ability to extrapolate what they did before to what they're trying to do now, because it's just a little different. They're incapable of reading and following simple instructions, comprehending the concept of "example" or "causality", and describe symptoms in childish terms.
These are not fringe cases, either. Quite literally 70 to 80% of our userbase (yes, I have gone so far as to correlate the number of tickets with the number of accounts) calls in with these types of "problems", and these are all average Joes and Janes. Many of them are professionals, including quite a number of doctors and lawyers. Nor are these limited to just those ignorant of technology -- it is not a technical matter to be capable of understanding cause and effect, or basic information extrapolation. Things your average lab rat is more than capable of doing.
I'm well aware that this is just one man's anecdote and I'm providing no hard data, but I'm obviously not going to start pasting emails and recorded phone conversations (of which I have many), so that's just kind of the way it is. Nevertheless, the "average person" is quite incapable of doing much that would be considered intelligent.
That's true to an extent. Almost exactly one year ago I put together my first "new" computer (as opposed to ones I'd cobbled together from random discarded or donated hardware). I wanted to keep the price down but have gaming performance since I do love my FPS games.
The final cost was about 1100 dollars for a dual-core e6600, GTS8800 768, two gigs of RAM, 500 gig SATA drive, motherboard, case, power supply, fans, and a very nice 21" 1680x1050 LCD. It's not a completely top-of-the-line machine (though at the time, it almost was), but who cares?
(To my dismay, two weeks later, Intel dropped the price of the quad core q6600 to exactly what I'd just paid for the dual core. Ah, well, it was bound to happen..)
Anyway, this machine runs Crysis beautifully with everything except antialiasing maxed out. It slows down in a few parts but never below playability level, and not often enough for me to really care. Bioshock, Quake 4, Doom 3, and all the others run at ridiculously high rates with everything maxed.
If you know where to shop and consider your options, it's easy to get a nice gaming rig without spending a truly insane amount of money. I have friends that spent twice what I did, and only get marginally better performance; there comes a point of diminishing returns, so to speak.
They'd probably argue that their machines are more "future proof" than mine, but really, that's kind of ridiculous. By the time the "next gen" of games after Crysis come out, all this stuff will be considered mid-level or lower anyway. Plus, with today's architecture, it's easy to drop in a quad core down the road if you need it, when the price will be cheaper anyway, or SLI your video card, again, much later, when you need it, when the price is cheaper anyway.
First, jury nullification and related concepts, while technically legal in the US, are hindered through the entire court process. Judges may expel jurors for trying it, or word their instructions such that the jury believes it doesn't have that power, and so forth. There's actually quite a lot they can do to discourage or prevent juries from nullifying the law.
Second, a jury's job is not really to determine the defendant's guilt or innocence, despite what a thousand movies and television shows would have us think. A jury's job is to determine whether or not the prosecution proved its case against the defendant.
The whole thing is even more silly when you consider that many of the "fax machines" in use today aren't even fax machines at all, but some sort of fax-to-email service. In my industry I see a lot of this sort of thing. People get all worked up over how email won't do, they must fax whatever it is -- and they end up using an e-fax service which probably ends up in some other guy's email box anyway through his own e-fax service. :)
Yet both sides are convinced that this is somehow better than just scanning the document and emailing it normally. Truly bizarre, if you ask me.
He's not saying Win95 was the best OS that Microsoft ever released. I think we can all agree that 2k and XP are far superior, and really, Vista is as well.
But Windows 95 was a high point, a nice milestone, any way you slice it. It was the first OS that was readily accepted by the masses, I believe -- before that, consumer-level computers, whether at home or at the office, were basically limited to DOS or 3.1 (which was DOS anyway), and a few random cranks with these "Mac" things nobody paid attention to. They were a pain to set up and a pain to use and except for those of us who grew up to be Slashdot users, nobody wanted 'em if they didn't need 'em.
Then here comes Windows 95, which for all its retrospective faults, was astonishing at the time. Want a hardware upgrade? Jam the hardware inside the box and let Windows figure out the drivers, IRQ settings, and everything else. Maybe use an installation disk or CD for drivers. It didn't always do it perfectly, but it was decent, and leaps and bounds ahead of toggling jumpers with toothpicks and trying to remember which comm port mapped where.
It brought the PC up to date and made it accessible to the masses, who by now have made "Windows" synonymous with "computer", at least to them. It came out at a time when the internet (and the Web) were becoming to seep into the conciousness of society at large, and made it possible for any schmuck to experience it without knowing a lot about computers. Business was booming, people liked the product for the most part, and the main competitor, Apple, was a nobody. A huge economy was growing around Windows 95, from games to business applications to support, and market penetration was off the scale.
Definitely sounded like a good time to be in Gates' position, or to be involved with Microsoft at all.
I call dual monitor setups unusual because the majority of people don't know and don't care. Salespeople use whatever the hell is on their desk when they sit down. If there wasn't a second monitor on their desk provided by the company, they wouldn't have missed it. You're absolutely right that they didn't adjust the resolution, but it's because they don't know how, so it's not like Windows is somehow easier than Linux for them in this regard.
You can decry my penchant for embellishment in my offhand Slashdot post all you want, but I asked you to point out where in my little table-of-installs I did such a thing. As far as I can tell, I didn't.
Windows tells me to reboot after an update. Fine, I understand why. Never said it shouldn't. Ubuntu does that too. But I can tell Ubuntu to piss off if I'm in the middle of something and dont' want to restart right now. Windows will nag me about it every ten minutes, or worse, just do it for me if I'm not there to tell it to go away. Many a morning I've woken up to discover my machine had rebooted overnight because Windows wanted to update. No, that's cool, the number-crunching and downloading I was doing overnight didn't matter anyway!
I suppose you get pissed off when your car beeps at you to tell you that you've left your keys in teh ignition or the lights on.
I think those are things that I should be made aware of. I don't need to be told how to take a tour of XP, or that I can safely unplug hardware with this icon. I don't need a multitude of applications all running their own little updaters and having to tell me about it. I don't need to be told that the firewall is turned off after I just turned it off, or that UAC is disabled after I just disabled it. I could go on and on like this. None of it is information that should be brought to my attention.
In the end, if you're going to stick to your stance that little things popping up all the time to notify you of this or that doesn't bother you, I can't change your mind. I personally find it infuriating -- and echoing your earlier sentiment, a quick look through the internet's many forums will show that many others do, too. There are entire websites devoted to the topic of Windows annoyances from a UI standpoint.
But don't act like my position of "I don't want popups and balloon thingers and notifications and the rest" is somehow ludicrous and unique. It's completely reasonable to want an OS that stays out of my face. So again, if you want to show me where my horrendous exaggerations were in the original link, I'm listening.
What "unique circumstances" would those be, exactly? If you can point out the "unique circumstances", I'm listening. Really, I am, because I want this to be accurate.
As far as I can tell these were all about as plain vanilla installs as you can possibly do. My requirements were extremely minimal -- a usable OS that doesn't get in your way, is reasonably secure, and doesn't have a bunch of useless stuff cluttering the machine and eating resources. You're calling that "unique"?
If I'd wanted to, I could have demanded unusual requirements like dual monitors (Vista doesn't exactly handle that very well, as evidenced by the legion of salespeople at my office with the same resolution on both screens despite the screens having different dimensions and resolutions), or some esoteric hardware, or demands that my Wacom thing absolutely must work, or whatever. But I didn't. I set out to get an OS installed on a laptop, to be used as a laptop, and that's it.
The difference is that, for the majority of people, Ubuntu will install cleanly, quickly, and when it's done, it's done -- you don't have to babysit the installer, because it won't ask you for information. It won't reboot a thousand times between phases of the install or updates (except kernel updates, but even then you can dismiss it and it will not ask again). It won't shove notifications in your face about everything under the sun. It won't have a bunch of useless garbage running on startup. It won't have dangerous and/or useless services enabled by default.
So, yes, the way Windows behaves annoys me. If you think that's unique, I can't convince you otherwise, but I'm finding it hard to believe that you really, really don't have a problem with ten thousand balloon tips and icons and systray helpers and all sorts of dumbass services. My guess is, you disable those things too, but you gloss over it with "install Windows" like it's a one-click operation. I may as well have said "Install Linux" and have been done with it.
And I also find it hard to believe that you've never gone through the crap where Windows simply fails to install critical drivers. You can complain all you want about how your second monitor didn't have Compiz, but Compiz on a second monitor is a really minor thing compared to XP and Vista both completely failing to load ethernet, wireless, sound, and accelerated video even on ONE monitor.
So chill. If you actually want to point out what I was doing that was so bizarre and wacky, again, I'm all ears -- but I think you're just being a bit defensive, and I can't figure out why.
Heh, I don't think so. I recently did a comparative install of XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on identical hardware. You can read all about it if you want (with a handy side by side chart).
Glossing over a Windows install with "Step one, install Windows" is absolutely absurd. Getting XP or Vista to a usable state (which I define in the "article") takes a tremendous amount of time, fidgeting with all kinds of settings, disabling all kinds of useless garbage and services, turning off notifications about everything, etc. And, as I state in my preamble, I don't believe these things are silly -- I don't consider an OS usable if it's nagging me about something every thirty seconds, has ten thousand startup services and systray helpers, gaping security holes, and the rest.
I'd give an Ubuntu CD to my mother any day of the week, confident that she could install it. There's no way in Hell she'd ever be able to get XP or Vista running without my help.
Yes, let's instead go back to obsessing about every point release of every Apple product under the iSun.
What credit were you looking for, exactly? This is how these things go:
...and so this is the project our department completed last week.
BOSS:
BIG BOSS: Ah, good, very nice.. hm, this looks excellent. Good work, Johnson. I'll show the executives at tomorrow's meeting.
BOSS: Thank you.
And at tomorrow's meeting, it'll go like this:
BIG BOSS: And then last week we completed this project here, so that should increase revenue synergy paradigms across end-to-end B2B logistical e-markets.
EXECUTIVE: Great work, we'll announce it in the press release next week. Nicely done, Smith.
BIG BOSS: Thank you.
You get the point? Credit always goes to the person who finally presents it to the next link in the chain, which makes sense, as that person is also usually the one who masterminded the project and managed it to completion. It's a given that he didn't do it all by himself and that there were people under him who did most of the actual grunt work; everyone's aware of it but it isn't necessary to declare each and every individual.
It'd be like a military commander getting accolades from his commanding officer about some victory or other. The commander accepts it on behalf of everyone -- he doesn't need to name each and every damn grunt under his command, even though they were all instrumental in helping to win.
Relax, man. It doesn't matter who got credit for it to the higher-ups, who probably have no idea who you are anyway. Your boss knows what you did, and when it comes time to ask for a raise or whatever, he's the one you're going to be asking, and he'll remember.
(If you'd actually be asking someone above him, same deal. You can still put the project into your "List of good things I've done" when asking whoever and nobody will question you -- or if they want to check, your boss will confirm that yes, you were on that project.)
This isn't some species from the ancient past that went extinct through the normal course of things. This is an animal that was doing just fine until humans showed up and hunted them into near-extinction over a period of about a thousand years.
By the 30s there weren't many left, and only in Tasmania, and we finished them off by placing bounties on them to keep them from attacking sheep. Not to mention the ever-growing destruction of habitat by our farming efforts, competition with the dogs we brought with us, and so forth.
Humans are almost entirely responsible for wiping out the Tasmanian tigers. If we could bring them back, I think we have an ethical obligation to do so, and I'd argue that for any species whose extinction can be directly attributed to human meddling.