'Despite what you read on websites and blogs, newspapers and magazines, people on the whole aren't all that dissatisfied with Windows. There are millions of users out there who just get on and use their PCs without any real difficulty.'"
This is certainly true, but it's also misleading. I, for example, run Windows on my gaming box without "any real difficulty" but that's because I've tweaked the living hell out of it, turned off all the annoying reminders and pop-up helper crap, organized my start menu so it's not three columns wide (actually it's almost the same as Gnome's "Applications" now), on and on. There are no extraneous services or applications loading on boot, no adware or spyware or other garbage, and so everything runs extremely smoothly... as smooth as Windows can get, anyway.
But that's my personal definition of "without any real difficulty".
For the average user, "without any real difficulty" means that yes, they can check their Outlook email and open their Word documents and screw around on the web, and things don't explode. That does not mean they aren't having difficulty. It means two other things:
1. They're blind to the problems. They have no idea that their computer could be a lot faster if they didn't have so much crap loading into memory for no reason, they have no idea that their machine is a gaping security hole waiting to be owned, and they have no idea that they could, say, delete useless start menu items if they wanted to. They just don't know any better.
2. They're accustomed to it. When things do go wrong, they sometimes complain about the computer being "slow", roll their eyes, sigh and call tech support, gripe about how they aren't "computer people" and these things are so complicated. But they're used to this, and they think it's just part of the experience of using computers. After a while, they're just happy that things work at all, and they count that as a "working computer, no problems". But when they do express frustration, they'll complain about "computers", when really what they're annoyed with is Windows -- they simply don't know that there's a distinction.
Before I started my own darkwave radio station (plug!) via shoutcast, I ran my station off live365. They made it easy, offered a pretty decent rate, and for the price I paid they handled the royalty issues, I had a fairly certain guaranteed uptime, and playlist management was easy. In return all I had to do was make sure all my songs were precisely and accurately ID3 encoded -- so that live365 could host ads and links for the artists I was spinning.
Sounds great for everyone, you ask me...I get to play music I love, people get to hear music they may never hear outside the drunken haze of a goth club, and the artists get free exposure, along with links and ads to their music if you wanted to buy it.
I know this model works because I was (and am) a live365 subscriber for years, and have bought at least two dozen albums based solely on the music I heard on particular stations, music to which I would not otherwise have been exposed. In fact, rips of those albums are a large part of what I spin today on my own station.
And as for that, today, with mirrorshades radio, I have artists sending me music asking to get put into rotation, and listeners, writing to tell me how great this track or that was and that they just grabbed it off iTunes. I know at least one guy who went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station -- he'd never heard them before, and what's that mean for VNV Nation? A ticket sale they wouldn't have otherwise had, not to mention whatever swag he probably bought while he was there.
Artists get increased exposure and sales. Listeners get music and choice. I (and my fellow broadcasters) get to play to whatever niche market we choose. Everyone gains, and no one loses, except for the RIAA, hawking their antiquated and outmoded business model.
I've said it before but I'll say it again -- there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcast for love of the music and artists enjoy the exposure. I was lucky enough to get free hosting for my stream, allowing me a great deal of versatility, but many small broadcasters turn to live365 and similar hosts for cheap, reliable broadcasts, for which they pay their dues and offer free advertising in exchange.
If the majority of people who use live365 as their broadcast platform could afford the rates that soundexchange is demanding, they wouldn't be on live365 to begin with -- they'd have their own dedicated servers with no ads and listeners limited only by bandwidth. As is so often the case, the Big Guys are beating up on the only segment of the population that can't defend themselves.
Yeah, sure. I can turn my phone off, and then I can turn it on later to fifty eight voicemails of idiots whining "Where aaarrreeee yyoooouuuu?" Not to mention the next day when everyone and their mother (including my own mother) harrasses me with "Whyy don't you answer your phoooooonnnne?" (If it's my mother, she'll add "What if it was immpoooorrrrrtaaaant?")
Or, just as likely, they'll next try sending me text messages like "WHERE R U?" and "CALL ME", or perhaps they'll try to track me down on IM, or email me. Ignoring a single phone call invariably results in four other attempts at communication.
The same problems occur with hitting the ignore button.
Ignoring people's inane and incessant calls is not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
You realize everything you said can be applied to Christians, too?
Much as I'd like it, I can hardly claim persecution for being pulled over on the basis that I'm atheist and have written and spoken in halfway-noteworthy functions on the subject, and most cops, judges, and DAs in America are Christians. Is this a Christian conspiracy?
For what it's worth I do agree that the guy is being persecuted for total BS; I just think you're arguing it from a really weak angle.
If you're in the military, you can buy and consume alcohol, but only at a military base. Try again.
How about 18 being considered a legal adult, the "right" to stand trial as an adult, the right to vote, to duty to enlist in the selective service if you're male, to enter into any legal arrangement and have it considered binding, to appear in or purchase pornography.. the list goes on.
True story -- I was in court on day answering a minor traffic violation, and as usual in this jurisdiction (Atlanta) you have to wait around in the courtroom for an hour watching others plead their case until yours comes up. So, I'm sitting there bored out of my skull and the judge calls up the next case, an 18 year old girl who was being charged with consumption by a minor. No DUI, no drugs, apparently just some girl that got busted at a party with a beer in hand.
As is often the case with high school kids she had her parents with her, who also went up to the bench and acted as moral support, I guess. The judge asked her something -- I couldn't hear what -- and the girl's father started to answer. The judge said -- and I'll never forget these words -- "Sir, I appreciate the concern of the family, but legally speaking she's an adult, so this has to come from her."
Legally speaking she is an adult, says this judge, probably not once stopping to consider the irony of enforcing a law which says she's too young and stupid to handle a couple of drinks. Absolutely idiotic.
It's just one of many moronic laws and statutes on the books, and if the authorities are ever wondering why hardly anyone respects the laws or the enforcers, they might want to start with BS like this.
The thing is that users don't complain about the same sort of things we of the technological elite complain about. They don't care about security flaws and software drivers and open versus closed source and incompatable codecs and all the rest.
No, users complain about much more mundane things, and call them flaws. "The computer is slow!" they cry. "I can't find anything!" they gripe. "Whaddya mean my internet is slow, I got broadband!" they whine.
Then we sigh and look and sure enough, the computer is "slow" because the user has ten IE windows open, fifteen random things in the systray, god knows what kind of crapware in the background, and it's anyone's guess when this thing was last defragged.
They "can't find anything" because their desktop is a solid mass of random documents, icons, shortcuts, and whatever else. If they actually remember to save it somewhere other than the desktop it's usually in My Documents, with such descriptive names as "Copy of Research Report of TPS Quality(1)(2).doc" or "New Text Document.txt".
Their "internet is slow" because they have ten computers connected via a hub to a router which goes to another router "because the cable was too short", their intern or kid is torrenting all kinds of stuff, someone is sending a fifteen meg email attachment, and all kinds of malware is sending who-knows-what to who-knows-where in the background.
My point here is that the things users complain about are things the users usually bring on themselves. Of course, they don't realize this, so they blame Microsoft, Windows, "the computer", or the IT staff, but their perception doesn't change the facts.
So, I guess it all depends on what you mean by "shortcomings" of an OS. The qustion here is somewhat loaded, as it presupposes that the user is the one making the complaint, in which case the user is almost always the one to blame and the OS is doing exactly what was asked of it. Whether that's a "flaw" of the OS depends on your point of view, but on the rare occasions that the OS tries to curb a user from doing stupid stuff we mock that, too. ("Cancel or Allow?")
Your aunt wasn't just given a car and told "have fun!" Driving a car is insanely complicated. There are thousands of little rules and laws to remember, all kinds of crazy crap going on all around you at all times, and you have to be aware of all of it while piloting a 3000 pound piece of metal at 70mph down a congested freeway. And that's just to drive it! To keep it running you have to know to get the oil changed every so often, and when it starts acting up, you wouldn't just take it to the mechanic and say "Car stopped working" or "The car's broken" -- you'd describe what sound it was making, when it started, and under what conditions it occurs.
To keep it legal you have to remember to get insurance, keep that up to date, maintain a sane policy, get your tags renewed every so often, get your license renewed every so often.. the list is practically endless.
Your aunt isn't a mechanic, but she sure as fuck wasn't born knowing any of this. She, like eveyrone else, accepted the fact that to operate this device you have to learn some things.
With computers we take the opposite approach. People see it as perfectly acceptable to take a multi-thousand-dollar machine and go "Heeee, I'm not a computer person! I don't need to know anything!" No one is asking them to know how to compile their TCP/IP stack or write software drivers. We're asking them the equivalent of knowing "This is the brake, this is the gas, if you have a problem pull over, and don't forget to change the oil." They don't even have to know how to change the oil themselves -- as long as they can describe what needs to be done to someone else. Which most people can't. (Aren't we all tired of hearing "the system is broken" from users?)
Guys, this isn't 1980. People who live in first-world countries and are old enough to have jobs are old enough to know a bit about computers, the foundation of the modern business world, without which most people wouldn't even have jobs. And among those who use computers only in a non-professional capacity you still have to wonder why they thought they could just latch on and not learn anything in the past ten years.
Operating systems all have a way to go; they annoy even the most technologically savvy among us with their various quirks. But as anyone who has ever worked a help desk can tell you, 95% of user problems are caused by the user. A computer may be a tool but for some reason people accept that to use any other tool, knowledge is required. Somehow we don't let that carry over to the computing world.
That's not the same at all. Having a computer to do some sample work or whatever has been standard practice for years. VNV Nation just played here in Atlanta, and you'll note that while they had their iBooks, they also had a drummer, a keyboardist, and Ronan himself didn't just sit there staring into a laptop -- he was bouncing around and singing and so on.
We're talking here about live shows that are exclusively done with laptops and nothing else.
All images of our galaxy are either composite images based on what we can see from Earth -- a bunch of pictures put together into a whole -- or are not actually our own galaxy, but other similar spiral galaxies, used for illustration.
Which is that people's choices are mostly influenced by marketing and "everyone knows" type garbage, rather than any real facts.
Specific to this issue, the truth is that for the overwhelmingly vast majority of general office workers, modern laptops are total overkill for what they need. Most people need word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoint (puke), Outlook or whatever email, and web browsing for their day to day work. Most people do not do much beyond that, to the point where a good percentage of the population doesn't realize there is anything else they can do with a computer.
For these people, a one gigahertz machine, maybe one point five, should be sufficient, with say half a gig of RAM. Their computing needs simply aren't that demanding. But with glorious advertisements about PRODUCTIVITY and EFFICIENCY they rush out and buy these dual core, two gig systems with all kinds of bells and whistles, and what do they do with it? Same thing they were doing before: Running Office and IE.
Really, the extra resources just means they can run more spyware and other useless or malicious garbage -- it isn't helping them any. A clean 1.5ghz system would be FINE for most people -- they just think it's slow because it's dragging all kinds of other crap along with it.
I know there's always special cases where someone does some high end work where more power is better, but really, you have to admit that the majority of people aren't getting any more "productivity" out of faster machines. But their malware sure is.
I run a synthpop and darkwave radio station myself (plug!), and I have had people tell me they've never heard this or that artist before, and then go check out their albums. One even went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station. What's that mean for VNV Nation? Money in their pockets. And that's just the ticket sale; who knows what merchandise the guy bought while there.
I've also had artists send me promo tracks, full albums, and other stuff -- mostly indie artists looking for some exposure. If they're good (and they usually are) I put them in rotation, so dozens of people get to hear someone they've never heard. I don't solicit; they send me this stuff because they want me to play it. As one recent artist, James Stark, told me, after he sent me some tracks for consideration and I enjoyed them enough to put them in rotation:
Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.
Just a guy trying to get his music noticed. And he's not alone -- this happens quite a bit, and I broadcast a niche genre. I bet broadcasters in more "mainstream" genres get even more artists than I do.
The artists love it -- they get free exposure to an audience primed to the genre, and whatever album sales, merchandise, mp3 downloads, and the rest that comes with it. The listeners love it. No one is losing and everyone is gaining -- except the labels and the RIAA who, in this day and age, are totally unnecessary anyway.
Some of the artists that send me stuff are easily good enough to get signed, and I know some have been approached, but they steadfastly refuse. They'd rather remain independant of money-grubbing middlemen and idiotic contracts, and get their music to the fans with channels of distribution their target audience is likely to use.
I started this venture after years and years of listening to net radio on live365 and other assorted places. And I bought music after listening. I know the system works.
Frankly, there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcasters do this for the love of the music and because it's fun. Don't penalize us for bringing the art to the people. Don't penalize us, the artists, or the audience.
But I'm reminded of John Titor here. You know, the guy who was posting on Usenet saying he was from the future? Bollocks, I'm sure, but he did have some interesting things to say, and one of them was something to the effect (I don't have the quote in front of me): "Pay attention when the government starts talking about non-lethal weapons to use against the enemy. When they start talking about that, the enemy they're talking about YOU. You don't really think they're going into hostile territory under RPG fire and jumping out of a helicopter with these 'non lethal' toys, do you?"
And, well, I had to admit there was a point there. Maybe we should find it disturbing that so much research is being put into this kind of thing.
1. What do you get on a fresh install? On Windows, you get jack-all squat. A bug-ridden web browser, a word processor (Wordpad) that is next to useless, and an unbelievably ass-tacular media player (WMP). That's about it. Pray you don't need this codec or that.
Ubuntu? Comes with just about everything the average user would ever need or want. AIM, IRC, decent media player (I prefer Audacious and VLC but Totem works fine, really), fully functional office suite including email, slick web browser, PDFs supported natively, the works.
2. Want to install something? In Vista you have to either buy a CD, or google around till you find something that looks promising, download it, install it, and end up with fifty thousand icons all over the start menu and desktop, and god only knows where it'll install the files. Not to mention the bullshit startup helpers and systray crap hogging resources in your system. Pray you don't need this or that obscure nonsense to get it to install or run properly.
Ubuntu? Crack open Synaptic and within one or two clicks you can have just about anything you could possibly want, all dependencies taken care of for you, sorted into a nice, neat menu system even your grandmother would understand. (She can figure out that a game is in "Games", but she won't remember that it's in Programs > Sierra > Atari > Unreal Tournament > Play Unreal Tournament. Not that your grandmother's playing Unreal, but whatever.) No screwing around, no systray nonsense, no startup helpers, no icons littering your desktop.
All that's just for starters; read my little article if you really care about my opinion. Suffice to say that I, for one, would feel perfectly confident giving an Ubuntu CD to my own mother and trusting that she could handle both installing and using it without much questioning of me. Whereas I'm helping her figure Windows out once or twice a week.
So people are "fuming" that their personalized news page and other crap, which is free, and mostly in beta, had a minor glitch and now they'll have to spend two minutes setting up their precious, precious settings again. My, what a catastrophe.
conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
Doubtful. Remember there was a time when the heliocentric model of the solar system was declared heretical, and under threat of imprisonment and torture Galileo was made to denounce his theories, because dogma at the time declared Earth to be the center of creation, as it fairly plainly states in the Bible that all of God's efforts were centered around us, and the stars and planets and moon and sky were basically just afterthoughts meant to benefit Earth.
Today, though, any fundamentalist can give you an impressive speech about how the precision and complexity of planetary orbits is actually a demonstration of the magnificence of God's wisdom and power.
There is no new discovery that can be made that fundies won't resist fiercely at first, and then incorporate into their own "explanation" of everything. Life on other planets? Even intelligent life? Why, clearly God put them there to help us, or to give us someone to witness the Gospels to, or because God didn't want us to be lonely in the universe, and anyway just look at how complex those lifeforms are! They could only have been designed by God, as we were!
I think that sooner or later you'll find fundies even accepting evolution (not in our lifetime), because the intricate check-and-balance system it relies on is so glorious, it could only have come from God.
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
And it's usually oh-so-effective. If I am having surgery and require antibiotics for the incision site afterwards, I'll trust those over your herbs, thank you very much.
Why don't we go back to drilling holes in our heads to let out the evil spirits, too? That was around way before your fancy-schmancy "Chinese medicine".
Actually it is a workable concept and has been explored -- at least on paper -- for collecting hydrogen for fusion reactors for whatever spaceship could be invented in the future. Unfortunately, someone (was it Krauss?) calculated that just to collect one gram of hydrogen per second, moving at a decent fraction of lightspeed even, you'd need a collector approximately 25 miles wide.
I always figured that in Star Trek, the fancy red thing on the front end of the engines (even in the original series) was some kind of.. electromagnetic.. quantum... thing.. of some sort that somehow attracted hydrogen to it.
I'm watching youtube videos of Guns N Roses (shut up, I like them) and I'm being more and more amazed by Slash's guitar skills. I thought I'd like to see some of his solo stuff as well, so my dumb ass, not thinking, types "slash" into the search box and UNLEASHED UNSPEAKABLE EVIL!
People are ridiculous. "Oh no, I can't receive emails while I'm in my car!" Can't these people find anything useful to do with themselves in the interim? Barring very, very specific and anamolous exceptions, if I have an employee who basically shuts down because of a Blackberry outage, I think I need to find another employee. It's like, wow guys, it's amazing anyone got anything done back in the Dark Ages of 2002 when we didn't have Blackberries!
Grow up, Blackberry users, and find something to do.
Then if the military isn't going to turn their guns on us, I guess we don't need guns to fight them, hm?
By the way I wasn't thinking of guns versus guns. Your hunting rifle versus a couple Apache helicopters or an M1 battle tank or, hell, a missile launched from a submarine sitting on a coast 400 miles away. Lots of luck with that.
Slashdot Mirror
This is certainly true, but it's also misleading. I, for example, run Windows on my gaming box without "any real difficulty" but that's because I've tweaked the living hell out of it, turned off all the annoying reminders and pop-up helper crap, organized my start menu so it's not three columns wide (actually it's almost the same as Gnome's "Applications" now), on and on. There are no extraneous services or applications loading on boot, no adware or spyware or other garbage, and so everything runs extremely smoothly... as smooth as Windows can get, anyway.
But that's my personal definition of "without any real difficulty".
For the average user, "without any real difficulty" means that yes, they can check their Outlook email and open their Word documents and screw around on the web, and things don't explode. That does not mean they aren't having difficulty. It means two other things:
1. They're blind to the problems. They have no idea that their computer could be a lot faster if they didn't have so much crap loading into memory for no reason, they have no idea that their machine is a gaping security hole waiting to be owned, and they have no idea that they could, say, delete useless start menu items if they wanted to. They just don't know any better.
2. They're accustomed to it. When things do go wrong, they sometimes complain about the computer being "slow", roll their eyes, sigh and call tech support, gripe about how they aren't "computer people" and these things are so complicated. But they're used to this, and they think it's just part of the experience of using computers. After a while, they're just happy that things work at all, and they count that as a "working computer, no problems". But when they do express frustration, they'll complain about "computers", when really what they're annoyed with is Windows -- they simply don't know that there's a distinction.
Before I started my own darkwave radio station (plug!) via shoutcast, I ran my station off live365. They made it easy, offered a pretty decent rate, and for the price I paid they handled the royalty issues, I had a fairly certain guaranteed uptime, and playlist management was easy. In return all I had to do was make sure all my songs were precisely and accurately ID3 encoded -- so that live365 could host ads and links for the artists I was spinning.
Sounds great for everyone, you ask me...I get to play music I love, people get to hear music they may never hear outside the drunken haze of a goth club, and the artists get free exposure, along with links and ads to their music if you wanted to buy it.
I know this model works because I was (and am) a live365 subscriber for years, and have bought at least two dozen albums based solely on the music I heard on particular stations, music to which I would not otherwise have been exposed. In fact, rips of those albums are a large part of what I spin today on my own station.
And as for that, today, with mirrorshades radio, I have artists sending me music asking to get put into rotation, and listeners, writing to tell me how great this track or that was and that they just grabbed it off iTunes. I know at least one guy who went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station -- he'd never heard them before, and what's that mean for VNV Nation? A ticket sale they wouldn't have otherwise had, not to mention whatever swag he probably bought while he was there.
Artists get increased exposure and sales. Listeners get music and choice. I (and my fellow broadcasters) get to play to whatever niche market we choose. Everyone gains, and no one loses, except for the RIAA, hawking their antiquated and outmoded business model.
I've said it before but I'll say it again -- there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcast for love of the music and artists enjoy the exposure. I was lucky enough to get free hosting for my stream, allowing me a great deal of versatility, but many small broadcasters turn to live365 and similar hosts for cheap, reliable broadcasts, for which they pay their dues and offer free advertising in exchange.
If the majority of people who use live365 as their broadcast platform could afford the rates that soundexchange is demanding, they wouldn't be on live365 to begin with -- they'd have their own dedicated servers with no ads and listeners limited only by bandwidth. As is so often the case, the Big Guys are beating up on the only segment of the population that can't defend themselves.
Stop treading on us, and let the music play.
PROSECUTOR: And so the state charges the defendant with making terrorist threats on a website via that site's forum--
JUDGE: Wait, wait. "Website"? "Forum"? Was there some sort of Town Hall meeting, or something?
PROSECUTOR: No, Your Honor, this was an online forum.
JUDGE: What were they standing on line for? To get into the meeting?
PROSECUTOR: No, sir. I mean, a forum on the internet.
JUDGE: The.. the what, now? What?
PROSECUTOR: (sigh) Your Honor, you know that big truck you drive?
JUDGE: Go on...
Yeah, sure. I can turn my phone off, and then I can turn it on later to fifty eight voicemails of idiots whining "Where aaarrreeee yyoooouuuu?" Not to mention the next day when everyone and their mother (including my own mother) harrasses me with "Whyy don't you answer your phoooooonnnne?" (If it's my mother, she'll add "What if it was immpoooorrrrrtaaaant?")
Or, just as likely, they'll next try sending me text messages like "WHERE R U?" and "CALL ME", or perhaps they'll try to track me down on IM, or email me. Ignoring a single phone call invariably results in four other attempts at communication.
The same problems occur with hitting the ignore button.
Ignoring people's inane and incessant calls is not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
You realize everything you said can be applied to Christians, too?
Much as I'd like it, I can hardly claim persecution for being pulled over on the basis that I'm atheist and have written and spoken in halfway-noteworthy functions on the subject, and most cops, judges, and DAs in America are Christians. Is this a Christian conspiracy?
For what it's worth I do agree that the guy is being persecuted for total BS; I just think you're arguing it from a really weak angle.
If you're in the military, you can buy and consume alcohol, but only at a military base. Try again.
How about 18 being considered a legal adult, the "right" to stand trial as an adult, the right to vote, to duty to enlist in the selective service if you're male, to enter into any legal arrangement and have it considered binding, to appear in or purchase pornography.. the list goes on.
True story -- I was in court on day answering a minor traffic violation, and as usual in this jurisdiction (Atlanta) you have to wait around in the courtroom for an hour watching others plead their case until yours comes up. So, I'm sitting there bored out of my skull and the judge calls up the next case, an 18 year old girl who was being charged with consumption by a minor. No DUI, no drugs, apparently just some girl that got busted at a party with a beer in hand.
As is often the case with high school kids she had her parents with her, who also went up to the bench and acted as moral support, I guess. The judge asked her something -- I couldn't hear what -- and the girl's father started to answer. The judge said -- and I'll never forget these words -- "Sir, I appreciate the concern of the family, but legally speaking she's an adult, so this has to come from her."
Legally speaking she is an adult, says this judge, probably not once stopping to consider the irony of enforcing a law which says she's too young and stupid to handle a couple of drinks. Absolutely idiotic.
It's just one of many moronic laws and statutes on the books, and if the authorities are ever wondering why hardly anyone respects the laws or the enforcers, they might want to start with BS like this.
The thing is that users don't complain about the same sort of things we of the technological elite complain about. They don't care about security flaws and software drivers and open versus closed source and incompatable codecs and all the rest.
No, users complain about much more mundane things, and call them flaws. "The computer is slow!" they cry. "I can't find anything!" they gripe. "Whaddya mean my internet is slow, I got broadband!" they whine.
Then we sigh and look and sure enough, the computer is "slow" because the user has ten IE windows open, fifteen random things in the systray, god knows what kind of crapware in the background, and it's anyone's guess when this thing was last defragged.
They "can't find anything" because their desktop is a solid mass of random documents, icons, shortcuts, and whatever else. If they actually remember to save it somewhere other than the desktop it's usually in My Documents, with such descriptive names as "Copy of Research Report of TPS Quality(1)(2).doc" or "New Text Document.txt".
Their "internet is slow" because they have ten computers connected via a hub to a router which goes to another router "because the cable was too short", their intern or kid is torrenting all kinds of stuff, someone is sending a fifteen meg email attachment, and all kinds of malware is sending who-knows-what to who-knows-where in the background.
My point here is that the things users complain about are things the users usually bring on themselves. Of course, they don't realize this, so they blame Microsoft, Windows, "the computer", or the IT staff, but their perception doesn't change the facts.
So, I guess it all depends on what you mean by "shortcomings" of an OS. The qustion here is somewhat loaded, as it presupposes that the user is the one making the complaint, in which case the user is almost always the one to blame and the OS is doing exactly what was asked of it. Whether that's a "flaw" of the OS depends on your point of view, but on the rare occasions that the OS tries to curb a user from doing stupid stuff we mock that, too. ("Cancel or Allow?")
Your aunt wasn't just given a car and told "have fun!" Driving a car is insanely complicated. There are thousands of little rules and laws to remember, all kinds of crazy crap going on all around you at all times, and you have to be aware of all of it while piloting a 3000 pound piece of metal at 70mph down a congested freeway. And that's just to drive it! To keep it running you have to know to get the oil changed every so often, and when it starts acting up, you wouldn't just take it to the mechanic and say "Car stopped working" or "The car's broken" -- you'd describe what sound it was making, when it started, and under what conditions it occurs.
To keep it legal you have to remember to get insurance, keep that up to date, maintain a sane policy, get your tags renewed every so often, get your license renewed every so often.. the list is practically endless.
Your aunt isn't a mechanic, but she sure as fuck wasn't born knowing any of this. She, like eveyrone else, accepted the fact that to operate this device you have to learn some things.
With computers we take the opposite approach. People see it as perfectly acceptable to take a multi-thousand-dollar machine and go "Heeee, I'm not a computer person! I don't need to know anything!" No one is asking them to know how to compile their TCP/IP stack or write software drivers. We're asking them the equivalent of knowing "This is the brake, this is the gas, if you have a problem pull over, and don't forget to change the oil." They don't even have to know how to change the oil themselves -- as long as they can describe what needs to be done to someone else. Which most people can't. (Aren't we all tired of hearing "the system is broken" from users?)
Guys, this isn't 1980. People who live in first-world countries and are old enough to have jobs are old enough to know a bit about computers, the foundation of the modern business world, without which most people wouldn't even have jobs. And among those who use computers only in a non-professional capacity you still have to wonder why they thought they could just latch on and not learn anything in the past ten years.
Operating systems all have a way to go; they annoy even the most technologically savvy among us with their various quirks. But as anyone who has ever worked a help desk can tell you, 95% of user problems are caused by the user. A computer may be a tool but for some reason people accept that to use any other tool, knowledge is required. Somehow we don't let that carry over to the computing world.
After I already paid the guy to become a borrowed ladder and spent four weeks in leg braces to get taller. Thanks for nothing!
That's not the same at all. Having a computer to do some sample work or whatever has been standard practice for years. VNV Nation just played here in Atlanta, and you'll note that while they had their iBooks, they also had a drummer, a keyboardist, and Ronan himself didn't just sit there staring into a laptop -- he was bouncing around and singing and so on.
We're talking here about live shows that are exclusively done with laptops and nothing else.
All images of our galaxy are either composite images based on what we can see from Earth -- a bunch of pictures put together into a whole -- or are not actually our own galaxy, but other similar spiral galaxies, used for illustration.
it must be dollaridoos.
Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Which is that people's choices are mostly influenced by marketing and "everyone knows" type garbage, rather than any real facts.
Specific to this issue, the truth is that for the overwhelmingly vast majority of general office workers, modern laptops are total overkill for what they need. Most people need word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoint (puke), Outlook or whatever email, and web browsing for their day to day work. Most people do not do much beyond that, to the point where a good percentage of the population doesn't realize there is anything else they can do with a computer.
For these people, a one gigahertz machine, maybe one point five, should be sufficient, with say half a gig of RAM. Their computing needs simply aren't that demanding. But with glorious advertisements about PRODUCTIVITY and EFFICIENCY they rush out and buy these dual core, two gig systems with all kinds of bells and whistles, and what do they do with it? Same thing they were doing before: Running Office and IE.
Really, the extra resources just means they can run more spyware and other useless or malicious garbage -- it isn't helping them any. A clean 1.5ghz system would be FINE for most people -- they just think it's slow because it's dragging all kinds of other crap along with it.
I know there's always special cases where someone does some high end work where more power is better, but really, you have to admit that the majority of people aren't getting any more "productivity" out of faster machines. But their malware sure is.
I've also had artists send me promo tracks, full albums, and other stuff -- mostly indie artists looking for some exposure. If they're good (and they usually are) I put them in rotation, so dozens of people get to hear someone they've never heard. I don't solicit; they send me this stuff because they want me to play it. As one recent artist, James Stark, told me, after he sent me some tracks for consideration and I enjoyed them enough to put them in rotation:
Just a guy trying to get his music noticed. And he's not alone -- this happens quite a bit, and I broadcast a niche genre. I bet broadcasters in more "mainstream" genres get even more artists than I do.
The artists love it -- they get free exposure to an audience primed to the genre, and whatever album sales, merchandise, mp3 downloads, and the rest that comes with it. The listeners love it. No one is losing and everyone is gaining -- except the labels and the RIAA who, in this day and age, are totally unnecessary anyway.
Some of the artists that send me stuff are easily good enough to get signed, and I know some have been approached, but they steadfastly refuse. They'd rather remain independant of money-grubbing middlemen and idiotic contracts, and get their music to the fans with channels of distribution their target audience is likely to use.
I started this venture after years and years of listening to net radio on live365 and other assorted places. And I bought music after listening. I know the system works.
Frankly, there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcasters do this for the love of the music and because it's fun. Don't penalize us for bringing the art to the people. Don't penalize us, the artists, or the audience.
But I'm reminded of John Titor here. You know, the guy who was posting on Usenet saying he was from the future? Bollocks, I'm sure, but he did have some interesting things to say, and one of them was something to the effect (I don't have the quote in front of me): "Pay attention when the government starts talking about non-lethal weapons to use against the enemy. When they start talking about that, the enemy they're talking about YOU. You don't really think they're going into hostile territory under RPG fire and jumping out of a helicopter with these 'non lethal' toys, do you?"
And, well, I had to admit there was a point there. Maybe we should find it disturbing that so much research is being put into this kind of thing.
I've even written a brief article about how Ubuntu is better than Windows for Your Mother. The two key things the TFA seems to completely gloss over:
1. What do you get on a fresh install? On Windows, you get jack-all squat. A bug-ridden web browser, a word processor (Wordpad) that is next to useless, and an unbelievably ass-tacular media player (WMP). That's about it. Pray you don't need this codec or that.
Ubuntu? Comes with just about everything the average user would ever need or want. AIM, IRC, decent media player (I prefer Audacious and VLC but Totem works fine, really), fully functional office suite including email, slick web browser, PDFs supported natively, the works.
2. Want to install something? In Vista you have to either buy a CD, or google around till you find something that looks promising, download it, install it, and end up with fifty thousand icons all over the start menu and desktop, and god only knows where it'll install the files. Not to mention the bullshit startup helpers and systray crap hogging resources in your system. Pray you don't need this or that obscure nonsense to get it to install or run properly.
Ubuntu? Crack open Synaptic and within one or two clicks you can have just about anything you could possibly want, all dependencies taken care of for you, sorted into a nice, neat menu system even your grandmother would understand. (She can figure out that a game is in "Games", but she won't remember that it's in Programs > Sierra > Atari > Unreal Tournament > Play Unreal Tournament. Not that your grandmother's playing Unreal, but whatever.) No screwing around, no systray nonsense, no startup helpers, no icons littering your desktop.
All that's just for starters; read my little article if you really care about my opinion. Suffice to say that I, for one, would feel perfectly confident giving an Ubuntu CD to my own mother and trusting that she could handle both installing and using it without much questioning of me. Whereas I'm helping her figure Windows out once or twice a week.
So people are "fuming" that their personalized news page and other crap, which is free, and mostly in beta, had a minor glitch and now they'll have to spend two minutes setting up their precious, precious settings again. My, what a catastrophe.
conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
Doubtful. Remember there was a time when the heliocentric model of the solar system was declared heretical, and under threat of imprisonment and torture Galileo was made to denounce his theories, because dogma at the time declared Earth to be the center of creation, as it fairly plainly states in the Bible that all of God's efforts were centered around us, and the stars and planets and moon and sky were basically just afterthoughts meant to benefit Earth.
Today, though, any fundamentalist can give you an impressive speech about how the precision and complexity of planetary orbits is actually a demonstration of the magnificence of God's wisdom and power.
There is no new discovery that can be made that fundies won't resist fiercely at first, and then incorporate into their own "explanation" of everything. Life on other planets? Even intelligent life? Why, clearly God put them there to help us, or to give us someone to witness the Gospels to, or because God didn't want us to be lonely in the universe, and anyway just look at how complex those lifeforms are! They could only have been designed by God, as we were!
I think that sooner or later you'll find fundies even accepting evolution (not in our lifetime), because the intricate check-and-balance system it relies on is so glorious, it could only have come from God.
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
And it's usually oh-so-effective. If I am having surgery and require antibiotics for the incision site afterwards, I'll trust those over your herbs, thank you very much.
Why don't we go back to drilling holes in our heads to let out the evil spirits, too? That was around way before your fancy-schmancy "Chinese medicine".
Like the brawl between Neo and all the Smiths? Man, that was cool.
Actually it is a workable concept and has been explored -- at least on paper -- for collecting hydrogen for fusion reactors for whatever spaceship could be invented in the future. Unfortunately, someone (was it Krauss?) calculated that just to collect one gram of hydrogen per second, moving at a decent fraction of lightspeed even, you'd need a collector approximately 25 miles wide.
I always figured that in Star Trek, the fancy red thing on the front end of the engines (even in the original series) was some kind of.. electromagnetic.. quantum... thing.. of some sort that somehow attracted hydrogen to it.
I'm watching youtube videos of Guns N Roses (shut up, I like them) and I'm being more and more amazed by Slash's guitar skills. I thought I'd like to see some of his solo stuff as well, so my dumb ass, not thinking, types "slash" into the search box and UNLEASHED UNSPEAKABLE EVIL!
People are ridiculous. "Oh no, I can't receive emails while I'm in my car!" Can't these people find anything useful to do with themselves in the interim? Barring very, very specific and anamolous exceptions, if I have an employee who basically shuts down because of a Blackberry outage, I think I need to find another employee. It's like, wow guys, it's amazing anyone got anything done back in the Dark Ages of 2002 when we didn't have Blackberries!
Grow up, Blackberry users, and find something to do.
Then if the military isn't going to turn their guns on us, I guess we don't need guns to fight them, hm? By the way I wasn't thinking of guns versus guns. Your hunting rifle versus a couple Apache helicopters or an M1 battle tank or, hell, a missile launched from a submarine sitting on a coast 400 miles away. Lots of luck with that.