Serious question -- who is to say this is for business purposes? Using ham radio to get internet access everywhere sounds like a pretty fun geek hobby experiment to me. If he were to get it working, wouldn't that be fun? And is anyone really going to complain that he checked his work email with it? Just how strict are these laws?
The obvious solution would be to put the touch-screen flat on the desk (and split the keyboard out to either side). Add eye-tracking to switch context/windows, multi-touch on-screen interaction, and built-in windex for a potentially workable solution..?
Jeez. The obvious solution would be to use computers the way they are, until some serious shift in the nature of human-computer interaction is required. It works fine the way it is.
Right now I can kick back in my chair, sit upright, slouch around, glance at the screen while talking to people, and so forth. It works fine for basically every computer user with two functional arms, and many with only one. In fact, right now my feet are on my desk as I type this on a laptop, and I can move one hand to control the workstation sitting on the desk if I need to.
Your solution would require us to all sit hunched over our desks, staring straight down so we could see the screen, train ourselves to limit our eye movement, spread our hands on both sides of the desk like we're having trouble holding up our body weight (which, after sitting hunched over like that, we might)...
I fail to see what is wrong with the current desktops and laptops as they stand today.
You have posited a situation in which a part of my suggestion may not be optimal!
I have posited a situation which applies to the vast majority of computer users in the world. Billions of people sit at a computer in an office for at least eight hours a day, five days a week, and often more. The majority of them are sitting where they can hear other coworkers, and most all of them have to compute while they talk to others, either face to face or on the phone.
Clicking your tongue just isn't going to work in such an environment. Your workaround is to use a mouse -- well, I'm already doing that. What problem is your solution solving?
In order to implement your solution in any meaningful way we'd have to deal with a bunch of things:
- Eye tracking accurate enough that the machine can tell that I'm looking at a button and not just nearby.
- A sound analysis system so sophisticated it can distinguish between my tongue clicks, the tongue clicks of someone nearby doing the same thing, the tongue clicks of me making "tsk tsk" noises at a stupid suggestion from a coworker, the sound of someone dropping a pencil on the desk, and other incidental environmental sound effects.
- A UI which allows seamlessly switching between staring-and-tongue-clicking, and using the mouse, for those times when I need to switch between working on my own stuff versus talking to someone, which is something everyone in an office needs to be able to do.
- Coworkers who think it's just hilarious to record tongue-clicky noises and play them back over your cube wall while you work so you end up clicking on all kinds of things. If you think that wouldn't happen you must work in the most boring place in the world.
Or, we could just use the mouse because it works absolutely fine. Why are we looking for other ways of moving cursors around?
(I like the idea of making a 'click' noise with your tongue for a simple, intuitive, self-contained interface)
Yeah, I want to sit in an office full of tongue-clicking nimrods. And that'd be really great for doing computer tasks while you're talking to someone or on the phone, too.
Clicking GUI buttons is a far cry from trying to draw accurately. The demands of a graphic artist are nothing, at all, like the demands of the general computer-using masses.
Of course, a stylus and tablet are also nothing, at all, like a touchscreen.
The millions of office workers out there really do not want to sit for eight hours a day holding their arms in front of them like mummies. I'd say it's likely to be physically impossible for a human to do that for more than a few minutes without the muscles fatiguing to the point where they are nonfunctional.
This touchscreen garbage keeps coming up every so often, usually with a tone of regret, lamenting the fact that the technology hasn't made any real inroads. There's a reason it's made no inroads, and that's a lack of demand. The reason the lack of demand is there is because touchscreens pretty much suck.
You iPhone-loving kids deal with touchscreens in a very specific, limited, handheld system for reasons I can't quite fathom but I will acknowledge that the technology seems to work for that very specific, limited, handheld system. Anything more complex and touchscreens seriously start to bite, and all attempts at integrating them into a normal computing experience have been met with failure because they bite.
Other than the iPhone, which I still don't even like, I've only seen one useful, real-world application where touchscreens were a good idea, and that's POS systems, particularly in restaurants. As a waiter I could wander over to one, tap the screen a few times, and place or modify an order. But those were also severely limited systems, with a user interface designed with a small number of very specific functions arranged into large, easy-to-tap buttons. It didn't need to do anything else, it didn't do anything else, and so the touchscreen worked well for one-handed operation (and no risk of spilling crap all over a keyboard).
Given the totally limited places touchscreens have ever been useful, I have to say WHO CARES if it never really goes anywhere?
I love the idea of Nexenta but I have never gotten it to successfully install and boot on any machine I've tried. OpenSolaris, on the other hand, has never failed me. As of right now, I completely suck at administrating it, but it does install, boot, and I can get around it well enough for my day to day tasks.
What I liked about this article is that it has nice clean tables showing the Solaris verison of the Linux commands I already know. Nexenta seems to want to hide me from all the Solaris stuff under the hood and let me carry on with my Linux ways -- which is nice if I'm just doing this for myself, but if I want to actually learn something about Solaris, isn't so nice.
It's a totally fair comparision. First, a shameless plug for my own "article" about Windows versus Ubuntu.
In a nutshell, Ubuntu comes with basically everything the average yob needs right off. Office suite, mail, multi-protocol IM client, browser, video player, music player, CD and DVD burner, music ripper, and the list goes on. Pretty much everything else you could want is available, for free, out of the repositories, with one simple click.
Windows has a terrible browser and a terrible media player (WMP) that barely works half the time. And MS Paint, I guess. That's about it. It doesn't even have a mail client anymore. Basically, if you want to do anything other than browse the web with IE, you are stuck either shelling out more money for applications, or you're responsible for finding, downloading, and installing all your applications.. by hand.. one at a time.
It doesn't hurt that Linux comes with all kinds of useful development and diagnostic tools. They're never going to be used by the "average user", I guess, but they're there.. unlike Windows where, again, you have to find 'em yourself, or open your wallet.
Amusingly, Ubuntu packs all that into about three gigs of drive space and a small memory footprint on boot. Windows 7 clocks in with something like eight or nine gigs of drive space, hogs a ton of memory just sitting there idle, and comes with nothing.
If ODF doesn't offer those advantages, what happens to the incentive to move away from MS Office? It's lost.
It's free. No licenses to keep track of, which is tedious and time consuming and costs money. One less reason for the BSA to get in your face. Shall I go on?
If the point of open source is to give me a choice of Abi, OO or KOffice, then why do I suffer the same lock-in effects when I use one? That's not a choice, that's Russian roulette, coz if I decide in two years that I don't like the one I chose, tough, because the decision is final.
Except that interaction between these suites has been getting better and better for years, so you can reasonably expect this trend to continue. In two years I wouldn't be surprised if most or all the ODF-interoperability problems you describe are gone.
Now tell me what happens in two years when you decide you don't like MS Office, or you're tired of shelling out unholy sums for incremental upgrades, and taking time to track and manage licenses, and so forth. You're completely stuck then.
I can say that [MS Office doesn't break its own files] with a straight face.
Then you're either being deceptive or haven't used it and supported it as much as you're leading us to believe. A quick google search reveals complaint after complaint of Microsoft products not being able to open Microsoft files. This is not a new phenomenon; it's been going on for at least a decade and a half.
I'm not suggesting Linux is somehow magically invulnerable, but rootkitting a Linux machine effectively requires a deliberate, targetted attack against that one machine. That's a hell of a far cry from the Windows system, where mindless, pointless alerts are considered the norm, and "download and install" is the expected method of getting new software and updates.
So, is it any wonder that people are suckered in by the "You have a virus! Click here to remove!" nonsense? To many people those "alerts" look exactly like every other Windows alert they've ever seen, and since Windows is always suggesting to download random garbage, they think this is normal. That's why I say Windows actively encourages this kind of stupidity.
We're talking about an OS where merely visiting a website can get your machine infected with some kind of malware, and botnets of Windows zombies are often million-plus strong. This is the OS that made possible Conficker, Nimbda, Code Red, and a huge number of others I can't remember because they all just blur together.
Rootkit a Linux box after specifically targetting it and taking advantage of bad passwords? Sure. But that doesn't even begin to compare to fifteen years of viruses, trojans, worms, adware, toolbars, and other malware that has marked the Windows experience.
The foolproof way to remove the AntiVirus ModelYear rootkit is: Make a file-based image of the hard disk. By design, it hides from the file system, meaning it will not be included in a image made by a tool like ImageX from Microsoft's free WAIK. Gather an image and apply it to the same hard disk, and the rootkit's gone.
I don't want to sound like "that guy", but really, that sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to protect an operating system that is, by design, vulnerable to such BS. The actual foolproof way to deal with these problems is to stop fixing them. Once users realise they can't just call someone to fix problems they caused themselves, they'll either wise up or use an OS that doesn't actively encourage this sort of behavior.
Yes, yes, that's a utopian ideal, it won't work in the real world, I know, I know. But really, by going through such enormous pains to protect users from not only their own stupidity but the shittiness of their operating system, you are empowering them to continue doing whatever stupid shit got them in trouble in the first place, because they'll think "support can always clean it up..."
In my company there comes a point when I just cut users off. They've inflicted whatever problem upon themselves, we've addressed it twice -- this is the third strike and they're out. It's not worth it to anyone to continue supporting people who insist on screwing themselves over, and the number one way they screw themselves over is by using an OS that allows them to screw themselves over so easily.
Okay, so I guess I do sound like "that guy". But how long are you going to continue mounting these Herculean efforts to rescue idiots from their own incompetence with a system that encourages their incompetence?
but clearly downloading an.exe file isn't a good way to keep your computer clean...
Then how else are Windows users supposed to get new software? Downloading and installing random executables from god-knows-where is the expected method in Windows. Then people wonder why Windows users get infected with all kinds of crap.
The lack of any managed repository of vetted and verified software is, to me, the number one reason Windows sucks so hard, A plain vanilla Windows install does absolutely nothing on its own -- you're expected to go find all the software you need, and this trains users to believe that downloading and installing random crap is just fine.
Combine that with Windows' propensity for getting up in your face about every little detail -- THIS SOFTWARE NEEDS UPDATING! YOUR FIREWALL SETTINGS AREN'T CORRECT SOME OTHER SOFTWARE NEEDS UPDATING! CLICK HERE TO GET NEW VIRUS DEFINITIONS! CLICK ME! CLICK ME! CLICK ME! -- and it's easy to understand how this happens.
The entire Windows model is built around mindless, unnecessary alerts and "download and install now" crap. How are you supposed to teach users which are legitimate and which are not, and what's okay to download and what isn't, when the culture of the OS itself encourages you to do all the wrong things?
Hang on a second -- I didn't mention networking utilities specifically, the original poster did. Though I find the convenience of having things like tcpdump packaged right with the distro to be much nicer than having to find the Windows version which can only be run from one specific directory.
I do agree that the original guy was nuts for jumping right to the network analysis as soon as a problem occured, but his approach was not a terrible one either. He had the tools, he knew how to use them. Your Mom might not be able to do this but that wasn't what the guy was talking about.
So despite what you claim, those tools only "exist" in Windows after you go fetch and install them. What if the problem is network related such that I can't go download and install this crap? I should have anticipated that and had those tools on my handy USB key? I guess that's what you think:
"I have a flash drive full of network diagnostic tools and utilities that enable me to troubleshoot or establish network connections simply and painlessly."
But I shouldn't have to carry tools around with me at all times. God forbid they're already included with Windows, because it isn't packing much else into those eight gigs of space it's using.
And that's just for networking. When an application is misbehaving in Windows, what are you going to do? When the OS itself screws up what are you going to do? Microsoft MCSE training is among the first to tell you "reinstall" in most situations, because reinstalling is about all you can do to "solve" most problems with Windows and most applications. Oh, or perhaps "use a restore point", which is about as likely to work as I am to stop drinking.
In Linux if something is screwing up, I can usually launch it from the terminal, wait for the crash or bug or whatever, and it'll spit out something I can use as a starting point to determine the problem. How do you do that in Windows?
Does Windows have strace that can be attached to running processes? I see a few that have been put together by random third parties, but the first one doesn't do Vista or Windows 7, and the second says "development stopped a long time ago", and that comment was made in 2007. Besides, frankly, I'm tired of having to go find these third-party bolt-ons to get useful tools in Windows, when the majortiy of them come with most modern Linux distros.
Ever look at Windows system log files? To the extent they log anything meaningful at all, they're nearly unusable and difficult to search. Applications rarely keep logs at all in Windows and there's no way to make most of them do it, either.
Indeed, there is a reason that "uninstall and reinstall" is the most common "fix" for Windows-related problems.
I hate to be the "Works On My Machine!" guy, but.. I've done this on numerous machines at work. In Gnome, it's System > Preferences > Remote Desktop > Checkbox for "Allow other users to view your desktop", done.
This has worked without a hitch for me in 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04. Haven't tried 9.04 yet but I can't imagine it's changed that much. And on my 8.04 machine I'm using right now, IPv6 is supported, though not being used, and isn't interfering with anything.
So, while I can't confirm or deny that you had this problem, I can say that it's worked flawlessly on every Ubuntu machine I've tried. In Windows it is just as much of a pain, and arguably worse, since at least with VNC it doesn't log other people out. I can grab control of a coworker's desktop and show them how to do this or that, instead of resorting to Webex or Copilot or whatever, or having to go over there, or have them log out and come to my desk. It's infinitely more useful than RDP that way.
I think his point was that under Linux the tools exist to discover the source of the problem. When things break in Windows you're more or less stuck sitting there whining at the screen, completely powerless to do anything about it.
Try creating a file in AbiWord. Save it. Open it in OO. Edit and save it. Open again in AbiWord. Broken formatting.
What you just illustrated is that with open source you have a choice -- you could use Abiword, or Open Office, or Koffice, or a bunch of others, to do the same job. They might not all interact perfectly but the choice is there.
If this is such an issue for your workplace, pick one of those and standardise on it. But instead your solution is to.. standardise on MS Office? Where the only reason it doesn't break formatting is because it only ever needs to deal with itself? Why not just standardise on Open Office and get the same result?
And, as an aside, I doubt you can tell me with a straight face that you haven't seen MS Office break its own files. Office's problems with different versions of itself are legendary, but I have seen documents break using the exact same install of Office on the same computer.
Option E. Close Twitter and forget it ever happened. The world will no more change from this than it would if you were to kick over an anthill in your back yard.
Really, is this important? Does anyone think that the asinine "hashtagged" @nonsense crapola on twitter is somehow valuable and is worried that someone might infringe upon it? Or is this just drama for the sake of drama?
Actually they totally undervalued me and hurt my feelings. I guessed that if someone were to "steal my digital life" as they put it, they'd make off with around two grand before they were stopped. I was informed that I'm only worth 645 dollars.:/
Also missing are the procedures by which the software was used, the prelaunch checkout procedures, we have almost NO documentation of the software, tools, and procedures that the ground controllers used, and so on.
Software maybe, but we've all seen Apollo 13 enough to know how to handle the launch procedures. You just yell out various station names and wait for someone to say "Go!"
Unless you're the kind of hapless user who needs to call equally hapless helpdesk idiots, whose solution is frequently "put the computer on the DMZ, okay, there, it works" and call it Mission Accomplished. Presto, a machine ripe for exploitation.
I've read of cases like that, and always wondered -- if they can read out loud, why can't they type what they want to say, then read that? Does it not work like that, or what's the story?
Yeah, what kind of "support" do you need, anyway? Any "classroom applications" will probably run under Wine, or at worst, an XP virtual machine. Wireless? How does that need "support"? The network manager in Gnome is literally click-and-connect, and if it fails it's unlikely to be a software problem. VPNs, aren't those pretty standard too? Get the VPN key and that's all you need -- hell, Ubuntu 9.04 integrates it into the network manager, even, but previous versions have no end of shiny GUI software you can get for that.
I'm really not clear on what kind of support is required. You take the computer to campus, plug it in, and use it.. what else do you need?
He may also be thinking of Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", where nanotechnology is the main technological component of the novel. Part of it describes a large swarm of these microbots patrolling the perimeter and interior of a city looking for and defeating pathogens.. and outsider microbots. If he's trying to cite Gibson I think it's more likely he got mixed up with Stephenson since they are contemporaries, but what do I know what this guy reads?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Serious question -- who is to say this is for business purposes? Using ham radio to get internet access everywhere sounds like a pretty fun geek hobby experiment to me. If he were to get it working, wouldn't that be fun? And is anyone really going to complain that he checked his work email with it? Just how strict are these laws?
andy zebrowitz.
The obvious solution would be to put the touch-screen flat on the desk (and split the keyboard out to either side). Add eye-tracking to switch context/windows, multi-touch on-screen interaction, and built-in windex for a potentially workable solution..?
Jeez. The obvious solution would be to use computers the way they are, until some serious shift in the nature of human-computer interaction is required. It works fine the way it is.
Right now I can kick back in my chair, sit upright, slouch around, glance at the screen while talking to people, and so forth. It works fine for basically every computer user with two functional arms, and many with only one. In fact, right now my feet are on my desk as I type this on a laptop, and I can move one hand to control the workstation sitting on the desk if I need to.
Your solution would require us to all sit hunched over our desks, staring straight down so we could see the screen, train ourselves to limit our eye movement, spread our hands on both sides of the desk like we're having trouble holding up our body weight (which, after sitting hunched over like that, we might)...
I fail to see what is wrong with the current desktops and laptops as they stand today.
You have posited a situation in which a part of my suggestion may not be optimal!
I have posited a situation which applies to the vast majority of computer users in the world. Billions of people sit at a computer in an office for at least eight hours a day, five days a week, and often more. The majority of them are sitting where they can hear other coworkers, and most all of them have to compute while they talk to others, either face to face or on the phone.
Clicking your tongue just isn't going to work in such an environment. Your workaround is to use a mouse -- well, I'm already doing that. What problem is your solution solving?
In order to implement your solution in any meaningful way we'd have to deal with a bunch of things:
- Eye tracking accurate enough that the machine can tell that I'm looking at a button and not just nearby.
- A sound analysis system so sophisticated it can distinguish between my tongue clicks, the tongue clicks of someone nearby doing the same thing, the tongue clicks of me making "tsk tsk" noises at a stupid suggestion from a coworker, the sound of someone dropping a pencil on the desk, and other incidental environmental sound effects.
- A UI which allows seamlessly switching between staring-and-tongue-clicking, and using the mouse, for those times when I need to switch between working on my own stuff versus talking to someone, which is something everyone in an office needs to be able to do.
- Coworkers who think it's just hilarious to record tongue-clicky noises and play them back over your cube wall while you work so you end up clicking on all kinds of things. If you think that wouldn't happen you must work in the most boring place in the world.
Or, we could just use the mouse because it works absolutely fine. Why are we looking for other ways of moving cursors around?
(I like the idea of making a 'click' noise with your tongue for a simple, intuitive, self-contained interface)
Yeah, I want to sit in an office full of tongue-clicking nimrods. And that'd be really great for doing computer tasks while you're talking to someone or on the phone, too.
Clicking GUI buttons is a far cry from trying to draw accurately. The demands of a graphic artist are nothing, at all, like the demands of the general computer-using masses.
Of course, a stylus and tablet are also nothing, at all, like a touchscreen.
The millions of office workers out there really do not want to sit for eight hours a day holding their arms in front of them like mummies. I'd say it's likely to be physically impossible for a human to do that for more than a few minutes without the muscles fatiguing to the point where they are nonfunctional.
This touchscreen garbage keeps coming up every so often, usually with a tone of regret, lamenting the fact that the technology hasn't made any real inroads. There's a reason it's made no inroads, and that's a lack of demand. The reason the lack of demand is there is because touchscreens pretty much suck.
You iPhone-loving kids deal with touchscreens in a very specific, limited, handheld system for reasons I can't quite fathom but I will acknowledge that the technology seems to work for that very specific, limited, handheld system. Anything more complex and touchscreens seriously start to bite, and all attempts at integrating them into a normal computing experience have been met with failure because they bite.
Other than the iPhone, which I still don't even like, I've only seen one useful, real-world application where touchscreens were a good idea, and that's POS systems, particularly in restaurants. As a waiter I could wander over to one, tap the screen a few times, and place or modify an order. But those were also severely limited systems, with a user interface designed with a small number of very specific functions arranged into large, easy-to-tap buttons. It didn't need to do anything else, it didn't do anything else, and so the touchscreen worked well for one-handed operation (and no risk of spilling crap all over a keyboard).
Given the totally limited places touchscreens have ever been useful, I have to say WHO CARES if it never really goes anywhere?
A background wallpaper for your insecurable XP desktop. (Anyone got a pointer to the 1024x768 version?)
Yo!
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/25/49346772_0ee70562a6_o.jpg
I'm busy setting this as the wallpaper for all the XP machines in the office.
I love the idea of Nexenta but I have never gotten it to successfully install and boot on any machine I've tried. OpenSolaris, on the other hand, has never failed me. As of right now, I completely suck at administrating it, but it does install, boot, and I can get around it well enough for my day to day tasks.
What I liked about this article is that it has nice clean tables showing the Solaris verison of the Linux commands I already know. Nexenta seems to want to hide me from all the Solaris stuff under the hood and let me carry on with my Linux ways -- which is nice if I'm just doing this for myself, but if I want to actually learn something about Solaris, isn't so nice.
It's a totally fair comparision. First, a shameless plug for my own "article" about Windows versus Ubuntu.
In a nutshell, Ubuntu comes with basically everything the average yob needs right off. Office suite, mail, multi-protocol IM client, browser, video player, music player, CD and DVD burner, music ripper, and the list goes on. Pretty much everything else you could want is available, for free, out of the repositories, with one simple click.
Windows has a terrible browser and a terrible media player (WMP) that barely works half the time. And MS Paint, I guess. That's about it. It doesn't even have a mail client anymore. Basically, if you want to do anything other than browse the web with IE, you are stuck either shelling out more money for applications, or you're responsible for finding, downloading, and installing all your applications.. by hand.. one at a time.
It doesn't hurt that Linux comes with all kinds of useful development and diagnostic tools. They're never going to be used by the "average user", I guess, but they're there.. unlike Windows where, again, you have to find 'em yourself, or open your wallet.
Amusingly, Ubuntu packs all that into about three gigs of drive space and a small memory footprint on boot. Windows 7 clocks in with something like eight or nine gigs of drive space, hogs a ton of memory just sitting there idle, and comes with nothing.
If ODF doesn't offer those advantages, what happens to the incentive to move away from MS Office? It's lost.
It's free. No licenses to keep track of, which is tedious and time consuming and costs money. One less reason for the BSA to get in your face. Shall I go on?
If the point of open source is to give me a choice of Abi, OO or KOffice, then why do I suffer the same lock-in effects when I use one? That's not a choice, that's Russian roulette, coz if I decide in two years that I don't like the one I chose, tough, because the decision is final.
Except that interaction between these suites has been getting better and better for years, so you can reasonably expect this trend to continue. In two years I wouldn't be surprised if most or all the ODF-interoperability problems you describe are gone.
Now tell me what happens in two years when you decide you don't like MS Office, or you're tired of shelling out unholy sums for incremental upgrades, and taking time to track and manage licenses, and so forth. You're completely stuck then.
I can say that [MS Office doesn't break its own files] with a straight face.
Then you're either being deceptive or haven't used it and supported it as much as you're leading us to believe. A quick google search reveals complaint after complaint of Microsoft products not being able to open Microsoft files. This is not a new phenomenon; it's been going on for at least a decade and a half.
I'm not suggesting Linux is somehow magically invulnerable, but rootkitting a Linux machine effectively requires a deliberate, targetted attack against that one machine. That's a hell of a far cry from the Windows system, where mindless, pointless alerts are considered the norm, and "download and install" is the expected method of getting new software and updates.
So, is it any wonder that people are suckered in by the "You have a virus! Click here to remove!" nonsense? To many people those "alerts" look exactly like every other Windows alert they've ever seen, and since Windows is always suggesting to download random garbage, they think this is normal. That's why I say Windows actively encourages this kind of stupidity.
We're talking about an OS where merely visiting a website can get your machine infected with some kind of malware, and botnets of Windows zombies are often million-plus strong. This is the OS that made possible Conficker, Nimbda, Code Red, and a huge number of others I can't remember because they all just blur together.
Rootkit a Linux box after specifically targetting it and taking advantage of bad passwords? Sure. But that doesn't even begin to compare to fifteen years of viruses, trojans, worms, adware, toolbars, and other malware that has marked the Windows experience.
The foolproof way to remove the AntiVirus ModelYear rootkit is: Make a file-based image of the hard disk. By design, it hides from the file system, meaning it will not be included in a image made by a tool like ImageX from Microsoft's free WAIK. Gather an image and apply it to the same hard disk, and the rootkit's gone.
I don't want to sound like "that guy", but really, that sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to protect an operating system that is, by design, vulnerable to such BS. The actual foolproof way to deal with these problems is to stop fixing them. Once users realise they can't just call someone to fix problems they caused themselves, they'll either wise up or use an OS that doesn't actively encourage this sort of behavior.
Yes, yes, that's a utopian ideal, it won't work in the real world, I know, I know. But really, by going through such enormous pains to protect users from not only their own stupidity but the shittiness of their operating system, you are empowering them to continue doing whatever stupid shit got them in trouble in the first place, because they'll think "support can always clean it up..."
In my company there comes a point when I just cut users off. They've inflicted whatever problem upon themselves, we've addressed it twice -- this is the third strike and they're out. It's not worth it to anyone to continue supporting people who insist on screwing themselves over, and the number one way they screw themselves over is by using an OS that allows them to screw themselves over so easily.
Okay, so I guess I do sound like "that guy". But how long are you going to continue mounting these Herculean efforts to rescue idiots from their own incompetence with a system that encourages their incompetence?
but clearly downloading an .exe file isn't a good way to keep your computer clean ...
Then how else are Windows users supposed to get new software? Downloading and installing random executables from god-knows-where is the expected method in Windows. Then people wonder why Windows users get infected with all kinds of crap.
The lack of any managed repository of vetted and verified software is, to me, the number one reason Windows sucks so hard, A plain vanilla Windows install does absolutely nothing on its own -- you're expected to go find all the software you need, and this trains users to believe that downloading and installing random crap is just fine.
Combine that with Windows' propensity for getting up in your face about every little detail -- THIS SOFTWARE NEEDS UPDATING! YOUR FIREWALL SETTINGS AREN'T CORRECT SOME OTHER SOFTWARE NEEDS UPDATING! CLICK HERE TO GET NEW VIRUS DEFINITIONS! CLICK ME! CLICK ME! CLICK ME! -- and it's easy to understand how this happens.
The entire Windows model is built around mindless, unnecessary alerts and "download and install now" crap. How are you supposed to teach users which are legitimate and which are not, and what's okay to download and what isn't, when the culture of the OS itself encourages you to do all the wrong things?
Hang on a second -- I didn't mention networking utilities specifically, the original poster did. Though I find the convenience of having things like tcpdump packaged right with the distro to be much nicer than having to find the Windows version which can only be run from one specific directory.
I do agree that the original guy was nuts for jumping right to the network analysis as soon as a problem occured, but his approach was not a terrible one either. He had the tools, he knew how to use them. Your Mom might not be able to do this but that wasn't what the guy was talking about.
So despite what you claim, those tools only "exist" in Windows after you go fetch and install them. What if the problem is network related such that I can't go download and install this crap? I should have anticipated that and had those tools on my handy USB key? I guess that's what you think:
"I have a flash drive full of network diagnostic tools and utilities that enable me to troubleshoot or establish network connections simply and painlessly."
But I shouldn't have to carry tools around with me at all times. God forbid they're already included with Windows, because it isn't packing much else into those eight gigs of space it's using.
And that's just for networking. When an application is misbehaving in Windows, what are you going to do? When the OS itself screws up what are you going to do? Microsoft MCSE training is among the first to tell you "reinstall" in most situations, because reinstalling is about all you can do to "solve" most problems with Windows and most applications. Oh, or perhaps "use a restore point", which is about as likely to work as I am to stop drinking.
In Linux if something is screwing up, I can usually launch it from the terminal, wait for the crash or bug or whatever, and it'll spit out something I can use as a starting point to determine the problem. How do you do that in Windows?
Does Windows have strace that can be attached to running processes? I see a few that have been put together by random third parties, but the first one doesn't do Vista or Windows 7, and the second says "development stopped a long time ago", and that comment was made in 2007. Besides, frankly, I'm tired of having to go find these third-party bolt-ons to get useful tools in Windows, when the majortiy of them come with most modern Linux distros.
Ever look at Windows system log files? To the extent they log anything meaningful at all, they're nearly unusable and difficult to search. Applications rarely keep logs at all in Windows and there's no way to make most of them do it, either.
Indeed, there is a reason that "uninstall and reinstall" is the most common "fix" for Windows-related problems.
I hate to be the "Works On My Machine!" guy, but.. I've done this on numerous machines at work. In Gnome, it's System > Preferences > Remote Desktop > Checkbox for "Allow other users to view your desktop", done.
This has worked without a hitch for me in 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04. Haven't tried 9.04 yet but I can't imagine it's changed that much. And on my 8.04 machine I'm using right now, IPv6 is supported, though not being used, and isn't interfering with anything.
So, while I can't confirm or deny that you had this problem, I can say that it's worked flawlessly on every Ubuntu machine I've tried. In Windows it is just as much of a pain, and arguably worse, since at least with VNC it doesn't log other people out. I can grab control of a coworker's desktop and show them how to do this or that, instead of resorting to Webex or Copilot or whatever, or having to go over there, or have them log out and come to my desk. It's infinitely more useful than RDP that way.
I think his point was that under Linux the tools exist to discover the source of the problem. When things break in Windows you're more or less stuck sitting there whining at the screen, completely powerless to do anything about it.
Your mindset here is kind of strange:
Try creating a file in AbiWord. Save it. Open it in OO. Edit and save it. Open again in AbiWord. Broken formatting.
What you just illustrated is that with open source you have a choice -- you could use Abiword, or Open Office, or Koffice, or a bunch of others, to do the same job. They might not all interact perfectly but the choice is there.
If this is such an issue for your workplace, pick one of those and standardise on it. But instead your solution is to.. standardise on MS Office? Where the only reason it doesn't break formatting is because it only ever needs to deal with itself? Why not just standardise on Open Office and get the same result?
And, as an aside, I doubt you can tell me with a straight face that you haven't seen MS Office break its own files. Office's problems with different versions of itself are legendary, but I have seen documents break using the exact same install of Office on the same computer.
Option E. Close Twitter and forget it ever happened. The world will no more change from this than it would if you were to kick over an anthill in your back yard.
Really, is this important? Does anyone think that the asinine "hashtagged" @nonsense crapola on twitter is somehow valuable and is worried that someone might infringe upon it? Or is this just drama for the sake of drama?
Actually they totally undervalued me and hurt my feelings. I guessed that if someone were to "steal my digital life" as they put it, they'd make off with around two grand before they were stopped. I was informed that I'm only worth 645 dollars. :/
Damn you, Symantec! I am not a number!
Also missing are the procedures by which the software was used, the prelaunch checkout procedures, we have almost NO documentation of the software, tools, and procedures that the ground controllers used, and so on.
Software maybe, but we've all seen Apollo 13 enough to know how to handle the launch procedures. You just yell out various station names and wait for someone to say "Go!"
Unless you're the kind of hapless user who needs to call equally hapless helpdesk idiots, whose solution is frequently "put the computer on the DMZ, okay, there, it works" and call it Mission Accomplished. Presto, a machine ripe for exploitation.
I've read of cases like that, and always wondered -- if they can read out loud, why can't they type what they want to say, then read that? Does it not work like that, or what's the story?
Yeah, what kind of "support" do you need, anyway? Any "classroom applications" will probably run under Wine, or at worst, an XP virtual machine. Wireless? How does that need "support"? The network manager in Gnome is literally click-and-connect, and if it fails it's unlikely to be a software problem. VPNs, aren't those pretty standard too? Get the VPN key and that's all you need -- hell, Ubuntu 9.04 integrates it into the network manager, even, but previous versions have no end of shiny GUI software you can get for that.
I'm really not clear on what kind of support is required. You take the computer to campus, plug it in, and use it.. what else do you need?
Laser pointers don't have enough power to get out of the atmosphere.
He may also be thinking of Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", where nanotechnology is the main technological component of the novel. Part of it describes a large swarm of these microbots patrolling the perimeter and interior of a city looking for and defeating pathogens.. and outsider microbots. If he's trying to cite Gibson I think it's more likely he got mixed up with Stephenson since they are contemporaries, but what do I know what this guy reads? :)