Whether or not I believe speeding is right or wrong, I'm still going to have to pay the ticket if I get caught.
Likewise, whether or not you like the current state of copyright law, it is your responsibility as a citizen of country with said laws, to follow them. It is also your right to lobby to get them changed, but that does not free you to break them in the meanwhile without being held to the penalty of the current law.
Most people do not, but I come at this from the perspective of an artist and consumer. While I think that it is stupid that an organization like Soundexchange or RIAA reaps tons of money that I never see, I still don't want to see my work being shared for free with anyone who wants it, when I invested considerable time and effort into creating a saleable product.
Yes, the Server service. The description of that service is that it enables file, printer, and named-pipe sharing over the network.
SSH Security issues, for instance running SSH through a firewall with no VPN; for businesses, the inability to monitor a user's activites because of encrypted traffic; port-forwarding capabilities that could open a wide open tunnel to the server and network from a compromised client; to name a few of the major concerns. It may not be as much of an issue in a closed small network environment but it has the potential to be a concern in remote access and larger network implementations.
I'm glad you're blessed with a photographic memory of service names. In reality, I don't mess with these services enough for it to really be an issue. Once I have the system set up the way I want it, I rarely even touch those services. The whole point really boils down not to whether or not it's easier to accomplish things from the command line, but to whether you are unable to do it easily or at all via the GUI. That is where Gnome lacks IMO at the moment.
The only people that seem to be horribly affected by this is the people who seem to think it is ok to share copyrighted materials with as many people as want them, and they want to be immune from being prosecuted for their activities. This bill doesn't necessarily affect the legality of what they are doing, it stiffens the penalties.
In order to sidestep the entire issue, the recording industry should lower prices on all the various forms of audio and video media, make them more affordable to the general public and more available via online services. They would sell more, keeping profits rolling in, while lessening the widespread consumer file sharing because of the affordability. Sell mp3's for 15 cents each and CD's for $5. Alot of people do this because it's simply too expensive to buy all of their favorite music. How much would it cost to fill up that 4GB Ipod with legit CD's? Assuming you could fit somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 songs on there, that's $800 at Itunes. What if you could do it for under $100? I think alot of people would go for that.
Lists Thai as one of the locales natively supported by 2000. I'd never heard of the Thai Starter Pack.
Either MS really poorly implemented it as you suggest, or you didn't implement it. I don't know, I wouldn't know Thai from Japanese.
Deskbar, Taskbar toolbar, Panel - call them what you want. Yes Gnome organizes them differently and calls them by different names. I'm not so impressed with adding search capabilities to a panel/toolbar/deskbar as I am with the capability being there. Nobody really even started doing indexed searching until a few years ago because it took too much processer time. As such I don't really give points to Gnome for adding the applet. We've had search capability in Windows since 95 even if they weren't as snappy, and I'm sure Gnome has had this since inception.
Hey I respect your opinion, it's been a fun debate and I realize that you've spent a lot more years on Gnome than I have; but I still see what I would consider core OS functionality - specifically in the areas of accessibility, graphics control, and driver sharing (specifically in the area of sound cards) just coming along in many areas that MS had implemented, crudely or not, as early as 1995.
Oh that's right, you don't have MS SQL and Pervasive and others which have separate instances with their own service names. Sorry.
Oh and I'd just stop the Server service. And, let see. Windows remote management (Vista/2008 Server only of course, MS didn't want the security issues it posed in Unix I guess...
Joe average user wouldn't know that command line syntax let alone the service names.
I'll give you that Gnome is faster. It's clean, well layed out, and looks modern.
Uhh... when did X become part of the conversation?
Admittedly, I don't have much experience with localization, other than my Czech friends who have fully localized, Czech language systems with XP that switch back and forth between Czech and English language as well as localization (keyboard layouts and the like) with a single click. Thai happens to be one of the 17 main language groups that MS started including with Windows 2000. I don't know what was available with Windows 98. Did Gnome adoption in Thailand really begin that long ago, or is it just that MS made it too difficult to figure out how to set up?
Another list. Here we go.
1. In the native Windows apps (explorer, printer spooler, control panel, etc., the UI is quite consistent. Same set of menus. Been this way for a long long time. What a 3rd party app decides to do with it's navigational menus and contexts menus is up to them - they shouldn't be forced into including something because the OS forces it to in the name of consistency. 2. Context menus. They are CONTEXT menus, dangit. They should have content based on where you click, again MS included this with Windows 95 after a few third party apps included this functionality on their own. By the way, that is what I dislike most about MacOS, not being able to take advantage of right click context menus in the GUI. So really, how is Gnome better? I wonder what you see here. It seems quite subjective - there is not a clear standard by which to judge one product better than the other. 3. Window management I have never had trouble with in Windows. I've never had trouble in Gnome. I'm used to the upper left corner double-click to close a window in Windows, but Gnome doesn't let me do that (or maybe I just haven't found the setting for it). Can you explain further how Gnome manages windows better? 4. Virtual Desktops. Yep, big gaping hole here in Windows. Wish it was part of the OS, but there is software (at least from ATI) that have done this for a while. 5. If you have a middle click button on your mouse, the driver for that mouse will allow you to assign a multitude of different functions. My logitech mouse has 7 buttons, and a scroll wheel that clicks down and side to side. Every movement of those buttons can be assigned a function. It's marvelous! 6. Deskbar applett. Well MS decided to implement this as Active desktop, starting with IE 4 on Window 95. Crappy implementation, but notable in that they at least tried to follow Apple's lead.:) 7. User filesystem layout. Not sure what you mean by this. I've found Gnomes file system layout to be limited compared to Windows 98 and forward. Hopefully v2.6 will help this out. 8. Menu layout. Entirely subjective again. Windows has been fairly standard with File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help for a long time. Start menu layout has changed alot - they should really allow the user to customize it more, but at least it's very easy to add or remove items from the menu. Gnome makes this a bit more of an hassle. And I can categorize my apps however I want by just organizing shortcuts in folders; I'm not stuck with however Gnome decided they should be. 9. System messages. I really don't want to see system messages at all. Not that I want to go to the extreme of Apple and make them so dumbed down you have no idea what is going on, but I think MS handles messages well with a plain english description and the option to click a button for details. We all know about the famous BSOD, but in reality it's pretty useful to troubleshoot the problem - if you know what to do with it. Could you explain just what you like better about Gnome's system messages? 10. Mime handling - is your complaint with the built in Windows mail clients, i.e. Outlook Express and Windows Mail? I've never had a problem with those myself. But I use MS Outlook primarily, and there is simply nothing at that level available for an
Have you never used one? They are all listed there with descriptions. So if someone told you to restart all your SQL server services, would you know them by name? I'd just look in the services applett and find them and restart them.
Re:Catching up ever so slowly
on
GNOME 2.24 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
2.1 AOL instant messenger was available for free in 1997 for windows. ICQ was also available for free. There was nothing else, you needed nothing else. Windows messenger was available in 2001 with XP. It did voice, text, video and file transfers. Irregardless, this isn't an "integrated" OS feature anyways, it's a bundled app.
2.2 Track your time? Hello, this is just a applet for which there has been software available to do pretty much ever since there was multitasking. No, it wasn't built into the OS, but what does it have to do with the OS? Just another bundled app.
2.3 Hello AOL IM and MSN. Just another bundled app.
2.4 Finally an OS feature!! And the one that I mentioned I would love to see in Windows. Also, Asian language support has been available as a download from MS since windows 98, and starting in 2002 they started putting it in a package called Global IME - available in several flavors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
2.5 Deskbar. MS has implemented a taskbar, that since Windows 98 has been able to perform these functions - however they chose to leave it to 3rd party developers to develop apps for it, which, by the way is what Gnome does too. They also made the entire desktop available for these lovely 3rd party apps. For some wierd reason MS took the ability to float toolbars and dock toolbars out of Vista, but it was available in every version of XP.
2.6,2.7,2.9 well you already pointed those out.
2.8 DVB? More 3rd party software, has nothing to do with OS operation. ATI's All-in-wonder has brought TV to the Windows OS since 1996.
Talk about localization. SP3 may only be available as of yet in 8 languages, but MS standardized on 24 localized languages starting with Windows 2000. In 03-04 they added the Language Interface Pack (LIP) for 27 more languages. That's 51 for those who are counting. And that's not 80% translated like Gnome, MS made sure things were finished.
By my count we've only identified one OS feature that Windows does not have or is not capable of doing. Just because 3rd party developers haven't created specific functionality doesn't mean that Windows can't do it. I don't really want most of these "features" anyways, like IM clients, TV broadcasting, and time tracking.
OK so that's 8 out of 9 user features that windows has done or was capable of going with 3rd party addons since Windows 98. There is also 3 accessibility features, all of which MS has done well since Windows 95. All total we're at 11 of 12, which is darn close to my original estimate at 92%. I give YOU a D+ also.
So maybe I misspoke. I really only saw 8 total OS features really listed there, the rest were 3rd party apps, which MS would typically get sued over including. So I'll give you just 7 of 8, so I really meant 88%. Sorry.
That's pretty similar then to the CPU usage graph that shows up in Windows taskbar when the Task Manager is open. Had that since Windows NT4.0 If I remember correctly, at least since Windows 2000.
Are you prepared to say that Gnome is better than the Windows GUI simply because one or two display features either do not exist or do not match functionally? I'm looking at it from the perspective of functionality, not graphical organization. For instance, Gnome is now able to handle multiple monitor setups. They now have improved accessibility features, something MS implemented in Windows 95. They now have sound themes that don't conflict with music playback, which Windows had in version 3.0 if not earlier.
By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI. Linux still hasn't accomplished this, they are way behind Mac and Windows in this aspect.
Virtual Desktops - agree wholeheartedly. Window Shading - I don't see how this is better than minimize to the taskbar. CPU usage graph is now available as a sidebar applet in Vista, and has been available as a 3rd party active desktop applet since Windows 98, and like you said, it's trivial.
You don't mention much to explain just why UNIX has a superior GUI, but I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access. This is where Linux and UNIX fall way short, as is evidenced by the new feature list in TFA. 95% are items that have been standard features in Windows since at least Window 98. Call it flamebait for pointing that out, but it's just the facts.
May I also contribute. The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu lets you remove just about everything the normal user should be able to remove as far as OS features or addon applications go. IE is the back end of the OS and they really have made it part of the OS - why should I uninstall it? I can remove the icon from my screen. I've never seen a program that required MSN or Windows Messenger to run, and you can uninstall it easily. System restore and Hibernation are easily disabled using the Control panel. Why do you want to remove the functionality, to save a few hundred KB? Why bother? They put features in the OS because people wanted it. If you give Joe Schmoe the ability to delete OS components, he will - and then wonder why stuff doesn't work.
On the other hand, nLite is a great option for techies who want to customize their systems - and it's a great tool to have for those folks who wish to dabble in it.
That's why most companies like that write their own custom software in house (or on a contract basis) for their mission critical applications. They don't buy anything pre-packaged from 3rd parties.
I have a friend who used to work for one of the major banks in their credit card billing facility, and he was part of the programming team that created all the software they used for billing. They would never buy a commercial package for their needs, because for one they don't exist, and two they absolutely needed full control over the system and all the code.
On the flip side, if your company purchased a program for a huge sum of money without even testing it first, shame on your company. You could have had the same problem with an open source package. And you might have paid your own in-house or contract developer the same amount of money up front and yearly, in order to reprogram an open source software to fit your needs and then maintain it on a regular basis.
So is the reality that we have lower expectations from OSS, and thus we expect it to be free, or do we want something free so badly that we lower our expectations? Nothing in life is free. We make certain concessions, usually in functionality, and get by with free or cheap software. For enterprise software, is there really anything free open source that does what an enterprise needs? Who out there programs complex client-server applications for nothing?
So while having something open source might have helped in your situation due to the fact that you could have a programmer modify the product to meet your needs, it still might very well end up being more costly tio implement than a proprietary software that was well researched, tested, and determined to meet your needs.
Actually my latest experience with Linux was with Ubuntu on a brand new, bleeding edge laptop. It took me six hours to get my wireless card working. Hardy Heron did not support my Intel 5100 series wireless card. Updating to the latest kernel build which was supposed to work crashed the system. Wiping everything out and installing the Intrepid beta 64 bit recognized the card but I couldn't enable it. Finally, the Intrepid 32 bit OS worked.
I then handed my laptop to my crash test dummy (my wife), who became frustrated when she went into firefox and went to facebook to an app that required flash. It prompted her to go to adobe.com and install flash, which presented her with 3 different options for installing flash, none of which can be used in the GUI in Ubuntu. I then had to explain that you can go into the package manager, search for flash, and install it. Once installed, the facebook app appeared but the flash applet did not work. This scenario simply doesn't exist on Windows, she was able to work through this on the same laptop under Windows Vista with ease.
Yes, for the most part, hardware just works on Hardy Heron. The problem becomes when you run across something that does not work out of the box. In windows you can download a driver and have it installed automatically by the setup program. In Ubuntu, if you can find a driver, it's probably stuck in a tar.gz, has to be unzipped, maybe compiled, and installed in a terminal window.
Wine definitely is better than it was a couple of years ago when I tried. Unfortunately the version in the package manager in Ubuntu was woefully out of date - I had to download, unzip, compile, and install the latest version at the command line. It was impressive to see MS Word 2007 running more or less natively on Ubuntu. However, Outlook did not work because apparently the makers of Wine haven't figured that out. It is coming along slowly.
As far as networking goes, I've not had the chance to install a network printer on Ubuntu yet. However, connecting to a Windows file share on my desktop, which I use all the time under Vista on the same laptop, did not work out of the box. I still haven't solved that problem even though I have searched various forums for help for several hours. Could you have the same problem on Windows? Maybe. Would it be easier to solve? Yes. Everything you need to look for is in the GUI.
I still maintain my point that Ubuntu, and several other flavors of Linux, are finally getting about to the level of Windows 95.
1. If MS went the route of Apple and started selling their OS on tightly controlled hardware with a limited set of rock solid drivers, we wouldn't be talking about BSOD's, hard freezes, etc. - at least no more than it happens on OSX (oh yes, it does!).
2. Desktop Linux will not continue to grow until somebody gets the UI out of diapers. It will not go past the range of the geek and the hobbyist. The cost of maintaining a system in which most administrative functions end up having to be done in a terminal window or a text file far outweighs the $130 or so that it costs to have Windows preloaded on a new computer. From the consumer perspective you may have a point about spending $600 for software. But for one, you exxagerate the cost of software; most consumers spend about $100 of the cost of the new computer on windows, and add another $130 for MS Office Home edition. However the flip side is that most computer-dummy consumers will flip out when something doesn't work and, if they are really resourceful, they search google for their problem and they are confronted with a bunch of well meaning people telling them to run commands in a terminal windows and edit a bunch of text files. Sorry, the UI needs to be able to do all of this. MacOS and Windows have been doing it for 12+ years and Linux still hasn't made it out of the 90's in this respect.
3. On the corporate side, Linux currently has no replacement for MS Outlook, ACT, or any other CRM client/server package. The free office packages do not provide seamless compatibility with MS Office, which is the best office suite out there even though it costs a fortune up front. I agree, nobody really wants Vista, but the corporate world will gobble up Windows 7 once it is proven to run all their business critical apps the way XP does now. Oh and their business critical apps don't run on Linux. Accounting systems, CRM software, CAD software, ERP software - the cost of replacing these far outweighs the savings of moving to a free OS. That's not to mention the cost of educating staff and retraining tech people.
Linux is making baby steps forward, but this ain't the year. Unless somebody steps forward and starts developing for profit, Linux will be doomed to languish among the geeks and nerds.
Several things must happen before Linux will qualify as a bona fide mainstream desktop OS:
1. A UI that does everything a user needs without ever needing to show a text only window.
2. A unified application installer a la.exe
3. A well funded corporate backer that will make linux profitable and convince developers to create mainstream software to run on Linux.
I guess what I'm saying is that unless Linux makes these steps forward, it's not Windows that will become increasingly irrelevant, it's Linux. People will tire of hearing about it, hearing about it, hearing about it some more, and finding out it still hasn't approached Windows 95 in usability. Case in point: if MS released Ubuntu in it's current form as their next generation OS, people would be complaining to no end about how crappy an OS it was because previous Windows releases did things so much better.
Unlike Ebay's other recent moves which really have only upset sellers, this one stands to upset both buyers and sellers. Granted, I use paypal on ebay and I always have, so I'm not really affected. But the company who pisses off both vendor and buyer is not one that is successful in the long term. It seems that the more ebay tweaks their system, the less profitable it becomes, and that prompts more tweaking.
My advice to ebay - go back to what made you successful in the first place, and stop worrying about eclipsing growth records. The Internet is not growing at the pace it used to be, neither is the economy growing at rapid fire pace. Be happy with the business you have because it's going to cost you far more to get it back once you've lost it.
So already 1% of people have installed it on their own computer plus two friends.
Why should EA be worried about this, it's what they are trying to prevent in the first place!
And that, my friend, is the basic problem with the open source model. Nobody can really make money doing it. Profit drives real development. People won't buy crap, thus it forces you to develop something worth purchasing. How much would you be willing to pay KDE or Gnome in their current state? You have to do WAY too much stuff in a terminal window for it to be a viable competitor to Mac OS or Windows.
The workaround is, distribute the free GPL'ed kernel, and sell your own closed source shell on top of it. IANAL, but if you can't do this, linux is never going to gain any significant ground because development is much slower than focused projects by for-profit companies. Hopefully this is what HP can accomplish, though truth be told, I'd rather it wasn't HP doing it.
Just where has companies spending their resources improving linux projects as a whole gotten us? We have barely improved linux desktop adoption over the past several years, as millions of PC's are sold with windows.
Ubuntu has been by far the most successful approach to desktop linux in the past 2 years, and they are doing it by rolling their own distro and concentrating on making it work for the desktop. If only a company with the financial resources to do so would make it a goal to make a linux distro with a top of the line GUI - a viable OS that could directly compete with Windows, for a profit, at a price in the $50-$100 range. Lack of profit is squeezing innovation, or at least catch-up, for linux. Apple managed to do it with OSX, somebody needs to do it with mainstream linux to make an OS that can be widely used on PC. The ultimate prize would be a linux distro that seamlessly integrated windows app compatibility - but I'm sure MS would never really allow this to happen.
I have always done the same thing with my laptops and desktops, and I really am pretty happy with Vista's performance, especially post SP1. I never had issues with ATI drivers myself.
Also, after recently messing around with Ubuntu for the first time on my brand new laptop, I have less of a hate for Vista's UAC. I really don't think that Vista's "click to continue" message boxes are really any more annoying than Ubuntu's prompt for my password before doing anything that messes with the system. Worse is Ubuntu's refusal to enable my wireless card despite countless hours toiling in a terminal window. At least Windows has a GUI that works for pretty much everything.
My point being, they spent so much time measuring performance with sequential data transfer and write speed, when at least in the short term (next 5-10 years) these are pretty much just going to be OS drives where those benchmarks are inconsequential. Let's test system performance in the setup I mentioned. Test Autocad performance with the app on the SSD. Test Crysis performance with the game data on the SSD. Run PCmark or similar benchmark utility installed on the SSD and compare it to the typical 7200rpm or 10,000rpm hard drive that is in a typical desktop today. Then we'll have a useful benchmark and a really good basis to determine whether or not we're getting close to price vs. performance feasibility.
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Whether or not I believe speeding is right or wrong, I'm still going to have to pay the ticket if I get caught.
Likewise, whether or not you like the current state of copyright law, it is your responsibility as a citizen of country with said laws, to follow them. It is also your right to lobby to get them changed, but that does not free you to break them in the meanwhile without being held to the penalty of the current law.
Most people do not, but I come at this from the perspective of an artist and consumer. While I think that it is stupid that an organization like Soundexchange or RIAA reaps tons of money that I never see, I still don't want to see my work being shared for free with anyone who wants it, when I invested considerable time and effort into creating a saleable product.
Seems like it's Ubuntu that didn't do their research. Why should I have to buy specific hardware just to get my OS to run?
Yes, the Server service. The description of that service is that it enables file, printer, and named-pipe sharing over the network.
SSH Security issues, for instance running SSH through a firewall with no VPN; for businesses, the inability to monitor a user's activites because of encrypted traffic; port-forwarding capabilities that could open a wide open tunnel to the server and network from a compromised client; to name a few of the major concerns. It may not be as much of an issue in a closed small network environment but it has the potential to be a concern in remote access and larger network implementations.
I'm glad you're blessed with a photographic memory of service names. In reality, I don't mess with these services enough for it to really be an issue. Once I have the system set up the way I want it, I rarely even touch those services. The whole point really boils down not to whether or not it's easier to accomplish things from the command line, but to whether you are unable to do it easily or at all via the GUI. That is where Gnome lacks IMO at the moment.
The only people that seem to be horribly affected by this is the people who seem to think it is ok to share copyrighted materials with as many people as want them, and they want to be immune from being prosecuted for their activities. This bill doesn't necessarily affect the legality of what they are doing, it stiffens the penalties.
In order to sidestep the entire issue, the recording industry should lower prices on all the various forms of audio and video media, make them more affordable to the general public and more available via online services. They would sell more, keeping profits rolling in, while lessening the widespread consumer file sharing because of the affordability. Sell mp3's for 15 cents each and CD's for $5. Alot of people do this because it's simply too expensive to buy all of their favorite music. How much would it cost to fill up that 4GB Ipod with legit CD's? Assuming you could fit somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 songs on there, that's $800 at Itunes. What if you could do it for under $100? I think alot of people would go for that.
Try http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Locales.mspx
Also see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/win2k/setup/localsupport.mspx
Lists Thai as one of the locales natively supported by 2000. I'd never heard of the Thai Starter Pack.
Either MS really poorly implemented it as you suggest, or you didn't implement it. I don't know, I wouldn't know Thai from Japanese.
Deskbar, Taskbar toolbar, Panel - call them what you want. Yes Gnome organizes them differently and calls them by different names. I'm not so impressed with adding search capabilities to a panel/toolbar/deskbar as I am with the capability being there. Nobody really even started doing indexed searching until a few years ago because it took too much processer time. As such I don't really give points to Gnome for adding the applet. We've had search capability in Windows since 95 even if they weren't as snappy, and I'm sure Gnome has had this since inception.
Hey I respect your opinion, it's been a fun debate and I realize that you've spent a lot more years on Gnome than I have; but I still see what I would consider core OS functionality - specifically in the areas of accessibility, graphics control, and driver sharing (specifically in the area of sound cards) just coming along in many areas that MS had implemented, crudely or not, as early as 1995.
Oh that's right, you don't have MS SQL and Pervasive and others which have separate instances with their own service names. Sorry.
Oh and I'd just stop the Server service. And, let see. Windows remote management (Vista/2008 Server only of course, MS didn't want the security issues it posed in Unix I guess...
Joe average user wouldn't know that command line syntax let alone the service names.
I'll give you that Gnome is faster. It's clean, well layed out, and looks modern.
Uhh... when did X become part of the conversation?
Admittedly, I don't have much experience with localization, other than my Czech friends who have fully localized, Czech language systems with XP that switch back and forth between Czech and English language as well as localization (keyboard layouts and the like) with a single click.
Thai happens to be one of the 17 main language groups that MS started including with Windows 2000. I don't know what was available with Windows 98. Did Gnome adoption in Thailand really begin that long ago, or is it just that MS made it too difficult to figure out how to set up?
Another list. Here we go.
1. In the native Windows apps (explorer, printer spooler, control panel, etc., the UI is quite consistent. Same set of menus. Been this way for a long long time. What a 3rd party app decides to do with it's navigational menus and contexts menus is up to them - they shouldn't be forced into including something because the OS forces it to in the name of consistency. :)
2. Context menus. They are CONTEXT menus, dangit. They should have content based on where you click, again MS included this with Windows 95 after a few third party apps included this functionality on their own. By the way, that is what I dislike most about MacOS, not being able to take advantage of right click context menus in the GUI. So really, how is Gnome better? I wonder what you see here. It seems quite subjective - there is not a clear standard by which to judge one product better than the other.
3. Window management I have never had trouble with in Windows. I've never had trouble in Gnome. I'm used to the upper left corner double-click to close a window in Windows, but Gnome doesn't let me do that (or maybe I just haven't found the setting for it). Can you explain further how Gnome manages windows better?
4. Virtual Desktops. Yep, big gaping hole here in Windows. Wish it was part of the OS, but there is software (at least from ATI) that have done this for a while.
5. If you have a middle click button on your mouse, the driver for that mouse will allow you to assign a multitude of different functions. My logitech mouse has 7 buttons, and a scroll wheel that clicks down and side to side. Every movement of those buttons can be assigned a function. It's marvelous!
6. Deskbar applett. Well MS decided to implement this as Active desktop, starting with IE 4 on Window 95. Crappy implementation, but notable in that they at least tried to follow Apple's lead.
7. User filesystem layout. Not sure what you mean by this. I've found Gnomes file system layout to be limited compared to Windows 98 and forward. Hopefully v2.6 will help this out.
8. Menu layout. Entirely subjective again. Windows has been fairly standard with File, Edit, View, Tools, and Help for a long time. Start menu layout has changed alot - they should really allow the user to customize it more, but at least it's very easy to add or remove items from the menu. Gnome makes this a bit more of an hassle. And I can categorize my apps however I want by just organizing shortcuts in folders; I'm not stuck with however Gnome decided they should be.
9. System messages. I really don't want to see system messages at all. Not that I want to go to the extreme of Apple and make them so dumbed down you have no idea what is going on, but I think MS handles messages well with a plain english description and the option to click a button for details. We all know about the famous BSOD, but in reality it's pretty useful to troubleshoot the problem - if you know what to do with it. Could you explain just what you like better about Gnome's system messages?
10. Mime handling - is your complaint with the built in Windows mail clients, i.e. Outlook Express and Windows Mail? I've never had a problem with those myself. But I use MS Outlook primarily, and there is simply nothing at that level available for an
Have you never used one? They are all listed there with descriptions. So if someone told you to restart all your SQL server services, would you know them by name? I'd just look in the services applett and find them and restart them.
2.1 AOL instant messenger was available for free in 1997 for windows. ICQ was also available for free. There was nothing else, you needed nothing else. Windows messenger was available in 2001 with XP. It did voice, text, video and file transfers. Irregardless, this isn't an "integrated" OS feature anyways, it's a bundled app.
2.2 Track your time? Hello, this is just a applet for which there has been software available to do pretty much ever since there was multitasking. No, it wasn't built into the OS, but what does it have to do with the OS? Just another bundled app.
2.3 Hello AOL IM and MSN. Just another bundled app.
2.4 Finally an OS feature!! And the one that I mentioned I would love to see in Windows. Also, Asian language support has been available as a download from MS since windows 98, and starting in 2002 they started putting it in a package called Global IME - available in several flavors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
2.5 Deskbar. MS has implemented a taskbar, that since Windows 98 has been able to perform these functions - however they chose to leave it to 3rd party developers to develop apps for it, which, by the way is what Gnome does too. They also made the entire desktop available for these lovely 3rd party apps. For some wierd reason MS took the ability to float toolbars and dock toolbars out of Vista, but it was available in every version of XP.
2.6,2.7,2.9 well you already pointed those out.
2.8 DVB? More 3rd party software, has nothing to do with OS operation. ATI's All-in-wonder has brought TV to the Windows OS since 1996.
Talk about localization. SP3 may only be available as of yet in 8 languages, but MS standardized on 24 localized languages starting with Windows 2000. In 03-04 they added the Language Interface Pack (LIP) for 27 more languages. That's 51 for those who are counting. And that's not 80% translated like Gnome, MS made sure things were finished.
By my count we've only identified one OS feature that Windows does not have or is not capable of doing. Just because 3rd party developers haven't created specific functionality doesn't mean that Windows can't do it. I don't really want most of these "features" anyways, like IM clients, TV broadcasting, and time tracking.
OK so that's 8 out of 9 user features that windows has done or was capable of going with 3rd party addons since Windows 98. There is also 3 accessibility features, all of which MS has done well since Windows 95. All total we're at 11 of 12, which is darn close to my original estimate at 92%. I give YOU a D+ also.
So maybe I misspoke. I really only saw 8 total OS features really listed there, the rest were 3rd party apps, which MS would typically get sued over including. So I'll give you just 7 of 8, so I really meant 88%. Sorry.
What if I don't know what the service name is? Aha! God Bless the GUI!!!
That's pretty similar then to the CPU usage graph that shows up in Windows taskbar when the Task Manager is open. Had that since Windows NT4.0 If I remember correctly, at least since Windows 2000.
Are you prepared to say that Gnome is better than the Windows GUI simply because one or two display features either do not exist or do not match functionally? I'm looking at it from the perspective of functionality, not graphical organization. For instance, Gnome is now able to handle multiple monitor setups. They now have improved accessibility features, something MS implemented in Windows 95. They now have sound themes that don't conflict with music playback, which Windows had in version 3.0 if not earlier.
By the time Windows 2000 came around, there was nothing in the OS that I could not configure using the GUI. Linux still hasn't accomplished this, they are way behind Mac and Windows in this aspect.
Virtual Desktops - agree wholeheartedly. Window Shading - I don't see how this is better than minimize to the taskbar. CPU usage graph is now available as a sidebar applet in Vista, and has been available as a 3rd party active desktop applet since Windows 98, and like you said, it's trivial.
You don't mention much to explain just why UNIX has a superior GUI, but I expect a GUI to be able to control all aspects of the OS that I need to access. This is where Linux and UNIX fall way short, as is evidenced by the new feature list in TFA. 95% are items that have been standard features in Windows since at least Window 98. Call it flamebait for pointing that out, but it's just the facts.
It is nice to see more features that Windows had 10 years ago.
Except for one - the tabbed file browser windows look great, I'd like to see Windows do that also.
May I also contribute. The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu lets you remove just about everything the normal user should be able to remove as far as OS features or addon applications go. IE is the back end of the OS and they really have made it part of the OS - why should I uninstall it? I can remove the icon from my screen. I've never seen a program that required MSN or Windows Messenger to run, and you can uninstall it easily. System restore and Hibernation are easily disabled using the Control panel. Why do you want to remove the functionality, to save a few hundred KB? Why bother? They put features in the OS because people wanted it. If you give Joe Schmoe the ability to delete OS components, he will - and then wonder why stuff doesn't work.
On the other hand, nLite is a great option for techies who want to customize their systems - and it's a great tool to have for those folks who wish to dabble in it.
That's why most companies like that write their own custom software in house (or on a contract basis) for their mission critical applications. They don't buy anything pre-packaged from 3rd parties.
I have a friend who used to work for one of the major banks in their credit card billing facility, and he was part of the programming team that created all the software they used for billing. They would never buy a commercial package for their needs, because for one they don't exist, and two they absolutely needed full control over the system and all the code.
On the flip side, if your company purchased a program for a huge sum of money without even testing it first, shame on your company. You could have had the same problem with an open source package. And you might have paid your own in-house or contract developer the same amount of money up front and yearly, in order to reprogram an open source software to fit your needs and then maintain it on a regular basis.
So is the reality that we have lower expectations from OSS, and thus we expect it to be free, or do we want something free so badly that we lower our expectations? Nothing in life is free. We make certain concessions, usually in functionality, and get by with free or cheap software. For enterprise software, is there really anything free open source that does what an enterprise needs? Who out there programs complex client-server applications for nothing?
So while having something open source might have helped in your situation due to the fact that you could have a programmer modify the product to meet your needs, it still might very well end up being more costly tio implement than a proprietary software that was well researched, tested, and determined to meet your needs.
Actually my latest experience with Linux was with Ubuntu on a brand new, bleeding edge laptop. It took me six hours to get my wireless card working. Hardy Heron did not support my Intel 5100 series wireless card. Updating to the latest kernel build which was supposed to work crashed the system. Wiping everything out and installing the Intrepid beta 64 bit recognized the card but I couldn't enable it. Finally, the Intrepid 32 bit OS worked.
I then handed my laptop to my crash test dummy (my wife), who became frustrated when she went into firefox and went to facebook to an app that required flash. It prompted her to go to adobe.com and install flash, which presented her with 3 different options for installing flash, none of which can be used in the GUI in Ubuntu. I then had to explain that you can go into the package manager, search for flash, and install it. Once installed, the facebook app appeared but the flash applet did not work. This scenario simply doesn't exist on Windows, she was able to work through this on the same laptop under Windows Vista with ease.
Yes, for the most part, hardware just works on Hardy Heron. The problem becomes when you run across something that does not work out of the box. In windows you can download a driver and have it installed automatically by the setup program. In Ubuntu, if you can find a driver, it's probably stuck in a tar.gz, has to be unzipped, maybe compiled, and installed in a terminal window.
Wine definitely is better than it was a couple of years ago when I tried. Unfortunately the version in the package manager in Ubuntu was woefully out of date - I had to download, unzip, compile, and install the latest version at the command line. It was impressive to see MS Word 2007 running more or less natively on Ubuntu. However, Outlook did not work because apparently the makers of Wine haven't figured that out. It is coming along slowly.
As far as networking goes, I've not had the chance to install a network printer on Ubuntu yet. However, connecting to a Windows file share on my desktop, which I use all the time under Vista on the same laptop, did not work out of the box. I still haven't solved that problem even though I have searched various forums for help for several hours. Could you have the same problem on Windows? Maybe. Would it be easier to solve? Yes. Everything you need to look for is in the GUI.
I still maintain my point that Ubuntu, and several other flavors of Linux, are finally getting about to the level of Windows 95.
1. If MS went the route of Apple and started selling their OS on tightly controlled hardware with a limited set of rock solid drivers, we wouldn't be talking about BSOD's, hard freezes, etc. - at least no more than it happens on OSX (oh yes, it does!).
2. Desktop Linux will not continue to grow until somebody gets the UI out of diapers. It will not go past the range of the geek and the hobbyist. The cost of maintaining a system in which most administrative functions end up having to be done in a terminal window or a text file far outweighs the $130 or so that it costs to have Windows preloaded on a new computer. From the consumer perspective you may have a point about spending $600 for software. But for one, you exxagerate the cost of software; most consumers spend about $100 of the cost of the new computer on windows, and add another $130 for MS Office Home edition. However the flip side is that most computer-dummy consumers will flip out when something doesn't work and, if they are really resourceful, they search google for their problem and they are confronted with a bunch of well meaning people telling them to run commands in a terminal windows and edit a bunch of text files. Sorry, the UI needs to be able to do all of this. MacOS and Windows have been doing it for 12+ years and Linux still hasn't made it out of the 90's in this respect.
3. On the corporate side, Linux currently has no replacement for MS Outlook, ACT, or any other CRM client/server package. The free office packages do not provide seamless compatibility with MS Office, which is the best office suite out there even though it costs a fortune up front. I agree, nobody really wants Vista, but the corporate world will gobble up Windows 7 once it is proven to run all their business critical apps the way XP does now. Oh and their business critical apps don't run on Linux. Accounting systems, CRM software, CAD software, ERP software - the cost of replacing these far outweighs the savings of moving to a free OS. That's not to mention the cost of educating staff and retraining tech people.
Linux is making baby steps forward, but this ain't the year. Unless somebody steps forward and starts developing for profit, Linux will be doomed to languish among the geeks and nerds.
Several things must happen before Linux will qualify as a bona fide mainstream desktop OS: 1. A UI that does everything a user needs without ever needing to show a text only window. 2. A unified application installer a la .exe
3. A well funded corporate backer that will make linux profitable and convince developers to create mainstream software to run on Linux.
I guess what I'm saying is that unless Linux makes these steps forward, it's not Windows that will become increasingly irrelevant, it's Linux. People will tire of hearing about it, hearing about it, hearing about it some more, and finding out it still hasn't approached Windows 95 in usability. Case in point: if MS released Ubuntu in it's current form as their next generation OS, people would be complaining to no end about how crappy an OS it was because previous Windows releases did things so much better.
Unlike Ebay's other recent moves which really have only upset sellers, this one stands to upset both buyers and sellers. Granted, I use paypal on ebay and I always have, so I'm not really affected. But the company who pisses off both vendor and buyer is not one that is successful in the long term. It seems that the more ebay tweaks their system, the less profitable it becomes, and that prompts more tweaking. My advice to ebay - go back to what made you successful in the first place, and stop worrying about eclipsing growth records. The Internet is not growing at the pace it used to be, neither is the economy growing at rapid fire pace. Be happy with the business you have because it's going to cost you far more to get it back once you've lost it.
So already 1% of people have installed it on their own computer plus two friends. Why should EA be worried about this, it's what they are trying to prevent in the first place!
And that, my friend, is the basic problem with the open source model. Nobody can really make money doing it. Profit drives real development. People won't buy crap, thus it forces you to develop something worth purchasing. How much would you be willing to pay KDE or Gnome in their current state? You have to do WAY too much stuff in a terminal window for it to be a viable competitor to Mac OS or Windows.
The workaround is, distribute the free GPL'ed kernel, and sell your own closed source shell on top of it. IANAL, but if you can't do this, linux is never going to gain any significant ground because development is much slower than focused projects by for-profit companies. Hopefully this is what HP can accomplish, though truth be told, I'd rather it wasn't HP doing it.
Just where has companies spending their resources improving linux projects as a whole gotten us? We have barely improved linux desktop adoption over the past several years, as millions of PC's are sold with windows.
Ubuntu has been by far the most successful approach to desktop linux in the past 2 years, and they are doing it by rolling their own distro and concentrating on making it work for the desktop. If only a company with the financial resources to do so would make it a goal to make a linux distro with a top of the line GUI - a viable OS that could directly compete with Windows, for a profit, at a price in the $50-$100 range. Lack of profit is squeezing innovation, or at least catch-up, for linux. Apple managed to do it with OSX, somebody needs to do it with mainstream linux to make an OS that can be widely used on PC. The ultimate prize would be a linux distro that seamlessly integrated windows app compatibility - but I'm sure MS would never really allow this to happen.
I have always done the same thing with my laptops and desktops, and I really am pretty happy with Vista's performance, especially post SP1. I never had issues with ATI drivers myself. Also, after recently messing around with Ubuntu for the first time on my brand new laptop, I have less of a hate for Vista's UAC. I really don't think that Vista's "click to continue" message boxes are really any more annoying than Ubuntu's prompt for my password before doing anything that messes with the system. Worse is Ubuntu's refusal to enable my wireless card despite countless hours toiling in a terminal window. At least Windows has a GUI that works for pretty much everything.
My point being, they spent so much time measuring performance with sequential data transfer and write speed, when at least in the short term (next 5-10 years) these are pretty much just going to be OS drives where those benchmarks are inconsequential. Let's test system performance in the setup I mentioned. Test Autocad performance with the app on the SSD. Test Crysis performance with the game data on the SSD. Run PCmark or similar benchmark utility installed on the SSD and compare it to the typical 7200rpm or 10,000rpm hard drive that is in a typical desktop today. Then we'll have a useful benchmark and a really good basis to determine whether or not we're getting close to price vs. performance feasibility.