midi wouldn't be right, we need a graphical representation. midi is a hopelessly lost cause when it comes to storing a graphical representation of the music (it can't even differentiation between an e-flat and a d-sharp, for example).
the most commonly used format is lilypond, which is basically AFAIK a collection of macros for tex, and very good it is too. MusicXML is now on the way in too, but i've never used it myself, so i won't say anything more about it.
i find it more laughable that you would place your desire to have something so trivial you perceive as lacking in free software above my ability to exchange information with you.
i think you're mostly right. one point however: your reason for wanting to see an increase in mac adoption (--after all, i own one) really does need some clarification.
i'm sure if other_operating_systems[] get to more than 10% we'll see microsoft working on those incompatibilities (by which i mean, microsoft will try to exacerbate the situation).
i seem to remember reading about police in australia negotating a 10% pay increase by agreeing to install sudden speed limits at the foot of long hills.
once more we have the typical error diagnostic under windows: "i think your error has to do with something else" (don't worry, i'm not poking fun at you, i'm just poking fun at the ridiculousmess of this sentence).
you're right to pick me up on it, because i didn't make myself particularly clear. my point being, most people use the system they know the best. moving to a different system requires a reasons. nowadays most people grow up with windows and changing operating system means changing from windows to another one (usually apple or linux. i don't know of many first time changers who move to bsd or solaris or whatever). to simplify greatly: with apple, this is because people have watched too much smallville or wherever apple is placed prominently nowadays. with linux, this is because people want to show microsoft.
that having been said, gnu/linux distributions offer some qualities which microsoft or apple cannot implement, for example: software repositories. because most software for gnu/linux is still foss, ubuntu or fedora or suse can offer huge amounts of custom-compiled software available at the click of a mouse button. the similarities between linux distributions greatly outweighs the differences. if you want to custom compile software on your ubuntu box, you can use apt and dpkg to do this, just like in gentoo. if you want to download precompiled binaries in gentoo, you can do this too. i contend (and you have uptil now not given any argumentation against this contention) that for most people who use gnu/linux they use a particular distribution because it's the distribution they're used to. it is, however, true that certain linux distributions target certain demographics (e.g. i would not be able to install ubuntu from a live cd on a pentium 1 with 32MB RAM, but damnsmalllinux would allow this). most common distributions (fedora, suse, ubuntu, debian etc. ) naturally do target the most common demographic, so i ignored things like damnsmalllinux or yellow dog in my first post (they would have probably made a better point in your posting than mentioning slackware as if it were a competitor to ubuntu).
i thought that was what you actually meant to say. i spent some time reading between the lines in your previous posting trying to work out what you were complaining about and i got really close to addressing this in my first answer but didn't, because i thought you'd just deny you meant that.
a number of points:
xubuntu-desktop is a meta-package. it can be deinstalled quite safely once it has been installed once.
i've just checked to see how large the printer drivers are on my system. they are in total about 1MB. my hard drive (a model from the year 2003) is 160GB in size. i don't really care about 1MB of printer drivers i don't use being on my hard drive.
earlier, 1MB would have been a bad thing, but now? who cares? if i want to delete them, i can.
as to the number of different distros, i already answered this question. some people use fedora, some use suse, some use ubuntu, some use whatever. i estimated in my first post that to 90% this is just tradition. it's "what these people are used to". it's the distro they settled down with because it was the first one they found which supported whatever and back then they didn't have the knowledge to get another distro to do it. i myself have now spent so much time with ubuntu that i have to search through/etc or/var to find stuff on other distros. ubuntu also has the advantage of being flavour of the month, so lots of sites offer debs for ubuntu where you wouldn't find an rpm for suse10.3, for example.
good point. a little bit exaggerated, just like my own, but a good point nevertheless. the trouble comes in having to knock down all those pins at once for the business customers (outlook, word, excel, ability to run whatever custom software they have in-house). as long as microsoft can keep people dependent, the large companies won't be able to leave, so that 1% is unimportant. i can see this turning into a generation thing. the "windows generation" will at some stage be replaced by the "free software generation" (based on things like the olpc, for example), but if one regards software as a static thing (which it has been for the last 15 years in the microsoft world), it will take a generation to do it.
why shouldn't one linux distribution be able to satisfy the needs of everybody using linux? i would hazard a guess that for 90% of people the linux distribution they use is basically based either on hearsay or on tradition. comparing one linux distribution to another nowadays is more like comparing different baseball teams. ubuntu is just the team of the month (for good reason, some would say), but you can play baseball with any of the teams.
"one size fits all" is a nice buzzword, but i can only guess at what you mean by it, seeing as the major linux distributions all have the same software in the repositories anyway: kopete on suse runs the same as kopete on debian, for example.
with linux i can see the percentage having to get larger before microsoft experiences any pressure to allow others to be compatible with it. if i may exaggerate slightly, the average linux user is portrayed as a poor smelly 30-something virgin living in his mother's basement and planning the replacement of democracy in america with communism: a demographic microsoft can afford to ignore for a very long time. and then, of course, the oh-so-reasonable-sounding fud will start--"well, open office doesn't really support doc, so why should word support odf, particularly seeing as doc is the most used format..."
i must admit, as someone who has never used windows xp, i do find this rather strange. basically you seem to be saying, if your computer isn't running at 3am, it will "insist on interrupting whatever you are in the middle of" and then "will not leave you alone until you restart the computer". even stranger, you seem to find this to be acceptable. moreover, you go out of your way to defend it.
in my case, my server runs 24 hours a day, but all other computers get switched on an off as and when i need them. i don't want an auto-update function to interrupt me and bother me and refuse to go away. i already find it ridiculous enough that the update-manager of ubuntu steals focus on the desktop a total of 3 times while its running to inform me of what it's doing. fortunately, one can just start apt-get on a virtual console and forget about it. from what i've heard, windows doesn't have this functionality. wake me up when it does.
i don't know what level you're at, so this may not be the best suggestion. i learned maths by reading mary boas 'mathematics in the physical sciences'. it is in my opinion a pedagogically excellent book, though nowhere near as thorough as more specialist literature. if you do work your way through it, you'll know most of the maths you need for any of the other sciences up to masters level (though statistics is pretty weak and fourier analysis could also be longer).
just a suggestion, i imagine other books are just as good. i would recommend staying away from arfken however, until you've got a good basic grounding. and whatever you do, don't read any pure maths books for mathematicians until you understand the subject. in my experience, maths books for mathematicians seem to be about condensing and archiving knowledge, not about making knowledge accessible.
Vista is not perfect, in fact it reminds me a great deal of Windows XP pre-SP1 and there are a lot of problems that are being ironed out over time. The fact of the matter is unless the hardware manufacturers are willing to incur the additional expense of continuing to develop and support Windows XP drivers, a move to "force" Microsoft to provide "downgrade" disks would be useless to the average customer.
i take you to task on the above quote from your posting. one would expect the hardware manufacturers to develop drivers for the most used operating system(s). it is unlikely that vista will overtake xp in the next 5 years. such an extreme limitation on the manufacturers' userbase would be folly. or will microsoft find a way of ordering the manufacturers to write drivers for vista only?
i find this telling. you are comparing an operating system patched together by a couple of nerds in their mothers' basements to run on hardware the largest and best funded monopoly in the world has spent untold millions and billions making it impossible for any other operating system to use with a product developed over the course of 6 years by 60 thousand workers at this monopoly.
what i find telling is that you can compare them. maybe computing actually isn't that hard. maybe a few good people can write good quality software. maybe we would have a hell of a lot more choice and more understanding of what our computers actually do if there wasn't one company there deliberately spending millions muddying the waters and trying to make computing look more like alchemy, phrenology or astrology.
nope, you still don't understand. microsoft has already been paid for the software. now the consumer is saying "i want to swap this software license for a different software license of yours". microsoft is losing nothing of material value by exchanging one license for another one. your argument is so inherently wrong i find it difficult to believe that you don't realise it yourself.
it's a horrible analogy and you know it. your hoop-jumping and marketing speech only prove it. a cd costs microsoft probably about 10c. the rest is just pure profit.
i don't know many people who have an irrational hate-on for Microsoft. i do know a lot of people (me included) who have a quite rational hate-on for Microsoft, as you put it.
the important thing being the customer should a/ know how much the operating system costs and b/ be able to get the computer without windows. if these two things aren't possible, then of course sales of windows aren't going to decrease. it does not however mean that the customer wants windows.
you're obviously rather new to the idea of thinking logically, so i'll help you out.
unbundling windows means just that--providing the customer with the opportunity to buy a computer without windows and clearly stating how much the windows premium is. it does not say anything about offering support for another operating system. you may like producing a strawman so that you can destroy it in oh so discreet language, but it is a strawman and a troll posting nevertheless.
32bit intel i86 doesn't have a 4GB limit and hasn't had it since pentium MMX if i remember correctly. the upper limit is instead 64GB, due to PAE--an extra 4-bit layer to the paging tables which is only used by the operating system. amd64 actually has 48-bit addressing (although the pointer is 64-bit long).
ah, a wonderful time, when there was innovation in hardware design:)
nowadays because every piece of hardware has to work with 32-bit windows xp for intel i86, there is very little innovation. with open source software, this could be achieved. the hardware manufacturer just has to make a gcc target for his architecture and then every piece of free software could run on it. something like the vast debian repositories with software for 10 different architectures:) which software do you want? just click a button on a desktop and it's installed on your system.
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midi wouldn't be right, we need a graphical representation. midi is a hopelessly lost cause when it comes to storing a graphical representation of the music (it can't even differentiation between an e-flat and a d-sharp, for example).
the most commonly used format is lilypond, which is basically AFAIK a collection of macros for tex, and very good it is too. MusicXML is now on the way in too, but i've never used it myself, so i won't say anything more about it.
i find it more laughable that you would place your desire to have something so trivial you perceive as lacking in free software above my ability to exchange information with you.
i think you're mostly right. one point however: your reason for wanting to see an increase in mac adoption (--after all, i own one) really does need some clarification.
i'm sure if other_operating_systems[] get to more than 10% we'll see microsoft working on those incompatibilities (by which i mean, microsoft will try to exacerbate the situation).
i seem to remember reading about police in australia negotating a 10% pay increase by agreeing to install sudden speed limits at the foot of long hills.
if we suppose that reliability fixes will solve this problem, i'm just amazed that a problem this blatant could make it through quality control.
once more we have the typical error diagnostic under windows: "i think your error has to do with something else" (don't worry, i'm not poking fun at you, i'm just poking fun at the ridiculousmess of this sentence).
you're right to pick me up on it, because i didn't make myself particularly clear. my point being, most people use the system they know the best. moving to a different system requires a reasons. nowadays most people grow up with windows and changing operating system means changing from windows to another one (usually apple or linux. i don't know of many first time changers who move to bsd or solaris or whatever). to simplify greatly: with apple, this is because people have watched too much smallville or wherever apple is placed prominently nowadays. with linux, this is because people want to show microsoft.
that having been said, gnu/linux distributions offer some qualities which microsoft or apple cannot implement, for example: software repositories. because most software for gnu/linux is still foss, ubuntu or fedora or suse can offer huge amounts of custom-compiled software available at the click of a mouse button. the similarities between linux distributions greatly outweighs the differences. if you want to custom compile software on your ubuntu box, you can use apt and dpkg to do this, just like in gentoo. if you want to download precompiled binaries in gentoo, you can do this too. i contend (and you have uptil now not given any argumentation against this contention) that for most people who use gnu/linux they use a particular distribution because it's the distribution they're used to. it is, however, true that certain linux distributions target certain demographics (e.g. i would not be able to install ubuntu from a live cd on a pentium 1 with 32MB RAM, but damnsmalllinux would allow this). most common distributions (fedora, suse, ubuntu, debian etc. ) naturally do target the most common demographic, so i ignored things like damnsmalllinux or yellow dog in my first post (they would have probably made a better point in your posting than mentioning slackware as if it were a competitor to ubuntu).
a number of points:
- xubuntu-desktop is a meta-package. it can be deinstalled quite safely once it has been installed once.
- i've just checked to see how large the printer drivers are on my system. they are in total about 1MB. my hard drive (a model from the year 2003) is 160GB in size. i don't really care about 1MB of printer drivers i don't use being on my hard drive.
earlier, 1MB would have been a bad thing, but now? who cares? if i want to delete them, i can.as to the number of different distros, i already answered this question. some people use fedora, some use suse, some use ubuntu, some use whatever. i estimated in my first post that to 90% this is just tradition. it's "what these people are used to". it's the distro they settled down with because it was the first one they found which supported whatever and back then they didn't have the knowledge to get another distro to do it. i myself have now spent so much time with ubuntu that i have to search through
good point. a little bit exaggerated, just like my own, but a good point nevertheless. the trouble comes in having to knock down all those pins at once for the business customers (outlook, word, excel, ability to run whatever custom software they have in-house). as long as microsoft can keep people dependent, the large companies won't be able to leave, so that 1% is unimportant. i can see this turning into a generation thing. the "windows generation" will at some stage be replaced by the "free software generation" (based on things like the olpc, for example), but if one regards software as a static thing (which it has been for the last 15 years in the microsoft world), it will take a generation to do it.
this is a strange way of looking at things.
why shouldn't one linux distribution be able to satisfy the needs of everybody using linux? i would hazard a guess that for 90% of people the linux distribution they use is basically based either on hearsay or on tradition. comparing one linux distribution to another nowadays is more like comparing different baseball teams. ubuntu is just the team of the month (for good reason, some would say), but you can play baseball with any of the teams.
"one size fits all" is a nice buzzword, but i can only guess at what you mean by it, seeing as the major linux distributions all have the same software in the repositories anyway: kopete on suse runs the same as kopete on debian, for example.
with linux i can see the percentage having to get larger before microsoft experiences any pressure to allow others to be compatible with it. if i may exaggerate slightly, the average linux user is portrayed as a poor smelly 30-something virgin living in his mother's basement and planning the replacement of democracy in america with communism: a demographic microsoft can afford to ignore for a very long time. and then, of course, the oh-so-reasonable-sounding fud will start--"well, open office doesn't really support doc, so why should word support odf, particularly seeing as doc is the most used format..."
i must admit, as someone who has never used windows xp, i do find this rather strange. basically you seem to be saying, if your computer isn't running at 3am, it will "insist on interrupting whatever you are in the middle of" and then "will not leave you alone until you restart the computer". even stranger, you seem to find this to be acceptable. moreover, you go out of your way to defend it.
in my case, my server runs 24 hours a day, but all other computers get switched on an off as and when i need them. i don't want an auto-update function to interrupt me and bother me and refuse to go away. i already find it ridiculous enough that the update-manager of ubuntu steals focus on the desktop a total of 3 times while its running to inform me of what it's doing. fortunately, one can just start apt-get on a virtual console and forget about it. from what i've heard, windows doesn't have this functionality. wake me up when it does.
i don't know what level you're at, so this may not be the best suggestion. i learned maths by reading mary boas 'mathematics in the physical sciences'. it is in my opinion a pedagogically excellent book, though nowhere near as thorough as more specialist literature. if you do work your way through it, you'll know most of the maths you need for any of the other sciences up to masters level (though statistics is pretty weak and fourier analysis could also be longer).
just a suggestion, i imagine other books are just as good. i would recommend staying away from arfken however, until you've got a good basic grounding. and whatever you do, don't read any pure maths books for mathematicians until you understand the subject. in my experience, maths books for mathematicians seem to be about condensing and archiving knowledge, not about making knowledge accessible.
how much does it cost a store if i buy a product, find i bought the wrong one without opening it and bring it back to exchange it for another?
Vista is not perfect, in fact it reminds me a great deal of Windows XP pre-SP1 and there are a lot of problems that are being ironed out over time. The fact of the matter is unless the hardware manufacturers are willing to incur the additional expense of continuing to develop and support Windows XP drivers, a move to "force" Microsoft to provide "downgrade" disks would be useless to the average customer.
i take you to task on the above quote from your posting. one would expect the hardware manufacturers to develop drivers for the most used operating system(s). it is unlikely that vista will overtake xp in the next 5 years. such an extreme limitation on the manufacturers' userbase would be folly. or will microsoft find a way of ordering the manufacturers to write drivers for vista only?
i find this telling. you are comparing an operating system patched together by a couple of nerds in their mothers' basements to run on hardware the largest and best funded monopoly in the world has spent untold millions and billions making it impossible for any other operating system to use with a product developed over the course of 6 years by 60 thousand workers at this monopoly.
what i find telling is that you can compare them. maybe computing actually isn't that hard. maybe a few good people can write good quality software. maybe we would have a hell of a lot more choice and more understanding of what our computers actually do if there wasn't one company there deliberately spending millions muddying the waters and trying to make computing look more like alchemy, phrenology or astrology.
nope, you still don't understand. microsoft has already been paid for the software. now the consumer is saying "i want to swap this software license for a different software license of yours". microsoft is losing nothing of material value by exchanging one license for another one. your argument is so inherently wrong i find it difficult to believe that you don't realise it yourself.
it's a horrible analogy and you know it. your hoop-jumping and marketing speech only prove it. a cd costs microsoft probably about 10c. the rest is just pure profit.
i don't know many people who have an irrational hate-on for Microsoft. i do know a lot of people (me included) who have a quite rational hate-on for Microsoft, as you put it.
the important thing being the customer should a/ know how much the operating system costs and b/ be able to get the computer without windows. if these two things aren't possible, then of course sales of windows aren't going to decrease. it does not however mean that the customer wants windows.
i don't see anything offensive in the parent's post. do enlighten me.
you're obviously rather new to the idea of thinking logically, so i'll help you out.
unbundling windows means just that--providing the customer with the opportunity to buy a computer without windows and clearly stating how much the windows premium is. it does not say anything about offering support for another operating system. you may like producing a strawman so that you can destroy it in oh so discreet language, but it is a strawman and a troll posting nevertheless.
32bit intel i86 doesn't have a 4GB limit and hasn't had it since pentium MMX if i remember correctly. the upper limit is instead 64GB, due to PAE--an extra 4-bit layer to the paging tables which is only used by the operating system. amd64 actually has 48-bit addressing (although the pointer is 64-bit long).
ah, a wonderful time, when there was innovation in hardware design :)
:) which software do you want? just click a button on a desktop and it's installed on your system.
nowadays because every piece of hardware has to work with 32-bit windows xp for intel i86, there is very little innovation. with open source software, this could be achieved. the hardware manufacturer just has to make a gcc target for his architecture and then every piece of free software could run on it. something like the vast debian repositories with software for 10 different architectures