I wish my parents were like your mother! They had AVG and Zone Alarm on XP SP2 and still regularly got infected - I think from clicking on shiny web ads.
You still might want to consider switching your mother sometime soon - as part of the attempt to migrate people to Win7, MS will be shutting down support for XP as soon as they possibly can. At which stage you're going to have to shell out for a new Win7-capable PC. If she isn't using Firefox, OpenOffice and webmail yet, get her used to these on Windows now - then the switch will be almost painless. With my hand on my heart, the only thing my parents have found lacking is the lack of auto-layout photo printing.
> I haven't spent a dime on security software for Windows in the last ten years. Mom and Dad users now believe annual subscriptions to Norton and McAfee are part of owning a computer.
> The enterprise Linux distribution comes with a service contract or a professional on-call - on-site - IT staff. Nothing of the sort is being offered in the consumer market. Have you ever got a useful response out of the support infrastructure that comes with Windows? Me neither. For Mom and Dad, there's likely no difference in support between Win and Lin - in both cases they are likely to have to rely on friends or a computer store.
> Linux runs on old hardware - but who the hell cares? 99.9% (no, I'm not a fraudster!) of computer users. You are an enthusiast, who chooses to spend your disposable income on a fancy computer. But most people want a machine that will let them email/browse. If it kept working for ten years, they'd be happy to continue using it. I think if you were honest about the amount you'd spent on your PC over the years (notwithstanding getting your AV software for free!), you'd understand why most Mom and Dad users (and corporate users for that matter) would be a lot better off with Linux.
I migrated my parents to Linux three years ago for my own sanity. I figured "How do I make it do this?" calls were preferable to the "I think I've got another computer virus" calls. They got used to Linux very quickly, and I now spend probably 5% of the time I used to supporting them. I'd recommend this to anyone who gets bugged to resolve computer problems.
> People have tipping points they may not even recognize, at some point > they will say "enough is enough" and take a stand against the authority > figure they see as unnecessarily restricting some free choices.
My brother was the ultimate Apple fanboi, and he's just bought an HTC Hero (android). The control-freakery was a major factor.
Your point seems to be that you can't be sure particular hardware will work with Linux. I haven't used Windows for several years so I can't comment on hardware issues with XP/Vista/W7, but I do know that on the 5 laptop/desktop computers in my household, every one "just works" with Ubuntu. Not a single hardware issue - not with a just-released printer/scanner from a supplier not known for their Linux support; not with the no-name PCMCIA wifi card one older laptop uses; or any of the built-in wifi adaptors.
I don't have access to unbiased datasets on this issue (I suspect that no-one does), but from my personal experience, this is a non-issue.
Interesting! My wife (yeah I know I'm not a real Slashdotter) is usually scathing about the "brilliant ideas" I come up with, and the only idea that she really liked turned out to be THE ONE.
This might be a good thing, cost-wise - you use a parabolic mirror (cheap) to concentrate normal light 500 times onto this collector, instead of needing a normal collector 500 times bigger.
If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government, freedom to think and act...
The fact that there isn't a (civilised) country like this should give you a clue. If you actually put your money where your mouth is, you'd be on the next flight to one of the collapsed states in Africa, where there is basically no government. No tax, absolute freedom... perfect! You'd probably even get a kick out of all the heavy weaponry you'd have to buy to protect yourself... for a while. But when you got ill, or old, I bet you'd come crawling right back.
Most of humanity has evolved past "brutal is best". Most of us have a deep-seated desire for justice, and have learned that co-operation is far preferable to conflict. We need to have a government to create laws, a credible police force to enforce them - and that costs money. Tax is an investment in civilisation, and when you consider what you get for it, it's a bargain.
Seriously, I'm and old c/c++ hand, lately turned to Python for most work because I enjoy it. But the reality is that very few of us get much choice - we have to use whatever system the PHB got swayed by back in the day.
So I wouldn't get too upset by this article, even if Java is your pride and joy - I doubt we'll see a stampede to Stalin. Java programmers will remain java programmers, just like those poor buggers who started out in Cobol are still hacking away in Cobol.
After yet another trojan wreaked one of their boxes, I moved all my immediate family (two sons, a wife and her parents) (OK, one Dell laptop, one Acer laptop, three beige boxes - forgot I was on Slashdot!) onto Linux two years ago - with some trepidation.
I was expecting all sorts of kickback - games for the kids, my father in law is an accountant with twenty years of excel spreadsheets. But apart from a few "How do I print my photos two to a page?" sort of questions, it's been a dream, after the previous continuous battle against malware. I haven't had a single issue with the excel-open office transition, and the boys actually prefer the ready availability of a great variety of free games on Linux. They also have had a lot of fun with audacity and blender, which wouldn't have happened on Windows. And I still don't know what all this angst about drivers is - everything just works.
So I guess my practical experience differs from yours - A, B, C and D. Life is much easier for me with Linux. And finally, you may joke about Microsoft being evil, but given their track record (including recent antics with ISO document formats), I'm very comfortable not using their software.
Except that as the Chairman clicks the button to launch, a UAC dialog pops up. After ten minutes of logging in as different users, and hacking the registry, he finally gets the launch button to work.
Meanwhile inside the silos, we see a screen counting down:
10...9...8...7... Fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0317:BFFA21C9. The current application will be terminated.
Microsoft's elite swing into action, and within nine months have deployed a patch for the launch computers. At last the countdown resumes: 10...9...8...7...5...4...3...2...1...The missiles lumber into the air through huge plumes of exhaust gases, gaining speed, adjusting their trajectory according to geo-location of Firefox user's IP addresses.
But wait! They are going off course! They've been compromised by spammers and are spewing emails targetted at impotent men! Where are they headed? Oh no! The spammers hacked their IP addresses into the system! KABOOOOOM!!!
As the radiation dies around the craters in Eastern Europe, the world's internet users notice an unusually fast response time, and email servers across the globe suddenly find their spam filters have nothing to do. Thank-you Chairman! How we misjudged you!
Anyone notice in the video, the 8 or so boards of what I assume is memory? I'm not a hardware person, but they didn't look like the normal DIMM boards, so maybe they are something else.
And I didn't see any disks (but I only watched once). Maybe they run entirely on ramdisk, which would explain the importance of the battery.
I'm right behind his point in the first paragraph - that RIA is pushed by vendors, and users just want plain/simple/familiar HTML.
And yet the web site has packaged these comments up in a nasty little scrolling window that you have to click and scroll and fiddle with every couple of lines - all so they can show lots of marketing gumph, which I studiously ignored.
...and a lot of small businesses run at least some mission-critical parts of the business on Access apps...
Any business that relies on Access for mission critical systems is not going to have any missions left, critical or otherwise. I've been burned too many times by Access - any consultant who doesn't move mission-critical systems onto MSSQL, or (back on topic) PostgreSQL should be taunted mercilessly with an outrageous French accent.
Agree with your point, but assuming you are using Linux, the IEs4Linux package is excellent for testing IE5-7. The only thing I've had to use a Windows machine for was a javascript window opener that didn't work under Linux, but did under Windows - otherwise rendering, CSS, and javascript seem to be faithfully reproduced.
Forget clicks per install - the one that drives me up the wall is reboots per install.
Closely followed by reinstalls per year required because the darn OS is slowing down. Before I abandoned Windows, I was often inclined to think that MS's most closely guarded secret is technology that makes the machine get slower and slower over time, driving most punters to buy a new PC - and another copy of Windows. Those in the know would reinstall every few months to regain the performance.
The thrust of the argument is that MS loses revenue from it's cash cows (mainly Office) when people switch.
MS could just release Office on MacOS and Linux to cover all bets - I'd guess that open=sourcing Windows would be a last-ditch event in Microsoft's corporate culture.
Re:Slashdot comments: censorship by glut
on
Censorship By Glut
·
· Score: 1
Also the research quoted by the article is the interesting thing here, and it makes a case for not displaying scores when you have mod points. That would remove any temptation to go with the herd, and each post would get bumped up on it's own merit. Worth a try, Commander?
If you look at the total votes for each candidate, the last election was split almost exactly 50/50, if my memory serves me right - or 49/49/2 if you include Nader. This time it was 52/46/2, which means only 3% changed their vote - or even less if you consider the new voters who disproportionatly supported Obama.
So despite fielding a young, inspirational candidate against an old one tarred with the same brush as the lame-duck incumbent; and a steady experienced running mate against - how can I say this kindly? - an extremely naive one; and the embarrassment that was Bush's presidency; and involvement in a war that has cost the country over 4000 people and it's prosperity; and spending 2.6 billion on their campaigns - less than 3% changed their vote.
Does this mean that most Americans simply vote they way they always have, regardless of what's happening around them? Maybe someone who actually lives in the place could explain this strangeness.
Ummmm... these things come with the wireless adaptor installed and working - and the webcam, microphone, hibernation... Your point may be relevant to upgrading a Windows PC to Linux, but it isn't for pre-installed hardware.
And the latest Ubuntu release finally puts that "wireless is a pain on linux" meme to rest, too.
For the record, appengine has pretty good version support. You can access your app running under an older version of appengine simply by using a different url, which gives developers a lot more breathing space to update their apps.
It is also reasonably easy to migrate from appengine to your own server. Your data is available any way you want to code access to it, and modifying the python to run on mod_python or mod_wsgi is simple - I know, I've done it in reverse. Yes, bigtable is proprietary, but it is far easier to move from bigtable's rather idiosyncratic storage to an SQL database. Not so easy the the other way round...
All up I'm very comfortable developing on appengine. I can be out of there like a flash if Google start doing evil, meanwhile I'm enjoying far better redundancy and scaling than I could ever provide with my own servers.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish my parents were like your mother! They had AVG and Zone Alarm on XP SP2 and still regularly got infected - I think from clicking on shiny web ads.
You still might want to consider switching your mother sometime soon - as part of the attempt to migrate people to Win7, MS will be shutting down support for XP as soon as they possibly can. At which stage you're going to have to shell out for a new Win7-capable PC. If she isn't using Firefox, OpenOffice and webmail yet, get her used to these on Windows now - then the switch will be almost painless. With my hand on my heart, the only thing my parents have found lacking is the lack of auto-layout photo printing.
> I haven't spent a dime on security software for Windows in the last ten years.
Mom and Dad users now believe annual subscriptions to Norton and McAfee are part of owning a computer.
> The enterprise Linux distribution comes with a service contract or a professional on-call - on-site - IT staff. Nothing of the sort is being offered in the consumer market.
Have you ever got a useful response out of the support infrastructure that comes with Windows? Me neither. For Mom and Dad, there's likely no difference in support between Win and Lin - in both cases they are likely to have to rely on friends or a computer store.
> Linux runs on old hardware - but who the hell cares?
99.9% (no, I'm not a fraudster!) of computer users. You are an enthusiast, who chooses to spend your disposable income on a fancy computer. But most people want a machine that will let them email/browse. If it kept working for ten years, they'd be happy to continue using it. I think if you were honest about the amount you'd spent on your PC over the years (notwithstanding getting your AV software for free!), you'd understand why most Mom and Dad users (and corporate users for that matter) would be a lot better off with Linux.
I migrated my parents to Linux three years ago for my own sanity. I figured "How do I make it do this?" calls were preferable to the "I think I've got another computer virus" calls. They got used to Linux very quickly, and I now spend probably 5% of the time I used to supporting them. I'd recommend this to anyone who gets bugged to resolve computer problems.
> People have tipping points they may not even recognize, at some point
> they will say "enough is enough" and take a stand against the authority
> figure they see as unnecessarily restricting some free choices.
My brother was the ultimate Apple fanboi, and he's just bought an HTC Hero (android). The control-freakery was a major factor.
Your point seems to be that you can't be sure particular hardware will work with Linux. I haven't used Windows for several years so I can't comment on hardware issues with XP/Vista/W7, but I do know that on the 5 laptop/desktop computers in my household, every one "just works" with Ubuntu. Not a single hardware issue - not with a just-released printer/scanner from a supplier not known for their Linux support; not with the no-name PCMCIA wifi card one older laptop uses; or any of the built-in wifi adaptors.
I don't have access to unbiased datasets on this issue (I suspect that no-one does), but from my personal experience, this is a non-issue.
Interesting! My wife (yeah I know I'm not a real Slashdotter) is usually scathing about the "brilliant ideas" I come up with, and the only idea that she really liked turned out to be THE ONE.
Mod parent up.
This might be a good thing, cost-wise - you use a parabolic mirror (cheap) to concentrate normal light 500 times onto this collector, instead of needing a normal collector 500 times bigger.
If there were a country with minimal tax, strong protection from the government, freedom to think and act...
The fact that there isn't a (civilised) country like this should give you a clue. If you actually put your money where your mouth is, you'd be on the next flight to one of the collapsed states in Africa, where there is basically no government. No tax, absolute freedom... perfect! You'd probably even get a kick out of all the heavy weaponry you'd have to buy to protect yourself... for a while. But when you got ill, or old, I bet you'd come crawling right back.
Most of humanity has evolved past "brutal is best". Most of us have a deep-seated desire for justice, and have learned that co-operation is far preferable to conflict. We need to have a government to create laws, a credible police force to enforce them - and that costs money. Tax is an investment in civilisation, and when you consider what you get for it, it's a bargain.
Seriously, I'm and old c/c++ hand, lately turned to Python for most work because I enjoy it. But the reality is that very few of us get much choice - we have to use whatever system the PHB got swayed by back in the day.
So I wouldn't get too upset by this article, even if Java is your pride and joy - I doubt we'll see a stampede to Stalin. Java programmers will remain java programmers, just like those poor buggers who started out in Cobol are still hacking away in Cobol.
After yet another trojan wreaked one of their boxes, I moved all my immediate family (two sons, a wife and her parents) (OK, one Dell laptop, one Acer laptop, three beige boxes - forgot I was on Slashdot!) onto Linux two years ago - with some trepidation.
I was expecting all sorts of kickback - games for the kids, my father in law is an accountant with twenty years of excel spreadsheets. But apart from a few "How do I print my photos two to a page?" sort of questions, it's been a dream, after the previous continuous battle against malware. I haven't had a single issue with the excel-open office transition, and the boys actually prefer the ready availability of a great variety of free games on Linux. They also have had a lot of fun with audacity and blender, which wouldn't have happened on Windows. And I still don't know what all this angst about drivers is - everything just works.
So I guess my practical experience differs from yours - A, B, C and D. Life is much easier for me with Linux. And finally, you may joke about Microsoft being evil, but given their track record (including recent antics with ISO document formats), I'm very comfortable not using their software.
Except that as the Chairman clicks the button to launch, a UAC dialog pops up. After ten minutes of logging in as different users, and hacking the registry, he finally gets the launch button to work.
Meanwhile inside the silos, we see a screen counting down:
10...9...8...7...
Fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0317:BFFA21C9. The current application will be terminated.
Microsoft's elite swing into action, and within nine months have deployed a patch for the launch computers. At last the countdown resumes:
10...9...8...7...5...4...3...2...1...The missiles lumber into the air through huge plumes of exhaust gases, gaining speed, adjusting their trajectory according to geo-location of Firefox user's IP addresses.
But wait! They are going off course! They've been compromised by spammers and are spewing emails targetted at impotent men! Where are they headed? Oh no! The spammers hacked their IP addresses into the system! KABOOOOOM!!!
As the radiation dies around the craters in Eastern Europe, the world's internet users notice an unusually fast response time, and email servers across the globe suddenly find their spam filters have nothing to do. Thank-you Chairman! How we misjudged you!
"...Put the content in a table..." STOP RIGHT THERE! Don't you know that tables are right up there with Windows on the geek hate list?
Instead thou shalt wrangle CSS in mind-bendingly un-intuitive ways, lest thou confuse mortal souls with tr and td tags. Sigh...
Anyone notice in the video, the 8 or so boards of what I assume is memory? I'm not a hardware person, but they didn't look like the normal DIMM boards, so maybe they are something else.
And I didn't see any disks (but I only watched once). Maybe they run entirely on ramdisk, which would explain the importance of the battery.
I'm right behind his point in the first paragraph - that RIA is pushed by vendors, and users just want plain/simple/familiar HTML.
And yet the web site has packaged these comments up in a nasty little scrolling window that you have to click and scroll and fiddle with every couple of lines - all so they can show lots of marketing gumph, which I studiously ignored.
...and a lot of small businesses run at least some mission-critical parts of the business on Access apps...
Any business that relies on Access for mission critical systems is not going to have any missions left, critical or otherwise. I've been burned too many times by Access - any consultant who doesn't move mission-critical systems onto MSSQL, or (back on topic) PostgreSQL should be taunted mercilessly with an outrageous French accent.
Agree with your point, but assuming you are using Linux, the IEs4Linux package is excellent for testing IE5-7. The only thing I've had to use a Windows machine for was a javascript window opener that didn't work under Linux, but did under Windows - otherwise rendering, CSS, and javascript seem to be faithfully reproduced.
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
Whoa! A two-digit Slashdot ID? This guy has mana - I'm inclined to believe his side of the story.
Forget clicks per install - the one that drives me up the wall is reboots per install.
Closely followed by reinstalls per year required because the darn OS is slowing down. Before I abandoned Windows, I was often inclined to think that MS's most closely guarded secret is technology that makes the machine get slower and slower over time, driving most punters to buy a new PC - and another copy of Windows. Those in the know would reinstall every few months to regain the performance.
The thrust of the argument is that MS loses revenue from it's cash cows (mainly Office) when people switch. MS could just release Office on MacOS and Linux to cover all bets - I'd guess that open=sourcing Windows would be a last-ditch event in Microsoft's corporate culture.
> My trust just went right down the toilet.
You had some trust in Microsoft left? Quick, get out of here before you get ridiculed mercilessly!
How many service packs will this beta need?
The answer my friend is blowing in the wind...
Also the research quoted by the article is the interesting thing here, and it makes a case for not displaying scores when you have mod points. That would remove any temptation to go with the herd, and each post would get bumped up on it's own merit. Worth a try, Commander?
If you look at the total votes for each candidate, the last election was split almost exactly 50/50, if my memory serves me right - or 49/49/2 if you include Nader. This time it was 52/46/2, which means only 3% changed their vote - or even less if you consider the new voters who disproportionatly supported Obama.
So despite fielding a young, inspirational candidate against an old one tarred with the same brush as the lame-duck incumbent; and a steady experienced running mate against - how can I say this kindly? - an extremely naive one; and the embarrassment that was Bush's presidency; and involvement in a war that has cost the country over 4000 people and it's prosperity; and spending 2.6 billion on their campaigns - less than 3% changed their vote.
Does this mean that most Americans simply vote they way they always have, regardless of what's happening around them? Maybe someone who actually lives in the place could explain this strangeness.
Ummmm... these things come with the wireless adaptor installed and working - and the webcam, microphone, hibernation... Your point may be relevant to upgrading a Windows PC to Linux, but it isn't for pre-installed hardware.
And the latest Ubuntu release finally puts that "wireless is a pain on linux" meme to rest, too.
For the record, appengine has pretty good version support. You can access your app running under an older version of appengine simply by using a different url, which gives developers a lot more breathing space to update their apps.
It is also reasonably easy to migrate from appengine to your own server. Your data is available any way you want to code access to it, and modifying the python to run on mod_python or mod_wsgi is simple - I know, I've done it in reverse. Yes, bigtable is proprietary, but it is far easier to move from bigtable's rather idiosyncratic storage to an SQL database. Not so easy the the other way round...
All up I'm very comfortable developing on appengine. I can be out of there like a flash if Google start doing evil, meanwhile I'm enjoying far better redundancy and scaling than I could ever provide with my own servers.
And we need to continue drilling Alaska... and offshore!!!