Is there even any way to get the Chrome browser to work with Microsoft Update!! If not, what are the folks in Europe going to do to keep Windows up to date ???
And, apparently incorrectly, didn't feel the need to quote the question.
I'd suggest you're in the minority with a preference for having no browser at point of delivery, rather than just the wrong browser.
Much of the rest of the crap I agree with you on, there's a whole load of crap I'll never need. But a browser is something I just expect to have on a new, complete, system and I'm quite prepared to change it if it's the 'wrong' one. I think I'm in the majority here.
This is partly why we've disallowed Chrome here. It's too subversive.
We used to allow Picasa (our staff generally have a _lot_ of images, and it makes sense to let them manage them as they see fit with some caveats), but since Picasa attempts to force the install of Chrome, and Chrome is known to be subversive, we've dropped Picasa and stopped rolling out Sketch Up.
MS are getting better and better and Google are getting less and less accommodating. I don't think there's anything here for the IE team to worry about.
At our discount the Linux box was about £10 more than the Windows one on the same spec for a matter of weeks. Last time I looked they were identical in price.
Sure, vote for them if you think that file sharing is the most single important issue facing modern society. Come the next elections I'm sure it will be depressing to see just how think it is. It'll be another in sorry indicator of just how detached people have become from real politics.
Elections are not entirely about who gets elected into Government for the next term. There's the marginal choice between the Tories and Labour, the consistent-third Lib Dems and then there's the single issue parties whose popularity indicates which issues the populace feel are being especially neglected by the Tories and Labour.
So you vote for the a single-issue party if you feel that there is not enough difference between the two parties who will in one order or the other make up Government and Opposition on any of the important issues, and feel that this single issue is one which has been sorely neglected by the pair of them.
No-one sets up a single-issue party to get into government, they do it to force those parties who might get into government to add this single issue to the many addressed in their manifesto for the next election.
Yeah, I've been pondering this. Much as there's no current party I'd particularly like to entrust with Government, a Lib Dem opposition would properly put the willies up the two major parties.
I doubt many people could give a proper answer on why the sky is blue, particularly if you want a more in-depth answer than "blue light is scattered more"
Do many kids require a more in-depth response than that? I certainly don't recall wondering any more about it until I was able to find out of my own accord.
This sounds like Nucleii (I'm pretty sure there were two i's). Which I found at a similar time, and haven't seen any trace of since shortly afterwards.
Ok, yes there is a chance the person wants to defend their rights and not give their key to the authorities, but it is also more likely the police has a really good reason for prosecuting that person, and the person has a pretty good reason for not giving the key (i.e. he has done crime). That's why they have this law
This was in the UK. Chances are there was not a really good reason for prosecuting that person. We have weekly reports of local and national government abusing loosely-defined 'rights' to surveillance and monitoring.
Had the UK government not already demonstrated a complete lack of respect for individual privacy, I think people would be more likely to feel they were justified in pressing for the passphrase.
So, I don't think my experience is that odd; if they want me to try ChromeOS, there's what I'd need to see.
I'd say it's pretty far from ubiquitous in my experience, and the recent rise of Apple supports it, too. In sort-of response to your points (not aiming for an argument, just pushing a different point of view):
1) Learning curves happen at every new Windows release. The more experienced you are the smaller they are, but most people aren't that experienced.
2) Not a huge amount of people want anything that's outside of the repos. I've not spoken to that many people, but most of them are in the larger bulk of the market, where they don't actually want to do *that* much with the PC. Email, web, music, office and another one or two apps maybe. Video editing or something.
3) I generally have less pain with Linux than I do Windows in attaching peripherals. I tend to put this down to a combination of more experience with Linux than Windows and an incredibly boring taste in peripherals. I plugged a Lexmark printer in the other week and it autoinstalled.
4) I can see and well understand the want for this, but I just don't have it myself.
The thing is, though, the market Google are aiming at hasn't been using Windows since DOS. They're mostly only-just-aware that they're using Windows. It's people who don't really care what tools they're using, just so long as they can do their email and their myspace. Google would be daft to try to compete with MS on the core of the market that actually likes Windows. They're going for the people who're indifferent, since they honestly don't care what they use.
I see many people with the argument "well, if they didn't want me to do it they should have stopped me". This kind of attitude is exactly that which encourages DRM and Speed Cameras and the kinds of databases so beloved of my government.
It's a part of the general trend of society towards a situation where thinking is entirely unnecessary since all decisions have been made for you, and the conclusions made obvious.
Similarly, Google lives by its search engine, and people at Google know it. There is nothing more important to Google than returning good search results, and if somebody else starts returning better ones Google is in deep trouble.
To stay at the top of a market, you only need stay as good as you are at it.
To enter an industry so dominated by a single player, you need to do something substantially better than that leader to gain any traction. It would be foolish to make an attempt at gaining some meaningful proportion of market share without offering a product substantially better than the current leader.
You need something to encourage people to switch, whereas the leader only needs have no reason for people to leave.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that microsoft/have/ come to the market with a particularly good product. It's certainly decidedly lacking on the features that google has (and, admittedly, that not many people use). But the fact that Google lives by it's search engine isn't enough to convince me it's automatically going to do the job better than anyone else.
Depending on who you ask, Microsoft live by either their OS or their office suite, both of which have significant armies of detractors.
It's by no means exhaustive, but I was saying to someone yesterday how refreshing it was searching for terms that probably should have come up with an MS product, but actually came up with what I was after instead.
I especially liked how searching for a postcode came up with a link to Streetmap as the first result, rather than MS's Multimap.
The feedback is clearly polar -- people either love the interface or hate it. There *IS* a large segment of the population that is well-served by the ribbon. It also means that a very large portion of the user base, possibly a majority, is quite unhappy with the PlaySkool-looking ribbon interface.
I'd posit that a large proportion of that is dislike of change.
How many of the people now claiming that Vista is awful because it's different to XP did same when XP came out because it wasn't an exact clone of 2k?
Personally, the ribbon interface serves me far better than the 'old' menu-driven one did, and I've had no users make any meaningful complaints about the new UI (there were a couple of 'does it have to come at the end of the year?' from accounts...).
By choosing the adaptive UI model (and abandoning the consistent UI model), MS clearly chose to serve the novice audience. That's OK! But to REMOVE the existing, proven, consistent UI interface as an unabashed fuck-you to professional office workers and anyone with more than a few years of computer experience.
I've got people who remember Lotus123 who seem quite happy with the new UI. Some have even praised it. Perhaps it's not universally derided by experienced users, just by those experienced users who share your idea of what a UI should be like?
Ubuntu would be better for a home server, for the casual user. For a production server, you want the standard unix environment, your server applications, and ideally nothing else.
Are they really that different?
I've had poke arounds on Ubuntu servers and they've felt quite familiar, just with some friendlier defaults. But I'm no pro, it's entirely likely that I inadvertently make my Debian boxes similar to Ubuntu ones...
But sit down at a random machine and try work out WHAT release of Debian (or Fedora or whatever) you are actually sitting in front of and you can pull your hair out.
Slashdot Mirror
And, apparently incorrectly, didn't feel the need to quote the question.
I'd suggest you're in the minority with a preference for having no browser at point of delivery, rather than just the wrong browser.
Much of the rest of the crap I agree with you on, there's a whole load of crap I'll never need. But a browser is something I just expect to have on a new, complete, system and I'm quite prepared to change it if it's the 'wrong' one. I think I'm in the majority here.
A browser's a "junk program you'll never use"?
Sony are in the business of selling complete, usable, PCs. To the bulk of the market, a PC with no web browser is incomplete.
Windows 7 doesn't require IE to use Windows Update.
This is partly why we've disallowed Chrome here. It's too subversive.
We used to allow Picasa (our staff generally have a _lot_ of images, and it makes sense to let them manage them as they see fit with some caveats), but since Picasa attempts to force the install of Chrome, and Chrome is known to be subversive, we've dropped Picasa and stopped rolling out Sketch Up.
MS are getting better and better and Google are getting less and less accommodating. I don't think there's anything here for the IE team to worry about.
The slightly worrying thing, though, is that it's really rather easy to believe the NYT's account.
At our discount the Linux box was about £10 more than the Windows one on the same spec for a matter of weeks. Last time I looked they were identical in price.
Elections are not entirely about who gets elected into Government for the next term. There's the marginal choice between the Tories and Labour, the consistent-third Lib Dems and then there's the single issue parties whose popularity indicates which issues the populace feel are being especially neglected by the Tories and Labour.
So you vote for the a single-issue party if you feel that there is not enough difference between the two parties who will in one order or the other make up Government and Opposition on any of the important issues, and feel that this single issue is one which has been sorely neglected by the pair of them.
No-one sets up a single-issue party to get into government, they do it to force those parties who might get into government to add this single issue to the many addressed in their manifesto for the next election.
Yeah, I've been pondering this. Much as there's no current party I'd particularly like to entrust with Government, a Lib Dem opposition would properly put the willies up the two major parties.
Do many kids require a more in-depth response than that? I certainly don't recall wondering any more about it until I was able to find out of my own accord.
He mentioned TrueCrypt. Read more at the paragraph starting "A program called TrueCrypt achieves something close to this"
This sounds like Nucleii (I'm pretty sure there were two i's). Which I found at a similar time, and haven't seen any trace of since shortly afterwards.
This was in the UK. Chances are there was not a really good reason for prosecuting that person. We have weekly reports of local and national government abusing loosely-defined 'rights' to surveillance and monitoring.
Had the UK government not already demonstrated a complete lack of respect for individual privacy, I think people would be more likely to feel they were justified in pressing for the passphrase.
I'd say it's pretty far from ubiquitous in my experience, and the recent rise of Apple supports it, too. In sort-of response to your points (not aiming for an argument, just pushing a different point of view):
1) Learning curves happen at every new Windows release. The more experienced you are the smaller they are, but most people aren't that experienced.
2) Not a huge amount of people want anything that's outside of the repos. I've not spoken to that many people, but most of them are in the larger bulk of the market, where they don't actually want to do *that* much with the PC. Email, web, music, office and another one or two apps maybe. Video editing or something.
3) I generally have less pain with Linux than I do Windows in attaching peripherals. I tend to put this down to a combination of more experience with Linux than Windows and an incredibly boring taste in peripherals. I plugged a Lexmark printer in the other week and it autoinstalled.
4) I can see and well understand the want for this, but I just don't have it myself.
The thing is, though, the market Google are aiming at hasn't been using Windows since DOS. They're mostly only-just-aware that they're using Windows. It's people who don't really care what tools they're using, just so long as they can do their email and their myspace. Google would be daft to try to compete with MS on the core of the market that actually likes Windows. They're going for the people who're indifferent, since they honestly don't care what they use.
I see many people with the argument "well, if they didn't want me to do it they should have stopped me". This kind of attitude is exactly that which encourages DRM and Speed Cameras and the kinds of databases so beloved of my government.
It's a part of the general trend of society towards a situation where thinking is entirely unnecessary since all decisions have been made for you, and the conclusions made obvious.
This is likely not something you want to boast about.
Keep it in a database forever? I thought they wanted it so they could leave it on trains.
Searching for Free Software gives an odd indication of bias in the top three returns:
google: Download.com, Tucows.com, Freewarefiles.com
bing: fsf.org, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/free_software, gnu.org
yahoo: freewarehome.com, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/free_software, freesoftware4all.co.uk
To stay at the top of a market, you only need stay as good as you are at it. To enter an industry so dominated by a single player, you need to do something substantially better than that leader to gain any traction. It would be foolish to make an attempt at gaining some meaningful proportion of market share without offering a product substantially better than the current leader.
/have/ come to the market with a particularly good product. It's certainly decidedly lacking on the features that google has (and, admittedly, that not many people use). But the fact that Google lives by it's search engine isn't enough to convince me it's automatically going to do the job better than anyone else.
You need something to encourage people to switch, whereas the leader only needs have no reason for people to leave.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that microsoft
Depending on who you ask, Microsoft live by either their OS or their office suite, both of which have significant armies of detractors.
It's by no means exhaustive, but I was saying to someone yesterday how refreshing it was searching for terms that probably should have come up with an MS product, but actually came up with what I was after instead.
I especially liked how searching for a postcode came up with a link to Streetmap as the first result, rather than MS's Multimap.
I'd posit that a large proportion of that is dislike of change. How many of the people now claiming that Vista is awful because it's different to XP did same when XP came out because it wasn't an exact clone of 2k? Personally, the ribbon interface serves me far better than the 'old' menu-driven one did, and I've had no users make any meaningful complaints about the new UI (there were a couple of 'does it have to come at the end of the year?' from accounts...).
I've got people who remember Lotus123 who seem quite happy with the new UI. Some have even praised it. Perhaps it's not universally derided by experienced users, just by those experienced users who share your idea of what a UI should be like?
We didn't before?
Couldn't they have tied this in better with the Reg's thing for HP having massive boxes?
Are they really that different?
I've had poke arounds on Ubuntu servers and they've felt quite familiar, just with some friendlier defaults. But I'm no pro, it's entirely likely that I inadvertently make my Debian boxes similar to Ubuntu ones...
cat /etc/issue /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/lsb_release
cat
cat
Often works. It's by no means ubiquitous, I'm well aware, but it's rarely *that* difficult.