Look at the whole Microsoft schpiel about how proprietary software gives you so much security because it is backed by a large corporation blah yah etc and then suddenly you get to this where you realize that you are just as screwed when things go wrong as when you installed an open source product.
You have no real leg to stand on when software you paid for dies on you.
 work around any technical limitations in the software;
There - right there - it says that if your computer is limited by this software you may not find a way to fix it!
Oh my goodness! I am so glad I got "your browser or hardware is incompatible with silverlight" or some generic message when I browsed to the silverlight page...
I wonder if "not allowed to work around" includes uninstalling it...
7. SUPPORT SERVICES. Because this software is âoeas is,â we may not provide support services for it.
So if it breaks your computer you are on your own!
Oh dear - what a chuckle. Trusted computing my left buttock.
I have two tabs - one for the normal stuff, and then one for my webmasters tools.
I prefer the tabs to the left of the page - they used to be on top - and the new way fits my resolution better (1450x1040) but I can see that the tab bar on the left take up too much real estate on lower-rez screens.
I don't really use iGoogle because I found the previous interface clunky - so unless I am not seeing what others are I think I will hence use iGoogle more often...
Someone once asked a while ago how much freedom will we be willing to surrender for a false sense of security.
It seems that in the US and UK this very scenario is playing itself out and all we can do is sit, horrified and watch in spite of ourselves.
It's like sitting in the passenger seat of a car that is being driven by a lunatic - you squint your eyes closed but keep peeking because you know what is bound to happen, but you cant help but look and hope you will be somehow wrong.
And safe.
One thing proponents of all this gathering of data on people keep forgetting is that data gets lost, stolen or otherwise compromised on a daily basis.
The UK is a shining example of data getting lost.
How long before a terrorist hacker steals the info and spoofs a phonecall to a bomb that is detonated via cellphone?
Suddenly the possibilities of being wrongly implemented in a terrorist plot is so much more possible.
This is a bad idea all around.
I am glad that I do not live in the US or the UK - if my country implements this kind of policy I would start browsing using the TOR network, set up my own mailserver to do direct relay and eventually fall back on using older means of communication - snail mail and pretty much nothing else.
Who is it that said "As soon as we change our way of living the terrorists have won"?
I tell you now - terrorists are holding the citizens of the US and the UK captive via proxy, and the proxy is ironically the very governments they are battling.
In my case it is the owner of the company where I work.
While I cannot speak for the personality of the OP's boss - mine is at least a very decent person.
So I walk into work and inherit an old Dell Latitude D600 running WinXP.
A month into the job I trash it and install Linux. I am now the only person in our company using Linux/OSS for everything I need to do.
I inherited a desktop PC that still runs XP - our control software is written in MS Access so I could not run that on Linux.
One day my boss remarked in a meeting that "You know you need to be able to run Windows dependent software on your laptop" which is his roundabout way laying down a kind of challenge to me.
So I set up our proxy server to allow me to SSH in and rdesktop to my desktop when I am on standby. The other tech's needed to make an offline backup of the control DB and then merge it with the "live" DB.
A week later in another meeting he reminded me to merge the database. "No need, I run the DB live"
So two months ago I was offered part ownership of the company and promoted to tech manager in the interim.
Sometime you need to play on the ragged edge for a bit in order to get your point accross.
I still run Linux on my laptop, and my whole tech team goes for weekly training on Linux with our sister company who is a Linux solutions provider.
Talking about drivers - in the one picture you can see the USB fingerprint reader's driver loading. I find that interesting as our local LUG had a discussion a while back about the lack of support for fingerprint readers on some of the newer laptops.
Am I correct in assuming that these drivers are open to share and could be used on a laptop to try and get it's fingerprint scanner to work?
Remember though that users need only worry about using the computer - IT geeks like those who's job it is to fix computers are supposed to worry about the actual hardware, and again for a power user/tech support it is less than an issue than you think.
Not in my personal experience; maybe it's my fault for choosing the wrong wireless card years before I switched to Linux, or for wanting hardware 3D acceleration, </sarcasm>
One area where Ubuntu has improved is Nvidia Driver support via the restricted drivers manager. One area where Ubuntu support rapidly falls apart is when you try and change screen resolutions and screen types. I have had to edi xorg.conf for more than one client and for my wife too many times.
but having to rebuild drivers from the command line with every kernel upgrade (and pray that they work, because I can't download updated wireless drivers without rebooting into the old kernel!) isn't something I particularly enjoy putting up with.
What distro are you using? I am really interested since I haven't come across this until I recently started using gentoo - now there is something only the bravest of geeks should try... with most of the mainstream distro's though your issue should be sorted out - or at least have a plan in place to sort it out.
Have you looked at the awesome cockup that is the Office 2007 interface?
Yes, I have, and quickly ran away screaming.;) I was thinking more about a Office 2003 -> OpenOffice transition when I wrote that. You're right, it can be just as bad without changing OSes. It usually isn't, but it can be, as Microsoft oh-so-recently proved.:)
Yes.
Apple seem to have hit a nice stride in the continuity stakes with their operating system as of late.Upgrading is relatively painless and if you are used to userspace moving on is easy. The same can be said for Gnome - use a gnome interface from a few years ago and one of the newest ones today and you feel immediately at home.
Sad to say but this is not true for KDE4 - I have used it and while it is an awesome piece of eyecandy I find it a general pain to use and in fact believe that Vista and KDE4 is basically a coin toss as far as choice goes - unlike with Vista, however, I firmly believe that the KDE4 interface will steadily improve through it's lifetime.
Migrating between OS'es is a general pain - and it is unfair to give Linux (and to single out Ubuntu which is one of the more seamless migrates out there is a bit... strange) special grief.
I used Ubuntu as that's what the grandparent was talking about suggesting people migrate to.
Fair enough - I myself migrated from XP to an installed version of Knoppix (on a vm) before Ubuntu became one of three OS'es I multi booted with - the others were XP and Mandrive Live with Metisse. Go figure. I have however been tooling around with Linux since 2000 when I played with Mandriva (remember the wizard??) and Red Hat, unsure what version this was - I hated it.
Generally, yes, it is a pain. But if you can run your old applications (XP -> Vista), or if there are versions of your old applications that will behave the same way (XP/Office 2003 -> OS X/Office 2004), then it'll be much less painful.
Agreed.
One thing that has made the migrating-ti-Linux thing much easier is the Wubi install option for Ubuntu.
I said "Today" referring to OpenOffice 3. I have run across some users who had.docx support without installing the converter apparently.
I give you your point though - but counter with: How does that make a difference? You need to do the same for Office 2k3 as for the *current* version of OpenOffice.
Hence you cannot sucsessfully argue that OpenOffice is less compatible than MS Office with MS Office based on the.docx support stakes.
That is more a failing of the hardware vendor than of the software installed.
Since Linux will run better than Windows on these netbooks I find it strange that vendors have not included more software for these things.
I am willing to bet that one can run a full installation of Ubuntu/PCLOS or any newish desktop Linux more than satisfactorily on one of these. In fact I know of at least one geek who installed Ubuntu on his EEEpc.
It is sad that by design the hardware vendors are limiting the linux versions by design to large smartphone net devices...
Also, you forget that the average/. crowd is not really a market for these things since the average/.er is dirt poor.
The OS may be no more difficult to learn (for everyday use; if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu),
I call BS on that statement.
I am a power user and in high level tech/server support, and one thing about power users is this: Interface is irrelevant.XP -> Ubuntu is equally as easy as XP-> Vista, Vista -> MacOS and MacOS -> Ubuntu.
What you are forgetting is that XP -> Anything Linux you could have a choice of Gnome, KDE, XFCE or a tonne of more obscure ones like IceWM or Enlightenment.
I have tried all of these above, I give tech support on all of these (OS'es and Environments) and once you teach a user where to click to do what they want they become drones again and to open mail click here, to edit a document click there and so on and so on endlessly. Users tend to "forget" the actual environment that they are in and learn an almost "muscle memory" type of sequence of mouse-gestures and keyboard clicks to get done what they want.
I got my wife to use Ubuntu, and she uses it every-day. I could've gotten her to use anything else.
The real pain comes in the "under the skin" things like adding your computer to a network, setting up your wireless and other essentially one-time housekeeping tasks that need to be done (setting up wireless on a laptop is more than a one-time task, but migrating around wireless networks with notebooks is an equal pain regardless of OS)
Then we get to actually installing the software and getting it to work with the actual hardware.Now immediately both you and I can point to areas where Windows has greater driver support from vendors than Linux - but ask yourself this: How many users ever set up their own hardware? Being a tech manager with an IT team I get the very strong impression that regardless of OS a user will call on us to install a new screencard, PCI/USB wifi network card or whatever the case might be. Thus user-wise the hardware issue has largely been negated by user incompetence. Remember though that users need only worry about using the computer - IT geeks like those who's job it is to fix computers are supposed to worry about the actual hardware, and again for a power user/tech support it is less than an issue than you think.
but then you also have the added learning curve of replacing every single application except possibly Firefox, if they weren't using IE before.
Again I need to point to the error of your statement.
1) Have you looked at the awesome cockup that is the Office 2007 interface?
I have countless users who phone me regularly to ask "where is the file meny", "where do I name the file when I (eventually found how to) save as" and so on.
2) Have you tried bringing an Office 2007 setup into an existing officespace?
Try telling a user over the phone how to install the patch that allows him to open.docx documents in Office 2003 OR explain why the Office 2007 user suddenly needs to save his files in a different type every-time-he-saves-it, or why it says "compatibility mode" when he opens a.doc file. Or why he can no longer open his old e-mails since he started using Outlook 2007 and his.pst file is no longer supported. Older versions of.pst files are a pain to recover.
3) A personal tale from first-hand experience.
We use a custom in house program developed in MS Access. Me, being a Linux user cannot use this program since I cannot open the database in Linux. That goes for every Office 2007 user in our company. The database needs to be converted to an Office 2007 compatible format before they can use it - and when that is done the ones using office 2003 can no longer use it since now it is incompatible with their version of office. We will only be able to get Office 2003 licenses for a short time still before 2k3 goes the way of XP. Thus very soon we will be forced to up
Slashdot Mirror
True story - a colleague of mine had so many wireless issues with his laptop+ubuntu that today he installed Vista.
Monday he's gonna start using it and see how it copes with the wireless - here's hoping it sucks even worse hehe...
I wonder how long it will be before this headline hits Slashdot only with "Vista" replaced by "Windows 7"
I still remember reading that guys mail that said "I feel that I got burned..."
It isn't, at that is the point.
Look at the whole Microsoft schpiel about how proprietary software gives you so much security because it is backed by a large corporation blah yah etc and then suddenly you get to this where you realize that you are just as screwed when things go wrong as when you installed an open source product.
You have no real leg to stand on when software you paid for dies on you.
Ironic isn't it?
My homepage is correct, I am from South Africa.
And we have changed out country from the mess it was in the 70's and 80's
And we had bombings and suicide bombings back then.
If our country can clean up it's mess why can't yours?
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform
Seems I am safe after all.
(sorry for the ugly linkage...)
From the silverlight terms of agreement:
You may not
 work around any technical limitations in the software;
There - right there - it says that if your computer is limited by this software you may not find a way to fix it!
Oh my goodness! I am so glad I got "your browser or hardware is incompatible with silverlight" or some generic message when I browsed to the silverlight page...
I wonder if "not allowed to work around" includes uninstalling it...
7. SUPPORT SERVICES. Because this software is âoeas is,â we may not provide support services for it.
So if it breaks your computer you are on your own!
Oh dear - what a chuckle. Trusted computing my left buttock.
I have two tabs - one for the normal stuff, and then one for my webmasters tools.
I prefer the tabs to the left of the page - they used to be on top - and the new way fits my resolution better (1450x1040) but I can see that the tab bar on the left take up too much real estate on lower-rez screens.
I don't really use iGoogle because I found the previous interface clunky - so unless I am not seeing what others are I think I will hence use iGoogle more often...
You yanks are safe from terrorism!
Your own officers is a different matter though...
Someone once asked a while ago how much freedom will we be willing to surrender for a false sense of security.
It seems that in the US and UK this very scenario is playing itself out and all we can do is sit, horrified and watch in spite of ourselves.
It's like sitting in the passenger seat of a car that is being driven by a lunatic - you squint your eyes closed but keep peeking because you know what is bound to happen, but you cant help but look and hope you will be somehow wrong.
And safe.
One thing proponents of all this gathering of data on people keep forgetting is that data gets lost, stolen or otherwise compromised on a daily basis.
The UK is a shining example of data getting lost.
How long before a terrorist hacker steals the info and spoofs a phonecall to a bomb that is detonated via cellphone?
Suddenly the possibilities of being wrongly implemented in a terrorist plot is so much more possible.
This is a bad idea all around.
I am glad that I do not live in the US or the UK - if my country implements this kind of policy I would start browsing using the TOR network, set up my own mailserver to do direct relay and eventually fall back on using older means of communication - snail mail and pretty much nothing else.
Who is it that said "As soon as we change our way of living the terrorists have won"?
I tell you now - terrorists are holding the citizens of the US and the UK captive via proxy, and the proxy is ironically the very governments they are battling.
They win on all fronts at this moment.
...Cellphone call resgisters YOU!
Oh, it seems in the UK as well...
In my case it is the owner of the company where I work.
While I cannot speak for the personality of the OP's boss - mine is at least a very decent person.
So I walk into work and inherit an old Dell Latitude D600 running WinXP.
A month into the job I trash it and install Linux. I am now the only person in our company using Linux/OSS for everything I need to do.
I inherited a desktop PC that still runs XP - our control software is written in MS Access so I could not run that on Linux.
One day my boss remarked in a meeting that "You know you need to be able to run Windows dependent software on your laptop" which is his roundabout way laying down a kind of challenge to me.
So I set up our proxy server to allow me to SSH in and rdesktop to my desktop when I am on standby. The other tech's needed to make an offline backup of the control DB and then merge it with the "live" DB.
A week later in another meeting he reminded me to merge the database. "No need, I run the DB live"
So two months ago I was offered part ownership of the company and promoted to tech manager in the interim.
Sometime you need to play on the ragged edge for a bit in order to get your point accross.
I still run Linux on my laptop, and my whole tech team goes for weekly training on Linux with our sister company who is a Linux solutions provider.
Ooh the marble mouse!
I used one back in 2000 - 2001 and loved it! When I left the company I couldn't take one with and only recently saw them on the shelves again.
Now I am a laptop user though so the trackpad is my weapon of choice as far as work goes.
I live in South Africa and don't see many trackballs (like the marble mouse) for sale...
To elaborate, why do I have to access the command to install certain things?
Read this:
http://blog.g33q.co.za/?p=72
You need the command line on more than just linux. I "need" the command line in Windows on a daily basis.
The "need the command line" argument is an old meme.
Find something better to use against Linux when you want to carry on about how desktop ready Linux is.
(apologies for whoring my own blog but I am not in the mood to thrash this old donkey of an argument all over again...)
I kinda figured as much.
Thanks.
Talking about drivers - in the one picture you can see the USB fingerprint reader's driver loading. I find that interesting as our local LUG had a discussion a while back about the lack of support for fingerprint readers on some of the newer laptops.
Am I correct in assuming that these drivers are open to share and could be used on a laptop to try and get it's fingerprint scanner to work?
Anybody know what these are running - or at least what it is based on?
From the pics I cannot tell much.
Is this a custom build or a distro hack?
[edit]
Just checked the picture again and saw MINIX - could it be?
[/edit]
Hey!
Get a clue. I am white and I live in Africa.
Geez - racist idiot...
Well there goes property values...
Heh - you make good points.
I must add that my one friend recently got his atheros network card to work on gentoo. That was an entertaining three hours right there...
Other than that I must say that most of what you mention has been sorted out or largely sorted out in most of the mainline distributions.
I am a recent convert to gentoo - and I must add, us geeks have a penant for punishing ourselves, no?
Remember though that users need only worry about using the computer - IT geeks like those who's job it is to fix computers are supposed to worry about the actual hardware, and again for a power user/tech support it is less than an issue than you think.
Not in my personal experience; maybe it's my fault for choosing the wrong wireless card years before I switched to Linux, or for wanting hardware 3D acceleration, </sarcasm>
One area where Ubuntu has improved is Nvidia Driver support via the restricted drivers manager. One area where Ubuntu support rapidly falls apart is when you try and change screen resolutions and screen types. I have had to edi xorg.conf for more than one client and for my wife too many times.
but having to rebuild drivers from the command line with every kernel upgrade (and pray that they work, because I can't download updated wireless drivers without rebooting into the old kernel!) isn't something I particularly enjoy putting up with.
What distro are you using? I am really interested since I haven't come across this until I recently started using gentoo - now there is something only the bravest of geeks should try... with most of the mainstream distro's though your issue should be sorted out - or at least have a plan in place to sort it out.
Have you looked at the awesome cockup that is the Office 2007 interface?
Yes, I have, and quickly ran away screaming. ;) I was thinking more about a Office 2003 -> OpenOffice transition when I wrote that. You're right, it can be just as bad without changing OSes. It usually isn't, but it can be, as Microsoft oh-so-recently proved. :)
Yes.
Apple seem to have hit a nice stride in the continuity stakes with their operating system as of late.Upgrading is relatively painless and if you are used to userspace moving on is easy. The same can be said for Gnome - use a gnome interface from a few years ago and one of the newest ones today and you feel immediately at home.
Sad to say but this is not true for KDE4 - I have used it and while it is an awesome piece of eyecandy I find it a general pain to use and in fact believe that Vista and KDE4 is basically a coin toss as far as choice goes - unlike with Vista, however, I firmly believe that the KDE4 interface will steadily improve through it's lifetime.
Migrating between OS'es is a general pain - and it is unfair to give Linux (and to single out Ubuntu which is one of the more seamless migrates out there is a bit... strange) special grief.
I used Ubuntu as that's what the grandparent was talking about suggesting people migrate to.
Fair enough - I myself migrated from XP to an installed version of Knoppix (on a vm) before Ubuntu became one of three OS'es I multi booted with - the others were XP and Mandrive Live with Metisse. Go figure. I have however been tooling around with Linux since 2000 when I played with Mandriva (remember the wizard??) and Red Hat, unsure what version this was - I hated it.
Generally, yes, it is a pain. But if you can run your old applications (XP -> Vista), or if there are versions of your old applications that will behave the same way (XP/Office 2003 -> OS X/Office 2004), then it'll be much less painful.
Agreed.
One thing that has made the migrating-ti-Linux thing much easier is the Wubi install option for Ubuntu.
I said "Today" referring to OpenOffice 3. I have run across some users who had .docx support without installing the converter apparently.
I give you your point though - but counter with: How does that make a difference? You need to do the same for Office 2k3 as for the *current* version of OpenOffice.
Hence you cannot sucsessfully argue that OpenOffice is less compatible than MS Office with MS Office based on the .docx support stakes.
There are severral. And flash is an option in Linux, just as is most if not all video formats.
Why not argue the ease of playing .ogg files in windows?
Good Post.
That is more a failing of the hardware vendor than of the software installed.
Since Linux will run better than Windows on these netbooks I find it strange that vendors have not included more software for these things.
I am willing to bet that one can run a full installation of Ubuntu/PCLOS or any newish desktop Linux more than satisfactorily on one of these. In fact I know of at least one geek who installed Ubuntu on his EEEpc.
It is sad that by design the hardware vendors are limiting the linux versions by design to large smartphone net devices...
Also, you forget that the average /. crowd is not really a market for these things since the average /.er is dirt poor.
The OS may be no more difficult to learn (for everyday use; if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu),
I call BS on that statement.
I am a power user and in high level tech/server support, and one thing about power users is this: Interface is irrelevant.XP -> Ubuntu is equally as easy as XP-> Vista, Vista -> MacOS and MacOS -> Ubuntu.
What you are forgetting is that XP -> Anything Linux you could have a choice of Gnome, KDE, XFCE or a tonne of more obscure ones like IceWM or Enlightenment.
I have tried all of these above, I give tech support on all of these (OS'es and Environments) and once you teach a user where to click to do what they want they become drones again and to open mail click here, to edit a document click there and so on and so on endlessly. Users tend to "forget" the actual environment that they are in and learn an almost "muscle memory" type of sequence of mouse-gestures and keyboard clicks to get done what they want.
I got my wife to use Ubuntu, and she uses it every-day. I could've gotten her to use anything else.
The real pain comes in the "under the skin" things like adding your computer to a network, setting up your wireless and other essentially one-time housekeeping tasks that need to be done (setting up wireless on a laptop is more than a one-time task, but migrating around wireless networks with notebooks is an equal pain regardless of OS)
Then we get to actually installing the software and getting it to work with the actual hardware.Now immediately both you and I can point to areas where Windows has greater driver support from vendors than Linux - but ask yourself this: How many users ever set up their own hardware? Being a tech manager with an IT team I get the very strong impression that regardless of OS a user will call on us to install a new screencard, PCI/USB wifi network card or whatever the case might be. Thus user-wise the hardware issue has largely been negated by user incompetence. Remember though that users need only worry about using the computer - IT geeks like those who's job it is to fix computers are supposed to worry about the actual hardware, and again for a power user/tech support it is less than an issue than you think.
but then you also have the added learning curve of replacing every single application except possibly Firefox, if they weren't using IE before.
Again I need to point to the error of your statement.
1) Have you looked at the awesome cockup that is the Office 2007 interface?
I have countless users who phone me regularly to ask "where is the file meny", "where do I name the file when I (eventually found how to) save as" and so on.
2) Have you tried bringing an Office 2007 setup into an existing officespace?
Try telling a user over the phone how to install the patch that allows him to open .docx documents in Office 2003 OR explain why the Office 2007 user suddenly needs to save his files in a different type every-time-he-saves-it, or why it says "compatibility mode" when he opens a .doc file. Or why he can no longer open his old e-mails since he started using Outlook 2007 and his .pst file is no longer supported. Older versions of .pst files are a pain to recover.
3) A personal tale from first-hand experience.
We use a custom in house program developed in MS Access. Me, being a Linux user cannot use this program since I cannot open the database in Linux. That goes for every Office 2007 user in our company. The database needs to be converted to an Office 2007 compatible format before they can use it - and when that is done the ones using office 2003 can no longer use it since now it is incompatible with their version of office. We will only be able to get Office 2003 licenses for a short time still before 2k3 goes the way of XP. Thus very soon we will be forced to up