Yeah, MS launching a patent lawsuit is like the Soviet Union launching nukes in the cold war. Sure it would do a lot of damage to their enemies, but the retaliation will be a bitch.
What MS is doing now is the equivalent of parading nuclear missiles through red square on May Day.
This deal won't have any influence on the courts. Its all about PR and thats as far as it goes. And everyone in the know knows how this is complete bullshit. If Linux is infringing on MS patents, then why is MS paying Novell, a linux distributer? Shouldn't Novell be paying MS? What is MS paying for? FUD, thats what. But FUD doesn't work in courts. FUD is about muddying the waters and the law is all about very specific little details.
And how do you define "results"? and no matter how you define it, you're going to end up with a bunch of organisations that spend a significant amount of money gathering statistics, writing progress reports, auditing, etc, which ends up taking resources away from actually helping people. And of course it will still be very easy to pad the numbers to make it look like you're doing a lot.
It really isn't just as easy as "lets run it like a business and demand results!". You honestly think that in the history of charitable organisations, that idea has never occurred to anyone?
Now don't take this the wrong way I'm not saying that the Gates Foundation is doing anything wrong. But if they are doing things right, its not as simple as "they expect results". Every funding agency in the world demands some kind of positive result for every project they fund. Do you really think anyone just throws money out there and hopes for the best? Everyone expects some kind of measurable progress, just some funding agencies are more efficient (and less corrupt) than others.
Difference is the primary use of grokster was copyright infringement. The primary use of you tube is kids to lip-sync poorly to music. Now, because of the music playing in the background, Google will have to send a little money to the RIAA, and they will have to take down anything like entire episodes of TV shows. But they are already making deals with the music industry and taking down copyright infinging material.
No its just retarded. "I didn't think this idea would work so I'll make sure it doesn't". So if I think a building is unsafe its a good idea for me to set it on fire?
USB 1.1 obviously, since it's "full speed" and usb 2.0 is "hi speed". USB 2.0 may be hi speed so its better than USB 1.0, but full speed is the best because you can't go any faster than full speed.
Its called marketing. Of course iceburgs floating past past NZ doesn't mean much empirically, its just one point of data. But it means pictures in newspapers and a bunch of articles written.
Based on pure scientific data its hard to argue against global warming and its cause being increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That argument is won.
The truth is on the side of the environmentalists this time. But the Truthiness is on the side of the oil industry. If global warming is false people can continue driving their SUVs and living in the suburbs. No one wants to have to make the serious changes needed to reduce their carbon output. Its much easier to take whatever anecdotal evidence and make all the rationalisations necessary so that you can continue to feel like global warming isn't true.
Now what do you do to convince someone who wants to believe that global warming is false? sit them down and force them to read a 500 page study on global warming and its effects? That just isn't going to work. Show them an iceburg floating past them and say "that's what global warming does", and you might get somewhere.
It's not science. But its much more effective than pointing to a dry scientific journal everytime someone says "It was pretty cold out today... so much for global warming". Everytime they give an anecdote about how global warming isn't happening you give them two that indicate that it is. That's politics.
It really is unfortunate that global warming is politicized. But now that it is you can't whine about the other side using your tactics against you now can you?
You're right I'm such a moron. I wasn't able to think outside the box and shift my paradigms to leverage the synergy that interacive design can offer in the new digital age.
You can't just have some "professional interactive designers" calling all the shots. What the hell do you mean by "interactive designers" anyway? Are they graphic designers or UI designers. Sounds like a bullshit title to me. The UI people decide how people will interact with the computer and the graphic designers deciding how it looks. You need to have the UI to be consistent, but with the look of things you have a lot more flexibility. And different people have different aesthetics. What does this all add up to? Yup themes. If my favourite colour is blue and your favourite colour is green, we can both have what we want. But if I sit down and use your computer, I can still find my way around, because the buttons are all in the same places and the menus are all the same as my computer.
I think a UI designed by graphic artists will end up as bad as a UI designed by programmers. You need the UI desgin team to tell the programmers where to put the buttons and how to organise the windows and such. Then you get the design team to make it all look pretty. Now, you need all parties talking to each other. The UI team has to tell the graphic artists that the users attention needs to drawn towards certain elements. The programmers let the artists know that a certain effect just isn't possible on low end hardware. The artists tell the programmers that a translucent effect on a certain widget would make it look really cool.
Capitalist run farms in Africa and Asia leave people starving. While people are poor in Cuba and Venezuela, nobody is starving, despite the best efforts of the US to make that happen.
Also there was a fair amount of entertainment available in the Soviet Union. They had great classical orchestras, ballets, and their sports were the best in the world. Now only the elite could afford these things, but then how many of the 5 billion people in the capitalist world can afford to buy a PS3 for $600, let alone the thousands of dollars they sell for on ebay?
Another interesting thing about a socialist system is that you don't see people thrown in jail for DMCA violations. Copyright is an ugly hack to make creativity profitable in a capitalist system. In a socialist system, the state pays the artist and the artist can be free to create art without having to install rootkits onto your computer.
I am a huge supporter of capitalism. In most industries privately run businesses are the most efficient ways of doing things. But the problem with capitalism is the same as the problem with communism. Its round by people and people do stupid things. Socialism works very well in situations involving public goods. Capitalism is ideal in situations that allow for competition.
Yes, but has wikipedia changed things from before? Take all the information we have printed in books and newspapers since the invention of the printing press. There is so much there that no one could possibly read it all. But we still need to dig up stuff because there is a lot of interesting stuff that was never written down. And the same is true today. Only a tiny sliver of what is happening in the world today ever makes it to wikipedia. And what does get there is already being published in newspapers already. Wikipedia doesn't really change anything.
Ok so only a few thousand few have access to newspapers more than 50 years old. But only a few thousand people want access to newspapers more than 50 years old.
And a good backup is a process, not a tape. When you change media you are supposed to transfer all your old files over before you get rid of your last tape reader.
Yeah, the jury is still out. They are looking more long term with the PS3. MS is going to hit a wall with the 360 soon, with not have a hard drive come standard and soon games devs will need more space than a standard DVD can hold. This will mean that MS will have to release yet another X-Box within two years. By then the PS3 will be at a reasonable price level and have a huge selection of games. Even the Xbox fanboys will be irratated after having to buy a new system every two or three years. When you can choose between a PS3 with a huge library of games and an Xbox720 with only a couple of games, and you know that its going to last as long as the Xbox720, and the PS3 is much cheaper than the 720... well the Xbox720 isn't going to sell that well is it?
I think Sony's strategy with the PS3 isn't to compete with the 360, they are going to try to kill whatever MS comes out with next.
Because there's only like 5 billion people in the world that have no access the wikipedia. But the people in the future won't care about them, they'll be more interested in a synopsis of some obscure anime title.
The greatest conspiracy of all is the conspiracy of self interest. If everyone works on their own selfish at the expense of the community, over time there will be a group of people whose interests will form perfect alignment. Because these people's goals compliment each other they will become much more powerful than those people whose interests don't line up with theirs. But this group of people whose interests complement each other don't actually have to form a traditional conspiracy. In fact they don't even have to know each other at all. They only have to rely on each other to each do what's in their own self interests.
Take the Iraq war. It was in the best interests of the oil companies (obvious reasons), the media (wars get great ratings), the politicians (we have to support the president in this time of war), and the defense industry (again obvious). All these parties don't have to get together to decide to go to war (although some might). They just have to rely on each other to do what's in their own self interest.
There are two great books on dystopias: 1984 and Brave New World. In 1984 the government controlled all information. People weren't allowed to know what was going on.
In Brave New World the government was much more subtle. With the use of drugs, orgies, and entertainment the government made it so nobody cared about what was going on.
To control a population you use fear and apathy. Now the fact that the West uses apathy to control its population more than the Chinese who use fear more, doesn't mean we aren't being controlled. As the middle class grows in China they will become more apathetic and the Ruling class won't need to use as much fear to keep the population in line.
The US is no better or worse than the Chinese government. The US is so apathetic that there are no student uprisings for the government to suppress. Now Iraq, on the other hand... well compare what you see on You tube to what you see on CNN and Fox News. Yes, they are allowed to report on Tienanmen-level events in Iraq, but they don't. Most people just don't want to see that, so the media doesn't show it.
And you're using anecdotal evidence to imply that these things are problems in Linux.
You're cherry picking a few instances where key combos have been bound to something else. I can point to a bunch of DOS apps where copy and paste doesn't work too. Hell, I could probably find a windows text editor that doesn't support copy and paste the same way as you're used to. And then there's all of those video games where it doesn't work. Does windows suck because some third party apps aren't cosistent with the windows way of doing things?
But of course with windows you just don't use the command line, you use notepad to edit your text files. Because you know its crazy to expect a DOS app to be compatible with the windows clipboard. Yet somehow you think its perfectly reasonable that command line apps like emacs, vim and pico to be compatible with Gnome or KDE's clipboards. Come on. You use gedit or kate or the like if you're in a windowed environment if you want copy and paste to work. And gedit is the default text editor in gnome and kate is the default text editor in KDE. You actually had to go to some effort to change the defaults so that you could use an app that doesn't support the features you want. Why did you do that? You do know there is a version of emacs for windows too? Does windows suck because you can install emacs and the copy and paste doesn't work properly with that?
It seems to me like you just didn't want to give linux a real chance. The default settings behave exactly the way you want an OS to behave. You actively changed ubuntu from its default behavior then complain about how it doesn't work the way you want it to. Gedit works exactly the way you want, why did you switch to emacs, vim, etc? If you want linux to fail then it will fail.
type "mount" on the commandline and you get the same information. And the C: D: is pretty useless in windows, sice D: might be a separate drive but it could also be a partition on the same drive. And with NTFS you can mount a drive as a directory similar to how you mount things in linux. So really the C: D: stuff doesn't mean anything at all and can even be misleading.
We've just got to flush 20+ years of expertize down the drain, unlearn everything we know, and re-learn it all on linux, using *TOTALLY* different
apps, different languages, APIs, widgets, frameworks, concepts and everything else.
Welcome to the world of computers. I remember having to mess around with 64K segments and do all kinds of wierd stuff to access memory above 640K back in the DOS days. Now that everything is 32-bit or better all of that knowledge is useless.
And this is exactly my point about wanting to know where stuff is installed. Why does that matter to you? The package manager puts the files where they need to be and deletes those files if you request that the package is removed. So here is where apache is installed. Exactly how does this knowledge help you?
Yes the RTFM line can be annoying but apache is server software. Server stuff is designed to be admin-friendly but not intuitive. That way someone who knows what they're doing can get apache, php, mysql, etc set up in a couple of minute. A beginner should read at least the page and a half on Basic settings to know a little bit about how to set up the software. So apache takes an experienced admin a couple of minutes to set up, but a beginner about 10 minutes. IIS takes 5-10 minutes for everyone to go through the hand holding install.
Not sure how you're having problems with mp3s over samba. Just click Places->Network Servers find the server the file is on and click on it. The song will play. When windows XP came out Network Neighborhood wasn't on the desktop anymore. Surely it didn't take hours of looking through 200 page pdf files to figure out how to play an MP3 over SMB in windows XP?
Config files and the windows registry are about the same as usability goes. If there is not documentation or comments available its impossible to know whats going on. If there is good documentation/comments, its pretty obvious how to set things.
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, all work much better in Linux (well I use Ubuntu, may be different under other distros) than in Windows. I can select a list of files in my file manager, copy and paste into a text file and it puts the gile names there. I can cut and paste to move files around. I can copy and paste text from one app to another, and it preserves formatting where it makes sense to do so. I have not had any problems with this for about five years now.
Input format: IDE works across a surprising amount of apps. Drag'n'drop / cut'n'paste rarely works between apps on Linux.
I just selected the above and dragged it into this text area. I also dragged it into a terminal window and a text editor and it worked fine.
I also just dragged a file from nautilus into this window and it put something like file:///home/user/filename here. I dragged a png into an open office document and I nice little resizable image appeared there. This morning I put in a blank CD-R and it popped up and asked me if I wanted to burn and audio CD or a data CD. I selected audio CD. I then dragged a bunch of MP3s into the audio CD window and clicked burn. It automatically converted the mp3s and burned the cd. Drag and drop not only works but it seems to know how to convert things properly too.
Not sure what you mean about output formats. I seem to be able to open any format out there in Linux. When I install it asks about Language and there's a whole lot of them.
Linux is great for beginners. And its perfect for experts. But it doesn't work very well for those people in between... the "Power Users". They get on a linux box and the first thing they say is "where's the C drive?" Then next its "where's Program Files?" Then they bitch about when stuff is installed it gets spread all over in places like/usr/bin,/usr/share,/usr/lib,/etc, etc. (see what I did there?).
For beginners its great. "where's My Documents?" "How do I get on the Internet?" "How do I log out?" After a few minutes they figure these things out and are on the way.
The experts get to the console and type ssh, rsync, grep, sed, find and the like and they're in heaven.
But the "power users" have so much knowledge of registry hacks and all the little things that you have to do just to make windows work. They know that the hard drive is C: and if you have more than one hard drive, the second on is D:, if not then D: is the cdrom. Apps are installed in their own folders under C:\program files\ (unless you specified something else in the installer) but you can't remove them by just deleting the folder, you have to go to add/remove programs in the control panel. If that doesn't work then you nuke the app from the registry and then delete the folder in program files. To all the "power users" out there, that is how computers are supposed to work. Show them anything else, then they are just as helpless as the beginners. They don't want to give up all that windows specific knowledge without a fight.
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It's the most secure America(tm) yet!
but novell isn't the only one using mono.
What MS is doing now is the equivalent of parading nuclear missiles through red square on May Day.
This deal won't have any influence on the courts. Its all about PR and thats as far as it goes. And everyone in the know knows how this is complete bullshit. If Linux is infringing on MS patents, then why is MS paying Novell, a linux distributer? Shouldn't Novell be paying MS? What is MS paying for? FUD, thats what. But FUD doesn't work in courts. FUD is about muddying the waters and the law is all about very specific little details.
And how do you define "results"? and no matter how you define it, you're going to end up with a bunch of organisations that spend a significant amount of money gathering statistics, writing progress reports, auditing, etc, which ends up taking resources away from actually helping people. And of course it will still be very easy to pad the numbers to make it look like you're doing a lot.
It really isn't just as easy as "lets run it like a business and demand results!". You honestly think that in the history of charitable organisations, that idea has never occurred to anyone?
Now don't take this the wrong way I'm not saying that the Gates Foundation is doing anything wrong. But if they are doing things right, its not as simple as "they expect results". Every funding agency in the world demands some kind of positive result for every project they fund. Do you really think anyone just throws money out there and hopes for the best? Everyone expects some kind of measurable progress, just some funding agencies are more efficient (and less corrupt) than others.
Ah, american capitalism. Come up with an idea, find weaknesses in it, then wait until someone else uses the idea and then sue their asses off.
This guy is pure slime.
Difference is the primary use of grokster was copyright infringement. The primary use of you tube is kids to lip-sync poorly to music. Now, because of the music playing in the background, Google will have to send a little money to the RIAA, and they will have to take down anything like entire episodes of TV shows. But they are already making deals with the music industry and taking down copyright infinging material.
This is just Mark Cuban being an ass.
No its just retarded. "I didn't think this idea would work so I'll make sure it doesn't". So if I think a building is unsafe its a good idea for me to set it on fire?
USB 1.1 obviously, since it's "full speed" and usb 2.0 is "hi speed". USB 2.0 may be hi speed so its better than USB 1.0, but full speed is the best because you can't go any faster than full speed.
Its called marketing. Of course iceburgs floating past past NZ doesn't mean much empirically, its just one point of data. But it means pictures in newspapers and a bunch of articles written.
Based on pure scientific data its hard to argue against global warming and its cause being increased CO2 in the atmosphere. That argument is won.
The truth is on the side of the environmentalists this time. But the Truthiness is on the side of the oil industry. If global warming is false people can continue driving their SUVs and living in the suburbs. No one wants to have to make the serious changes needed to reduce their carbon output. Its much easier to take whatever anecdotal evidence and make all the rationalisations necessary so that you can continue to feel like global warming isn't true.
Now what do you do to convince someone who wants to believe that global warming is false? sit them down and force them to read a 500 page study on global warming and its effects? That just isn't going to work. Show them an iceburg floating past them and say "that's what global warming does", and you might get somewhere.
It's not science. But its much more effective than pointing to a dry scientific journal everytime someone says "It was pretty cold out today... so much for global warming". Everytime they give an anecdote about how global warming isn't happening you give them two that indicate that it is. That's politics.
It really is unfortunate that global warming is politicized. But now that it is you can't whine about the other side using your tactics against you now can you?
You're right I'm such a moron. I wasn't able to think outside the box and shift my paradigms to leverage the synergy that interacive design can offer in the new digital age.
My bad.
You can't just have some "professional interactive designers" calling all the shots. What the hell do you mean by "interactive designers" anyway? Are they graphic designers or UI designers. Sounds like a bullshit title to me. The UI people decide how people will interact with the computer and the graphic designers deciding how it looks. You need to have the UI to be consistent, but with the look of things you have a lot more flexibility. And different people have different aesthetics. What does this all add up to? Yup themes. If my favourite colour is blue and your favourite colour is green, we can both have what we want. But if I sit down and use your computer, I can still find my way around, because the buttons are all in the same places and the menus are all the same as my computer.
I think a UI designed by graphic artists will end up as bad as a UI designed by programmers. You need the UI desgin team to tell the programmers where to put the buttons and how to organise the windows and such. Then you get the design team to make it all look pretty. Now, you need all parties talking to each other. The UI team has to tell the graphic artists that the users attention needs to drawn towards certain elements. The programmers let the artists know that a certain effect just isn't possible on low end hardware. The artists tell the programmers that a translucent effect on a certain widget would make it look really cool.
Capitalist run farms in Africa and Asia leave people starving. While people are poor in Cuba and Venezuela, nobody is starving, despite the best efforts of the US to make that happen.
Also there was a fair amount of entertainment available in the Soviet Union. They had great classical orchestras, ballets, and their sports were the best in the world. Now only the elite could afford these things, but then how many of the 5 billion people in the capitalist world can afford to buy a PS3 for $600, let alone the thousands of dollars they sell for on ebay?
Another interesting thing about a socialist system is that you don't see people thrown in jail for DMCA violations. Copyright is an ugly hack to make creativity profitable in a capitalist system. In a socialist system, the state pays the artist and the artist can be free to create art without having to install rootkits onto your computer.
I am a huge supporter of capitalism. In most industries privately run businesses are the most efficient ways of doing things. But the problem with capitalism is the same as the problem with communism. Its round by people and people do stupid things. Socialism works very well in situations involving public goods. Capitalism is ideal in situations that allow for competition.
Yes, but has wikipedia changed things from before? Take all the information we have printed in books and newspapers since the invention of the printing press. There is so much there that no one could possibly read it all. But we still need to dig up stuff because there is a lot of interesting stuff that was never written down. And the same is true today. Only a tiny sliver of what is happening in the world today ever makes it to wikipedia. And what does get there is already being published in newspapers already. Wikipedia doesn't really change anything.
Ok so only a few thousand few have access to newspapers more than 50 years old. But only a few thousand people want access to newspapers more than 50 years old.
And a good backup is a process, not a tape. When you change media you are supposed to transfer all your old files over before you get rid of your last tape reader.
Tell me, what does MS pay for astroturf these days?
I think Sony's strategy with the PS3 isn't to compete with the 360, they are going to try to kill whatever MS comes out with next.
Because there's only like 5 billion people in the world that have no access the wikipedia. But the people in the future won't care about them, they'll be more interested in a synopsis of some obscure anime title.
The greatest conspiracy of all is the conspiracy of self interest. If everyone works on their own selfish at the expense of the community, over time there will be a group of people whose interests will form perfect alignment. Because these people's goals compliment each other they will become much more powerful than those people whose interests don't line up with theirs. But this group of people whose interests complement each other don't actually have to form a traditional conspiracy. In fact they don't even have to know each other at all. They only have to rely on each other to each do what's in their own self interests.
Take the Iraq war. It was in the best interests of the oil companies (obvious reasons), the media (wars get great ratings), the politicians (we have to support the president in this time of war), and the defense industry (again obvious). All these parties don't have to get together to decide to go to war (although some might). They just have to rely on each other to do what's in their own self interest.
There are two great books on dystopias: 1984 and Brave New World. In 1984 the government controlled all information. People weren't allowed to know what was going on.
In Brave New World the government was much more subtle. With the use of drugs, orgies, and entertainment the government made it so nobody cared about what was going on.
To control a population you use fear and apathy. Now the fact that the West uses apathy to control its population more than the Chinese who use fear more, doesn't mean we aren't being controlled. As the middle class grows in China they will become more apathetic and the Ruling class won't need to use as much fear to keep the population in line.
The US is no better or worse than the Chinese government. The US is so apathetic that there are no student uprisings for the government to suppress. Now Iraq, on the other hand... well compare what you see on You tube to what you see on CNN and Fox News. Yes, they are allowed to report on Tienanmen-level events in Iraq, but they don't. Most people just don't want to see that, so the media doesn't show it.
Apathy.
And you're using anecdotal evidence to imply that these things are problems in Linux.
You're cherry picking a few instances where key combos have been bound to something else. I can point to a bunch of DOS apps where copy and paste doesn't work too. Hell, I could probably find a windows text editor that doesn't support copy and paste the same way as you're used to. And then there's all of those video games where it doesn't work. Does windows suck because some third party apps aren't cosistent with the windows way of doing things?
But of course with windows you just don't use the command line, you use notepad to edit your text files. Because you know its crazy to expect a DOS app to be compatible with the windows clipboard. Yet somehow you think its perfectly reasonable that command line apps like emacs, vim and pico to be compatible with Gnome or KDE's clipboards. Come on. You use gedit or kate or the like if you're in a windowed environment if you want copy and paste to work. And gedit is the default text editor in gnome and kate is the default text editor in KDE. You actually had to go to some effort to change the defaults so that you could use an app that doesn't support the features you want. Why did you do that? You do know there is a version of emacs for windows too? Does windows suck because you can install emacs and the copy and paste doesn't work properly with that?
It seems to me like you just didn't want to give linux a real chance. The default settings behave exactly the way you want an OS to behave. You actively changed ubuntu from its default behavior then complain about how it doesn't work the way you want it to. Gedit works exactly the way you want, why did you switch to emacs, vim, etc? If you want linux to fail then it will fail.
type "mount" on the commandline and you get the same information. And the C: D: is pretty useless in windows, sice D: might be a separate drive but it could also be a partition on the same drive. And with NTFS you can mount a drive as a directory similar to how you mount things in linux. So really the C: D: stuff doesn't mean anything at all and can even be misleading.
We've just got to flush 20+ years of expertize down the drain, unlearn everything we know, and re-learn it all on linux, using *TOTALLY* different apps, different languages, APIs, widgets, frameworks, concepts and everything else.
Welcome to the world of computers. I remember having to mess around with 64K segments and do all kinds of wierd stuff to access memory above 640K back in the DOS days. Now that everything is 32-bit or better all of that knowledge is useless.
And this is exactly my point about wanting to know where stuff is installed. Why does that matter to you? The package manager puts the files where they need to be and deletes those files if you request that the package is removed. So here is where apache is installed. Exactly how does this knowledge help you?
Yes the RTFM line can be annoying but apache is server software. Server stuff is designed to be admin-friendly but not intuitive. That way someone who knows what they're doing can get apache, php, mysql, etc set up in a couple of minute. A beginner should read at least the page and a half on Basic settings to know a little bit about how to set up the software. So apache takes an experienced admin a couple of minutes to set up, but a beginner about 10 minutes. IIS takes 5-10 minutes for everyone to go through the hand holding install.
Not sure how you're having problems with mp3s over samba. Just click Places->Network Servers find the server the file is on and click on it. The song will play. When windows XP came out Network Neighborhood wasn't on the desktop anymore. Surely it didn't take hours of looking through 200 page pdf files to figure out how to play an MP3 over SMB in windows XP?
Config files and the windows registry are about the same as usability goes. If there is not documentation or comments available its impossible to know whats going on. If there is good documentation/comments, its pretty obvious how to set things.
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, all work much better in Linux (well I use Ubuntu, may be different under other distros) than in Windows. I can select a list of files in my file manager, copy and paste into a text file and it puts the gile names there. I can cut and paste to move files around. I can copy and paste text from one app to another, and it preserves formatting where it makes sense to do so. I have not had any problems with this for about five years now.
I just selected the above and dragged it into this text area. I also dragged it into a terminal window and a text editor and it worked fine. I also just dragged a file from nautilus into this window and it put something like file:///home/user/filename here. I dragged a png into an open office document and I nice little resizable image appeared there. This morning I put in a blank CD-R and it popped up and asked me if I wanted to burn and audio CD or a data CD. I selected audio CD. I then dragged a bunch of MP3s into the audio CD window and clicked burn. It automatically converted the mp3s and burned the cd. Drag and drop not only works but it seems to know how to convert things properly too.
Not sure what you mean about output formats. I seem to be able to open any format out there in Linux. When I install it asks about Language and there's a whole lot of them.
Linux is great for beginners. And its perfect for experts. But it doesn't work very well for those people in between... the "Power Users". They get on a linux box and the first thing they say is "where's the C drive?" Then next its "where's Program Files?" Then they bitch about when stuff is installed it gets spread all over in places like /usr/bin, /usr/share, /usr/lib, /etc, etc. (see what I did there?).
For beginners its great. "where's My Documents?" "How do I get on the Internet?" "How do I log out?" After a few minutes they figure these things out and are on the way.
The experts get to the console and type ssh, rsync, grep, sed, find and the like and they're in heaven.
But the "power users" have so much knowledge of registry hacks and all the little things that you have to do just to make windows work. They know that the hard drive is C: and if you have more than one hard drive, the second on is D:, if not then D: is the cdrom. Apps are installed in their own folders under C:\program files\ (unless you specified something else in the installer) but you can't remove them by just deleting the folder, you have to go to add/remove programs in the control panel. If that doesn't work then you nuke the app from the registry and then delete the folder in program files. To all the "power users" out there, that is how computers are supposed to work. Show them anything else, then they are just as helpless as the beginners. They don't want to give up all that windows specific knowledge without a fight.
Is it also possible to die from looking directly at a horrible shade of yellow?