Absolute nonsense getting modded informative yet again.
Try using a contemporary desktop-oriented distro -hell, try using last year's- and you'll see it's not like that at all. Ubuntu, SUSE, Linspire, and Madriva are all capable of managing removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives without any hoop-jumping, bending over backwards, or other assorted circus tricks and contortions.
And, as mypalmike said a few threads up, and I quote,
"Desk accessories were a hack to workaround the lack of multitasking in early versions of Mac OS. See MultiFinder [wikipedia.org].
Apple Widgets are a knockoff of Konfabulator because Apple borrowed the idea of writing little desktop applications in Javascript."
Sincere apologies to all for redundancy.
The waiting is what's telling. Apple was glad to ignore the issue until well after the iPod became ubiquitous and most of the folks who wanted one got their hands on one. Now that the iPod purchase frenzy has peaked -most folks who wanted one have one, and Apple hasn't offerred any particularly compelling new features in the latest models to motivate yet another purchase by the average consumer- it's time to make sure that they are well-protected. Remember, saturation was driven by not just featureset and interface alone, but also style factor and the accessories market, and the latter was built not just by Apple but dozens of other small "me too!" companies.
Given the lawsuit-happy trigger fingers of many large software companies, I'm not at all surprised that no one says anything along the lines of what you're suggesting. Yes, it would be better, but it's not a realistic option for any developer or group of developers that don't want to face time in court.
I'm all for what you're saying here and, speaking for my own experiences of having switched friends and neighbors, can agree on most points.
I do, however, have to point out that Ubuntu uses apt, and *not* yum. Not trying to be a dick, but let's avoid out-and-out inaccuracies while making the sale, huh?
Nicely summed up. We can't keep running around shrieking that something "isn't art" just because it doesn't meet someone's particular bar of exellence. Let's not forget that there can be "bad" art. For every meaningful and/or breathtaking piece of art that gets created these days, there's scores of folks laying red carpet inside of a large tube to make something resembling a birth canal and sticking it in a show as an "interactive installation". Don't like that example? Name another cliche. It'll probably be not particularly interesting or expressive, too. Maybe it's creative as a "meta cliche", but not for long...such provokes the reaction of "cheeky bastard" in many. But still, you can't say it's not art.
Don't forget Sierra's Gold Rush: a given game session could just end with your character dying of cholera. This was determined at random when you started your game. If it happened, your saves wouldn't do you any good at all, because whatever variable that determined it had already been set based on no action of your own. You had to restart from the very beginning and use an entirely new set of saves, and hope that you didn't come down with cholera that time around.
"You *should* be allowed to. That you're not is just one more example of a bad law."
Lucky for some folks such isn't allowed in some places. Could you imagine a grocery store that wouldn't sell you food on account of being [insert religion, color, creed, sexuality, political affiliation, degree of being an asshole]?
Yet despite all this, your conclusion's that we should still be concerned, and you're damn right about that. My own reaction is similar to Greenpeace's, if not quite so extreme as to make assumptions and try to skew them as fact: if Apple's really serious about protecting the environment, fighting the e-waste problem, and so on, they need to prove they're putting their money where their mouth is and have some kind of transparency in their recycling operations.
Yeah, I know, a lot of you "we must protect business secrets!" types are going to jump up and go, "But they can't necessarily reveal everything!". Yeah, I know...there may be contractual agreements with whatever recycling companies they use where they can't reveal certain details (such as pricing), and if Apple's own recycling fees are slightly inflated as suggested, they wouldn't necessarily want to reveal this either. They don't have to reveal *everything*, but they need to tell us some of the stuff they aren't somehow bound to keep secret. If they're interested in being a part of the solution, they'll pony up a substantial amount of details and specifics that they can use to back up the rhetoric.
ESR suggests that the community give in and pay up for proprietary technologies to enable more easy and immediate multimedia support, which in turn will somehow make Linux more attractive to people obsessed with the current trappings of multimedia pop culture.
I can't say I care for the idea, but I don't understand how it's supposed to leverage open source software in the long-run: by embracing and welcoming proprietary technologies now and successfully bringing more people in through those sorts of actions, how are they going to be lead to believe that open source multimedia technologies are a good idea? Accepting these things would ultimately result in them being accepted on yet another platform and decrease the relevance of open and/or free alternatives. Sounds like a pretty shit plan to me.
The worst part is that there's a ton of fiber out there that *could* be used, but isn't. I live on the south side of Chicago, mere blocks from the Dan Ryan Expressway, and there's a shload of dark fiber running underneath it. Comcast or AT&T could be jumping on the chance, given that the Ryan's all torn up for the rennovation project right now, but they're not. Stupid, isn't it?
Ha ha, you quoted out of context and made a funny. And got modded up a bit, no less. Damn shame, as the whole point was that the guy gave ZERO context as to his relevant background/qualifications to say something was crap without going into any detail. Even bonafide authorities on a given subject normally don't get to be dismissive without a proper explanation, yet this guy gets the mod-point free-ride.
And again with the "wah wah, you bastard no-nothing elitist zealot" tirade.
You're missing the point. It's not about disagreement, but pointless, unjustified, mean-spirited bitching which will *get you nowhere*.
You complained to no end about a bunch of things not working properly or being inferior and failed to be specific.
Now you're mentioning some specifics. That's good.
Yes, it genuinely sucks that your hardware isn't supported properly (something quite different from it not being supported to the point where, say, it works but the mixer channels don't map properly). What have you done to try to contribute to the alleviation of this particular? Can you code? Can you ask others to? Can you tell folks who are working at it, "Hey, X aspect of this doesn't work how it should!"?
More importantly: have you?
You still haven't said what *exactly* sucks so much about Amarok. I can say it works great for me, but my needs may be different from yours...in fact, they almost definitely are. My only beef with Amarok is that it's a bit too beefy for what it does and it happens to crash once in a great long while. This is why I use it on my nice box at home and not the considerably lesser one I use at work (a place where my focus should not be listening to music anyway). But what's bad about it for you, and, again, have you considered doing anything about it?
And what's the video app that won't let you resize windows? You haven't mentioned this at all. I'm curious to know what it is, and why you're using it at all when there are in fact several great apps for playing video (VLC, Mplayer, Xine) where this should not be an issue. If it is an issue, speak up and let it be known.
If things are broken, if things are inferior or just plain suck...glad to see you're paying attention! But please, when you bring it up, and try to be constructive about it. Otherwise you're just the guy on the corner who has no money but scoffs at the opportunity to take a job and change the situation.
What application are you running that doesn't allow the video window to be resized?
What outmoded piece of shit audio hardware are you running that can't work properly with ALSA?
What, specifically, is more intuitive about iTunes to you?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but rather, you don't seem to want to put facts out there for us all to know what in particular is fucked/broke/unuseable.
Attention mods: stop running off sheer opinion and opt to instead validate opinions based on conclusions drawn from facts.
This guy gives the "I'm an IT professional" spiel and then basically rants about how frustrating it is to him. He says nothing about what it is that he actually does in IT or what his own experiences are. Sounds more like unsubstantiated "I'm new to it and it didn't click in five seconds, so it sucks, and believe me, I know what I'm talking about, 'cause I'm in IT, matey!" bias to me.
"But I'm guessing the non-top-down adoption rate on the desktop remains pegged where it was in 1997: zero. There's just not really any instances of normal, everyday (read: non-geek) people walking into Best Buy and walking out with a copy of Linux. To me that remains the benchmark of desktop adoption."
I doubt *anyone* is walking out of Best Buy with a copy of Linux. Your benchmark is inadequate and does not at all account for discs professionally pressed and distributed for free, burned from ISOs, installed by knowledgeable friends, or put onto refurbished machines by non-profits geared towards getting free machines to individuals in the community (i.e. many of the FreeGeek projects across the USA...see freegeek.org for the original, or freegeekchicago.org for the one I helped start).
Sure, it might not be 25%, but it's quite a bit greater than zero.
Those drop shadows are friggin' horrible. Debian is doing themselves no favor by making their first graphical installer look like a bad ISP advertisement from 1996. Lose it!
At least make that "perceived underdog culture". Everyone knows who Apple is and they're bloody well successful. They've picked out a few niches and pretty well dominated them (such as MP3 players and integrated all-in-one desktop machines), been very successful in others to the point where they're seen by most as being among the top-tier best in their field (both pro and consumer grade laptops, workstations for producing creative content), and maybe two or three where they haven't had great success (servers, for one) but still do great things.
Apple truly an underdog? No, probably not. End-users of the products (usually) really enjoying their experience with them to the point that they're super-defensive of the company when others point out its foibles/short-comings? Yeah, that's probably more on the mark. It's a sort of "justified zealotry", if one can imagine such a thing and accept the contradiction in the term as a facet of the condition as well as the phrasing.
Why is this modded insightful? No offense, but isn't it just a "Wow, Apple makes great products and OS X is just plain stellar, I'm so glad I switched!" statement that's based largely on opinion and not fact (as OS X, while great, does not meet everybody's particular needs) and isn't particularly relevant to the points of the article or any derrivative discussion?
"However, I object strenuously to GPL style "free" software that forces me to release my software under the same license if I use it. None of my software went out GPL. If you want to make it free, make it *completely* free. Don't tie a huge pile of strings onto it and call it free, because it isn't."
The point of the GPL is to protect the code and encourage further development. The trade-off is that if the code is released with 100% permission to re-use the code in any way possible, there exists the possibility of the code getting improved without any give-back to the community: the improved code can wind up unavailable to those who need it, which can result in needless replication. Also, it is possible for the code to be used without crediting not just those who originated the project or contributed to it, but the very project from which the end result was derrived. Thankfully some people still play nice and say, "Yes, our product is derrived from [existing software], and we appreciate the hard work blah blah blah." But imagine how often we *don't* see this.
The GPL by no means perfect, but does manage to (at least legally) prevent this from happening when it is utilized.
"The huge fallacy of the software market is that software should be free because it has no material cost. Such logic completely disregards the value of the labor that went into writing (and maintaining!) the code. The principles that underly the philosophy of the FSF are closer to communism that most modern day communist regimes. Both would have the hard working and diligent stripped of the products of their labor."
Go back and re-read the FSF stuff. FSF does not insist that *everyone* must share their code, but rather says it's good, ethically-sound practice for things that are made available outside the doors of a given company/institution/project. They do not insist that "free" should necessarily mean "gratis", nor do they demand that everyone collaborate; rather, they encourage people to volunteer -that is, elect to work together of their own accord, QUITE different from communism, which is imposed on the populous by the will of the state- to cooperate and share things for the common good, because that's how mankind betters itself. They themselves value this so much that they will not behave otherwise, but do not necessarily expect other to act this way (though they would prefer if more did). Stallman himself has even been known to concede that it is not practical to expect folks to change to their high-ideals in one big jump (and did so a few months ago when lecturing at UIC in Chicago), but rather transition gradually with the overall goal in mind. It's not the loony pinko business you claim it is.
Worst analogy ever. Bicycles require extra physical extertion to go from A to B, but are among the most efficient machines known to man, and the exertion is beneficial. Dells, on the other hand...
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
There's a direct consequence with one and not the other. Willfully run someone down with a car and you're liable to wind up in jail. The story probably gets in the paper and people get reminded not to run each other down.
But put up a badly-implemented Flash site, or even a good one that's only compatible with a version of the player that's not available on all desktop platforms, and what happens? Some folks don't get to see your site, or give up after a minute because it plays a lot of lame animations. You wind up missing out on a few potential customers or whatever, but this doesn't get documented as hard statistics. Other people producing web content with Flash are not encouraged to implement it any more courteously or effectively, because Adobe doesn't do anything to encourage this themselves.
"To the unsophisticated user; simply sticking in a disc, installing an OS or program is the de facto norm with Windows and proprietary software. They're not used to having to recompile their kernel just to install a piece of software"
Slow down there, Flash!
What unsophisticated user is going to be doing any software installation requiring a kernel recompile? With the main distros out there and their pre-compiled kernels, such is only required to support more exotic peripherals and less common file systems. I think you'll be hard-pressed for such in most instances, and in an enterprise environment, where it *is* a bit more likely, the "unsophisticate" isn't going to be doing it, but rather the admins, who'd better damn well know what they're doing on a given system in the shop before touching it, 'cause that's their effing job.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolute nonsense getting modded informative yet again. Try using a contemporary desktop-oriented distro -hell, try using last year's- and you'll see it's not like that at all. Ubuntu, SUSE, Linspire, and Madriva are all capable of managing removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives without any hoop-jumping, bending over backwards, or other assorted circus tricks and contortions.
And, as mypalmike said a few threads up, and I quote, "Desk accessories were a hack to workaround the lack of multitasking in early versions of Mac OS. See MultiFinder [wikipedia.org]. Apple Widgets are a knockoff of Konfabulator because Apple borrowed the idea of writing little desktop applications in Javascript." Sincere apologies to all for redundancy.
The waiting is what's telling. Apple was glad to ignore the issue until well after the iPod became ubiquitous and most of the folks who wanted one got their hands on one. Now that the iPod purchase frenzy has peaked -most folks who wanted one have one, and Apple hasn't offerred any particularly compelling new features in the latest models to motivate yet another purchase by the average consumer- it's time to make sure that they are well-protected. Remember, saturation was driven by not just featureset and interface alone, but also style factor and the accessories market, and the latter was built not just by Apple but dozens of other small "me too!" companies.
Given the lawsuit-happy trigger fingers of many large software companies, I'm not at all surprised that no one says anything along the lines of what you're suggesting. Yes, it would be better, but it's not a realistic option for any developer or group of developers that don't want to face time in court.
I'm all for what you're saying here and, speaking for my own experiences of having switched friends and neighbors, can agree on most points.
I do, however, have to point out that Ubuntu uses apt, and *not* yum. Not trying to be a dick, but let's avoid out-and-out inaccuracies while making the sale, huh?
Nicely summed up. We can't keep running around shrieking that something "isn't art" just because it doesn't meet someone's particular bar of exellence. Let's not forget that there can be "bad" art. For every meaningful and/or breathtaking piece of art that gets created these days, there's scores of folks laying red carpet inside of a large tube to make something resembling a birth canal and sticking it in a show as an "interactive installation". Don't like that example? Name another cliche. It'll probably be not particularly interesting or expressive, too. Maybe it's creative as a "meta cliche", but not for long...such provokes the reaction of "cheeky bastard" in many. But still, you can't say it's not art.
Don't forget Sierra's Gold Rush: a given game session could just end with your character dying of cholera. This was determined at random when you started your game. If it happened, your saves wouldn't do you any good at all, because whatever variable that determined it had already been set based on no action of your own. You had to restart from the very beginning and use an entirely new set of saves, and hope that you didn't come down with cholera that time around.
"You *should* be allowed to. That you're not is just one more example of a bad law."
Lucky for some folks such isn't allowed in some places. Could you imagine a grocery store that wouldn't sell you food on account of being [insert religion, color, creed, sexuality, political affiliation, degree of being an asshole]?
"Far nicer than the political ads that are swamping televisions this election year. "
What's next..."Gacey wasn't so evil as Dahmer because Gacey didn't eat his victims genitals?"
Yet despite all this, your conclusion's that we should still be concerned, and you're damn right about that. My own reaction is similar to Greenpeace's, if not quite so extreme as to make assumptions and try to skew them as fact: if Apple's really serious about protecting the environment, fighting the e-waste problem, and so on, they need to prove they're putting their money where their mouth is and have some kind of transparency in their recycling operations. Yeah, I know, a lot of you "we must protect business secrets!" types are going to jump up and go, "But they can't necessarily reveal everything!". Yeah, I know...there may be contractual agreements with whatever recycling companies they use where they can't reveal certain details (such as pricing), and if Apple's own recycling fees are slightly inflated as suggested, they wouldn't necessarily want to reveal this either. They don't have to reveal *everything*, but they need to tell us some of the stuff they aren't somehow bound to keep secret. If they're interested in being a part of the solution, they'll pony up a substantial amount of details and specifics that they can use to back up the rhetoric.
ESR suggests that the community give in and pay up for proprietary technologies to enable more easy and immediate multimedia support, which in turn will somehow make Linux more attractive to people obsessed with the current trappings of multimedia pop culture.
I can't say I care for the idea, but I don't understand how it's supposed to leverage open source software in the long-run: by embracing and welcoming proprietary technologies now and successfully bringing more people in through those sorts of actions, how are they going to be lead to believe that open source multimedia technologies are a good idea? Accepting these things would ultimately result in them being accepted on yet another platform and decrease the relevance of open and/or free alternatives. Sounds like a pretty shit plan to me.
The worst part is that there's a ton of fiber out there that *could* be used, but isn't. I live on the south side of Chicago, mere blocks from the Dan Ryan Expressway, and there's a shload of dark fiber running underneath it. Comcast or AT&T could be jumping on the chance, given that the Ryan's all torn up for the rennovation project right now, but they're not. Stupid, isn't it?
Ha ha, you quoted out of context and made a funny. And got modded up a bit, no less. Damn shame, as the whole point was that the guy gave ZERO context as to his relevant background/qualifications to say something was crap without going into any detail. Even bonafide authorities on a given subject normally don't get to be dismissive without a proper explanation, yet this guy gets the mod-point free-ride.
And again with the "wah wah, you bastard no-nothing elitist zealot" tirade.
You're missing the point. It's not about disagreement, but pointless, unjustified, mean-spirited bitching which will *get you nowhere*.
You complained to no end about a bunch of things not working properly or being inferior and failed to be specific.
Now you're mentioning some specifics. That's good.
Yes, it genuinely sucks that your hardware isn't supported properly (something quite different from it not being supported to the point where, say, it works but the mixer channels don't map properly). What have you done to try to contribute to the alleviation of this particular? Can you code? Can you ask others to? Can you tell folks who are working at it, "Hey, X aspect of this doesn't work how it should!"?
More importantly: have you?
You still haven't said what *exactly* sucks so much about Amarok. I can say it works great for me, but my needs may be different from yours...in fact, they almost definitely are. My only beef with Amarok is that it's a bit too beefy for what it does and it happens to crash once in a great long while. This is why I use it on my nice box at home and not the considerably lesser one I use at work (a place where my focus should not be listening to music anyway). But what's bad about it for you, and, again, have you considered doing anything about it?
And what's the video app that won't let you resize windows? You haven't mentioned this at all. I'm curious to know what it is, and why you're using it at all when there are in fact several great apps for playing video (VLC, Mplayer, Xine) where this should not be an issue. If it is an issue, speak up and let it be known.
If things are broken, if things are inferior or just plain suck...glad to see you're paying attention! But please, when you bring it up, and try to be constructive about it. Otherwise you're just the guy on the corner who has no money but scoffs at the opportunity to take a job and change the situation.
What application are you running that doesn't allow the video window to be resized?
What outmoded piece of shit audio hardware are you running that can't work properly with ALSA?
What, specifically, is more intuitive about iTunes to you?
I'm not saying you're wrong, but rather, you don't seem to want to put facts out there for us all to know what in particular is fucked/broke/unuseable.
Until such a time arrives: shut up.
Attention mods: stop running off sheer opinion and opt to instead validate opinions based on conclusions drawn from facts.
This guy gives the "I'm an IT professional" spiel and then basically rants about how frustrating it is to him. He says nothing about what it is that he actually does in IT or what his own experiences are. Sounds more like unsubstantiated "I'm new to it and it didn't click in five seconds, so it sucks, and believe me, I know what I'm talking about, 'cause I'm in IT, matey!" bias to me.
"But I'm guessing the non-top-down adoption rate on the desktop remains pegged where it was in 1997: zero. There's just not really any instances of normal, everyday (read: non-geek) people walking into Best Buy and walking out with a copy of Linux. To me that remains the benchmark of desktop adoption."
I doubt *anyone* is walking out of Best Buy with a copy of Linux. Your benchmark is inadequate and does not at all account for discs professionally pressed and distributed for free, burned from ISOs, installed by knowledgeable friends, or put onto refurbished machines by non-profits geared towards getting free machines to individuals in the community (i.e. many of the FreeGeek projects across the USA...see freegeek.org for the original, or freegeekchicago.org for the one I helped start).
Sure, it might not be 25%, but it's quite a bit greater than zero.
Those drop shadows are friggin' horrible. Debian is doing themselves no favor by making their first graphical installer look like a bad ISP advertisement from 1996. Lose it!
At least make that "perceived underdog culture". Everyone knows who Apple is and they're bloody well successful. They've picked out a few niches and pretty well dominated them (such as MP3 players and integrated all-in-one desktop machines), been very successful in others to the point where they're seen by most as being among the top-tier best in their field (both pro and consumer grade laptops, workstations for producing creative content), and maybe two or three where they haven't had great success (servers, for one) but still do great things. Apple truly an underdog? No, probably not. End-users of the products (usually) really enjoying their experience with them to the point that they're super-defensive of the company when others point out its foibles/short-comings? Yeah, that's probably more on the mark. It's a sort of "justified zealotry", if one can imagine such a thing and accept the contradiction in the term as a facet of the condition as well as the phrasing.
Why is this modded insightful? No offense, but isn't it just a "Wow, Apple makes great products and OS X is just plain stellar, I'm so glad I switched!" statement that's based largely on opinion and not fact (as OS X, while great, does not meet everybody's particular needs) and isn't particularly relevant to the points of the article or any derrivative discussion?
Apologies for the run-together, my machine in the office defaulted to formatting the post in HTML. Changing that now. :)
"However, I object strenuously to GPL style "free" software that forces me to release my software under the same license if I use it. None of my software went out GPL. If you want to make it free, make it *completely* free. Don't tie a huge pile of strings onto it and call it free, because it isn't." The point of the GPL is to protect the code and encourage further development. The trade-off is that if the code is released with 100% permission to re-use the code in any way possible, there exists the possibility of the code getting improved without any give-back to the community: the improved code can wind up unavailable to those who need it, which can result in needless replication. Also, it is possible for the code to be used without crediting not just those who originated the project or contributed to it, but the very project from which the end result was derrived. Thankfully some people still play nice and say, "Yes, our product is derrived from [existing software], and we appreciate the hard work blah blah blah." But imagine how often we *don't* see this. The GPL by no means perfect, but does manage to (at least legally) prevent this from happening when it is utilized. "The huge fallacy of the software market is that software should be free because it has no material cost. Such logic completely disregards the value of the labor that went into writing (and maintaining!) the code. The principles that underly the philosophy of the FSF are closer to communism that most modern day communist regimes. Both would have the hard working and diligent stripped of the products of their labor." Go back and re-read the FSF stuff. FSF does not insist that *everyone* must share their code, but rather says it's good, ethically-sound practice for things that are made available outside the doors of a given company/institution/project. They do not insist that "free" should necessarily mean "gratis", nor do they demand that everyone collaborate; rather, they encourage people to volunteer -that is, elect to work together of their own accord, QUITE different from communism, which is imposed on the populous by the will of the state- to cooperate and share things for the common good, because that's how mankind betters itself. They themselves value this so much that they will not behave otherwise, but do not necessarily expect other to act this way (though they would prefer if more did). Stallman himself has even been known to concede that it is not practical to expect folks to change to their high-ideals in one big jump (and did so a few months ago when lecturing at UIC in Chicago), but rather transition gradually with the overall goal in mind. It's not the loony pinko business you claim it is.
Worst analogy ever. Bicycles require extra physical extertion to go from A to B, but are among the most efficient machines known to man, and the exertion is beneficial. Dells, on the other hand...
There's a direct consequence with one and not the other. Willfully run someone down with a car and you're liable to wind up in jail. The story probably gets in the paper and people get reminded not to run each other down. But put up a badly-implemented Flash site, or even a good one that's only compatible with a version of the player that's not available on all desktop platforms, and what happens? Some folks don't get to see your site, or give up after a minute because it plays a lot of lame animations. You wind up missing out on a few potential customers or whatever, but this doesn't get documented as hard statistics. Other people producing web content with Flash are not encouraged to implement it any more courteously or effectively, because Adobe doesn't do anything to encourage this themselves.
"To the unsophisticated user; simply sticking in a disc, installing an OS or program is the de facto norm with Windows and proprietary software. They're not used to having to recompile their kernel just to install a piece of software" Slow down there, Flash! What unsophisticated user is going to be doing any software installation requiring a kernel recompile? With the main distros out there and their pre-compiled kernels, such is only required to support more exotic peripherals and less common file systems. I think you'll be hard-pressed for such in most instances, and in an enterprise environment, where it *is* a bit more likely, the "unsophisticate" isn't going to be doing it, but rather the admins, who'd better damn well know what they're doing on a given system in the shop before touching it, 'cause that's their effing job.