I actually use AdBlock for a bunch of sites. (Although it drives me nuts that it has a whitelist, but no blacklist. I'd actually like to keep it off for all domains except a few, and there's no way of doing that.)
I'm just fucking sick of reading about it. Any time there's a story that's even vaguely about web browsers, you can guarantee a parade of +5 "AdBlock is great!" posts that have absolutely zero new content, and usually virtually nothing to do with the topic at hand. Part of this is the moderator's fault (who the fuck is modding these redundant content-free posts up!?), but the people who post the same threads over and over are to blame as well.
If you don't have anything to say, just say nothing. Instead of knee-jerking and posting "AdBlock is great!"
MS Office 5 years ago has a way of viewing the same document in two columns, side-by-side. It also has Normal View, and a far more functional Outline View.
There are many features Office has had longer than 5 years that OpenOffice still doesn't have. To say otherwise is just demonstrating that you're one of those people who is unqualified to judge which is the better product, because you don't use Office products enough.
And I'm not even claiming that I'm in that group, either. But I've used enough MS Office and enough OpenOffice to know about the two things I've pointed out up there.
On the other hand, most of the people in these threads who say that everybody can use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office aren't office application users.
Every single one of these articles instantly devolves into a thread about AdBlock. Yes, we get it. A lot of people here like AdBlock. Can we stop fucking posting the same fucking thread in every fucking single fucking article? Christ.
It's like Ron Paul in the politics tab during the election.
I tend not to throw out perfectly working equipment just because Microsoft decided to gratuitously change their device driver model.
Gratuitously? They did it to increase security and stability. That's not gratuitous... as you'll realize, the first time your video card or sound card driver crashes in Vista, and Vista recovers without even a hiccup.
If you're going to bash Windows, please pick something that makes sense. Thanks.
That might change. Look at the new Office 2007 interface.
While I'm sure, this being Slashdot, I'm going to get 20 replies from geeks saying how much they hate it, the very fact that Microsoft was willing, and even eager, to redesign the UI of their flagship app almost from scratch is pretty damned impressive, and I think telling about the company.
They didn't attempt to violate the GPL, get caught,
Please, that's made-up Slashdot bullshit. Don't believe everything you read on this site, hell, don't believe anything you read on this site: Microsoft intended to release the drivers under the GPL from day 1. (Why would they even bother making them, otherwise? Think about it-- they're useless outside the kernel, and they need to be GPL to get in the kernel!)
I'm not saying it's comprehensive proof, I'm just pointing out that it's ridiculous to extend his personal experience with 2 computers on a home LAN to people using Vista in an office environment with a centralized file server, when he could have instead, you know, *asked* one of the hundreds of thousands of people using Vista in an office environment with a centralized file server. It's not that rare.
The navigation app on the iPhone doesn't get interrupted for calls-- if you take the call, it goes right back to where it was before. Then again, 3G iPhone using GPS for 5 hours would drain the batteries pretty effectively-- so yeah, there are always drawbacks.
You're probably being a jerk, but really using a solution like Windows Live Sync is actually a better option than the built-in filesharing. It doesn't require you to fiddle with the configuration or open dangerous ports-- it's much, much easier to use-- but it'll sync with LAN speeds if it detects both computers are on the same LAN.
Considering that companies usually have a central file server somewhere, imagine business workers trying to do basic file IO stuff, like copy word docs, spreadsheet files, or large.psd files from the Design Department.
I actually use Windows Vista at an actual company with an actual central file server somewhere, and I don't experience any of the problems you're talking about. Go ahead and wildly spitball, though!
As far as I can tell, you have literally said "a serialized stream cannot be used to support a GUI". This is what I was complaining about.
All I can say is that you've utterly failed at reading comprehension. You can complain until the cows come home, but I never said that, and I can't even imagine in what way you've mis-read the two quoted passages to come to that conclusion.
Microsoft has been deliberately "subtle" in the past -- see MS Java, Dr DOS and Windows 3.1, "It ain't done till Lotus won't run", etc.
MS Java - Microsoft added features to Java to make it integrate better with Windows, since Sun had absolutely no desire to make Java GUIs not suck-ass.
Dr DOS - Dr DOS had a genuine incompatibility with Windows 3.1, and, moreover, was a configuration not supported by Microsoft, so the warning was entirely appropriate.
Lotus won't run - Nothing but an urban legend. If you can *prove* that this incident happened then I'm all ears. So far I've seen no proof. Hell, I haven't even seen any evidence that any Lotus products failed to run on a particular Microsoft OS: which product? Which OS?
Now I don't doubt that *you* believe all those events represent nothing but pure, unadulterated, evil from Microsoft. But you also have to realize that all of them have an alternate interpretation where Microsoft's absolutely worst act is to protect themselves from lawsuits by people using an unsupported configuration of Windows 3.1. That doesn't strike me as particularly evil.
Again, the question here is: Is it so unbelievable that someone would both overtly rail at his enemies, and covertly attempt to undermine them? Ballmer wouldn't be the first to do this.
Ballmer? Or your crazy exaggerated caricature of Ballmer?
What I'm suggesting is more paranoid -- that said firm could easily be a front, or could be tempted with sufficient amounts of money, so that it looks as though they've sold the patents to a Linux-friendly company.
Yah! And it's actually run by Illuminati lizardmen who have tunnels from DC all the way to Area 51 in Nevada, which they use (with the assistance of chemtrails) to conceal the true secret of TimeCube from an unsuspecting public!
But keep in mind, this is the same Microsoft who sent astroturfers to a Linux convention, saying things like "It's all over, the suits are taking over," back when IBM started showing up at these conventions.
[Citation needed]
This is the same Microsoft who essentially stole the GUI concept wholesale from a Macintosh prototype -- keep in mind, Apple did actually license it from Xerox.
I think what really happened is that Apple's extremely useful implementation of the concept proved to Microsoft that it was worth pursuing their own.
And it's also worthwhile to mention that Windows was far more different from Macintosh then, say, GEOS was. And, much of the original success of the Macintosh was due to Microsoft applications-- the reason Apple showed their prototype to Microsoft in the first place was to convince Microsoft to write apps for it.
And this is the same Microsoft who continues to fund SCO.
[Citation needed]
It is not paranoid to expect a company which has been underhanded and "subtle" in the past to continue to do so in the future.
Perhaps not, but you've yet to PROVE that Microsoft has been underhanded and subtle. The best you've done at this point is quoted a debunked urban legend.
"GUI" does NOT mean "it is impossible to construct out of small pieces that communicate with each other".
I NEVER SAID IT DID.
Whose posts are you replying to? Certainly not mine.
Seriously, if you're not going to even bother to read my fucking posts, I don't see why I, or anybody, should bother to attempt to have a conversation with you. This is your second reply, and also the second reply in which you're responding to a point I NEVER MADE.
Your post applies to, *maaaybe*, 0.05% of the population who not only directly types in URLs (instead of using bookmarks/search/address bar history), but also types in URLs they've never seen before. So while it's a valid point, it's not worth any web developer's time to think about.
I never said "Microsoft never developed any text-based formats", so if you're trying to counter that specific point, I'm not sure why.
But you are living under your rock apparently, somehow believing that GUI and stuff typed on a keyboard are different systems that have nothing to do with each other.
They are, in Windows and OS X. Hell, old school Mac Classic didn't even *have* a text-based mode, it literally did not exist.
Go ahead and continue to claim that Unix is "old fashined" because you have proven you don't have any idea what you are talking about, so you can justify it to yourself.
I think pretty much everybody agrees that Unix is old fashioned. That's why a lot of the people on this site love it-- most everybody who gushes on about the CLI would have to admit, if they could get over their irrational hatred of Microsoft, that Microsoft's PowerShell is a *better* CLI environment than, say, BASH.
Because if all Unix users cared about was having a powerful CLI, well, you could build a more powerful GUI from scratch and get rid of all the crappy old Linux-isms at the same time... if that was the goal, the Linux community would have invented PowerShell, not Microsoft. Instead, the goal is to be able to run the same shell scripts you ran 25 years ago. i.e. relying on an old fashioned system for backwards compatibility.
What the hell word is that even supposed to be? I guess "ruminate" would be the closest word that sounds remotely similar to "laminate" and also makes sense in context.
The idea of small programs that communicate via serialized streams, of human-editable text configs, etc, is entirely antithetical to the MS Way.
That's because it's not that useful for anything other than text editing and shuffling files around. Now, if you're a hard-core Linux user, editing text and shuffling files around is all you ever care about. But the whole point of the GUI revolution is that computers can do more than editing text and shuffling files around-- they can do graphics, video, music, all three at the same time.
I know you're often pro-Microsoft, borderline fanboy
If that's how people on this site define the word "sane", then yes I am.
but even you should be able to see that Steve "FUCKING KILL GOOGLE" Ballmer would love a chance to cut Linux off at the knees.
So the guy who yells "FUCKING KILL GOOGLE" (so you say) is so subtle that he'd try to auction the patents to some other firm? So that other firm would then harass Linux and Microsoft would be in-the-clear? And yet so short-sighted that he didn't foresee the possibility that a firm that wants to defend Linux would buy the patents in the same auction? It's not just a conspiracy theory, it's a retarded one.
It's much more likely that Microsoft auctioned the patents for some wholly un-related reason, and didn't care who purchased them.
If that worked, why aren't artists already doing it? It's not like the Internet is some tiny new technology anymore-- if it were possible, someone would be doing it.
Oddly enough it's pretty easy to enable the ssh server in MacOS. It's there but not turned on by default and very easy to switch on. You don't have to make it a disaster to make it easy. Apple has been proving this for decades.
Uh, if you turn on file sharing in Windows, it automatically adds a rule to the firewall to allow it. Which is the exact same thing Apple does for SSH. So I have no clue what your complaint actually is-- "Enabling SSH in OS X is exactly as easy as enabling file-sharing in Windows, therefore Apple is better!"
Slashdot Mirror
I actually use AdBlock for a bunch of sites. (Although it drives me nuts that it has a whitelist, but no blacklist. I'd actually like to keep it off for all domains except a few, and there's no way of doing that.)
I'm just fucking sick of reading about it. Any time there's a story that's even vaguely about web browsers, you can guarantee a parade of +5 "AdBlock is great!" posts that have absolutely zero new content, and usually virtually nothing to do with the topic at hand. Part of this is the moderator's fault (who the fuck is modding these redundant content-free posts up!?), but the people who post the same threads over and over are to blame as well.
If you don't have anything to say, just say nothing. Instead of knee-jerking and posting "AdBlock is great!"
MS Office 5 years ago has a way of viewing the same document in two columns, side-by-side. It also has Normal View, and a far more functional Outline View.
There are many features Office has had longer than 5 years that OpenOffice still doesn't have. To say otherwise is just demonstrating that you're one of those people who is unqualified to judge which is the better product, because you don't use Office products enough.
And I'm not even claiming that I'm in that group, either. But I've used enough MS Office and enough OpenOffice to know about the two things I've pointed out up there.
On the other hand, most of the people in these threads who say that everybody can use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office aren't office application users.
Every single one of these articles instantly devolves into a thread about AdBlock. Yes, we get it. A lot of people here like AdBlock. Can we stop fucking posting the same fucking thread in every fucking single fucking article? Christ.
It's like Ron Paul in the politics tab during the election.
I tend not to throw out perfectly working equipment just because Microsoft decided to gratuitously change their device driver model.
Gratuitously? They did it to increase security and stability. That's not gratuitous... as you'll realize, the first time your video card or sound card driver crashes in Vista, and Vista recovers without even a hiccup.
If you're going to bash Windows, please pick something that makes sense. Thanks.
That might change. Look at the new Office 2007 interface.
While I'm sure, this being Slashdot, I'm going to get 20 replies from geeks saying how much they hate it, the very fact that Microsoft was willing, and even eager, to redesign the UI of their flagship app almost from scratch is pretty damned impressive, and I think telling about the company.
They didn't attempt to violate the GPL, get caught,
Please, that's made-up Slashdot bullshit. Don't believe everything you read on this site, hell, don't believe anything you read on this site: Microsoft intended to release the drivers under the GPL from day 1. (Why would they even bother making them, otherwise? Think about it-- they're useless outside the kernel, and they need to be GPL to get in the kernel!)
I'm not saying it's comprehensive proof, I'm just pointing out that it's ridiculous to extend his personal experience with 2 computers on a home LAN to people using Vista in an office environment with a centralized file server, when he could have instead, you know, *asked* one of the hundreds of thousands of people using Vista in an office environment with a centralized file server. It's not that rare.
The navigation app on the iPhone doesn't get interrupted for calls-- if you take the call, it goes right back to where it was before. Then again, 3G iPhone using GPS for 5 hours would drain the batteries pretty effectively-- so yeah, there are always drawbacks.
Using IE is one thing, but you're still using IE6!? Find your IT people and smack them, hard. Please for the sake of all of us.
For the record, and since this is Slashdot and I take nothing for granted, IE7 and IE8 have tabs.
You're probably being a jerk, but really using a solution like Windows Live Sync is actually a better option than the built-in filesharing. It doesn't require you to fiddle with the configuration or open dangerous ports-- it's much, much easier to use-- but it'll sync with LAN speeds if it detects both computers are on the same LAN.
Considering that companies usually have a central file server somewhere, imagine business workers trying to do basic file IO stuff, like copy word docs, spreadsheet files, or large .psd files from the Design Department.
I actually use Windows Vista at an actual company with an actual central file server somewhere, and I don't experience any of the problems you're talking about. Go ahead and wildly spitball, though!
As far as I can tell, you have literally said "a serialized stream cannot be used to support a GUI". This is what I was complaining about.
All I can say is that you've utterly failed at reading comprehension. You can complain until the cows come home, but I never said that, and I can't even imagine in what way you've mis-read the two quoted passages to come to that conclusion.
Microsoft has been deliberately "subtle" in the past -- see MS Java, Dr DOS and Windows 3.1, "It ain't done till Lotus won't run", etc.
MS Java - Microsoft added features to Java to make it integrate better with Windows, since Sun had absolutely no desire to make Java GUIs not suck-ass.
Dr DOS - Dr DOS had a genuine incompatibility with Windows 3.1, and, moreover, was a configuration not supported by Microsoft, so the warning was entirely appropriate.
Lotus won't run - Nothing but an urban legend. If you can *prove* that this incident happened then I'm all ears. So far I've seen no proof. Hell, I haven't even seen any evidence that any Lotus products failed to run on a particular Microsoft OS: which product? Which OS?
Now I don't doubt that *you* believe all those events represent nothing but pure, unadulterated, evil from Microsoft. But you also have to realize that all of them have an alternate interpretation where Microsoft's absolutely worst act is to protect themselves from lawsuits by people using an unsupported configuration of Windows 3.1. That doesn't strike me as particularly evil.
Again, the question here is: Is it so unbelievable that someone would both overtly rail at his enemies, and covertly attempt to undermine them? Ballmer wouldn't be the first to do this.
Ballmer? Or your crazy exaggerated caricature of Ballmer?
What I'm suggesting is more paranoid -- that said firm could easily be a front, or could be tempted with sufficient amounts of money, so that it looks as though they've sold the patents to a Linux-friendly company.
Yah! And it's actually run by Illuminati lizardmen who have tunnels from DC all the way to Area 51 in Nevada, which they use (with the assistance of chemtrails) to conceal the true secret of TimeCube from an unsuspecting public!
But keep in mind, this is the same Microsoft who sent astroturfers to a Linux convention, saying things like "It's all over, the suits are taking over," back when IBM started showing up at these conventions.
[Citation needed]
This is the same Microsoft who essentially stole the GUI concept wholesale from a Macintosh prototype -- keep in mind, Apple did actually license it from Xerox.
I think what really happened is that Apple's extremely useful implementation of the concept proved to Microsoft that it was worth pursuing their own.
And it's also worthwhile to mention that Windows was far more different from Macintosh then, say, GEOS was. And, much of the original success of the Macintosh was due to Microsoft applications-- the reason Apple showed their prototype to Microsoft in the first place was to convince Microsoft to write apps for it.
And this is the same Microsoft who continues to fund SCO.
[Citation needed]
It is not paranoid to expect a company which has been underhanded and "subtle" in the past to continue to do so in the future.
Perhaps not, but you've yet to PROVE that Microsoft has been underhanded and subtle. The best you've done at this point is quoted a debunked urban legend.
Yep, you are as ignorant as I thought.
"GUI" does NOT mean "it is impossible to construct out of small pieces that communicate with each other".
I NEVER SAID IT DID.
Whose posts are you replying to? Certainly not mine.
Seriously, if you're not going to even bother to read my fucking posts, I don't see why I, or anybody, should bother to attempt to have a conversation with you. This is your second reply, and also the second reply in which you're responding to a point I NEVER MADE.
Christ.
Your post applies to, *maaaybe*, 0.05% of the population who not only directly types in URLs (instead of using bookmarks/search/address bar history), but also types in URLs they've never seen before. So while it's a valid point, it's not worth any web developer's time to think about.
Despite that, http://microsoft.com/ie works. As does http://microsoft.com/office and http://microsoft.com/windows . Hell, even http://microsoft.com/sql goes directly to SQL Server 2008.
So it's not worth any web developer's time to think about, *and* you're flat-out wrong. Kudos.
What, exactly, is "not what was said at all?" Said by whom? "The initial Lemming reaction?" What is that?
Is your post in code? I have absolutely no idea what you're trying to tell me.
What's your point?
I never said "Microsoft never developed any text-based formats", so if you're trying to counter that specific point, I'm not sure why.
But you are living under your rock apparently, somehow believing that GUI and stuff typed on a keyboard are different systems that have nothing to do with each other.
They are, in Windows and OS X. Hell, old school Mac Classic didn't even *have* a text-based mode, it literally did not exist.
Go ahead and continue to claim that Unix is "old fashined" because you have proven you don't have any idea what you are talking about, so you can justify it to yourself.
I think pretty much everybody agrees that Unix is old fashioned. That's why a lot of the people on this site love it-- most everybody who gushes on about the CLI would have to admit, if they could get over their irrational hatred of Microsoft, that Microsoft's PowerShell is a *better* CLI environment than, say, BASH.
Because if all Unix users cared about was having a powerful CLI, well, you could build a more powerful GUI from scratch and get rid of all the crappy old Linux-isms at the same time... if that was the goal, the Linux community would have invented PowerShell, not Microsoft. Instead, the goal is to be able to run the same shell scripts you ran 25 years ago. i.e. relying on an old fashioned system for backwards compatibility.
What the hell word is that even supposed to be? I guess "ruminate" would be the closest word that sounds remotely similar to "laminate" and also makes sense in context.
The idea of small programs that communicate via serialized streams, of human-editable text configs, etc, is entirely antithetical to the MS Way.
That's because it's not that useful for anything other than text editing and shuffling files around. Now, if you're a hard-core Linux user, editing text and shuffling files around is all you ever care about. But the whole point of the GUI revolution is that computers can do more than editing text and shuffling files around-- they can do graphics, video, music, all three at the same time.
I know you're often pro-Microsoft, borderline fanboy
If that's how people on this site define the word "sane", then yes I am.
but even you should be able to see that Steve "FUCKING KILL GOOGLE" Ballmer would love a chance to cut Linux off at the knees.
So the guy who yells "FUCKING KILL GOOGLE" (so you say) is so subtle that he'd try to auction the patents to some other firm? So that other firm would then harass Linux and Microsoft would be in-the-clear? And yet so short-sighted that he didn't foresee the possibility that a firm that wants to defend Linux would buy the patents in the same auction? It's not just a conspiracy theory, it's a retarded one.
It's much more likely that Microsoft auctioned the patents for some wholly un-related reason, and didn't care who purchased them.
So paranoid.
If that worked, why aren't artists already doing it? It's not like the Internet is some tiny new technology anymore-- if it were possible, someone would be doing it.
Oddly enough it's pretty easy to enable the ssh server in MacOS. It's there
but not turned on by default and very easy to switch on. You don't have to
make it a disaster to make it easy. Apple has been proving this for decades.
Uh, if you turn on file sharing in Windows, it automatically adds a rule to the firewall to allow it. Which is the exact same thing Apple does for SSH. So I have no clue what your complaint actually is-- "Enabling SSH in OS X is exactly as easy as enabling file-sharing in Windows, therefore Apple is better!"
Yeah, like a ninja with rockets in his sword hilts!
WOOT CRAZYJIM!
You know this guy invented the video game Tribes only a year after Tribes was released!? He's a friggin' genius.