If you can embed a Excel sheet, complete with all the Excel controls/menus/features/etc into SimpleText, why would anybody buy Excel from Microsoft? (And, of course, it means the SimpleText document would be huge to incorporate all that functionality-- not sure if that was ever addressed.) It didn't help that all the preview technologies (CyberDog, for example) completely sucked and crashed all the time.
That's why it never worked. Which is an interesting point, because the concept could actually work in open source, if open source implemented it.
Do you mean, the LAST time? Red Hat 6.0 was released in 1999.
No, the last time was Ubuntu 6.something, about 2 years ago. I was trying to set up a MythTV box, but gave up after it turned out Linux had no drivers for my Hauppauge WinPVR 250 video capture card. (There was one driver that claimed to support it, but didn't.)
Guess what, Red Hat 6.0 in a professionally preinstalled configuration worked just fine, too.
Maybe it did.
But the Red Hat website specifically claimed that it supported Creative Soundblaster 128 soundcards, and yet the entire time I had it running I never heard any sound from it.
Admittedly, it wasn't a "professionally preinstalled configuration", but if the product claims to support X and doesn't actually support X, I don't know about you, but I go back to the alternate product that actually does what it claims.
Are you sure that those "usability concepts" aren't actually your expectations that everything in the world has to have an exact copy of Windows interface (pre-OSX Mac OS was where it was copied from, this is why it looks familiar to you)?
No. I've used Macs my entire life. I was raised on Macintosh 6.0-9.2, OS X 10.2-current, Windows 95-current (never had experience with previous versions of Windows.) I've used NeXT, I've used BeOS, I've used OS/2. I've used GeOS, even, on my Commodore 64.
And yes, I do complain about OS X all the time; Apple's ditching of useful features and complete disdain for the spatial GUI design they themselves invented were enough to drive me to Windows. Windows also isn't spatial, but at least it doesn't pretend to be like OS X does. And at least every version of Windows has all the features that the previous version did; Apple sure can't say that. Also the dock sucks.
I complain about Windows, I complain about Macintosh (OS X or Classic), I've complained about every OS listed above. (Except perhaps BeOS, it was damned sharp.) I'm not looking for a Windows clone. But the simple fact is that, right now, Microsoft is arguably doing more to advance the state-of-the-art for GUI usability than any other company out there. Certainly more than every Linux distribution combined.
Apple's Time Machine is Windows Shadow Copy with some sparkle added. Apple's "Dashboard" widgets is Windows 98's "Active Desktop." Vista can reboot drivers without rebooting the OS, the exact same way BeOS did. The Office 2007 interface is more discoverable than anything I've seen.
The only original concept I've ever seen from Linux is the idea of virtual desktops. I think they have dubious usability benefits, but it's an original concept. Everything else is just ripped from Windows, except poorly implemented.
I'm sorry I don't meet your expectations of a naive Windows-only user.
I think you're talking about Apple's old OpenDoc concept... but maybe I just don't really get what you're explaining. Just FYI, pictures are worth several thousand words, especially when describing GUI features.
Turns out she does use some crazy word functionality for tracking edits. Different parts of a document are highlighted according to when and by whom they were eddied by. At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that, now she has a negative experience with free software.
"Crazy Word functionality?" I think it's more like "basic expected functionality." Having a writing tool designed for an office environment that doesn't have revision tracking would be like writing a program without using source control. OpenOffice does it, but it's pretty primitive compared to Word.
What your comment really illustrates is that the people who constantly post "OpenOffice is good enough for everything I want to do!" really don't do all that much in Word/Excel/etc.
Wait, you're actually advocating putting developers on bling rather than actually making the product better? Thinking like that is the main thing that's gotten Microsoft to lose as many customers to OO as it already has.
The Office 2007 interface isn't "bling." It's a new interface strategy determined from the results of dozens of usability studies, many of them real-world in office environments, not just some random thing someone sketched in a notebook.
The real problem isn't that OpenOffice should "put developers on bling," but that OpenOffice should get people who aren't developers. People who, for instance, are willing to run the usability studies, to come up with the big picture ideas to test. Psychologists to come up with those little tricks that make things appear faster and better without actually making them faster and better-- for example, the new progress bars in OS X and Vista both use a simple optical illusion to appear to be moving faster than they actually are. Even an artist, or at least designer, to set your color scheme up to look modern and fresh.
The problem is that all you have is developers. It takes a lot more than that to create successful software.
Me, I'd much rather they put their heads to making OO run faster with less memory. It's truly pathetic that MS Office 2k3 runs faster under vmware+xp than OO does natively in linux.
And by that, I assume you mean, at least MS is out there needlessly changing the interfaces for applications we've gotten used to over the past, oh, 20 years, such that they deviate from UI paradigms we've become intimately familiar with. Yes, thank goodness for that. God bless MS.
Those bastards! Trying to increase the usability of their products! They should all burn in hell for it!
Seriously, WTF guys? Insightful? This isn't "insightful" this is "get off my lawn you kids!" Whether or not Office 2007's interface is great or terrible, at least you can say this about Microsoft: they *tried* to make it better. And that's a hell of a lot more than OpenOffice has ever done; it's been a rip-off of other products since day one.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that, if there isn't enough RAM to run OpenOffice or Eclipse, that the OS put up a dialog box telling you so. Unless you think 32M is not enough memory to put up a dialog box... but I seem to remember Macintosh doing that just fine in 128k of RAM.
For what it's worth, my experience was a lot like Anonymous Coward's. I came across tons of bugs in software packages, mysterious error messages, applications quitting with *no* error message, etc.
I know that "well, it's better now" but it's been "better now" since the first time I tried Linux with Red Hat 6, and I'm sick of being jerked around. When a non-biased person, a person who knows computer GUIs pretty well, a person who will ensure 100% feature parity with at least Windows 2000 or Mac OS 9, tells me that Linux is as good as Windows, maybe I'll believe him. Right now Linux is this weird mix of technologically advanced applications and concepts, while missing some of the most basic usability concepts that Microsoft and Apple had right in the mid-90s.
I considering myself a pretty neutral person, and I have to say the FUD flows both ways. Talk to any Slashdotter about Vista, for instance, and try to correlate the information they relate with reality. I don't react well to propaganda, and I see a lot more anti-Microsoft propaganda than pro-Microsoft, so maybe it's something of a knee-jerk reaction. (It also doesn't hurt that Microsoft indirectly pays my bills.)
I guess what I'm really opposed to is this destructive "us vs. them" philosophy that you seem to convey, along with a lot of other posts on this site. Despite how "evil" Microsoft is, you have to admit that they've done a damn sight better job at making an OS that actually works for the average Joe and has features that American corporations drool over. As a person who doesn't give a flying crap about "Freedom" (don't get me started on that particular piece of 1984 doublethink!), I'd much rather use OS X or Windows Vista (or XP) over Ubuntu, because from my experience OS X and Vista actually work while Ubuntu doesn't.
(Of course part of the problem there is more propaganda from the Linux community, telling me that Ubuntu is just as good as XP, I should give it a try. So I give it a try, and nothing f-ing works! My wireless doesn't work, my computer doesn't go into sleep mode, applications crash left and right, installing an application in the prescribed manner doesn't put an icon on the desktop or "we ripped off the Start menu"-widget. I was disappointed with that, but even more disappointed that, given the opportunity to start from a clean slate, the UI was an exact Xerox of Windows-- is nobody in the Linux world even slightly concerned about usability? Ugh.)
Anyway, sorry for the rant. I guess the big picture is that I don't react well to propaganda and blatant lies, and I see more of those from the Linux community than any Microsoft community I talk to, including actual Microsoft employees.
Christ, you sound like you're trying to convince Christians to expel the moors from Spain. Microsoft's just a company like any other, making software just like any other. If Microsoft's "an enemy of free and open software" then what is Adobe? Intuit? Apple? Etc? Are any companies *not* enemies of free and open software?
Uh, "browsing the web" in the year 2008 consists of things that would be unthinkable in the mid-90s. Like Hulu.com and YouTube for instance. And it's not just uber-nerds using these sites, my parents actually use Hulu.com on a regular basis to watch the Office.
"Browsing the web" in 1995 consisted of, what, HTML 2 and GIF? Now it consists of HTML 2-4, XHTML 1, CSS 1+2, XML, PNG, JPEG, Flash, etc. Your web browser alone is doing the work of a hundred 1995 computers. And you can't have it both way; you can't post "oh software is so bloated!" one day then post "wow I really love CSS!" the next.
Yeah, I ask you to cite an actual fact instead of boring everyone with nostalgia-fueled BS, and you immediately give up. And start ranting about 70 million survivors of... some... thing.
Enough has been said that any prudent person who is just coming upon this argument will explore the data themself, form their own opinion, and act accordingly.
Hard to do when you haven't actually provided any data.
How blatantly arbitrary and unfair. Why is the FCC flipping out over "fck" on the radio after this went unpunished!
The FCC only covers over-the-air broadcasts, not cable. Cable networks can show whatever the shit they want. Although they generally follow the same standards as over-the-air broadcasters. (With some exceptions, like HBO.)
It doesn't work that way exactly. You right-click the icon and instead of Open select "Run As..." You'll be asked for the credentials of the user you want to run the program as, and there you can enter an administrative user's name and password, running the program so that it can update itself.
Or, just file bugs with the program's creators saying their auto-updater is stupid. (Programs can tell which user account they're under, so it could simply prompt you automatically for an admin password when it needs one to update, like OS X does. Windows installers do this all the time.)
Everything. People run as administrator because they have to.
In XP? Nah.
The only reason people "had to" in Windows 2000 is because third party software companies didn't get the memo, and they were still writing software for Windows 98. The majority of that software is defunct now, so the vast majority of people can run as normal users without any problems whatsoever.
(The default is admin, which I agree is stupid, but that's not what you're talking about here. And Vista fixes that anyway, so upgrade.)
Ever tried to debug as an unprivileged user on W2K?
Yes, worked fine. Given, it was debugging Javascript, but you didn't mention the language.;)
(Not to say debugging other languages won't work, I just haven't tried it myself.)
Ever tried to install software?
Yes, works fine unless you: 1) Want to install for "All Users" (in which case it requires admin, of course, since you're modifying other user accounts.) 2) Are installing shitty software, like Lotus Notes, which have broken installers. Not much Microsoft can do about shitty software.
Just what is the Windows equivalent of sudo that ships standard with Windows XP?
You right-click the icon and select "Run As..."
Are you asking seriously? Do you even use Windows XP? How could you not know that?
"Run As..." is actually marginally better than SUDO because you can run a program as an account with fewer privileges if you want, for instance, if you normally run as admin but don't want to give admin to some cheesy program you downloaded from the web.
Twenty years ago I had leisure time. I saw probably 25 movies a year. I read 50-100 books a year, most of them novels. I had hobbies. I took day trips on some weekends to the beach or mountains, often enough that they were not really special. I had dreams that I thought I could make manifest.
So stop working so hard, if you don't enjoy it. If you'd rather see 25 movies a year, take some time off and do that. The reason you no longer thing you can make your dreams manifest is simply because you've become such a cynical pessimist, the exact reason we're having this discussion.
That says nothing about society in general. You can change your own life, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Despite making more money, I have less leisure time, and less resources available for pursuits other than career or business. My bank account is bigger, but I've got much less real wealth in my daily life.
So fix that. Get a lower-paying job which provides you with more leisure time. If your bank account's so big, retire! Work at Wal-Mart as a greeter, or get a job at the local McDonalds. You're a hell of a lot better off, financially at least, than I am, and you're still here whinging about how horrible the world is.
Twenty years ago, the rails and roads you use were twenty years younger.
Actually, they're laying new rails right now as we speak. And the highway I would use if I commuted in my car was just expanded to 4 lanes from two along half its length, with the other have planned for this summer. Maybe you just live in a place with crappy roads/railroads?
Things were not needing repairs so often as they now do, and the cost of those repairs was much easier to bear.
[Citation needed] What makes you think things needed fewer repairs in the past? What makes you think those repairs were "easier to bear?" What does "easier to bear" even mean, cheaper maybe?
Unless you can give me some actual fact here and not just nostalgia-fueled vagueries, I'm calling BS on this particular point. Sorry.
There was also much less pressure on those resources than there is now. The infrastructure that supports your life style was designed with a lot of surplus capacity and safety margin: much of that extra capacity and margin no longer exists: it is now being used.
True. And it all still works just as reliably as it did when it was built. So what?
Look, I agree whole-heartedly that this country needs to engage in a program of aggressive building of power plants (preferably nuclear), power lines, and various other pieces of infrastructure. The stuff we have works, yes, and it's still over-built, it's just not over-built enough. Nothing about that last paragraph indicates that the world is going to hell, it just means we have to work on the same thing we've always had to work on: improving things.
If the quality of your life has not degraded over the last 20 years, consider yourself one of the fortunate few.
Woot.
The more likely case is that your situation has also degraded, but accepting that fact would make going on with it too painful an experience, and the subconscious protective mechanism of denial has kicked in for you. Sorry to prick your bubble, but it is unfair for you to urge everyone else to go along with the delusions that have kept you reasonably happy.
Oh yeah, I'm the delusional one.
Let each find his own way to cope with a very uncertain world, where trusted bridges can collapse beneath you at any time when they fail from the increased loads put on them.
Hey, here's a foundation of my positive philosophy: no matter how great the world is, shit happens. Bridges collapsed on occasion, maybe a truck caught on fire (like that overpass in LA), maybe some inspector screwed up, or maybe there was a big storm and it sank (like one of Seattle's floating bridges). You'll just have to deal with it, it's not a perfect world.
However, it is a pretty goddamned good world.
(I blame that nasty model of pessimistic sci-fi written during the Cold War, personally. That and large doses of rationality-killing nostalgia.)
Look. Your daily routine today is pretty much the exact same as it was 20 years ago. Nothing fundamental has changed. What makes you think something fundamental will change in the next 20? I can predict that in 20 years: the trestle I take to work will still have too many cars on it, the train will periodically get stopped because of mudslides, and everything I know and love now will still exist, with possibly a few new additions to the list.
Discussions like this always remind me of the Christians who are convinced, utterly convinced, that the Rapture (which hasn't happened in the last two thousand years) is going to start any second now! I'm not an optimist, I'm a realist... and based on my experience the world just keeps chugging along the same way it always has, despite human paranoia about nuclear war, terrorism, biological disaster, etc.
You read too much science fiction. The world keeps chugging along the way its always chugging along.
If this were WWII or the start of the Cold War when crazy dictators were busy killing literally millions of their own citizens, you might be able to justify your paranoia. But frankly, we're not doing so bad right now.
I agree entirely. The Bill Gates borg icon is simply sad and pathetic at this point in time. So are the "funny" quotes at the bottom of each page. (Of course, while I'm railing against them, this page actually has a decent one for once. Most of the time they're just random phrases that mean nothing.)
Of course the reason for this is obvious: CmdrTaco simply doesn't give half-a-crap about the quality of his website. Same reason there are constant dupes, just plain wrong articles/headlines, Flash ads that consume 100% of the browser's CPU allotment, etc.
(I also think it's ridiculous to equate "poor public speaker" with "stupid" like most liberals do. Bush has a hell of a lot more schooling than I do. But that's for another topic.)
Presuming that somebody actually cares about the quality of that paint program, it'll eventually get set to a more normal icon.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can embed a Excel sheet, complete with all the Excel controls/menus/features/etc into SimpleText, why would anybody buy Excel from Microsoft? (And, of course, it means the SimpleText document would be huge to incorporate all that functionality-- not sure if that was ever addressed.) It didn't help that all the preview technologies (CyberDog, for example) completely sucked and crashed all the time.
That's why it never worked. Which is an interesting point, because the concept could actually work in open source, if open source implemented it.
Do you mean, the LAST time? Red Hat 6.0 was released in 1999.
No, the last time was Ubuntu 6.something, about 2 years ago. I was trying to set up a MythTV box, but gave up after it turned out Linux had no drivers for my Hauppauge WinPVR 250 video capture card. (There was one driver that claimed to support it, but didn't.)
Guess what, Red Hat 6.0 in a professionally preinstalled configuration worked just fine, too.
Maybe it did.
But the Red Hat website specifically claimed that it supported Creative Soundblaster 128 soundcards, and yet the entire time I had it running I never heard any sound from it.
Admittedly, it wasn't a "professionally preinstalled configuration", but if the product claims to support X and doesn't actually support X, I don't know about you, but I go back to the alternate product that actually does what it claims.
Are you sure that those "usability concepts" aren't actually your expectations that everything in the world has to have an exact copy of Windows interface (pre-OSX Mac OS was where it was copied from, this is why it looks familiar to you)?
No. I've used Macs my entire life. I was raised on Macintosh 6.0-9.2, OS X 10.2-current, Windows 95-current (never had experience with previous versions of Windows.) I've used NeXT, I've used BeOS, I've used OS/2. I've used GeOS, even, on my Commodore 64.
And yes, I do complain about OS X all the time; Apple's ditching of useful features and complete disdain for the spatial GUI design they themselves invented were enough to drive me to Windows. Windows also isn't spatial, but at least it doesn't pretend to be like OS X does. And at least every version of Windows has all the features that the previous version did; Apple sure can't say that. Also the dock sucks.
I complain about Windows, I complain about Macintosh (OS X or Classic), I've complained about every OS listed above. (Except perhaps BeOS, it was damned sharp.) I'm not looking for a Windows clone. But the simple fact is that, right now, Microsoft is arguably doing more to advance the state-of-the-art for GUI usability than any other company out there. Certainly more than every Linux distribution combined.
Apple's Time Machine is Windows Shadow Copy with some sparkle added. Apple's "Dashboard" widgets is Windows 98's "Active Desktop." Vista can reboot drivers without rebooting the OS, the exact same way BeOS did. The Office 2007 interface is more discoverable than anything I've seen.
The only original concept I've ever seen from Linux is the idea of virtual desktops. I think they have dubious usability benefits, but it's an original concept. Everything else is just ripped from Windows, except poorly implemented.
I'm sorry I don't meet your expectations of a naive Windows-only user.
Just FYI, according to this site: http://visio.mvps.org/Excel_2007.htm Excel 2007's limits are:
16k Columns
1M Rows
With the highest possible cell being: XFD1048576 (In Excel 2003, it was IV65536).
(Now comes the obligatory "you should be using a database!" post.)
I think you're talking about Apple's old OpenDoc concept... but maybe I just don't really get what you're explaining. Just FYI, pictures are worth several thousand words, especially when describing GUI features.
Turns out she does use some crazy word functionality for tracking edits. Different parts of a document are highlighted according to when and by whom they were eddied by. At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that, now she has a negative experience with free software.
"Crazy Word functionality?" I think it's more like "basic expected functionality." Having a writing tool designed for an office environment that doesn't have revision tracking would be like writing a program without using source control. OpenOffice does it, but it's pretty primitive compared to Word.
What your comment really illustrates is that the people who constantly post "OpenOffice is good enough for everything I want to do!" really don't do all that much in Word/Excel/etc.
Wait, you're actually advocating putting developers on bling rather than actually making the product better? Thinking like that is the main thing that's gotten Microsoft to lose as many customers to OO as it already has.
The Office 2007 interface isn't "bling." It's a new interface strategy determined from the results of dozens of usability studies, many of them real-world in office environments, not just some random thing someone sketched in a notebook.
The real problem isn't that OpenOffice should "put developers on bling," but that OpenOffice should get people who aren't developers. People who, for instance, are willing to run the usability studies, to come up with the big picture ideas to test. Psychologists to come up with those little tricks that make things appear faster and better without actually making them faster and better-- for example, the new progress bars in OS X and Vista both use a simple optical illusion to appear to be moving faster than they actually are. Even an artist, or at least designer, to set your color scheme up to look modern and fresh.
The problem is that all you have is developers. It takes a lot more than that to create successful software.
Me, I'd much rather they put their heads to making OO run faster with less memory. It's truly pathetic that MS Office 2k3 runs faster under vmware+xp than OO does natively in linux.
I agree, that's also important.
And by that, I assume you mean, at least MS is out there needlessly changing the interfaces for applications we've gotten used to over the past, oh, 20 years, such that they deviate from UI paradigms we've become intimately familiar with. Yes, thank goodness for that. God bless MS.
Those bastards! Trying to increase the usability of their products! They should all burn in hell for it!
Seriously, WTF guys? Insightful? This isn't "insightful" this is "get off my lawn you kids!" Whether or not Office 2007's interface is great or terrible, at least you can say this about Microsoft: they *tried* to make it better. And that's a hell of a lot more than OpenOffice has ever done; it's been a rip-off of other products since day one.
I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that, if there isn't enough RAM to run OpenOffice or Eclipse, that the OS put up a dialog box telling you so. Unless you think 32M is not enough memory to put up a dialog box... but I seem to remember Macintosh doing that just fine in 128k of RAM.
For what it's worth, my experience was a lot like Anonymous Coward's. I came across tons of bugs in software packages, mysterious error messages, applications quitting with *no* error message, etc.
I know that "well, it's better now" but it's been "better now" since the first time I tried Linux with Red Hat 6, and I'm sick of being jerked around. When a non-biased person, a person who knows computer GUIs pretty well, a person who will ensure 100% feature parity with at least Windows 2000 or Mac OS 9, tells me that Linux is as good as Windows, maybe I'll believe him. Right now Linux is this weird mix of technologically advanced applications and concepts, while missing some of the most basic usability concepts that Microsoft and Apple had right in the mid-90s.
I considering myself a pretty neutral person, and I have to say the FUD flows both ways. Talk to any Slashdotter about Vista, for instance, and try to correlate the information they relate with reality. I don't react well to propaganda, and I see a lot more anti-Microsoft propaganda than pro-Microsoft, so maybe it's something of a knee-jerk reaction. (It also doesn't hurt that Microsoft indirectly pays my bills.)
I guess what I'm really opposed to is this destructive "us vs. them" philosophy that you seem to convey, along with a lot of other posts on this site. Despite how "evil" Microsoft is, you have to admit that they've done a damn sight better job at making an OS that actually works for the average Joe and has features that American corporations drool over. As a person who doesn't give a flying crap about "Freedom" (don't get me started on that particular piece of 1984 doublethink!), I'd much rather use OS X or Windows Vista (or XP) over Ubuntu, because from my experience OS X and Vista actually work while Ubuntu doesn't.
(Of course part of the problem there is more propaganda from the Linux community, telling me that Ubuntu is just as good as XP, I should give it a try. So I give it a try, and nothing f-ing works! My wireless doesn't work, my computer doesn't go into sleep mode, applications crash left and right, installing an application in the prescribed manner doesn't put an icon on the desktop or "we ripped off the Start menu"-widget. I was disappointed with that, but even more disappointed that, given the opportunity to start from a clean slate, the UI was an exact Xerox of Windows-- is nobody in the Linux world even slightly concerned about usability? Ugh.)
Anyway, sorry for the rant. I guess the big picture is that I don't react well to propaganda and blatant lies, and I see more of those from the Linux community than any Microsoft community I talk to, including actual Microsoft employees.
Christ, you sound like you're trying to convince Christians to expel the moors from Spain. Microsoft's just a company like any other, making software just like any other. If Microsoft's "an enemy of free and open software" then what is Adobe? Intuit? Apple? Etc? Are any companies *not* enemies of free and open software?
It's released, but it's not on Windows Update yet. You can download and install it manually if you want to be bleeding edge.
Uh, "browsing the web" in the year 2008 consists of things that would be unthinkable in the mid-90s. Like Hulu.com and YouTube for instance. And it's not just uber-nerds using these sites, my parents actually use Hulu.com on a regular basis to watch the Office.
"Browsing the web" in 1995 consisted of, what, HTML 2 and GIF? Now it consists of HTML 2-4, XHTML 1, CSS 1+2, XML, PNG, JPEG, Flash, etc. Your web browser alone is doing the work of a hundred 1995 computers. And you can't have it both way; you can't post "oh software is so bloated!" one day then post "wow I really love CSS!" the next.
When do they come for the people who post that stale, over-used quote on Slashdot? And who mod it up every single time?
Yeah, I ask you to cite an actual fact instead of boring everyone with nostalgia-fueled BS, and you immediately give up. And start ranting about 70 million survivors of... some... thing.
Enough has been said that any prudent person who is just coming upon this argument will explore the data themself, form their own opinion, and act accordingly.
Hard to do when you haven't actually provided any data.
I'm chalking that up as a win for my team. Woot.
How blatantly arbitrary and unfair. Why is the FCC flipping out over "fck" on the radio after this went unpunished!
The FCC only covers over-the-air broadcasts, not cable. Cable networks can show whatever the shit they want. Although they generally follow the same standards as over-the-air broadcasters. (With some exceptions, like HBO.)
That's great, but how do I do it on an icon I double-click? I'm not a CLI person.
It doesn't work that way exactly. You right-click the icon and instead of Open select "Run As..." You'll be asked for the credentials of the user you want to run the program as, and there you can enter an administrative user's name and password, running the program so that it can update itself.
Or, just file bugs with the program's creators saying their auto-updater is stupid. (Programs can tell which user account they're under, so it could simply prompt you automatically for an admin password when it needs one to update, like OS X does. Windows installers do this all the time.)
Everything. People run as administrator because they have to.
;)
In XP? Nah.
The only reason people "had to" in Windows 2000 is because third party software companies didn't get the memo, and they were still writing software for Windows 98. The majority of that software is defunct now, so the vast majority of people can run as normal users without any problems whatsoever.
(The default is admin, which I agree is stupid, but that's not what you're talking about here. And Vista fixes that anyway, so upgrade.)
Ever tried to debug as an unprivileged user on W2K?
Yes, worked fine. Given, it was debugging Javascript, but you didn't mention the language.
(Not to say debugging other languages won't work, I just haven't tried it myself.)
Ever tried to install software?
Yes, works fine unless you:
1) Want to install for "All Users" (in which case it requires admin, of course, since you're modifying other user accounts.)
2) Are installing shitty software, like Lotus Notes, which have broken installers. Not much Microsoft can do about shitty software.
Just what is the Windows equivalent of sudo that ships standard with Windows XP?
You right-click the icon and select "Run As..."
Are you asking seriously? Do you even use Windows XP? How could you not know that?
"Run As..." is actually marginally better than SUDO because you can run a program as an account with fewer privileges if you want, for instance, if you normally run as admin but don't want to give admin to some cheesy program you downloaded from the web.
Twenty years ago I had leisure time. I saw probably 25 movies a year. I read 50-100 books a year, most of them novels. I had hobbies. I took day trips on some weekends to the beach or mountains, often enough that they were not really special. I had dreams that I thought I could make manifest.
So stop working so hard, if you don't enjoy it. If you'd rather see 25 movies a year, take some time off and do that. The reason you no longer thing you can make your dreams manifest is simply because you've become such a cynical pessimist, the exact reason we're having this discussion.
That says nothing about society in general. You can change your own life, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Despite making more money, I have less leisure time, and less resources available for pursuits other than career or business. My bank account is bigger, but I've got much less real wealth in my daily life.
So fix that. Get a lower-paying job which provides you with more leisure time. If your bank account's so big, retire! Work at Wal-Mart as a greeter, or get a job at the local McDonalds. You're a hell of a lot better off, financially at least, than I am, and you're still here whinging about how horrible the world is.
Twenty years ago, the rails and roads you use were twenty years younger.
Actually, they're laying new rails right now as we speak. And the highway I would use if I commuted in my car was just expanded to 4 lanes from two along half its length, with the other have planned for this summer. Maybe you just live in a place with crappy roads/railroads?
Things were not needing repairs so often as they now do, and the cost of those repairs was much easier to bear.
[Citation needed] What makes you think things needed fewer repairs in the past? What makes you think those repairs were "easier to bear?" What does "easier to bear" even mean, cheaper maybe?
Unless you can give me some actual fact here and not just nostalgia-fueled vagueries, I'm calling BS on this particular point. Sorry.
There was also much less pressure on those resources than there is now. The infrastructure that supports your life style was designed with a lot of surplus capacity and safety margin: much of that extra capacity and margin no longer exists: it is now being used.
True. And it all still works just as reliably as it did when it was built. So what?
Look, I agree whole-heartedly that this country needs to engage in a program of aggressive building of power plants (preferably nuclear), power lines, and various other pieces of infrastructure. The stuff we have works, yes, and it's still over-built, it's just not over-built enough. Nothing about that last paragraph indicates that the world is going to hell, it just means we have to work on the same thing we've always had to work on: improving things.
If the quality of your life has not degraded over the last 20 years, consider yourself one of the fortunate few.
Woot.
The more likely case is that your situation has also degraded, but accepting that fact would make going on with it too painful an experience, and the subconscious protective mechanism of denial has kicked in for you. Sorry to prick your bubble, but it is unfair for you to urge everyone else to go along with the delusions that have kept you reasonably happy.
Oh yeah, I'm the delusional one.
Let each find his own way to cope with a very uncertain world, where trusted bridges can collapse beneath you at any time when they fail from the increased loads put on them.
Hey, here's a foundation of my positive philosophy: no matter how great the world is, shit happens. Bridges collapsed on occasion, maybe a truck caught on fire (like that overpass in LA), maybe some inspector screwed up, or maybe there was a big storm and it sank (like one of Seattle's floating bridges). You'll just have to deal with it, it's not a perfect world.
However, it is a pretty goddamned good world.
(I blame that nasty model of pessimistic sci-fi written during the Cold War, personally. That and large doses of rationality-killing nostalgia.)
The giangantic block of blue hideousness on this webpage is uglier and scarier than most monsters on that list.
(BTW, the real answer is Godzilla. He's so badass he literally fought *smog*! And kicked its ass.)
Look. Your daily routine today is pretty much the exact same as it was 20 years ago. Nothing fundamental has changed. What makes you think something fundamental will change in the next 20? I can predict that in 20 years: the trestle I take to work will still have too many cars on it, the train will periodically get stopped because of mudslides, and everything I know and love now will still exist, with possibly a few new additions to the list.
Discussions like this always remind me of the Christians who are convinced, utterly convinced, that the Rapture (which hasn't happened in the last two thousand years) is going to start any second now! I'm not an optimist, I'm a realist... and based on my experience the world just keeps chugging along the same way it always has, despite human paranoia about nuclear war, terrorism, biological disaster, etc.
This stuff is both awesome and hilarious. It's like if the ranting drunk guy on the street corner had a laptop and internet connection!
You read too much science fiction. The world keeps chugging along the way its always chugging along.
If this were WWII or the start of the Cold War when crazy dictators were busy killing literally millions of their own citizens, you might be able to justify your paranoia. But frankly, we're not doing so bad right now.
The part the nutty conspiracy theorists always seem to miss is motivation.
Why exactly would "the ruling elite" do this, again?
I agree entirely. The Bill Gates borg icon is simply sad and pathetic at this point in time. So are the "funny" quotes at the bottom of each page. (Of course, while I'm railing against them, this page actually has a decent one for once. Most of the time they're just random phrases that mean nothing.)
Of course the reason for this is obvious: CmdrTaco simply doesn't give half-a-crap about the quality of his website. Same reason there are constant dupes, just plain wrong articles/headlines, Flash ads that consume 100% of the browser's CPU allotment, etc.
(I also think it's ridiculous to equate "poor public speaker" with "stupid" like most liberals do. Bush has a hell of a lot more schooling than I do. But that's for another topic.)
Presuming that somebody actually cares about the quality of that paint program, it'll eventually get set to a more normal icon.