More importantly, creating Tetris makes him a one hit wonder puzzle inventor while saying almost nothing regarding his skills in programming, IT, computer science or economics.
Wait a second, I don't know jack about programming, IT, computer science, or economics... but I know video games, and he's not just a one-hit wonder. He also designed Pandora's Box and Hexic HD.
This Microsoft thing sounds interesting, but I think that it's overstating the value of online ads. Typically, online ads aren't for branding... they are attempts at guessing what you want based on context (search) or by tricking you to click.
1) A lot of online advertising is for branding. Look at the automotive companies that advertise online, for example... they don't honestly expect people to click the ad and immediately buy a car.
2) The real point to all of this is this one little nugget: Online ads can be tracked.
With traditional media, you have no freakin' clue. You have no idea how many saw the ad, how many converted after seeing the ad, no clue whatsoever... you can find the ratings of the TV show, perhaps, but those ratings are calculated by dubious methods (200 families representing entire states!?), and they're only for the show, not for the ads. (Tivo/other DVR makers could make major in-roads here, as you can imagine.)
Since online ads have *some* form of concrete data behind them, schemes like this can really help advertisers and publishers optimize their spend in ways traditional advertising never could. Maybe they're going a little crazy, but we're talking about an industry that's ran on no data besides opinion surveys for as long as its existed... actual data is a good thing.
It doesn't hurt that this will undoubtedly lower Google's standing.
Third party cookies, same way everybody else does it. The data processing is all done on their back-end, which I can imagine is some impressively huge set of servers... that's really what's holding back this ROI calculation, not the concept of it, but the fact that you have to shovel through terabytes of data going back weeks for each conversion to actually pull it off.
Microsoft got this capability, BTW, from their recent Aquantive acquisition. Google probably got some similar capability from DoubleClick, but they're not going to implement it without kicking and screaming from their clients-- this model makes Google look much worse than the old model, as you can imagine.
(Sure, the ad view convinced me to buy the Panasonic TV, but how do I find where to buy it? Google. Right now, Google gets 100% of the credit, even if they didn't serve any banners or do anything but watch a couple of search terms. With the new model, Google's contribution to conversions will go way down.)
FYI, if someone does find an easy way to get iTunes Music into Zune, I'd appreciate it. I recently got an 80gb Zune as a gift, but until I can transfer my music over, I have to carry both the iPod and Zune around and it's kind of annoying.
Yeah, but it's not something that helps your case when you're in court. It's stupid and petty, perhaps, but people judge you instinctually on how you conduct yourself, and if he doesn't have the self-control to stop running his mouth and let other people's opinions be heard, that might signal to the jury that he also lacked self-control when it came to dealings with his wife.
Especially since you can be sure that his lawyer has advised him of this exact fact, and he still is talking in court despite that.
Like what? Yahoo Auctions doesn't exist in the States anymore, what other reasonably-sized competitors are there?
I'm pretty sure newspaper ads and garage sales didn't instantly disappear the moment eBay was founded, for one. There's also this fairly popular site called, oh what is it, some kind of river... oh yeah Amazon.com! Have you heard of it? And of course some guy named Craig has a list online you can use for stuff like this.
You're seriously telling me you spent more than 5 microseconds thinking about this problem and didn't come up with a single alternative to eBay?
In that case, never mind. It's much more likely that you executed a denial of service attack on your *own* machine than on eBay. I mean, you do know that Firefox has an upper limit on how many connections it will actually open at the same time, right? (Go to about:config and filter for "connect.") All other connections are just placed in a queue until Firefox has an available slot. The slowdown was entirely on your own machine and LAN.
It is possible that eBay does some kind of distributed balancing based on IP or MAC, in which case he could, *may*be, have slowed one particular eBay server that happened to be assigned to his IP or MAC. But your scenario is much more likely... did he verify it was "DOSed" with a neutral third party on a different ISP?
Windows's command line is a complete joke by comparison. The ability to hack up a quick 1-line script with a pipeline of commands to do a job is not something to be sniffed at.
You can do that in Windows' CLI, both the old one and the new Monad one. All you've demonstrated is that you have no clue what you're talking about-- you can't decree Windows' CLI inferior simply because you don't know how to use it.
It does have a CLI, but one so poor that it may as well not be there at all.
How can I trust anything you say about the Windows CLI? You didn't even know you could string commands together.
As I said, there is no single task - it's lots and lots of stuff that it is useful for.
Lots and lots of "stuff"... but you can't name a single one.
It has to do with the fact that the GUI isn't always the most appropriate tool for the job.
Tell me what "the job" is, and I might be able to address this.
If Apple shipped a POS web browser, their market share is low enough that web sites would probably just not bother to jump through the hoops required to support it and Apple users would *have* to choose a better browser. But when MS do it, everyone has to support it because they can't afford to lose 90-odd% of their customers.
You didn't get to the part where you explain to me how that's a bad thing.
when you switch OS then you're going to face pain which ever way you go while you learn to live without those features and use the new features you have instead.
I don't "face pain" when I "switch" from OS X to Windows (or, use both simultaneously, the whole 'switch' terminology is pretty stupid-- like you can only own one computer!). I do experience pain each and every time I try out Linux.
Microsoft's have been free for ages, as well. Given, it didn't come with a IDE, but the SDK and compiler have been freely downloadable since Windows 2000 was brand-new, IIRC. And of course they have had freely available versions of all their.net languages for some time.
Whereupon they are required to trawl through thousands of options - that's enough to put anyone off. I for one prefer to pick a distro that suits my purposes rather than hand-configure everything. But then, I'm not a Gentoo user.:)
Are you really this stupid, or are you just trying to make me angry? It's working.
If you don't want to wade through a thousand options, you'd choose either KDE or GNOME. If you DO want the goofy custom crap, like installing it on an ancient computer, or using some strange hardware, only then would you use the "Other" option and have to trawl through options-- but you're an advanced user, so you wouldn't mind that.
No, you are suggesting an idea that appears to be unworkable and then refusing to explain how to make it workable.
You're criticizing the plan with moronic examples that show you didn't spend more than a millisecond even thinking about it. Maybe it is unworkable, and I'd like an *actual* example why, but your idiotic examples? Don't waste my time.
Open source and Free are not the same thing - Free implies open source but the converse is not true. There are a lot of open source licences which are not Free.
That's exactly the type of 1984 doublespeak bullshit I don't want to see. The only purpose is to confuse the hell out of people to make it sound more important than it actually is.
So because only 0.01% (which I seriously think is a massive underestimate) of the population does something we shouldn't even bother to provide that feature?
Of course not, stop being stupid. But you shouldn't expend any effort making it easy/usable when there's a lot of work to be done on the features that 99.99% of the people use.
Why? Most of the time there is a piece of Free software that does the job better.
Ok, let's say I run a hospital pharmacy. Name an open source pharmacy management/drug interaction program, then explain to me how it's better than the closed source version.
* Sloppy focus (and yes, I know you can turn it on in Windows with TweakUI but it breaks far too much stuff) * The ability to use partially obscured windows without having to raise them * Window shading * Virtual desktops * Powerful commandline * Select/Paste
And there are some more recent things too, such as Compiz's Scale and Desktop Cube plugins which I find very useful.
1) I don't know what "sloppy focus" is. 2) So OS X and Windows have a more consistent layer model and don't let you break it for trivial purposes like Linux does, ok. 3) I don't know what "window shading" is. 4) Virtual desktops are confusing and difficult from a usability standpoint, and completely break the entire desktop model. It's an anti-feature, great for people who can keep the entire computer state in their heads at all times (like Linux geeks who hate GUIs), but terrible for all other users. That all said, you're right that Windows doesn't have them. But OS X does, and it also has a much better feature, Expose, which serves the same purpose without destroying usability. 5) No more powerful than Windows or OS X's. From my understanding, significantly less powerful than Windows's Monad CLI. Or, if it is in some way, your point is far too vague to actually bother with. 6) Every OS selects, and every OS pastes. All of them do a better job of it than Linux, too.
I am a professional software developer and I do my software development using vim and make. A very large proportion of the other developers I know do the same.
That's because you surround yourself with people like yourself, duh. Unless you have some kind of evidence other than "my friends are a lot like me", stop saying stupid stuff, please.
There is no one thing - it's lots of stuff. I find myself regularly hitting the commandline to do stuff that would just be plain painful in a GUI. For example, bulk operations on a directory of files (photos, for example). And the number of times
Yeah? You can drag-and-drop a file onto a taskbar button in Windows, can you? You can drag-and-drop an application from the dock to the desktop in OS X, can you?
I suspect you are using "works everywhere" to mean "works everywhere I've ever wanted it to work", which is a perfectly valid definition for you personally to use when deciding which operating system to use, but isn't very useful as a means of comparing them in general.
Well, ok, but either way Linux doesn't work.
Could you please give some examples of where this doesn't work in Linux? I don't copy and paste between applications much, but I just tried something I thought seemed quite likely to fail (copying part of an image from GIMP and pasting it into the completely unrelated OpenOffice.org Writer), and it worked perfectly.
The last failure I had was copying a few spreadsheet cells from OpenOffice into a bitmap paint program, I don't remember if it was GIMP or something else. I do remember that it didn't work. I also remember that it worked on my Macintosh SE running System 6.0.8.
That's unfair. Neither OS X nor Windows has feature parity with MacOS circa 1998. (Seriously, Apple, FTFF. This is not funny any more.)
Good point. I actually switched away from Mac after getting pissed at OS X, after 5 versions, STILL not having all the features of OS 9.
Extremely flexible and easy to use don't go hand in hand - you are suggesting replacing the current vast choice in distros with one enormous installer that presents every option anyone might possibly ever want. I'm pretty sure that pretty much every user is going to be put off by an installer with thousands of options (have you tried configuring the Linux kernel? You're talking about an installer like that but worse.)
Wow, are you purposely being dense?
No, I'm proposing having three Linux distro choices: 1) GNOME 2) KDE 3) Other
The people who want crazy flexibility and options would get distro 3, which would have an unusable installer with tons of options. Normal human beings would go for one of the other two options, which are usable out-of-the-box. (In theory at least.)
Ok, so lets say you have Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. all offering support to a single distro. What happens when Red Hat wants the distro they are supporting to work one way and Canonical want it to work in another? Also, how are the vendors going to make their offering stand out from the other vendors?
I dunno, they'll just have to figure it out somehow. It hardly matters as long as Linux users love to mire themselves in the 24,000 distros available.
I believe that Free software (in general) works better than proprietary software.
Not my experience.
I'm also not a fan of the 1984-esque "Free" doublespeak you guys got going... please just say open source.
My experience of closed software is that it is pretty unstable and bugridden by comparison.
Then buy better "closed" software.
I can't say I ever use drag & drop so I can't comment, but copy and paste works just fine under Linux.
Only of text. Try copying images or spreadsheet cells (tabular data), or sound clips, or even video clips. Or parts of a Flash movie, OS X can do that one just fine.
Copy and paste works fine under Linux... for text. And even then, I had problems with formatted text-- in my experience, Linux applications tended to lose the formatting. For virtually any other type of data, it fails miserably.
This works both ways - I'm sure you can point at a bunch of features that Windows had in 1998 and Linux still doesn't have, but I can point at a whole load of features I have used on a daily basis in Linux since before 1998 which Windows still doesn't do.
I'll take you up on that. Name one.
But I also recognise that whilst the GUI is good for some stuff, the commandline is good for other stuff.
Stuff only something like 0.01% of the population ever does. Using the CLI as a basis for promoting an OS to the general public is ridiculous. The CLI is good for tasks like, "show me every file created between March and November that has a 'g' in the second paragraph." Which is great if you do that every day... nobody I know does. Or maybe editing a config file that you do, at most, once every 3 years when you buy a new computer. (But even then you could use a GUI editor.)
Even software development now is almost all done in GUI IDEs. What exactly is the task you're doing so regularly that the CLI is so suited for?
Under Linux we have a powerful GUI and a powerful commandline so you get the choice.
A powerful GUI that doesn't support drag&drop? Hah! You don't get to count it as "powerful" until you at least have feature parity with Mac OS X.
Under Windows there's a mediocre GUI and any abysmal commandline so you're stuck using the GUI even where it's completely inappropriate.
Like what? Like I asked above, what task exactly is it you are constantly using the CLI to do? I'm a pretty geeky guy, and I use a CLI maybe once a year, and that's only because I can't VNC into my web host.
I could say the same about the amount of time spent trying to convince Windows to do stuff that it really should do out of the box.
I'm sure you're the same guy who was saying, back in the day, that Windows shouldn't even have a web browser out-of-the-box because it's anti-competitive.
The reason there are lots of distros is because they meet different requirements. These requirements may be technical, ethical, etc. For example, if you want a distro that runs on crappy old hardware, Damn Small Linux is probably quite a good choice. Or if you want a distro that only uses Free software, you could go with Fedora. For long term support, something like CentOS or RHEL, etc.
Yes, but that's retarded. Look, let's say in this world there are three Linux distros: GNOME, KDE, "Other". If you want crappy old hardware, you install "other" and check the "crappy old hardware" box on the extremely flexible installer. If you want long-term support, there's no reason CentOS or RedHat couldn't provide long-term support to the standardized GNOME and KDE distros.
If you care about "Free" software, then you're an irredeemable geek and you should have no say in any software that you expect average normal human beings to use. Because nobody cares.
Choice is good - it allows you to pick the system that works best for you and helps keep innovation going.
Yes, but why not an actual choice that the end-user can understand? A meaningful choice? If you give the end-user 2 distros with GNOME, one of which is "Free" and one of which isn't... are they going to be able to tell the difference? It's just confusing to everyone involved.
"Here, pick between these two. They're both 99.9% identical." "Then why make me pick?"
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
I'm not going to argue with your opinion of Windows' GUI, other than to say it's extremely misguided. But while it may be "abysmal" in your eyes, hey, at least drag&drop and copy&paste work 99% of the time. That's more than any Linux GUI can brag about.
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
No, this is a "Foo doesn't have the features Bar had in 1998, and you want me to switch to Foo... why?" problem. I get it, geeks hate the GUI, they spit on it, and the only reason they even bother to pretend to like it is so they can brag that they have the same stuff Windows and OS X have.
I haven't been forced to choose a desktop environment for many many years - boot up and there's Gnome. If you want to change it you can, but you have to go out of your way to do so.
Then why bother with more than one distro with GNOME?
No, it really doesn't - by artificially restricting what desktop environment can be used you make it so that people can't configure their systems to behave how they want. Sure, lots of people don't need this choice but I don't see that as any reason to take it away from those who do.
People who want to can install the "Other" distro and select all the goodies they want from the nice flexible installer.
So you get paid to play Guitar Hero 3?
No, but if I spend 3 hours playing GH3 I feel a lot better about myself than if I spent 3 hours swearing at a Linux distro that lied to me about what hardware it supports.
Have you tried copy/paste to the default console, or using search in command-line history? To me it's Windows that doesn't do the basics right. Who cares about drag-and-drop, that's a silly crutch;-)
Yeah, but that's a matter of you learning the Windows CLI. The Windows CLI is technically capable of everything the Linux CLI is... maybe it's a bit more awkward, maybe you need more batch files than you like, but it's technically capable of it. The Linux GUI, however, is not technically capable of everything the Windows/OS X GUI is... that's a huge problem. People (you know, the normal type of people, not the hard-core Unix geeks like yourself) won't use a GUI if it's not at least as good as the one they're switching from.
The bottom line is you can't expect Linux to reproduce your Windows experience. You have to meet somewhere in the middle. In the process you learn something that might help you make your life easier.
Considering virtually everything I do with my computer is reliant on the GUI, and Linux's GUI doesn't have the features of Windows' or OS X's (or the usability for that matter), I very much doubt it can do anything to make my life easier. Of course that's a moot point, since I've yet to have a Linux distribution even work.
With your Windows-only experience (or perhaps OS/X + Windows, you do mention and iBook), you are stuck in a local optimum of productivity. It takes pains to leave it but there maybe a more global optimum for you in the OS space.
I'm not talking about what I'm used to, I'm talking about minimum functionality. Windows and OS X may be very different, but both have drag&drop that works everywhere, Linux doesn't. Windows and OS X might be hard to switch from, but both still have working copy&paste. (And before some geek tries to correct me, copy&paste between *every* type of data and *every* application-- not just text!)
I've used both Mac and Windows about equally, and Linux's GUI simply isn't there yet. When you have feature parity with Mac OS circa 1998, give me a call... and I mean 100% feature parity.
I take your point about supported hardware though. In general unsupported hardware is due to the manufacturer's unwillingness to disclose driver issues, but not always. In your case the SB should have worked.
Should've, would've, could've. If Linux can't use the hardware, it shouldn't be on the "supported" list. That all I'm asking for, not to be lied to.
There's very little difference between Office 2000, XP, and 2003. Except that 2003 has some corporate features you'd never use at home (for instance, extensive Sharepoint support.)
But you should try Office 2007. Microsoft went back to the drawing board and came up with a new interface from scratch after they realized that most of their requested features were features Office already had, people just couldn't locate them in the menus. I don't know if you'll think it's better, but I quite like it...
And I really like the thought of a major software maker actually working to improve the usability of their product (even if it doesn't work out, at least they tried... that's more than, say, Adobe's ever done.)
I can't tell you how many IT people claim to have "tried linux and it is too experimental/incomplete/unstable/whatever". Then, I ask them a little more about their experience and find that they tried the wrong distro,
Which one is the "right" distro? How is anybody supposed to be able to figure out which one is the "right" distro without dedicating a third of their life for two months trying them all?
I personally don't even get why there are more than three distros: KDE, GNOME and "other/roll your own". What's the point of 26 distros, all of which use GNOME as a desktop environment, when all you end up seeing is GNOME?
three versions ago. In the OSS world, 6 months is a long time. If you haven't tried the recommended beginner linux distro at the version that has been released within the last 6 months, you shouldn't be asserting that modern linux distros are not mature.
There's two problems here:
1) Once you make a bad impression, people give up on the software. I'm not going to try Linux again. I gave it three chances: a) Redhat 6 said it supported my SoundBlaster 128; it didn't work. b) Ubuntu (I don't remember which) said it supported my Hauppauge WinPVR 150 video capture card using the IVTV driver; it didn't. c) A newer Ubuntu claimed to be compatible with 14" G4 iBooks; it wasn't. (Notably, it didn't support sleep mode, and it didn't support the wireless.)
That's it. I've given it three tries, all based on the gushing praise of Linux-using friends, and each time something went wrong. I'm done.
2) It's extremely upsetting to use a "modern" OS, and have stuff that worked fine in Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.0 not work in Linux. It's like going back in time... the real problem is that Linux developers are playing catch-up with Windows and Macintosh by adding things like 3D accelerated graphics, when the old fashioned basics (like universal drag&drop support) never get done.
Yes, there's the possibility that that work got done in the 6 months since someone used the "old" distro, but it's pretty unlikely, especially considering it hasn't gotten done in the 7 *years* or so Linux users have been calling it a valid desktop OS choice. In this circumstance, it doesn't matter how old or new the distro is, I can guarantee drag&drop won't work as well today as it did in Windows or Macintosh in 1998.
You wouldn't give an assessment of Vista based on your experiences with Windows 2000 would you?
Why not? People on Slashdot do it all the time.:)
Finally, are you really complaining about having to choose between desktop managers?
He did make a very good point. Do Linux distributions actually expect users to try each desktop manager for a week and then choose the "best" one for each person? Even Ubuntu (the easy one) is available in both flavors... why?
For "normal" OSes, the established desktop ones, the desktop environment is part of the OS. Doesn't that just make much more sense? Like I said above, there only really needs to be 3 actual Linux distros, since 99% of the time the users will interact with nothing but the desktop environment anyway.
Better yet, learn the current state of linux. From what I hear, it is pretty cheap to try it out.
Time = money. The time I waste trying Linux I could instead spend doing freelance work and making some cha-ching. Or, hell, just playing Guitar Hero 3 and having fun.
You're freaking kidding me. You're lambasting Heroes for plot holes, then saying that the quintessential "make shit up that makes absolutely no sense, and refrain from explaining it because we sure as hell don't know what's going on either" show meets your standards for good writing? That's my mindless entertainment; I like watching it just to see what random changes occur to the plot and characters. They have built themselves the nice out that since pretty much everything is built around lies and deception, they can always change the explanation whenever they want. maybe that's how they out-do the Heroes writers -- realizing that internal consistency is only an obstacle if you reveal the rules.
First of all, nobody's saying Lost is necessarily a great show, it's just better-written than Heroes. I think that would be obvious to any neutral observer... Lost episodes don't (typically) waste half their time with filler subplots, Lost characters are actually likeable and generally don't do anything utterly, bone-headedly stupid. (It helps that the main character doesn't constantly whine.) Lost characters don't mysteriously disappear from one location then appear a day later in another, literally on the opposite side of the world, with no explanation or motivation. Lost doesn't pull nearly as many punches as Heroes-- characters, likeable characters, actually die during the course of the series. And when I watched season 1 of Lost, I went back to watch season 2... I'm sure as hell not going to watch season 2 of Heroes.
Look, all I know is that I spent half the episodes yelling at the screen: "You stupid idiot!" or wondering why the editors decided not to show that crucial plot point (how *did* Mohinder get back to New York, for example?) or being obviously aware that half the episode was nothing but filler!... that is bad writing. The saddest part is that this bad 24 or whatever episode season probably could have been a cleanly-written 13 episode season, but oh well. Hell, even the scene where Sylar goes to see his mom. WTF was that about, other than filler?
Also it didn't help that virtually none of the characters are likeable in any way. Mohinder was the only normal guy in the entire show who wasn't a whiner, or using his powers to be an asshole, or murdering people, etc. And then I got pissed at him when he refused to do the OBVIOUS ACTION anybody would have done in his place and shoot Sylar... after that, I have to say the most likeable character was probably Sylar himself, because at least he kills some of the other unlikeable characters.
Oh, and the BS voiceovers at the beginning of each episode about some mental retard's idea of evolution was a nice touch of annoying they just had to add. Sorry, I'm a horrible bitter person, but I hate it when a half-dozen people insist I watch this great new show, and the show is crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript's a fine language, it's the DOM API that sucks ass.
That's some crazy logic right there. So it's not enough to be accomplished in a single field, unless that field gets memorable press coverage?
Also, if you ARE a gamer and you haven't heard of at least Hexic HD, you should be ashamed of yourself. It's only the launch freebie for the Xbox 360.
More importantly, creating Tetris makes him a one hit wonder puzzle inventor while saying almost nothing regarding his skills in programming, IT, computer science or economics.
Wait a second, I don't know jack about programming, IT, computer science, or economics... but I know video games, and he's not just a one-hit wonder. He also designed Pandora's Box and Hexic HD.
This Microsoft thing sounds interesting, but I think that it's overstating the value of online ads. Typically, online ads aren't for branding... they are attempts at guessing what you want based on context (search) or by tricking you to click.
1) A lot of online advertising is for branding. Look at the automotive companies that advertise online, for example... they don't honestly expect people to click the ad and immediately buy a car.
2) The real point to all of this is this one little nugget: Online ads can be tracked.
With traditional media, you have no freakin' clue. You have no idea how many saw the ad, how many converted after seeing the ad, no clue whatsoever... you can find the ratings of the TV show, perhaps, but those ratings are calculated by dubious methods (200 families representing entire states!?), and they're only for the show, not for the ads. (Tivo/other DVR makers could make major in-roads here, as you can imagine.)
Since online ads have *some* form of concrete data behind them, schemes like this can really help advertisers and publishers optimize their spend in ways traditional advertising never could. Maybe they're going a little crazy, but we're talking about an industry that's ran on no data besides opinion surveys for as long as its existed... actual data is a good thing.
It doesn't hurt that this will undoubtedly lower Google's standing.
Third party cookies, same way everybody else does it. The data processing is all done on their back-end, which I can imagine is some impressively huge set of servers... that's really what's holding back this ROI calculation, not the concept of it, but the fact that you have to shovel through terabytes of data going back weeks for each conversion to actually pull it off.
Microsoft got this capability, BTW, from their recent Aquantive acquisition. Google probably got some similar capability from DoubleClick, but they're not going to implement it without kicking and screaming from their clients-- this model makes Google look much worse than the old model, as you can imagine.
(Sure, the ad view convinced me to buy the Panasonic TV, but how do I find where to buy it? Google. Right now, Google gets 100% of the credit, even if they didn't serve any banners or do anything but watch a couple of search terms. With the new model, Google's contribution to conversions will go way down.)
FYI, if someone does find an easy way to get iTunes Music into Zune, I'd appreciate it. I recently got an 80gb Zune as a gift, but until I can transfer my music over, I have to carry both the iPod and Zune around and it's kind of annoying.
Yeah, but it's not something that helps your case when you're in court. It's stupid and petty, perhaps, but people judge you instinctually on how you conduct yourself, and if he doesn't have the self-control to stop running his mouth and let other people's opinions be heard, that might signal to the jury that he also lacked self-control when it came to dealings with his wife.
Especially since you can be sure that his lawyer has advised him of this exact fact, and he still is talking in court despite that.
Like what? Yahoo Auctions doesn't exist in the States anymore, what other reasonably-sized competitors are there?
I'm pretty sure newspaper ads and garage sales didn't instantly disappear the moment eBay was founded, for one. There's also this fairly popular site called, oh what is it, some kind of river... oh yeah Amazon.com! Have you heard of it? And of course some guy named Craig has a list online you can use for stuff like this.
You're seriously telling me you spent more than 5 microseconds thinking about this problem and didn't come up with a single alternative to eBay?
In that case, never mind. It's much more likely that you executed a denial of service attack on your *own* machine than on eBay. I mean, you do know that Firefox has an upper limit on how many connections it will actually open at the same time, right? (Go to about:config and filter for "connect.") All other connections are just placed in a queue until Firefox has an available slot. The slowdown was entirely on your own machine and LAN.
It is possible that eBay does some kind of distributed balancing based on IP or MAC, in which case he could, *may*be, have slowed one particular eBay server that happened to be assigned to his IP or MAC. But your scenario is much more likely... did he verify it was "DOSed" with a neutral third party on a different ISP?
It's eBay's site, it's eBay's rules. If you don't like them, don't use eBay-- there are plenty of auction sites out there.
Still waiting for that technical reason you don't want it...
More dollar $ign$! MORE!!
Windows's command line is a complete joke by comparison. The ability to hack up a quick 1-line script with a pipeline of commands to do a job is not something to be sniffed at.
You can do that in Windows' CLI, both the old one and the new Monad one. All you've demonstrated is that you have no clue what you're talking about-- you can't decree Windows' CLI inferior simply because you don't know how to use it.
It does have a CLI, but one so poor that it may as well not be there at all.
How can I trust anything you say about the Windows CLI? You didn't even know you could string commands together.
As I said, there is no single task - it's lots and lots of stuff that it is useful for.
Lots and lots of "stuff"... but you can't name a single one.
It has to do with the fact that the GUI isn't always the most appropriate tool for the job.
Tell me what "the job" is, and I might be able to address this.
If Apple shipped a POS web browser, their market share is low enough that web sites would probably just not bother to jump through the hoops required to support it and Apple users would *have* to choose a better browser. But when MS do it, everyone has to support it because they can't afford to lose 90-odd% of their customers.
You didn't get to the part where you explain to me how that's a bad thing.
when you switch OS then you're going to face pain which ever way you go while you learn to live without those features and use the new features you have instead.
I don't "face pain" when I "switch" from OS X to Windows (or, use both simultaneously, the whole 'switch' terminology is pretty stupid-- like you can only own one computer!). I do experience pain each and every time I try out Linux.
Microsoft's have been free for ages, as well. Given, it didn't come with a IDE, but the SDK and compiler have been freely downloadable since Windows 2000 was brand-new, IIRC. And of course they have had freely available versions of all their .net languages for some time.
Whereupon they are required to trawl through thousands of options - that's enough to put anyone off. I for one prefer to pick a distro that suits my purposes rather than hand-configure everything. But then, I'm not a Gentoo user. :)
Are you really this stupid, or are you just trying to make me angry? It's working.
If you don't want to wade through a thousand options, you'd choose either KDE or GNOME. If you DO want the goofy custom crap, like installing it on an ancient computer, or using some strange hardware, only then would you use the "Other" option and have to trawl through options-- but you're an advanced user, so you wouldn't mind that.
No, you are suggesting an idea that appears to be unworkable and then refusing to explain how to make it workable.
You're criticizing the plan with moronic examples that show you didn't spend more than a millisecond even thinking about it. Maybe it is unworkable, and I'd like an *actual* example why, but your idiotic examples? Don't waste my time.
Open source and Free are not the same thing - Free implies open source but the converse is not true. There are a lot of open source licences which are not Free.
That's exactly the type of 1984 doublespeak bullshit I don't want to see. The only purpose is to confuse the hell out of people to make it sound more important than it actually is.
So because only 0.01% (which I seriously think is a massive underestimate) of the population does something we shouldn't even bother to provide that feature?
Of course not, stop being stupid. But you shouldn't expend any effort making it easy/usable when there's a lot of work to be done on the features that 99.99% of the people use.
Why? Most of the time there is a piece of Free software that does the job better.
Ok, let's say I run a hospital pharmacy. Name an open source pharmacy management/drug interaction program, then explain to me how it's better than the closed source version.
* Sloppy focus (and yes, I know you can turn it on in Windows with TweakUI but it breaks far too much stuff)
* The ability to use partially obscured windows without having to raise them
* Window shading
* Virtual desktops
* Powerful commandline
* Select/Paste
And there are some more recent things too, such as Compiz's Scale and Desktop Cube plugins which I find very useful.
1) I don't know what "sloppy focus" is.
2) So OS X and Windows have a more consistent layer model and don't let you break it for trivial purposes like Linux does, ok.
3) I don't know what "window shading" is.
4) Virtual desktops are confusing and difficult from a usability standpoint, and completely break the entire desktop model. It's an anti-feature, great for people who can keep the entire computer state in their heads at all times (like Linux geeks who hate GUIs), but terrible for all other users. That all said, you're right that Windows doesn't have them. But OS X does, and it also has a much better feature, Expose, which serves the same purpose without destroying usability.
5) No more powerful than Windows or OS X's. From my understanding, significantly less powerful than Windows's Monad CLI. Or, if it is in some way, your point is far too vague to actually bother with.
6) Every OS selects, and every OS pastes. All of them do a better job of it than Linux, too.
I am a professional software developer and I do my software development using vim and make. A very large proportion of the other developers I know do the same.
That's because you surround yourself with people like yourself, duh. Unless you have some kind of evidence other than "my friends are a lot like me", stop saying stupid stuff, please.
There is no one thing - it's lots of stuff. I find myself regularly hitting the commandline to do stuff that would just be plain painful in a GUI. For example, bulk operations on a directory of files (photos, for example). And the number of times
Yeah? You can drag-and-drop a file onto a taskbar button in Windows, can you? You can drag-and-drop an application from the dock to the desktop in OS X, can you?
I suspect you are using "works everywhere" to mean "works everywhere I've ever wanted it to work", which is a perfectly valid definition for you personally to use when deciding which operating system to use, but isn't very useful as a means of comparing them in general.
Well, ok, but either way Linux doesn't work.
Could you please give some examples of where this doesn't work in Linux? I don't copy and paste between applications much, but I just tried something I thought seemed quite likely to fail (copying part of an image from GIMP and pasting it into the completely unrelated OpenOffice.org Writer), and it worked perfectly.
The last failure I had was copying a few spreadsheet cells from OpenOffice into a bitmap paint program, I don't remember if it was GIMP or something else. I do remember that it didn't work. I also remember that it worked on my Macintosh SE running System 6.0.8.
That's unfair. Neither OS X nor Windows has feature parity with MacOS circa 1998. (Seriously, Apple, FTFF. This is not funny any more.)
Good point. I actually switched away from Mac after getting pissed at OS X, after 5 versions, STILL not having all the features of OS 9.
Extremely flexible and easy to use don't go hand in hand - you are suggesting replacing the current vast choice in distros with one enormous installer that presents every option anyone might possibly ever want. I'm pretty sure that pretty much every user is going to be put off by an installer with thousands of options (have you tried configuring the Linux kernel? You're talking about an installer like that but worse.)
Wow, are you purposely being dense?
No, I'm proposing having three Linux distro choices:
1) GNOME
2) KDE
3) Other
The people who want crazy flexibility and options would get distro 3, which would have an unusable installer with tons of options. Normal human beings would go for one of the other two options, which are usable out-of-the-box. (In theory at least.)
Ok, so lets say you have Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, etc. all offering support to a single distro. What happens when Red Hat wants the distro they are supporting to work one way and Canonical want it to work in another? Also, how are the vendors going to make their offering stand out from the other vendors?
I dunno, they'll just have to figure it out somehow. It hardly matters as long as Linux users love to mire themselves in the 24,000 distros available.
I believe that Free software (in general) works better than proprietary software.
Not my experience.
I'm also not a fan of the 1984-esque "Free" doublespeak you guys got going... please just say open source.
My experience of closed software is that it is pretty unstable and bugridden by comparison.
Then buy better "closed" software.
I can't say I ever use drag & drop so I can't comment, but copy and paste works just fine under Linux.
Only of text. Try copying images or spreadsheet cells (tabular data), or sound clips, or even video clips. Or parts of a Flash movie, OS X can do that one just fine.
Copy and paste works fine under Linux... for text. And even then, I had problems with formatted text-- in my experience, Linux applications tended to lose the formatting. For virtually any other type of data, it fails miserably.
This works both ways - I'm sure you can point at a bunch of features that Windows had in 1998 and Linux still doesn't have, but I can point at a whole load of features I have used on a daily basis in Linux since before 1998 which Windows still doesn't do.
I'll take you up on that. Name one.
But I also recognise that whilst the GUI is good for some stuff, the commandline is good for other stuff.
Stuff only something like 0.01% of the population ever does. Using the CLI as a basis for promoting an OS to the general public is ridiculous. The CLI is good for tasks like, "show me every file created between March and November that has a 'g' in the second paragraph." Which is great if you do that every day... nobody I know does. Or maybe editing a config file that you do, at most, once every 3 years when you buy a new computer. (But even then you could use a GUI editor.)
Even software development now is almost all done in GUI IDEs. What exactly is the task you're doing so regularly that the CLI is so suited for?
Under Linux we have a powerful GUI and a powerful commandline so you get the choice.
A powerful GUI that doesn't support drag&drop? Hah! You don't get to count it as "powerful" until you at least have feature parity with Mac OS X.
Under Windows there's a mediocre GUI and any abysmal commandline so you're stuck using the GUI even where it's completely inappropriate.
Like what? Like I asked above, what task exactly is it you are constantly using the CLI to do? I'm a pretty geeky guy, and I use a CLI maybe once a year, and that's only because I can't VNC into my web host.
I could say the same about the amount of time spent trying to convince Windows to do stuff that it really should do out of the box.
I'm sure you're the same guy who was saying, back in the day, that Windows shouldn't even have a web browser out-of-the-box because it's anti-competitive.
The reason there are lots of distros is because they meet different requirements. These requirements may be technical, ethical, etc. For example, if you want a distro that runs on crappy old hardware, Damn Small Linux is probably quite a good choice. Or if you want a distro that only uses Free software, you could go with Fedora. For long term support, something like CentOS or RHEL, etc.
Yes, but that's retarded. Look, let's say in this world there are three Linux distros: GNOME, KDE, "Other". If you want crappy old hardware, you install "other" and check the "crappy old hardware" box on the extremely flexible installer. If you want long-term support, there's no reason CentOS or RedHat couldn't provide long-term support to the standardized GNOME and KDE distros.
If you care about "Free" software, then you're an irredeemable geek and you should have no say in any software that you expect average normal human beings to use. Because nobody cares.
Choice is good - it allows you to pick the system that works best for you and helps keep innovation going.
Yes, but why not an actual choice that the end-user can understand? A meaningful choice? If you give the end-user 2 distros with GNOME, one of which is "Free" and one of which isn't... are they going to be able to tell the difference? It's just confusing to everyone involved.
"Here, pick between these two. They're both 99.9% identical."
"Then why make me pick?"
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
I'm not going to argue with your opinion of Windows' GUI, other than to say it's extremely misguided. But while it may be "abysmal" in your eyes, hey, at least drag&drop and copy&paste work 99% of the time. That's more than any Linux GUI can brag about.
This isn't a "Foo is better than Bar" problem, it's a "Foo is different to Bar" problem. Short of making Linux work exactly like Windows (which I seriously hope never happens because Windows's UI is *abysmal*) I can't see that there is a solution to this.
No, this is a "Foo doesn't have the features Bar had in 1998, and you want me to switch to Foo... why?" problem. I get it, geeks hate the GUI, they spit on it, and the only reason they even bother to pretend to like it is so they can brag that they have the same stuff Windows and OS X have.
I haven't been forced to choose a desktop environment for many many years - boot up and there's Gnome. If you want to change it you can, but you have to go out of your way to do so.
Then why bother with more than one distro with GNOME?
No, it really doesn't - by artificially restricting what desktop environment can be used you make it so that people can't configure their systems to behave how they want. Sure, lots of people don't need this choice but I don't see that as any reason to take it away from those who do.
People who want to can install the "Other" distro and select all the goodies they want from the nice flexible installer.
So you get paid to play Guitar Hero 3?
No, but if I spend 3 hours playing GH3 I feel a lot better about myself than if I spent 3 hours swearing at a Linux distro that lied to me about what hardware it supports.
Have you tried copy/paste to the default console, or using search in command-line history? To me it's Windows that doesn't do the basics right. Who cares about drag-and-drop, that's a silly crutch ;-)
Yeah, but that's a matter of you learning the Windows CLI. The Windows CLI is technically capable of everything the Linux CLI is... maybe it's a bit more awkward, maybe you need more batch files than you like, but it's technically capable of it. The Linux GUI, however, is not technically capable of everything the Windows/OS X GUI is... that's a huge problem. People (you know, the normal type of people, not the hard-core Unix geeks like yourself) won't use a GUI if it's not at least as good as the one they're switching from.
The bottom line is you can't expect Linux to reproduce your Windows experience. You have to meet somewhere in the middle. In the process you learn something that might help you make your life easier.
Considering virtually everything I do with my computer is reliant on the GUI, and Linux's GUI doesn't have the features of Windows' or OS X's (or the usability for that matter), I very much doubt it can do anything to make my life easier. Of course that's a moot point, since I've yet to have a Linux distribution even work.
With your Windows-only experience (or perhaps OS/X + Windows, you do mention and iBook), you are stuck in a local optimum of productivity. It takes pains to leave it but there maybe a more global optimum for you in the OS space.
I'm not talking about what I'm used to, I'm talking about minimum functionality. Windows and OS X may be very different, but both have drag&drop that works everywhere, Linux doesn't. Windows and OS X might be hard to switch from, but both still have working copy&paste. (And before some geek tries to correct me, copy&paste between *every* type of data and *every* application-- not just text!)
I've used both Mac and Windows about equally, and Linux's GUI simply isn't there yet. When you have feature parity with Mac OS circa 1998, give me a call... and I mean 100% feature parity.
I take your point about supported hardware though. In general unsupported hardware is due to the manufacturer's unwillingness to disclose driver issues, but not always. In your case the SB should have worked.
Should've, would've, could've. If Linux can't use the hardware, it shouldn't be on the "supported" list. That all I'm asking for, not to be lied to.
There's very little difference between Office 2000, XP, and 2003. Except that 2003 has some corporate features you'd never use at home (for instance, extensive Sharepoint support.)
But you should try Office 2007. Microsoft went back to the drawing board and came up with a new interface from scratch after they realized that most of their requested features were features Office already had, people just couldn't locate them in the menus. I don't know if you'll think it's better, but I quite like it...
And I really like the thought of a major software maker actually working to improve the usability of their product (even if it doesn't work out, at least they tried... that's more than, say, Adobe's ever done.)
I can't tell you how many IT people claim to have "tried linux and it is too experimental/incomplete/unstable/whatever". Then, I ask them a little more about their experience and find that they tried the wrong distro,
:)
Which one is the "right" distro? How is anybody supposed to be able to figure out which one is the "right" distro without dedicating a third of their life for two months trying them all?
I personally don't even get why there are more than three distros: KDE, GNOME and "other/roll your own". What's the point of 26 distros, all of which use GNOME as a desktop environment, when all you end up seeing is GNOME?
three versions ago. In the OSS world, 6 months is a long time. If you haven't tried the recommended beginner linux distro at the version that has been released within the last 6 months, you shouldn't be asserting that modern linux distros are not mature.
There's two problems here:
1) Once you make a bad impression, people give up on the software. I'm not going to try Linux again. I gave it three chances:
a) Redhat 6 said it supported my SoundBlaster 128; it didn't work.
b) Ubuntu (I don't remember which) said it supported my Hauppauge WinPVR 150 video capture card using the IVTV driver; it didn't.
c) A newer Ubuntu claimed to be compatible with 14" G4 iBooks; it wasn't. (Notably, it didn't support sleep mode, and it didn't support the wireless.)
That's it. I've given it three tries, all based on the gushing praise of Linux-using friends, and each time something went wrong. I'm done.
2) It's extremely upsetting to use a "modern" OS, and have stuff that worked fine in Windows 95 and Mac OS 7.0 not work in Linux. It's like going back in time... the real problem is that Linux developers are playing catch-up with Windows and Macintosh by adding things like 3D accelerated graphics, when the old fashioned basics (like universal drag&drop support) never get done.
Yes, there's the possibility that that work got done in the 6 months since someone used the "old" distro, but it's pretty unlikely, especially considering it hasn't gotten done in the 7 *years* or so Linux users have been calling it a valid desktop OS choice. In this circumstance, it doesn't matter how old or new the distro is, I can guarantee drag&drop won't work as well today as it did in Windows or Macintosh in 1998.
You wouldn't give an assessment of Vista based on your experiences with Windows 2000 would you?
Why not? People on Slashdot do it all the time.
Finally, are you really complaining about having to choose between desktop managers?
He did make a very good point. Do Linux distributions actually expect users to try each desktop manager for a week and then choose the "best" one for each person? Even Ubuntu (the easy one) is available in both flavors... why?
For "normal" OSes, the established desktop ones, the desktop environment is part of the OS. Doesn't that just make much more sense? Like I said above, there only really needs to be 3 actual Linux distros, since 99% of the time the users will interact with nothing but the desktop environment anyway.
Better yet, learn the current state of linux. From what I hear, it is pretty cheap to try it out.
Time = money. The time I waste trying Linux I could instead spend doing freelance work and making some cha-ching. Or, hell, just playing Guitar Hero 3 and having fun.
You're freaking kidding me. You're lambasting Heroes for plot holes, then saying that the quintessential "make shit up that makes absolutely no sense, and refrain from explaining it because we sure as hell don't know what's going on either" show meets your standards for good writing? That's my mindless entertainment; I like watching it just to see what random changes occur to the plot and characters. They have built themselves the nice out that since pretty much everything is built around lies and deception, they can always change the explanation whenever they want. maybe that's how they out-do the Heroes writers -- realizing that internal consistency is only an obstacle if you reveal the rules.
First of all, nobody's saying Lost is necessarily a great show, it's just better-written than Heroes. I think that would be obvious to any neutral observer... Lost episodes don't (typically) waste half their time with filler subplots, Lost characters are actually likeable and generally don't do anything utterly, bone-headedly stupid. (It helps that the main character doesn't constantly whine.) Lost characters don't mysteriously disappear from one location then appear a day later in another, literally on the opposite side of the world, with no explanation or motivation. Lost doesn't pull nearly as many punches as Heroes-- characters, likeable characters, actually die during the course of the series. And when I watched season 1 of Lost, I went back to watch season 2... I'm sure as hell not going to watch season 2 of Heroes.
Brilliant post, thank you.
I dunno, he took a cab or rented a car?
He took a cab from India to NYC? Wow, that's a fare.
I'm also wondering why you slogged through the whole thing if you hated it so much...
Because I paid for the DVDs, like a sucker, because a lot of my friends said it was a great show.
Look, all I know is that I spent half the episodes yelling at the screen: "You stupid idiot!" or wondering why the editors decided not to show that crucial plot point (how *did* Mohinder get back to New York, for example?) or being obviously aware that half the episode was nothing but filler! ... that is bad writing. The saddest part is that this bad 24 or whatever episode season probably could have been a cleanly-written 13 episode season, but oh well. Hell, even the scene where Sylar goes to see his mom. WTF was that about, other than filler?
Also it didn't help that virtually none of the characters are likeable in any way. Mohinder was the only normal guy in the entire show who wasn't a whiner, or using his powers to be an asshole, or murdering people, etc. And then I got pissed at him when he refused to do the OBVIOUS ACTION anybody would have done in his place and shoot Sylar... after that, I have to say the most likeable character was probably Sylar himself, because at least he kills some of the other unlikeable characters.
Oh, and the BS voiceovers at the beginning of each episode about some mental retard's idea of evolution was a nice touch of annoying they just had to add. Sorry, I'm a horrible bitter person, but I hate it when a half-dozen people insist I watch this great new show, and the show is crap.