BS. Dell Precision cases are brilliantly designed so that they are quieter than the beige box while also being more easily-serviced. No screwdriver required to do anything. The case has a latch and opens clam-shell style, the drives are all on rails, when the case is open everything can be reached easily and nothing's crammed so close to something else that you cut your fingers or risk damaging something. Why get out my screwdriver if I'm just quickly adding a PCI card?
In addition, Dell designs air-flows in their cases so they don't become big echo-chambers for noise like beige box cases usually are.
I also think Apple does a good job designing cases, although installing two HDs in a G5 is a little awkward.
the vast majority of computer users just want the system to work and will put up with all sorts of security and performance issues to get that level of "convenience".
You consider a computer that works a convenience? Wow, Linux users have LOW standards.
It's a "benefit of the doubt" thing. Did they pull the cord specifically to avoid a loss, or did they genuinely have a network problem or power outage causing them to lose the connection? Most games, assuming the player is honest, treat the disconnect as the latter.
It's pretty hard to create a software solution to "people are jerks" though. I prefer games giving the benefit of the doubt, but it's a huge pain for honest players sometimes.
I would hardly call offering more features for certain video games "forcing" people into doing anything.
In fact, if it involves video games, there's no "forcing" involved. People choose to play video games. It's not like you need Vista to (say) order life-saving medicines or something.
Xbox 360 ships with Hexic HD on the HD. Technically, it ships on the HD, because stand-alone HDs have Hexic HD pre-installed on them also. But either way, I was pleasantly surprised, I wasn't expecting.
I don't know about PS3.
Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with the topic at hand...
For instance, voice across the entire system (not just in-game chat) without having to worry whether the person is using TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or Skype.
A single username across the entire system, meaning you can be sure the "HappyGodzilla" you play in Halo 3 is the same "HappyGodzilla" you got teamed up with in Shadowrun. This also greatly assists with getting rid of griefers and jerks.
I'm not necessarily saying it's worth $50, but to say that Xbox Live offers nothing is disingenuous if not outright wrong.
You didn't. As you said yourself, you did a "geek fix" and it worked. But it's kind of hypocritical to bash Linux for not running on any random hardware out there while using hardware specifically designed to run with a specific OS.
I didn't do a "geek fix". I couldn't. The fix required internet access, and I don't have internet access with no wi-fi. I just used Ubuntu for a couple days with no internet connection, until it became apparent that 95% of the stuff I do with my laptop requires an internet connection.
Secondly, Ubuntu *claims* to work on iBooks. It doesn't.
When was that, anyway? I just did it with oocalc and the Gimp...
About a year ago, it didn't work for me in Fedora. I was using a different graphics app, but I can't remember the name of it now.
So pick a wireless chipset that does work. I gave you a link to a bunch. And it's not that hard. I didn't do any special searching and I have three different ones that work. There are legal issues with video cards, too. But it's not like you appear to be implying, that there aren't any working options.
A. I shouldn't have to BUY hardware to get an OS working-- especially an OS that people constantly tell me is the greatest thing since sliced bread!
B. The iBook only takes one kind of wireless card, because of it's under-the-keyboard PCMCIA slot and special antenna plug. Which means to buy a different wireless chipset, I'd need to buy an entire new LAPTOP! No thanks.
If people are going to sell me on Linux, they should at least make sure Linux works first. That's all I'm saying.
And Doom isn't even that great a choice for early FPS games. If you're looking for innovative games, Marathon is much better. It had 8-player LAN play (complete with voice chat and several different game modes), friendly critters, a great well-developed story, the ability to look up and down, and you didn't straddle the grenade launcher in-between your legs. Doom came out in late-1993, and Marathon came out a year later in 1994 but is a vastly superior game. (For reference, Quake I came out in 1996.) Marathon is 2.5D with a hack so that you can look up and down.
Linux could even better... but the competition isn't all that impressive.
Last I used Linux, you couldn't copy a set of cells from a spreadsheet into a graphics program and see a bitmap of the cells. That's not an "impressive" feat, that's something Mac OS did in 1984 and Windows did in Windows 3.1 (whenever that came out... 92?) Linux, as of about a year ago, can't do it. If you think that's acceptable, you must have very low quality standards.
There was also no program to do Gantt charts. Whenever I asked about one, Linux users told me I didn't actually need to make Gantt charts and people who do are idiots, etc.
And I assert that, in actual practice, it is. My Linux systems have been easier to install, maintain, and debug than my Windows systems for several years now, along with being less expensive and dramatically more secure.
As long as you don't care about copy and paste working correctly. I happen to.
And that is a legal problem, not a technical one!
Who cares? It's a problem, whether it's legal, technical, or anything else. I'd love to try Linux, in fact I did for a bit with no internet, but I can't give it a fair trial because Linux doesn't support my laptop. Period.
Yet another "we don't need to fix Linux because Windows is already just as bad!" argument.
If you want Linux accepted in the mainstream, it needs to be *better* than Windows or OS X. Sure, you sometimes have to do "geek fixes" on Windows, the difference is that in Linux, my wireless card doesn't work *at all* without the "geek fix." (And note that the "geek fix" requires internet access, which requires wireless, but the wireless doesn't work. Catch-22 is a popular book among Linux developers, huh?) And this is on a supported laptop-- or at least as much as Ubuntu supports anything.
Dell makes sure that wireless card works when the computer is shipped out. That's a ton more QA than any Linux distro does right now, even for computers that the distro "supports." If I upgrade an existing Dell laptop with wireless to Vista, there's a 95% chance the wireless will work with no action on my part. Again, no Linux can promise that. Of course Windows isn't perfect, but through Microsoft and Dell's efforts, it's a lot better.
And no, for what it's worth I don't end up doing tech support for friends and relatives. My relatives all use Macintosh, and my friends are all good enough with computers that they don't ask me for help.
You can't open Hosts with a graphical text editor because it requires Root. You can if you activate the Root account first, but doing so is just as complex as editing Hosts with a command-line editor, so you don't really gain any headway there.
I love these personal stories that are utterly irrelevant to the story, and yet get modded up.
Sure, *you* think fixing things in Linux is easy... but you also fixed it by editing the Hosts file. Do you know any average computer users (Mac, Windows, or Linux if there are any average users on Linux) that even know what the Hosts file is or how to edit it? An "easy" fix for this crowd would be, say, "I threw iTunes in the trash and then used Apple Software Updater to download a new copy of iTunes." Anything more complicated than that is a geek fix, and is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Then the obligatory part where the advanced computer user who fixes Linux can't fix a simple problem in Windows, despite Windows having as much or more available support. I find it hard to believe that somebody who knows how to edit the Hosts file can't reinstall a scanner driver. I'm not calling you a liar as such, I just find it very very hard to believe.
Also I don't even get the point of this paragraph:
I had a meeting where the guest speaker brought a Power Point presentation. My Windows machine with Office 2000 did not display the presentation properly. The text box appeared all at once instead of bullet by bullet. Switched to the Linux partition and Open Office presented it properly. Later I found the free Power Point viewer from the MS site.
Are you attempting to communicate something, or just relaying a really dull anecdote?
Wow monospace is hard to read. Repost from parent in default font:
The problem from Dell's point of view is touched by the author.
If you go configure the cheapest possible PC you can at Dell's website, you can do it damn cheap y just about any measure.
But they try like heck to upsell you to something, anything, with a decent profit margin. Two of the biggest profit makers, in no special order are printers and cameras. At-home photography is a cash cow. HP isn't anything practically but an *ink* and paper company. Selling you a $500 PC with a $100 printer and $100 camera is a great sale to Dell because that $200 of add-on's is a whole different margin category than the PC. Plus it leads to years of sales opportunitis for ink, batteries, paper, etc.
So, when you say you had to research which printers worked well and which ones did not that should clue you into a big worry. Actually getting software that is the right mix of features/ease of use for a simple needs user is also a major concern. Selling a product which limits upsell potential for high-profit products is a really bad business decision.
I have no problem with Linux whatsoever, but hopefully Dell will think carefully about succumbing to the pressure from a highly selected, highly elite techno-saavy crowd who is probably not representative of the entire set of Dell customers. Selling Linux pre-loaded needs to be done carefully, with carefully crafted expectations. Nothing but nothing can damage the long term prospects of Linux than putting it unsuccessfully into the hands of the mass market. Literally nothing can undo the perception of a product as a cheap "knock off" of something else. It is the kiss of death for a generation or more to a good brand name.
Finally, though there isn't what I would call a great track record with MS, oddly enough, there is a certain stability to Windows in terms of release schedule. Even compared to other commerical OS'es, Windows moves at a glacial development pace. And when a new release happens it's a gigantic bang complete with lots of hype but also some carefully planning. Honestly, with Linux, it is entirely possible that a major or even minor release could have very large implications and Dell could be left holding the bag with it's customers. This could happen with MS, but Dell is a large enough customer that frankly pressure can be applied directly up the chain. A reasonable ancedote goes back a few years to when I used GNUCash everyday. It was nice. I was working off a desktop install that I had compiled mostly from scratch. It seems like suddenly the GNUCash people recommended not compiling yourself, and all the make scripts fell apart in my environment. They posted a message on the site about using a binary packages as the new norm, and here are all the ones we support. I ended up fixing the scripts myself, but that's not the point. Things are better now and I still use it everyday. But look at their FAQ page. Compare to the closest version of that page from MS here. This is a product that costs, essentially, $19 - $60 bucks, depending on the version. This type of difference in overall "polish" gets more and more pronounced all the time. And if it's that bad for Windows v. Linux, imagine how bad it is for OSX vs. Linux.
I like the entirely strange logic with which you blame Linux's usability problems on Windows.
Linux has poor usability because... uh... M$ BLOATWARE! DON'T QUESTION IT!!! They don't know what drivers are! Which somehow has something to do with maintaining computers!
Ironically, Linux is probably even *harder* to set up and maintain for Mac OS users than Windows users, which just might reveal a problem with Linux itself... but since this is Slashdot, I'll just spell "MS" with a dollar sign and call it good. And a Mac OS user is a lot less likely to know what a driver is, if that's at all relevant.
I suppose it would be flamebait on Slashdot to point out that Microsoft does exactly this.
They have a simple shuttle system for employees to move around the campus (and servicing some off-campus business parks, as well), and they give FTEs passes to the local public transit system. Moreover, they've been doing this for longer than Google's even been around. Of course, Microsoft isn't as trendy, so they don't get breathless news stories pretending that it's something new.
Microsoft has a shuttle system that services their entire campus, including some buildings outside of the main campus. Plus they pay for the bus for employees. Same as the Google system, except not as snobby and exclusive.
It also fails to acknowledge that the biggest gap in Apple's product line (between the iMac and Mac Pro) is EXACTLY where most corporations buy their machines. And it's a huge gap... a gap you could drive a Mack truck through.
It gives me the impression that the IRS employee didn't know what the question was. I'd like to see what email was sent to them before judging the returned email.
That doesn't help if Google doesn't have a document detailing their installation, problems they ran in to (and how they solved them), and re-evaluated the business case for using Samba over the alternatives. That's what he's looking for, documentation.
Just saying "well Google uses it!" is a terrible strategy. First it makes it look as if you're out of ideas and just spouting out company names as a last resort, and secondly because saying "Google uses it!" could mean the janitors at Google use it to check off which bathrooms are clean.
Linux is also a huge ecosystem of various distributions and software.
So when you *say* Linux, you can use whichever version suits you at the moment. You can say "Linux (kernel) is the most secure OS ever!" and you can also say, "Linux has a huge variety of productivity software!" That leads to a ton of confusion.
Oh yeah, I forgot the only way to get a bug looked at is to complain about it on Slashdot. In any case, it's already been "looked at"... what it hasn't been is triaged. I'd be happy with a "yes we will fix this," or a "no we won't fix this."
Slashdot Mirror
Wow Linus is a total jackass in his post. I thought he was supposed to be the only Unix figurehead that wasn't a jackass. What's up with that?
BS. Dell Precision cases are brilliantly designed so that they are quieter than the beige box while also being more easily-serviced. No screwdriver required to do anything. The case has a latch and opens clam-shell style, the drives are all on rails, when the case is open everything can be reached easily and nothing's crammed so close to something else that you cut your fingers or risk damaging something. Why get out my screwdriver if I'm just quickly adding a PCI card?
In addition, Dell designs air-flows in their cases so they don't become big echo-chambers for noise like beige box cases usually are.
I also think Apple does a good job designing cases, although installing two HDs in a G5 is a little awkward.
the vast majority of computer users just want the system to work and will put up with all sorts of security and performance issues to get that level of "convenience".
You consider a computer that works a convenience? Wow, Linux users have LOW standards.
It's a "benefit of the doubt" thing. Did they pull the cord specifically to avoid a loss, or did they genuinely have a network problem or power outage causing them to lose the connection? Most games, assuming the player is honest, treat the disconnect as the latter.
It's pretty hard to create a software solution to "people are jerks" though. I prefer games giving the benefit of the doubt, but it's a huge pain for honest players sometimes.
I would hardly call offering more features for certain video games "forcing" people into doing anything.
In fact, if it involves video games, there's no "forcing" involved. People choose to play video games. It's not like you need Vista to (say) order life-saving medicines or something.
Xbox 360 ships with Hexic HD on the HD. Technically, it ships on the HD, because stand-alone HDs have Hexic HD pre-installed on them also. But either way, I was pleasantly surprised, I wasn't expecting.
I don't know about PS3.
Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with the topic at hand...
For instance, voice across the entire system (not just in-game chat) without having to worry whether the person is using TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, or Skype.
A single username across the entire system, meaning you can be sure the "HappyGodzilla" you play in Halo 3 is the same "HappyGodzilla" you got teamed up with in Shadowrun. This also greatly assists with getting rid of griefers and jerks.
I'm not necessarily saying it's worth $50, but to say that Xbox Live offers nothing is disingenuous if not outright wrong.
You didn't. As you said yourself, you did a "geek fix" and it worked. But it's kind of hypocritical to bash Linux for not running on any random hardware out there while using hardware specifically designed to run with a specific OS.
I didn't do a "geek fix". I couldn't. The fix required internet access, and I don't have internet access with no wi-fi. I just used Ubuntu for a couple days with no internet connection, until it became apparent that 95% of the stuff I do with my laptop requires an internet connection.
Secondly, Ubuntu *claims* to work on iBooks. It doesn't.
When was that, anyway? I just did it with oocalc and the Gimp...
About a year ago, it didn't work for me in Fedora. I was using a different graphics app, but I can't remember the name of it now.
So pick a wireless chipset that does work. I gave you a link to a bunch. And it's not that hard. I didn't do any special searching and I have three different ones that work. There are legal issues with video cards, too. But it's not like you appear to be implying, that there aren't any working options.
A. I shouldn't have to BUY hardware to get an OS working-- especially an OS that people constantly tell me is the greatest thing since sliced bread!
B. The iBook only takes one kind of wireless card, because of it's under-the-keyboard PCMCIA slot and special antenna plug. Which means to buy a different wireless chipset, I'd need to buy an entire new LAPTOP! No thanks.
If people are going to sell me on Linux, they should at least make sure Linux works first. That's all I'm saying.
Why would I lie about that? Christ.
And Doom isn't even that great a choice for early FPS games. If you're looking for innovative games, Marathon is much better. It had 8-player LAN play (complete with voice chat and several different game modes), friendly critters, a great well-developed story, the ability to look up and down, and you didn't straddle the grenade launcher in-between your legs. Doom came out in late-1993, and Marathon came out a year later in 1994 but is a vastly superior game. (For reference, Quake I came out in 1996.) Marathon is 2.5D with a hack so that you can look up and down.
a me)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(computer_g
Linux could even better... but the competition isn't all that impressive.
Last I used Linux, you couldn't copy a set of cells from a spreadsheet into a graphics program and see a bitmap of the cells. That's not an "impressive" feat, that's something Mac OS did in 1984 and Windows did in Windows 3.1 (whenever that came out... 92?) Linux, as of about a year ago, can't do it. If you think that's acceptable, you must have very low quality standards.
There was also no program to do Gantt charts. Whenever I asked about one, Linux users told me I didn't actually need to make Gantt charts and people who do are idiots, etc.
And I assert that, in actual practice, it is. My Linux systems have been easier to install, maintain, and debug than my Windows systems for several years now, along with being less expensive and dramatically more secure.
As long as you don't care about copy and paste working correctly. I happen to.
And that is a legal problem, not a technical one!
Who cares? It's a problem, whether it's legal, technical, or anything else. I'd love to try Linux, in fact I did for a bit with no internet, but I can't give it a fair trial because Linux doesn't support my laptop. Period.
Yet another "we don't need to fix Linux because Windows is already just as bad!" argument.
If you want Linux accepted in the mainstream, it needs to be *better* than Windows or OS X. Sure, you sometimes have to do "geek fixes" on Windows, the difference is that in Linux, my wireless card doesn't work *at all* without the "geek fix." (And note that the "geek fix" requires internet access, which requires wireless, but the wireless doesn't work. Catch-22 is a popular book among Linux developers, huh?) And this is on a supported laptop-- or at least as much as Ubuntu supports anything.
Dell makes sure that wireless card works when the computer is shipped out. That's a ton more QA than any Linux distro does right now, even for computers that the distro "supports." If I upgrade an existing Dell laptop with wireless to Vista, there's a 95% chance the wireless will work with no action on my part. Again, no Linux can promise that. Of course Windows isn't perfect, but through Microsoft and Dell's efforts, it's a lot better.
And no, for what it's worth I don't end up doing tech support for friends and relatives. My relatives all use Macintosh, and my friends are all good enough with computers that they don't ask me for help.
You can't open Hosts with a graphical text editor because it requires Root. You can if you activate the Root account first, but doing so is just as complex as editing Hosts with a command-line editor, so you don't really gain any headway there.
Nice try, though.
I love these personal stories that are utterly irrelevant to the story, and yet get modded up.
Sure, *you* think fixing things in Linux is easy... but you also fixed it by editing the Hosts file. Do you know any average computer users (Mac, Windows, or Linux if there are any average users on Linux) that even know what the Hosts file is or how to edit it? An "easy" fix for this crowd would be, say, "I threw iTunes in the trash and then used Apple Software Updater to download a new copy of iTunes." Anything more complicated than that is a geek fix, and is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Then the obligatory part where the advanced computer user who fixes Linux can't fix a simple problem in Windows, despite Windows having as much or more available support. I find it hard to believe that somebody who knows how to edit the Hosts file can't reinstall a scanner driver. I'm not calling you a liar as such, I just find it very very hard to believe.
Also I don't even get the point of this paragraph:
I had a meeting where the guest speaker brought a Power Point presentation. My Windows machine with Office 2000 did not display the presentation properly. The text box appeared all at once instead of bullet by bullet. Switched to the Linux partition and Open Office presented it properly. Later I found the free Power Point viewer from the MS site.
Are you attempting to communicate something, or just relaying a really dull anecdote?
I like the entirely strange logic with which you blame Linux's usability problems on Windows.
Linux has poor usability because... uh... M$ BLOATWARE! DON'T QUESTION IT!!! They don't know what drivers are! Which somehow has something to do with maintaining computers!
Ironically, Linux is probably even *harder* to set up and maintain for Mac OS users than Windows users, which just might reveal a problem with Linux itself... but since this is Slashdot, I'll just spell "MS" with a dollar sign and call it good. And a Mac OS user is a lot less likely to know what a driver is, if that's at all relevant.
I suppose it would be flamebait on Slashdot to point out that Microsoft does exactly this.
They have a simple shuttle system for employees to move around the campus (and servicing some off-campus business parks, as well), and they give FTEs passes to the local public transit system. Moreover, they've been doing this for longer than Google's even been around. Of course, Microsoft isn't as trendy, so they don't get breathless news stories pretending that it's something new.
Microsoft has a shuttle system that services their entire campus, including some buildings outside of the main campus. Plus they pay for the bus for employees. Same as the Google system, except not as snobby and exclusive.
At least they didn't fumble or bobble the Fingle dopple!
It also fails to acknowledge that the biggest gap in Apple's product line (between the iMac and Mac Pro) is EXACTLY where most corporations buy their machines. And it's a huge gap... a gap you could drive a Mack truck through.
It gives me the impression that the IRS employee didn't know what the question was. I'd like to see what email was sent to them before judging the returned email.
That doesn't help if Google doesn't have a document detailing their installation, problems they ran in to (and how they solved them), and re-evaluated the business case for using Samba over the alternatives. That's what he's looking for, documentation.
Just saying "well Google uses it!" is a terrible strategy. First it makes it look as if you're out of ideas and just spouting out company names as a last resort, and secondly because saying "Google uses it!" could mean the janitors at Google use it to check off which bathrooms are clean.
It's a language thing.
Linux is a small OS kernel.
Linux is also a huge ecosystem of various distributions and software.
So when you *say* Linux, you can use whichever version suits you at the moment. You can say "Linux (kernel) is the most secure OS ever!" and you can also say, "Linux has a huge variety of productivity software!" That leads to a ton of confusion.
Please tell me the bug number and I will look at it.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461
Oh yeah, I forgot the only way to get a bug looked at is to complain about it on Slashdot. In any case, it's already been "looked at"... what it hasn't been is triaged. I'd be happy with a "yes we will fix this," or a "no we won't fix this."