then your complaints, though technically valid, lack perspective
But ask an open source zealot what the *advantage* of Linux is, and he'll say that he advantage is that Linux listens to the users and adapts to them (users can change programs themselves), Linux changes rapidly to accommodate them (release early and often), and Linux is more bug-free because "many eyes" look at the code.
So it *is* more valid to complain about issues in Linux than in other OSes because, in theory (and according to the zealots), those issues will be fixed much more quickly in Linux than they are in Windows or OS X.
Unfortunately, the reality is that while Linux development goes fast (in some areas) it goes extremely slow in others. And those "other" areas where development is slow are the areas I consider the "basics." For instance, copy and paste working for more than just text.
You're completely and utterly missing the point. My example could have easily been something not relating to difficulty at all. I could also point out that Linux zealots frequently focus on the examples while the point whizzes over their head.
The point is that if Linux has a problem that Windows shares, the Linux community will never fix it because from the Linux community's point of view, it's only a problem in Linux if it's *worse* than in Windows. Therefore, Linux can never possibly be of higher quality than Windows.
Defining "innovative" is hard, but I'd say, personally, that the most "innovative" platform out there is Macintosh at the moment. And Macintosh programming is just as dependent on Apple as Windows programming is dependent on Microsoft. I've never seen anything in Linux I'd call "innovative," personally.
Usability problems never go away, because these usability problems are often so ingrained that nobody notices them. If you are a developer you know exactly what I mean...you can think a UI is so dirt simple but then watch as others are totally befuddled by it.
Except Microsoft has usability labs that observe real, average human beings use their software to solve exactly that problem. Now there are some parts of Microsoft that obviously never use the usability labs (Query Analyzer and SQL Enterprise Manager wasn't just designed by committee, but a committee of chimps), but the capability is there and Office and Windows teams make extensive use of it. That never happens in Linux.
There's a lot of buck-passing in bug reports. Last time I reported a bug to an open source project, it turned into "oh well that's GNOME's fault," and the bug got shunted to GNOME who promptly utterly ignored it. Despite it being a usability issue that GNOME's supposed to be interested in.
Oh yeah, one of the reasons you can't talk about them is because every Linux zealot is so single-mindedly focused on Microsoft all the time that they refuse to agree that Linux has a problem when Microsoft also has the same problem.
Oh yeah, one of the reasons you can't talk about them is because every Linux zealot is so single-mindedly focused on Microsoft all the time that they refuse to agree that Linux has a problem unless Microsoft also has the same problem.
For instance, User: "Printer setup in Linux is hard." Zealot: "Oh yeah!? Well printer setup in Windows is even harder!"
See how the Linux Zealot argument has absolutely nothing to do with the original complaint?
It's clear where Linux developers have set their quality standard: right at Windows-level. Since anything in Linux that's as bad as it is in Linux will never get attention. Given that standard of quality, I don't see how Linux will ever beat Windows because it'll never be better than Windows... setting up a printer in Linux will never be easier than setting one up in Windows because it's a non-problem to the zealots.
At the very least, the Linux Zealots could spend a few weeks using OS X so their quality bar might be a bit higher.
Uh, does your reply have anything to do with my point?
My point is that it wouldn't have been helpful to include Linux with HP computers in 1997 because Linux was far to immature for HP to support or users to use successfully.
I never said people don't derive value from OSS tools. Nor did I ever say that many don't use OOS tolls for gain and profit from not having to shell out license fees. I also never said Linux sucks, although I do believe that it's immature and it suffers from poor usability in general compared to the alternatives. I don't know what the "lazy-tax" refers to.
Things like, "if I copy some spreadsheet cells from OpenOffice Calc into an application with no concept of spreadsheet cells, like GIMP, will I see a picture of the cells or nothing at all?"
In OS X and Windows, you see the cells represented in the way the receiving application can cope with them, in this case as an image. In Linux, you generally see... nothing.
Getting details like that right is what I mean by "polish." I don't give a crap how it looks, as long as it's not offensively ugly.
FSF ain't exactly new. If companies embraced it 10 years ago like they fucking should have, we'd be better fucking off, instead of using half-baked shitastic OSes like Vista nowadays. See, look what your greed and apathy got you.
Considering that Linux NOW has about the polish of 10-year-old Mac OS X or Windows, I'd hate to think what Linux looked like 10 years ago. My guess is: crap.
It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously by the games community, then emulating Second Life is a bad way to go.
If you want to be taken seriously by the zoophile/furry/pedophile community, then Sony's definitely on the right track. Way to go, Sony! Know your audience!
Sessions held yesterday and today touched on the future of games and story in this new generation of games
Where were these sessions?
Zonk, can you at least get the journalism questions answered in the summaries, if you're not going to bother with typos and mispellings? The critical one here is "where?" (I think we got the "who?" and "what?" ok.)
A hardware profile of a computer isn't "personally identifiable." I would argue an IP address isn't, either, personally, unless you know for sure that it's static.
Posting here would be easier if people said what they meant. "Gave me the ability to create a dedicated server for free" is a lot different than "gave me a dedicated server for free."
In any case, I don't see why Xbox Live on PC would change anything. There's nothing technically preventing game companies from making dedicated server versions of their games like they have in the past. I can't say for sure they will, but the grandparent also can't simply declare they won't without any evidence.
Just the same, the company is now charging for services normally taken for granted as a freebie on the PC platform.
Like this pointless (and incorrect) dig at Microsoft for no reason at the end of the article.
No, no PC game offers what Xbox Live offers. Sorry. You can find individual games that offer some of the features, but most of the entire point of Xbox Live is that you have the same friends list across every game you play, which is not true of any PC games. Additionally, it does a great job of removing griefers and cheaters from the game ecosystem, again, across every game you play. That means if someone is found cheating at Gears of War and they get caught, you don't have to worry about that same cheater later showing up in Prey. And the (almost trivially small) charge discourages that cheater from creating a new account and getting caught again. Plus, Xbox Live guarantees the games tracking server will be up as long as the Live service exists. Which is almost certainly much longer than most PC game trackers remain up otherwise.
Xbox Live does provide a valuable service at a reasonable cost. While the services it offers are normally taken for granted, they also come in a bunch of different disjoint packages... sure Skype lets you leave voicemails for people (I think), but you can't really use it in game. Sure TeamSpeak works in game, but it doesn't integrate with the built-in Unreal Tournament 2004 speech system. Sure World of Warcraft gets rid of griefers, but those griefers can just show up in Everquest 2 the next day with a fresh history.
OOXML has one big thing going for it that ODF does not: It supports all of Microsoft Office's features.
If Microsoft had adopted ODF, they either would have had to remove features from their products, or add features to the ODF format. Either way, they're doomed to decades of bad press.
I love how Slashdot makes it sound like a big Microsoft conspiracy when, in reality, the reason they don't use ODF is practicality.
how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
Like, seriously, why not?
Well, maybe I want to track revisions. Or when I do a mail merge with the letter, maybe I want the settings to stick around for the next time I do a mail merge? Oh, and preserving the Undo history between saving the file and opening it again would be handy. Keeping track of what the print margins were set to. Maybe I want my newsletter to have 4 columns... that's a royal, royal pain in CSS.
Criminy, it's not just about saving the text and the formatting.
The reason Microsoft doesn't use ODF (right or wrong) is because ODF doesn't support every bit of data that the Word.Doc format does. And of course, if Microsoft started "extending" the ODF format to be able to save a typical Word document, imagine the complaints from Slashdot! They're damned if they do, damned if they don't... so I don't blame them for pushing their own format.
And shame on whoever designed ODF in the first place! If you expect Microsoft to use it, you need to support everything their existing format does!
There's a new saw at work: A) cross-platform, B) cheaply developed, or C) tightly integrated with the O/S. Pick any two.
Unless you use a tool like RealBasic, which compiles for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux from the same codebase and supports pretty much every OS feature of each of those OSes.
I'm not shilling for them, but tools like that *do* exist right now.
Yeah, and I recently hired a private eye ($500 a day, plus expenses) to track down that nickel I dropped last saturday. I know I dropped it near the bus stop... I hope he finds the bastard soon and recovers my penny! It's been 4 days, and no sign of him yet.
Seriously, if Digg or an animated.gif is actually a drain on any of your computer resources, you should buy a computer made in this millennium. Please. The processing cycles used to animate that ad about mortgage rates is worth about $0.001. If you're actually worried about it, your time must be worthless to an amazing degree.
Not true. There are drag-and-drop Javascript controls for the usual platforms, though I don't know of any that are platform-independent. I've used them on Windows and Linux and they work.
I've never seen one before... can you point me to a sample page? If someone's gotten this to work, it would be a huge boon to webmail sites and forums. Attaching files to a website is always such a huge pain in the rear-end... it's about the only thing I ever see the "Open" dialog for in OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
then your complaints, though technically valid, lack perspective
But ask an open source zealot what the *advantage* of Linux is, and he'll say that he advantage is that Linux listens to the users and adapts to them (users can change programs themselves), Linux changes rapidly to accommodate them (release early and often), and Linux is more bug-free because "many eyes" look at the code.
So it *is* more valid to complain about issues in Linux than in other OSes because, in theory (and according to the zealots), those issues will be fixed much more quickly in Linux than they are in Windows or OS X.
Unfortunately, the reality is that while Linux development goes fast (in some areas) it goes extremely slow in others. And those "other" areas where development is slow are the areas I consider the "basics." For instance, copy and paste working for more than just text.
You're completely and utterly missing the point. My example could have easily been something not relating to difficulty at all. I could also point out that Linux zealots frequently focus on the examples while the point whizzes over their head.
The point is that if Linux has a problem that Windows shares, the Linux community will never fix it because from the Linux community's point of view, it's only a problem in Linux if it's *worse* than in Windows. Therefore, Linux can never possibly be of higher quality than Windows.
Defining "innovative" is hard, but I'd say, personally, that the most "innovative" platform out there is Macintosh at the moment. And Macintosh programming is just as dependent on Apple as Windows programming is dependent on Microsoft. I've never seen anything in Linux I'd call "innovative," personally.
Usability problems never go away, because these usability problems are often so ingrained that nobody notices them. If you are a developer you know exactly what I mean...you can think a UI is so dirt simple but then watch as others are totally befuddled by it.
Except Microsoft has usability labs that observe real, average human beings use their software to solve exactly that problem. Now there are some parts of Microsoft that obviously never use the usability labs (Query Analyzer and SQL Enterprise Manager wasn't just designed by committee, but a committee of chimps), but the capability is there and Office and Windows teams make extensive use of it. That never happens in Linux.
There's a lot of buck-passing in bug reports. Last time I reported a bug to an open source project, it turned into "oh well that's GNOME's fault," and the bug got shunted to GNOME who promptly utterly ignored it. Despite it being a usability issue that GNOME's supposed to be interested in.
Crud, typo in the first sentence. It should read:
Oh yeah, one of the reasons you can't talk about them is because every Linux zealot is so single-mindedly focused on Microsoft all the time that they refuse to agree that Linux has a problem when Microsoft also has the same problem.
Oh yeah, one of the reasons you can't talk about them is because every Linux zealot is so single-mindedly focused on Microsoft all the time that they refuse to agree that Linux has a problem unless Microsoft also has the same problem.
For instance,
User: "Printer setup in Linux is hard."
Zealot: "Oh yeah!? Well printer setup in Windows is even harder!"
See how the Linux Zealot argument has absolutely nothing to do with the original complaint?
It's clear where Linux developers have set their quality standard: right at Windows-level. Since anything in Linux that's as bad as it is in Linux will never get attention. Given that standard of quality, I don't see how Linux will ever beat Windows because it'll never be better than Windows... setting up a printer in Linux will never be easier than setting one up in Windows because it's a non-problem to the zealots.
At the very least, the Linux Zealots could spend a few weeks using OS X so their quality bar might be a bit higher.
I don't know anything about Bill Gates' dad, but Gates himself supports the inheritance tax. Which is kind of unusual for somebody mega-rich.
Uh, does your reply have anything to do with my point?
My point is that it wouldn't have been helpful to include Linux with HP computers in 1997 because Linux was far to immature for HP to support or users to use successfully.
I never said people don't derive value from OSS tools. Nor did I ever say that many don't use OOS tolls for gain and profit from not having to shell out license fees. I also never said Linux sucks, although I do believe that it's immature and it suffers from poor usability in general compared to the alternatives. I don't know what the "lazy-tax" refers to.
I'm talking about *polish*, not eye-candy.
Things like, "if I copy some spreadsheet cells from OpenOffice Calc into an application with no concept of spreadsheet cells, like GIMP, will I see a picture of the cells or nothing at all?"
In OS X and Windows, you see the cells represented in the way the receiving application can cope with them, in this case as an image. In Linux, you generally see... nothing.
Getting details like that right is what I mean by "polish." I don't give a crap how it looks, as long as it's not offensively ugly.
FSF ain't exactly new. If companies embraced it 10 years ago like they fucking should have, we'd be better fucking off, instead of using half-baked shitastic OSes like Vista nowadays. See, look what your greed and apathy got you.
Considering that Linux NOW has about the polish of 10-year-old Mac OS X or Windows, I'd hate to think what Linux looked like 10 years ago. My guess is: crap.
Could be worse. Better dead than drawn by Rob Leifeld: http://schend.net/images/funny/rob_leifeld.jpg
It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously by the games community, then emulating Second Life is a bad way to go.
If you want to be taken seriously by the zoophile/furry/pedophile community, then Sony's definitely on the right track. Way to go, Sony! Know your audience!
Sessions held yesterday and today touched on the future of games and story in this new generation of games
Where were these sessions?
Zonk, can you at least get the journalism questions answered in the summaries, if you're not going to bother with typos and mispellings? The critical one here is "where?" (I think we got the "who?" and "what?" ok.)
A hardware profile of a computer isn't "personally identifiable." I would argue an IP address isn't, either, personally, unless you know for sure that it's static.
Posting here would be easier if people said what they meant. "Gave me the ability to create a dedicated server for free" is a lot different than "gave me a dedicated server for free."
In any case, I don't see why Xbox Live on PC would change anything. There's nothing technically preventing game companies from making dedicated server versions of their games like they have in the past. I can't say for sure they will, but the grandparent also can't simply declare they won't without any evidence.
Nobody. Those are free over Live Silver, and Silver accounts are free.
Good attempt to flame Microsoft for no reason, though! Don't let those silly things like "facts" get in the way!
What PC game gives you dedicated servers for free? I've never seen one.
MMORPGs, yes... but MMORPGs have dedicated servers on Xbox Live as well.
Just the same, the company is now charging for services normally taken for granted as a freebie on the PC platform.
Like this pointless (and incorrect) dig at Microsoft for no reason at the end of the article.
No, no PC game offers what Xbox Live offers. Sorry. You can find individual games that offer some of the features, but most of the entire point of Xbox Live is that you have the same friends list across every game you play, which is not true of any PC games. Additionally, it does a great job of removing griefers and cheaters from the game ecosystem, again, across every game you play. That means if someone is found cheating at Gears of War and they get caught, you don't have to worry about that same cheater later showing up in Prey. And the (almost trivially small) charge discourages that cheater from creating a new account and getting caught again. Plus, Xbox Live guarantees the games tracking server will be up as long as the Live service exists. Which is almost certainly much longer than most PC game trackers remain up otherwise.
Xbox Live does provide a valuable service at a reasonable cost. While the services it offers are normally taken for granted, they also come in a bunch of different disjoint packages... sure Skype lets you leave voicemails for people (I think), but you can't really use it in game. Sure TeamSpeak works in game, but it doesn't integrate with the built-in Unreal Tournament 2004 speech system. Sure World of Warcraft gets rid of griefers, but those griefers can just show up in Everquest 2 the next day with a fresh history.
Including OpenOffice would do more to hurt Apple than Microsoft's cancelling of MS Office. OpenOffice on Mac sucks, sucks real bad.
OOXML has one big thing going for it that ODF does not: It supports all of Microsoft Office's features.
If Microsoft had adopted ODF, they either would have had to remove features from their products, or add features to the ODF format. Either way, they're doomed to decades of bad press.
I love how Slashdot makes it sound like a big Microsoft conspiracy when, in reality, the reason they don't use ODF is practicality.
how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
.Doc format does. And of course, if Microsoft started "extending" the ODF format to be able to save a typical Word document, imagine the complaints from Slashdot! They're damned if they do, damned if they don't... so I don't blame them for pushing their own format.
Like, seriously, why not?
Well, maybe I want to track revisions. Or when I do a mail merge with the letter, maybe I want the settings to stick around for the next time I do a mail merge? Oh, and preserving the Undo history between saving the file and opening it again would be handy. Keeping track of what the print margins were set to. Maybe I want my newsletter to have 4 columns... that's a royal, royal pain in CSS.
Criminy, it's not just about saving the text and the formatting.
The reason Microsoft doesn't use ODF (right or wrong) is because ODF doesn't support every bit of data that the Word
And shame on whoever designed ODF in the first place! If you expect Microsoft to use it, you need to support everything their existing format does!
Slashdot To Process Review Subject Article Coherency!
There's a new saw at work: A) cross-platform, B) cheaply developed, or C) tightly integrated with the O/S. Pick any two.
Unless you use a tool like RealBasic, which compiles for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux from the same codebase and supports pretty much every OS feature of each of those OSes.
I'm not shilling for them, but tools like that *do* exist right now.
Yeah, and I recently hired a private eye ($500 a day, plus expenses) to track down that nickel I dropped last saturday. I know I dropped it near the bus stop... I hope he finds the bastard soon and recovers my penny! It's been 4 days, and no sign of him yet.
.gif is actually a drain on any of your computer resources, you should buy a computer made in this millennium. Please. The processing cycles used to animate that ad about mortgage rates is worth about $0.001. If you're actually worried about it, your time must be worthless to an amazing degree.
Seriously, if Digg or an animated
Not true. There are drag-and-drop Javascript controls for the usual platforms, though I don't know of any that are platform-independent. I've used them on Windows and Linux and they work.
I've never seen one before... can you point me to a sample page? If someone's gotten this to work, it would be a huge boon to webmail sites and forums. Attaching files to a website is always such a huge pain in the rear-end... it's about the only thing I ever see the "Open" dialog for in OS X.