Too bad you posted as an AC, this really needs to be seen by more Linux users.
Unless you've done a usability test, don't claim that something is usable... the result of usability testing is, more often than not, entirely counter-intuitive, and even if you *think* something is usable, it's unlikely that it really is. And, right now, there's very little usability testing in the Linux world.
People on Slashdot complain and gripe about the new Office 12 UI, and how terrible it will be because nobody will be able to learn it, but here's the crux of the matter: Microsoft did usability testing with it every step of the way, and because of they, they *know* it's a better UI. It's documented in a hundred studies that people can use it better, can find features that Word has had forever but they didn't know how to find them before, and that it won't confuse existing Office power-users. Documented scientifically.
The open source world has nothing like that. The closest you've gotten is just piggy-backing on Apple's (GNOME) and Microsoft's (KDE) previous work by duplicating it.
t's also really easy to know if you have a good card or bad card. Got a PVR 150, 250, 350 or 500? you have a good card. Now some of the newer 500s have a samsung tuner that they'e having to hack. Just buy your card of ebay, and blame samsung.
Most of the stuff you said up there is utter and complete gibberish to me, because I'm not a 1337 haxor like you are, but for the record I *do* have a PVR-250 which is (according to you) a "good card" and it Does Not Fucking Work with the version of IVTV that claims to support it. Period.
I tried for a long, long time to get this to work and I finally gave up.
One of the people I consulted told me that there are different versions of the PVR-250 with slightly different (and incompatible) firmware, but otherwise indistinguishable from each other. And that is why IVTV doesn't work with my card. The IVTV documentation doesn't mention this *anywhere* if it is, indeed, true. The card's too old to exchange, and even if I could, what guarantee is there that I wouldn't get one of these different PVR-250 cards back again?
Note that this mysterious "other" firmware that IVTV doesn't work with operates just fine in Windows with Hauppauge's standard driver set, so it's not a defective card.
And, honestly, I don't even mind that IVTV doesn't support it; what I mind is that IVTV's documentation LIES to me about supporting it, thereby wasting a LOT of my time.
ATI's installer doesn't work in Ubuntu. When I rebooted, I was thrown back to a text prompt with some vague error message on it I didn't understand, and I had to type in some crazy command to restore some.conf file back to how it was before ATI's installer screwed with it. And after doing that, there was no way to get rid of the REST of the stuff ATI's installer left behind, because there was no uninstaller. So my Ubuntu machine has a non-working ATI driver installed somewhere, but not being used, and no 3D acceleration. Hooray for Linux.
IVTV doesn't work. At least not on Ubuntu. I had two Linux experts help me over the course of a week, and never did we get anything more out of the card than a postage-stamp-size mpg of static.
Sorry, but it's true. Even if you DO manage to get IVTV installed (which is a herculean task in itself, since the documentation is crap and there's no automated install), it only works with certain subsets of the Hauppauge cards it *claims* to work with, and there's no way of telling whether you have a good card or a bad card until you've installed it and been disappointed.
So far the only piece of hardware that wasn't auto-detected by Linux that I was able to get to work was my USB ethernet card, and that only worked using NDIS wrapper, a program that runs Windows drivers!
1) As an OS X user, I can say with certainty that InstallSheid sucks ass. If your goal is to be *equal* to Windows, then sure, saying "it's no harder than InstallShield" is a valid argument, but isn't the Linux goal to be *better* than Windows? If so, you have to do better.
The argument "Linux is equally easy to install if it came pre-installed on computers" is bunk because it doesn't come pre-installed. And it's not going to any time soon, so the Linux community is just going to have to cope with that.
2) The Linux 'system' pretty much entirely alienates proprietary developers. If I write a video game, "Super Monkey Joy", and I want to play it on every Linux, that means I have to create a half-dozen different packages for it. A RPM for some distros, a whatever-apt-uses for other distros. What if it's a distro with no package management at all? Do I just write my files where I want them and hope that it doesn't screw something else up?
Then there's the philosophical part of the 'system.' Aren't Linux users, being all about freedom, going to give my software a pass even if it's superior to open source solutions because it isn't "free?" Even worse, what if an open source clone to "Super Monkey Joy" pops up overnight the week after my proprietary copy goes on sale?
Yup. This is also why I avoid IBM software like the plague. What incentive is there for IBM to make Lotus Notes easy to use? None, because when it's hard, a company will call in a high priced Lotus Notes "consultant" to dive into the crap and fix whatever issue while shoving that $200/hour into his wallet.
IMO, companies that sell a software product shouldn't be allowed to "consult" for that same product, otherwise there's absolutely zero incentive for the company to improve that software's usability in any way.
The problem is that by the time someone learns to use the software well-enough that they are able to submit patches, they're probably way past the point of noticing all the flaws in it, usability-wise. They've fiddled with the source, know exactly *why* (for instance) the wizard screen has a "finish" button that's always inactive, and so they'd never think to pop up a bug report about it or create a patch to solve it.
Attendant: "So what killed you?" Kryten: "Some kind of giant squid." Attendant: "Oh, the Despair Squid? That shouldn't have killed you, you just blast it with the laser cannons." Kryten: "But Starbug didn't have any laser cannon capability." Attendant: "You're supposed to use the laser cannons on the Esperanto. It's an obvious clue! Esperanto means hope, hope defeats despair! No wonder you only scored 3%."
(Ok, this ship is the Esperanzo... but still damned close.)
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Oh yeah. Well, the point is that I played through story mode twice with every character and I still have absolutely NO FARKING CLUE what the hell was going on at any point. So whatever's in this screenplay is fine with me, since it's not like I can complain about it not being faithful to the game.
"Save the whales environmental bullshit" is a general term I'm using to describe all of those preachy movies in the Star Trek IV mold. It doesn't mean that there are actually whales in it. Not every single word written is literal, you know.
I'm guessing that they needed an excuse for the same pilot to be in the Battle of Britain and the Pacific during a single career, and that's about the only reasonable way it'd happen.
90 days? What are you talking about? I've have several DVDs shipped to me so that they were sitting in my mailbox on the exact day you could buy them at retail. I've never heard of anything about a 90 day limit, and I've been a happy subscriber since they started the service. Stop spreading lies.
Blockbuster gave me both Ray, the newest Harry Potter, and Walk The Line the very same day they were released to retail outlets. (And not just shipped that day, but in my mailbox.) They're great about new movies.
Sarcasm recognized, it *is* a pain for those of us who don't own a printer. It's moronic in this day of everything being networked that Blockbuster stores need the physical piece of paper to give you a rental... why can't they just punch in my name and I'll give my password, and mark it off on a intranet site somewhere?
I actually emailed a complaint saying that the service doesn't say that it requires a printer before you sign up. I don't know if it does not; I hope so.
Blockbuster gives you free in-store rental coupons with your online membership for your 'spur-of-the-moment' rentals. That's what the grandparent was trying to explain. And, for me at least, that's what made me choose Blockbuster over Netflix. (The in-store coupons can be used for video games, BTW.)
What you're missing is that Blockbuster.com ALSO gives you a steady flow.
Here's how it works. Blockbuster.com = 3 DVDs at a time, unlimited rentals a month. PLUS, you get coupons you can use in-store if you want for free. (The coupons, BTW, work for video game rentals also.)
So you get your mailed movies, then if you suddenly feel in the mood to watch something else, you can print out a coupon and walking in to your local Blockbuster and rent away. It really is a good deal.
To be fair, the game doesn't have any substance either. (At least not plot-wise.)
Let's see, what exactly happens? There's this kid who gets trained by a drunken guy, and then an old guy, and then there's some kind of ninja meeting on a rope bridge. Then some wrestler dude pushes someone over in front of a casino and so they fight in the street and get hit by cars. Then everyone in the universe goes to the mansion built atop a skyscraper where they fight each other in strange random combinations for moronic reasons. There's something about a Jamaican guy who speaks Japanese human-flying his way up the outside of it, then landing on a heli-pad. Then there's a blue plasma-chick who's really tough to beat and fights about half of the people inside the lab, then the other half atop the heli-pad. Then there's some goofy movie where the chick swims with dolphins but it turns out it's just a dream.
I don't think Wargames had exploding consoles anywhere... In fact I'm almost 100% sure. WORP goes into his 'thing' where he's playing against himself, and the screens go crazy playing out scenarios at a very high framerate, then he powers down all the consoles except the main one (making the room dark) when he's done. Nothing there is really very bad at all.
I thought the Director's Cut of Abyss (complete with poorly-done special effects and hackneyed "save the whales" environmental bullshit) was far inferior to the theatrical version. But I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion.
1) Nobody's used Fat32 in ages, except for things like portable hard drives and USB memory sticks, and then only because the three major OSes can't agree on a single read/write filesystem that can sanely support more than 80GB or so. (XP can't read/write HFS+ or EXT, OS X and Linux can't write NTFS. Pain. In. Ass.)
2) Don't just gloss over the fact that the original post made a blatant lie about Windows. I hate when this community will jump the gun to declare Microsoft evil no matter what they're doing, but when someone makes up crap to make Windows look worse there's no response at all.
Microsoft provides a defrag utility in Windows XP, and Windows 2000, and 98, and 95. I don't know about Vista, but try your best to not spread FUD, huh?
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Too bad you posted as an AC, this really needs to be seen by more Linux users.
Unless you've done a usability test, don't claim that something is usable... the result of usability testing is, more often than not, entirely counter-intuitive, and even if you *think* something is usable, it's unlikely that it really is. And, right now, there's very little usability testing in the Linux world.
People on Slashdot complain and gripe about the new Office 12 UI, and how terrible it will be because nobody will be able to learn it, but here's the crux of the matter: Microsoft did usability testing with it every step of the way, and because of they, they *know* it's a better UI. It's documented in a hundred studies that people can use it better, can find features that Word has had forever but they didn't know how to find them before, and that it won't confuse existing Office power-users. Documented scientifically.
The open source world has nothing like that. The closest you've gotten is just piggy-backing on Apple's (GNOME) and Microsoft's (KDE) previous work by duplicating it.
t's also really easy to know if you have a good card or bad card. Got a PVR 150, 250, 350 or 500? you have a good card. Now some of the newer 500s have a samsung tuner that they'e having to hack. Just buy your card of ebay, and blame samsung.
Most of the stuff you said up there is utter and complete gibberish to me, because I'm not a 1337 haxor like you are, but for the record I *do* have a PVR-250 which is (according to you) a "good card" and it Does Not Fucking Work with the version of IVTV that claims to support it. Period.
I tried for a long, long time to get this to work and I finally gave up.
One of the people I consulted told me that there are different versions of the PVR-250 with slightly different (and incompatible) firmware, but otherwise indistinguishable from each other. And that is why IVTV doesn't work with my card. The IVTV documentation doesn't mention this *anywhere* if it is, indeed, true. The card's too old to exchange, and even if I could, what guarantee is there that I wouldn't get one of these different PVR-250 cards back again?
Note that this mysterious "other" firmware that IVTV doesn't work with operates just fine in Windows with Hauppauge's standard driver set, so it's not a defective card.
And, honestly, I don't even mind that IVTV doesn't support it; what I mind is that IVTV's documentation LIES to me about supporting it, thereby wasting a LOT of my time.
ATI's installer doesn't work in Ubuntu. When I rebooted, I was thrown back to a text prompt with some vague error message on it I didn't understand, and I had to type in some crazy command to restore some .conf file back to how it was before ATI's installer screwed with it. And after doing that, there was no way to get rid of the REST of the stuff ATI's installer left behind, because there was no uninstaller. So my Ubuntu machine has a non-working ATI driver installed somewhere, but not being used, and no 3D acceleration. Hooray for Linux.
IVTV doesn't work. At least not on Ubuntu. I had two Linux experts help me over the course of a week, and never did we get anything more out of the card than a postage-stamp-size mpg of static.
Sorry, but it's true. Even if you DO manage to get IVTV installed (which is a herculean task in itself, since the documentation is crap and there's no automated install), it only works with certain subsets of the Hauppauge cards it *claims* to work with, and there's no way of telling whether you have a good card or a bad card until you've installed it and been disappointed.
So far the only piece of hardware that wasn't auto-detected by Linux that I was able to get to work was my USB ethernet card, and that only worked using NDIS wrapper, a program that runs Windows drivers!
You're missing a couple things:
1) As an OS X user, I can say with certainty that InstallSheid sucks ass. If your goal is to be *equal* to Windows, then sure, saying "it's no harder than InstallShield" is a valid argument, but isn't the Linux goal to be *better* than Windows? If so, you have to do better.
The argument "Linux is equally easy to install if it came pre-installed on computers" is bunk because it doesn't come pre-installed. And it's not going to any time soon, so the Linux community is just going to have to cope with that.
2) The Linux 'system' pretty much entirely alienates proprietary developers. If I write a video game, "Super Monkey Joy", and I want to play it on every Linux, that means I have to create a half-dozen different packages for it. A RPM for some distros, a whatever-apt-uses for other distros. What if it's a distro with no package management at all? Do I just write my files where I want them and hope that it doesn't screw something else up?
Then there's the philosophical part of the 'system.' Aren't Linux users, being all about freedom, going to give my software a pass even if it's superior to open source solutions because it isn't "free?" Even worse, what if an open source clone to "Super Monkey Joy" pops up overnight the week after my proprietary copy goes on sale?
Yup. This is also why I avoid IBM software like the plague. What incentive is there for IBM to make Lotus Notes easy to use? None, because when it's hard, a company will call in a high priced Lotus Notes "consultant" to dive into the crap and fix whatever issue while shoving that $200/hour into his wallet.
IMO, companies that sell a software product shouldn't be allowed to "consult" for that same product, otherwise there's absolutely zero incentive for the company to improve that software's usability in any way.
The problem is that by the time someone learns to use the software well-enough that they are able to submit patches, they're probably way past the point of noticing all the flaws in it, usability-wise. They've fiddled with the source, know exactly *why* (for instance) the wizard screen has a "finish" button that's always inactive, and so they'd never think to pop up a bug report about it or create a patch to solve it.
(Paraphrased from memory)
Attendant: "So what killed you?"
Kryten: "Some kind of giant squid."
Attendant: "Oh, the Despair Squid? That shouldn't have killed you, you just blast it with the laser cannons."
Kryten: "But Starbug didn't have any laser cannon capability."
Attendant: "You're supposed to use the laser cannons on the Esperanto. It's an obvious clue! Esperanto means hope, hope defeats despair! No wonder you only scored 3%."
(Ok, this ship is the Esperanzo... but still damned close.)
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Source? I can't turn up anything with Google.
Oh yeah. Well, the point is that I played through story mode twice with every character and I still have absolutely NO FARKING CLUE what the hell was going on at any point. So whatever's in this screenplay is fine with me, since it's not like I can complain about it not being faithful to the game.
"Save the whales environmental bullshit" is a general term I'm using to describe all of those preachy movies in the Star Trek IV mold. It doesn't mean that there are actually whales in it. Not every single word written is literal, you know.
Holy crap.
One more time. BLOCKBUSTER MAILS DVD TO YOU, JUST LIKE NETFLIX DOES. The in-store rentals are a bonus.
This article isn't talking about Blockbuster STORES competing with Netflix, it's talking about Blockbuster ONLINE completing with Netflix. Criminy.
I'm guessing that they needed an excuse for the same pilot to be in the Battle of Britain and the Pacific during a single career, and that's about the only reasonable way it'd happen.
90 days? What are you talking about? I've have several DVDs shipped to me so that they were sitting in my mailbox on the exact day you could buy them at retail. I've never heard of anything about a 90 day limit, and I've been a happy subscriber since they started the service. Stop spreading lies.
Blockbuster gave me both Ray, the newest Harry Potter, and Walk The Line the very same day they were released to retail outlets. (And not just shipped that day, but in my mailbox.) They're great about new movies.
Sarcasm recognized, it *is* a pain for those of us who don't own a printer. It's moronic in this day of everything being networked that Blockbuster stores need the physical piece of paper to give you a rental... why can't they just punch in my name and I'll give my password, and mark it off on a intranet site somewhere?
I actually emailed a complaint saying that the service doesn't say that it requires a printer before you sign up. I don't know if it does not; I hope so.
Uh. The exact same. Try visiting Blockbuster.com once in awhile.
You're way out of date, buddy. Blockbuster has been matching Netflix's service for like a year and a half or more now.
Blockbuster gives you free in-store rental coupons with your online membership for your 'spur-of-the-moment' rentals. That's what the grandparent was trying to explain. And, for me at least, that's what made me choose Blockbuster over Netflix. (The in-store coupons can be used for video games, BTW.)
What you're missing is that Blockbuster.com ALSO gives you a steady flow.
Here's how it works. Blockbuster.com = 3 DVDs at a time, unlimited rentals a month. PLUS, you get coupons you can use in-store if you want for free. (The coupons, BTW, work for video game rentals also.)
So you get your mailed movies, then if you suddenly feel in the mood to watch something else, you can print out a coupon and walking in to your local Blockbuster and rent away. It really is a good deal.
To be fair, the game doesn't have any substance either. (At least not plot-wise.)
Let's see, what exactly happens? There's this kid who gets trained by a drunken guy, and then an old guy, and then there's some kind of ninja meeting on a rope bridge. Then some wrestler dude pushes someone over in front of a casino and so they fight in the street and get hit by cars. Then everyone in the universe goes to the mansion built atop a skyscraper where they fight each other in strange random combinations for moronic reasons. There's something about a Jamaican guy who speaks Japanese human-flying his way up the outside of it, then landing on a heli-pad. Then there's a blue plasma-chick who's really tough to beat and fights about half of the people inside the lab, then the other half atop the heli-pad. Then there's some goofy movie where the chick swims with dolphins but it turns out it's just a dream.
Is that accurate?
Oh, wait, I forgot the Jurassic Park part.
I don't think Wargames had exploding consoles anywhere... In fact I'm almost 100% sure. WORP goes into his 'thing' where he's playing against himself, and the screens go crazy playing out scenarios at a very high framerate, then he powers down all the consoles except the main one (making the room dark) when he's done. Nothing there is really very bad at all.
I thought the Director's Cut of Abyss (complete with poorly-done special effects and hackneyed "save the whales" environmental bullshit) was far inferior to the theatrical version. But I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion.
1) Nobody's used Fat32 in ages, except for things like portable hard drives and USB memory sticks, and then only because the three major OSes can't agree on a single read/write filesystem that can sanely support more than 80GB or so. (XP can't read/write HFS+ or EXT, OS X and Linux can't write NTFS. Pain. In. Ass.)
2) Don't just gloss over the fact that the original post made a blatant lie about Windows. I hate when this community will jump the gun to declare Microsoft evil no matter what they're doing, but when someone makes up crap to make Windows look worse there's no response at all.
We know how they built pyramids. Huge dirt ramps and lots of slave labor.
Microsoft provides a defrag utility in Windows XP, and Windows 2000, and 98, and 95. I don't know about Vista, but try your best to not spread FUD, huh?