Re:Who the hell is this end user that edits DVDs?
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30 Days With Ubuntu Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, pretty much everyone I do tech support for is like that too. I think my boyfriend's the only person I know with a PDA (Crackberry) that syncs to the computer. I think he's the only person I know with a PDA, and he's far from an average user. He's a hacker. Everyone else just sends email using webmail or types things in Word (or Writer in my family's case) not realizing Notepad/Wordpad (or Gedit) exists or uses AIM (or Gaim) or browses the web on Firefox. They do understand single/double click, but I know my mom is afraid of right-click. In the interest of getting her to stop fearing her computer, I set her up with no sudo rights so she doesn't have to worry about breaking it. I mean, I'm in college. I look around my dorm, I see AIM, a web browser, Word, and iTunes. That's it. That's what average users use. There's also a few guys who play video games, but they're very outnumbered, and most are console-gamers anyway.
In Ubuntu you just install the language pack you want (in the Settings menu) and then whenever you go to log in, you can click "languages" in the "options" menu and pick which one you want to use. I have mine set to allow me to choose English, Japanese, or Russian.
What does "there is no driver for this" have to do with stability? Do you know what stability means?It means your computer doesn't crash all the time. My computer's not unstable just because a "Windows only" (not even Mac!) gadget I got for Christmas doesn't work. I mean, it IS unstable, but that's not the reason. The reason is that I'm alpha-testing Feisty Fawn. If you look at Ubuntu, though, it isn't hell to install. Neither is Fedora or Sabayon or Knoppix (all I've ever done). Put in the disk, answer like 5 questions, hit "install" and it goes off on its own. If you have unsupported hardware, it's tougher, but even something I've been told is a PITA to install (drivers for a Broadcom bcm43xx) turned out to be a matter of 10-15 minutes because there are auto-installer scripts for them. I know it doesn't work for everything. I'd like drivers for my little photo keychain, but that's miniscule. Can I play mp3s? Yes. Can I browse the web and chat? Yes. Can I type my papers? Yes. Can I play Flash games? Yes. Can I make really nice genealogy reports (the kind that make Windows users jealous) using GRAMPS? Yes. Can I set up a printer without installing any drivers at all, just by clicking 3 or 4 buttons (new driver, next, next, next)? Yes. Does it crash? Provided I don't block the air vents on my laptop so that it gets no circulation and hits 88C, no, it doesn't. If I DO do stupid things that make it overheat, then yeah. Does the unstable version I'm running crash? No! It's "unstable" and "alpha" but it's rock solid!
It also means that if you're an admin and there are many users, you can avoid giving out the root password. You can set it so only specific people can use sudo, and you can monitor everything they do while in sudo mode. So, if something goes wrong, you know which person did it rather than a general "someone with the root password did it" and every guy's pointing to the guy next to him going "he did it!"
Agreed! I just took a bunch of computers from an office that used to have Win98 on them and installed Linux. Today they were put into place at a local school. When you use a non-bloated OS and don't have AV, spware-scans, etc running all the time plus the actual spyware, old computers can work just fine. For that matter, I still have a Gateway from 1998. It has Windows XP on it now. Yes, it runs slow, but I suspect it's because XP is a lot bigger than Win98. I would like to see it fly with an install of Damn Small Linux or Knoppix or Puppy, but the printer could be tricky. I've tested it with a live cd, though. All the hardware is supported. I just need to figure out how to get Lexmark printers going, and a 9-year-old computer can be fast again. People have this belief that if the computer slows down you need a new one because it can't be made fast again. Step 1: get rid of the Luna theme. Really, though, a fresh install of whatever OS you're using will be just as fast as when you bought it. That just might be slow relative to today's standards, in which case you throw in a bit more ram, and you're good. There is no reason to trash a computer after only a few years. You can get at least 5 or 6 years out of them and have it running at a reasonable speed without upgrading at all if you don't bog it down with Norton AV (try AVG instead) or let it be part of a botnet
Of course! If your invention is "novel" (and "non-obvious") in light of the predecessor invention and patent, you can patent the improvement. That was true 200 years ago, and is true today.
However, this fact doesn't allow you to use your improvement. Holding a patent on an improvement does not give you the right to use the base invention. It only gives you the right to stop others (including the inventor of the base invention) from using your improvement. Again - that concept has not changed in 200 years.
Perhaps that's exactly what needs to change then. Implementing a patented idea without making a novel improvement should be breaking patent law, instead of the current method.
Isn't the way they worked very close to Free Software, though? They would show their code to anyone, and anyone who could improve it was allowed to, etc. Open Source doesn't necessarily mean you're allowed to improve it.
I'd like to see ogg more (and I was very happy to see 20 songs for download in.ogg format on Bijelo Dugme's website), but I know my mp3 player doesn't support it. As soon as the firmware is totally cracked on it, I'm Rockboxing it and making it ogg-compatible though. Why not offer high-bitrate mp3 and average-bitrate oggs? The sound quality will be high on both. The mp3s may be a bit bigger of files, but users of mp3 players can use them, and then if people who keep their music on their computers can use ogg and have smaller files with the high-quality sound.
But thanks to the GPL, if MS *was* to plant something in there to trip up Linux, it'd just become GPL'd itself. And then that code which is *also* in MS's stuff would be GPL too and they would be stuck with their own code would have to be GPL as well. Well, unless dual-licensing comes in.
I like Banshee for music. The artist recommendations, streaming radio, and last.fm stuff are all nice to have, and it manages your music library. I think most of that stuff isn't in the Edgy version, though. For running a VPN client, kvpnc is definitely a helpful thing, especially if you don't want to decode the Cisco password since you can just import the.pcf. KSnapshot is also a nice screenshot tool because it allows a delay so you can take pics of a spinning Beryl cube. KTorrent was the other KDE app I liked, but that's just because Bittorrent's UI is bad. Azureus works the same way as KTorrent though, and it fits the GNOME theme nicely.
I don't have the information to update the Ubuntu wiki. I may be using Feisty alpha, but I don't know many tricks. When I find out the necessary tweaks to get a poorly-performing bit of hardware to work correctly, I add it, though. The hardware compatibility list is the one to which I pay the most attention.
Really??In 2000/2001 was $250-$400 normal for a computer? That's the last time my family got a desktop. The 3 store-bought desktops are from 1998-2001. Other desktop is a home-made, and my laptop was $850 (yay for being on sale 15% off). Maybe this is a case of inflation screwing me up. I haven't looked at desktops in a long time, and I don't think there are any plans to buy a new one any time in the next few years. The next computers we get will be Linux laptops from System76 when my siblings go to college. The other computers may be up to 9 years old (1998 Pentium 2 is the oldest) but that's not bad. Still runs, right? That thing could run for years longer. If my dad decides to retire it, I'll put in a bigger hard drive, Damn Small Linux, and make it a file server. That thing could *fly* with DSL.
Actually, if you've seen Beryl, you'll note that Vista Ultimate doesn't compare in terms of "look & feel" for eye-candy. Eye-candy was one of the big things MS was showing off, but Beryl easily pwns them there.
Why get the KDE stuff? GNOME is simpler. Yeah, Holy War, I know. GNOME has a lot of functionality, but it does the "this is the big stuff, here's the options, go into the advanced settings if you wanna get more detailed, but I'm not cluttering this interface from the start" thing while KDE shows all the options at once. Anyway, ignore the Ubuntu wiki. It doesn't get updated enough. Use ubuntuguide.org It has everything you need to make multimedia go and a lot more. It's all command line, but it's not scary. It's just "copy" "paste" "press enter." For checking to see if an app will work in Wine: http://appdb.winehq.org/
Can I have Windows 95 back? That control panel made sense. The "category view" makes pretty much no sense. It just means more clicks to find what you want. Thankfully, "classic view" is an option, but I have to check that the person with whom I am speaking is in that mode. I don't recall looking at Vista's CP though. It's changed again?That sucks. I think I'm going to have to try to push that idea with my friend to make a flash-based website which is a Vista simulation for techs who don't have it in front of them. I use Linux, so I don't know the exact wording of everything. Even when I used Windows I didn't know the wording, but I knew the idea. Over the phone, that doesn't help much though, and now I can't read off the screen. I told him he should make a flash site that has screenshots so when you click something in the control panel, the picture changes to having the resulting window open, and clicking the tabs moves between those interfaces etc. so that you can read from the screenshot what the person needs to click.
It's pretty obvious you don't speak Japanese. There is no possible way to write "wii" in Japanese characters. A few hundred years ago, there was a letter for "wi" to which you could add "i". It no longer exists. The closest you'll get is "uii". If you know anything about any Latin-ish language, think of the letter "i" in that. It's sounds like a long e. Heck, short i's always sound like long e's. It's just a matter of how "finished" it sounds. Say "ee" and stop halfway through. It sounds like a short i. Just like the beginning of "idiot" or even better, the second i in "idiot" really sounds like that. Do you speak English?
Well, I don't know about "honest requests" but if there had been any major OEM offering pre-installed Linux when I got my laptop, I would've done it. I know there are Linux OEMs, but economies of scale mean they cost an arm and a leg. As it is, I want to try to get a Windows refund.
Oh, this only goes for laptops. If you can get a Dell desktop without their terrible squishy keyboard, count that in too. If you're stuck with those pieces of junk, no Dell desktops. I'm gonna go request nicer keyboards on their site. I hate suffering through using those squishy keyboards. What happened to clicky? To be fair, Lenovo makes the best laptop keyboard, though I recently saw (felt?) a really nice HP one. Too bad Dell hasn't figured out how to make a keyboard the clicks properly.
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Yeah, pretty much everyone I do tech support for is like that too. I think my boyfriend's the only person I know with a PDA (Crackberry) that syncs to the computer. I think he's the only person I know with a PDA, and he's far from an average user. He's a hacker. Everyone else just sends email using webmail or types things in Word (or Writer in my family's case) not realizing Notepad/Wordpad (or Gedit) exists or uses AIM (or Gaim) or browses the web on Firefox. They do understand single/double click, but I know my mom is afraid of right-click. In the interest of getting her to stop fearing her computer, I set her up with no sudo rights so she doesn't have to worry about breaking it. I mean, I'm in college. I look around my dorm, I see AIM, a web browser, Word, and iTunes. That's it. That's what average users use. There's also a few guys who play video games, but they're very outnumbered, and most are console-gamers anyway.
In Ubuntu you just install the language pack you want (in the Settings menu) and then whenever you go to log in, you can click "languages" in the "options" menu and pick which one you want to use. I have mine set to allow me to choose English, Japanese, or Russian.
What does "there is no driver for this" have to do with stability? Do you know what stability means?It means your computer doesn't crash all the time. My computer's not unstable just because a "Windows only" (not even Mac!) gadget I got for Christmas doesn't work. I mean, it IS unstable, but that's not the reason. The reason is that I'm alpha-testing Feisty Fawn. If you look at Ubuntu, though, it isn't hell to install. Neither is Fedora or Sabayon or Knoppix (all I've ever done). Put in the disk, answer like 5 questions, hit "install" and it goes off on its own. If you have unsupported hardware, it's tougher, but even something I've been told is a PITA to install (drivers for a Broadcom bcm43xx) turned out to be a matter of 10-15 minutes because there are auto-installer scripts for them. I know it doesn't work for everything. I'd like drivers for my little photo keychain, but that's miniscule. Can I play mp3s? Yes. Can I browse the web and chat? Yes. Can I type my papers? Yes. Can I play Flash games? Yes. Can I make really nice genealogy reports (the kind that make Windows users jealous) using GRAMPS? Yes. Can I set up a printer without installing any drivers at all, just by clicking 3 or 4 buttons (new driver, next, next, next)? Yes. Does it crash? Provided I don't block the air vents on my laptop so that it gets no circulation and hits 88C, no, it doesn't. If I DO do stupid things that make it overheat, then yeah. Does the unstable version I'm running crash? No! It's "unstable" and "alpha" but it's rock solid!
In which case you use gtkpod and you can sync the iPod just dandy
It also means that if you're an admin and there are many users, you can avoid giving out the root password. You can set it so only specific people can use sudo, and you can monitor everything they do while in sudo mode. So, if something goes wrong, you know which person did it rather than a general "someone with the root password did it" and every guy's pointing to the guy next to him going "he did it!"
Agreed! I just took a bunch of computers from an office that used to have Win98 on them and installed Linux. Today they were put into place at a local school. When you use a non-bloated OS and don't have AV, spware-scans, etc running all the time plus the actual spyware, old computers can work just fine. For that matter, I still have a Gateway from 1998. It has Windows XP on it now. Yes, it runs slow, but I suspect it's because XP is a lot bigger than Win98. I would like to see it fly with an install of Damn Small Linux or Knoppix or Puppy, but the printer could be tricky. I've tested it with a live cd, though. All the hardware is supported. I just need to figure out how to get Lexmark printers going, and a 9-year-old computer can be fast again. People have this belief that if the computer slows down you need a new one because it can't be made fast again. Step 1: get rid of the Luna theme. Really, though, a fresh install of whatever OS you're using will be just as fast as when you bought it. That just might be slow relative to today's standards, in which case you throw in a bit more ram, and you're good. There is no reason to trash a computer after only a few years. You can get at least 5 or 6 years out of them and have it running at a reasonable speed without upgrading at all if you don't bog it down with Norton AV (try AVG instead) or let it be part of a botnet
I know. I'm reading that book right now :)
Isn't the way they worked very close to Free Software, though? They would show their code to anyone, and anyone who could improve it was allowed to, etc. Open Source doesn't necessarily mean you're allowed to improve it.
If I recall correctly, mp3 itself is up in 2009 or 2010. I don't know about the rest.
Patents are good for 20 years.
I'd like to see ogg more (and I was very happy to see 20 songs for download in .ogg format on Bijelo Dugme's website), but I know my mp3 player doesn't support it. As soon as the firmware is totally cracked on it, I'm Rockboxing it and making it ogg-compatible though. Why not offer high-bitrate mp3 and average-bitrate oggs? The sound quality will be high on both. The mp3s may be a bit bigger of files, but users of mp3 players can use them, and then if people who keep their music on their computers can use ogg and have smaller files with the high-quality sound.
Money IS God!
But thanks to the GPL, if MS *was* to plant something in there to trip up Linux, it'd just become GPL'd itself. And then that code which is *also* in MS's stuff would be GPL too and they would be stuck with their own code would have to be GPL as well. Well, unless dual-licensing comes in.
I like Banshee for music. The artist recommendations, streaming radio, and last.fm stuff are all nice to have, and it manages your music library. I think most of that stuff isn't in the Edgy version, though. For running a VPN client, kvpnc is definitely a helpful thing, especially if you don't want to decode the Cisco password since you can just import the .pcf. KSnapshot is also a nice screenshot tool because it allows a delay so you can take pics of a spinning Beryl cube. KTorrent was the other KDE app I liked, but that's just because Bittorrent's UI is bad. Azureus works the same way as KTorrent though, and it fits the GNOME theme nicely.
I don't have the information to update the Ubuntu wiki. I may be using Feisty alpha, but I don't know many tricks. When I find out the necessary tweaks to get a poorly-performing bit of hardware to work correctly, I add it, though. The hardware compatibility list is the one to which I pay the most attention.
Really??In 2000/2001 was $250-$400 normal for a computer? That's the last time my family got a desktop. The 3 store-bought desktops are from 1998-2001. Other desktop is a home-made, and my laptop was $850 (yay for being on sale 15% off). Maybe this is a case of inflation screwing me up. I haven't looked at desktops in a long time, and I don't think there are any plans to buy a new one any time in the next few years. The next computers we get will be Linux laptops from System76 when my siblings go to college. The other computers may be up to 9 years old (1998 Pentium 2 is the oldest) but that's not bad. Still runs, right? That thing could run for years longer. If my dad decides to retire it, I'll put in a bigger hard drive, Damn Small Linux, and make it a file server. That thing could *fly* with DSL.
Actually, if you've seen Beryl, you'll note that Vista Ultimate doesn't compare in terms of "look & feel" for eye-candy. Eye-candy was one of the big things MS was showing off, but Beryl easily pwns them there.
Why get the KDE stuff? GNOME is simpler. Yeah, Holy War, I know. GNOME has a lot of functionality, but it does the "this is the big stuff, here's the options, go into the advanced settings if you wanna get more detailed, but I'm not cluttering this interface from the start" thing while KDE shows all the options at once. Anyway, ignore the Ubuntu wiki. It doesn't get updated enough. Use ubuntuguide.org It has everything you need to make multimedia go and a lot more. It's all command line, but it's not scary. It's just "copy" "paste" "press enter." For checking to see if an app will work in Wine: http://appdb.winehq.org/
Can I have Windows 95 back? That control panel made sense. The "category view" makes pretty much no sense. It just means more clicks to find what you want. Thankfully, "classic view" is an option, but I have to check that the person with whom I am speaking is in that mode. I don't recall looking at Vista's CP though. It's changed again?That sucks. I think I'm going to have to try to push that idea with my friend to make a flash-based website which is a Vista simulation for techs who don't have it in front of them. I use Linux, so I don't know the exact wording of everything. Even when I used Windows I didn't know the wording, but I knew the idea. Over the phone, that doesn't help much though, and now I can't read off the screen. I told him he should make a flash site that has screenshots so when you click something in the control panel, the picture changes to having the resulting window open, and clicking the tabs moves between those interfaces etc. so that you can read from the screenshot what the person needs to click.
Months? Following those steps would take less than 5 minutes. Are you nuts or does it take you 3 days to type each letter?
Ssh is secure by default. That's why it's called SECURE SHell. Duh. Just add -X when you launch ssh and you can have clicky instead of typey. Easy.
Someone has no idea how to use ssh with X forwarding.
$1200 is not midrange. That's gaming. Cheap is like $250-350. Mid-range is like $400.
It's pretty obvious you don't speak Japanese. There is no possible way to write "wii" in Japanese characters. A few hundred years ago, there was a letter for "wi" to which you could add "i". It no longer exists. The closest you'll get is "uii". If you know anything about any Latin-ish language, think of the letter "i" in that. It's sounds like a long e. Heck, short i's always sound like long e's. It's just a matter of how "finished" it sounds. Say "ee" and stop halfway through. It sounds like a short i. Just like the beginning of "idiot" or even better, the second i in "idiot" really sounds like that. Do you speak English?
Well, I don't know about "honest requests" but if there had been any major OEM offering pre-installed Linux when I got my laptop, I would've done it. I know there are Linux OEMs, but economies of scale mean they cost an arm and a leg. As it is, I want to try to get a Windows refund.
Oh, this only goes for laptops. If you can get a Dell desktop without their terrible squishy keyboard, count that in too. If you're stuck with those pieces of junk, no Dell desktops. I'm gonna go request nicer keyboards on their site. I hate suffering through using those squishy keyboards. What happened to clicky? To be fair, Lenovo makes the best laptop keyboard, though I recently saw (felt?) a really nice HP one. Too bad Dell hasn't figured out how to make a keyboard the clicks properly.