Growing up, my best friend was always one of the smartest and successful kids in the class. But he also had an annoying habit of going around making offhand remarks about how he hadn't cracked a book until 10 minutes before the finals and still aced it, etc...
Although I shouldn't have let it get to me, it definitely did since we were always competitive. And it took quite a few years before I realized how stupid it was to believe that he could possibly be relying on innate intelligence to know things like obscure Gettysburg lieutenants or isotope neutron counts, whatever.
Anyways, as it turns out, we became roommates after college and I finally got to see the man behind the curtain. The kid's a workhorse! Sure he's still brilliant, but I had no idea how intense his work ethic was. His job requires all sorts of certification exams, and he would be locked in his room 10 hours a day for weeks at a time just memorizing, memorizing, memorizing...
Anyways, I'm sure Einstein wouldn't have wanted people to know that he used flashcards either :)
Maybe not your friend, but there are people in this world who truly have "photographic" memories. I had one such friend at university and it frustrated me no end that we could go to a lecture and then he would go out that night and do no study whatsoever while I would study hard, and he would show up the next day with much better recall than me. Not just important concepts but any small detail about exactly what was on the board at the time ... he could just read it off from the mental image in his mind with no effort at all.
I have a counter example. I've known one guy who aced his EE degree, receiving the highest marks in his graduating class. He also scored the second highest in his graduating class for his economics degree. He earned both degrees simultaneously. I knew him really well, and he usually copied assignments and spent no more than a day studying for exams. I think he was really good at getting the most from the lectures.
It's funny feeling like the doc has you open in gdb or something. I had my aortic root and a valve replaced a few years ago. However, I had been monitored for years prior, so I avoided the surprise you got. Anyways, glad you came through ok. The trauma of surgery becomes just another inconvenience from the past with a year or two of hindsight.
I haven't tried it since upgrading to OSX 10.5 but http://trac.kismac-ng.org/ always just worked with the AirPort built into the MBP. With an idiotproof Mac GUI to boot.
As a dude who just tried Ubuntu for the first time in 5 years to see how far they've come, but couldn't because the fucking liveCD didn't have a driver for my cdrom, this rings true.
But for what it's worth, after a few grueling days getting the p.o.s. up and running, I was shocked to have all the UI fluff my macbook has, plus the infinite list of other great stuff that's inherent to Linux.
The moral? Just shrinkwrap all OSS with a CS degree holding nerd who has a couple days of free time.
If you buy Windows and have trouble installing it (which, by the way, is far less likely in my experience than with most Linux installs -- although things are getting better on that front, too), there's a phone number I/my grandma can call for help. You'd be surprised by how big a difference that makes.
Yeah, I'm not suggesting that the Linux installation process is as friendly as Windows (though, as you said, things are getting better). But how many Windows users even know what an operating system is? How many of them realize that Windows isn't built-in to the computer? I think there's a mental obstacle here that would make installing Windows difficult for many (but not all) Windows users.
I mean how many users could take a PC with no OS and get Windows running on it.
Installation is an obstacle for linux adoption, but it's not (entirely) because the installation process is broken. It's because Linux doesn't have the OEM distribution model that Microsoft does.
I don't think this refutes anything you've said, I'm just pointing out that it is more than a software issue.
It's not usually the CDROM, but the chipset it's attached to. A lot of recent motherboards have multiple disk controllers -- usually a standard one that's a part of the motherboard chipset, and a second super-shitty one (often from JMicron) so that they can advertise extra ports (also because Intel chipsets didn't support SATA hotplug for the longest time).
It's fairly common for the CDROM in an 'enthusiast' desktop to be attached to the single PATA port on a secondary controller.
Linux users have no need to court people like you. We're not a business, market share is a meaningless metric. I don't care if 1% or 100% of the people using computers use Linux, what I care about is if there are enough people working on the projects to make it usable for ME. There are.
People who complain about FOSS community's "attitude" should really check their own sense of entitlement. We are talking about you getting something FREE that costs hundreds of thousands of man hours to make. If it takes you more than one try to get it to install then think of that as the cost to enter instead of the $150 you pay Microsoft
(incidentally Windows suffers similar problems on my home desktops SATA controller as you describe having under Linux, it is not a Linux thing it is a shitty hardware thing).
Keep beating that strawman, you're sure to make a point eventually.
The argument isn't whether or not Linux is useful to a bunch of nerds, myself included, or whether or not I should kiss rms for bestowing this gift unto humanity for free. It's whether it's competitive against its better known closed source counterparts on the Desktop. And you basically answered that question in your first paragraph.
My girlfriend and parents prefer it too. If your entire interaction with the computer is through Firefox, a music player, and Office like it is for them, OpenOffice is actually closer to what they know than the "new" Office 2007. Subtract out viruses, add in never needing drivers (how do I make my printer work? just plug it in), and they are much happier under Linux than Windows.
I've installed it for a lot of people and there are basically 3 periods. 1) Installing (which turns a lot of people off if they can't get it right there). 2) Getting used to it (which basically is people learning it and finding out its not that alien) and 3) Preferring it.
I have yet to find someone who didn't get to stage 3 in about 6 months. You don't get it at first but eventually you go back to windows and start looking for the 'Always on Top' checkbox or you have a popup during a presentation and say, why the hell am I paying for this?
Please tell me which desktop you mean. Do you mean the home desktop? Or perhaps the administrative assistant desktop that needs access to the calendar, word, and email, (maybe the web too...). Perhaps you mean the desktops of the engineers, using autocad and a pile of specialized tools. And so on.
Each of the above has different needs (perhaps even vastly different). A smart consultant/company/etc would go ahead and stop trying to use the same tool for every job. Some of those environments could probably switch to linux, and after a couple of months of "getting used to it time" everything would continue on as if nothing happened.
The point is that "the desktop" has always struck me as a strawman to begin with.
1) China. Enough said.
2) The box never says whether the cd-rom uses a "standard driver model."
After reviewing the facts as they exist in this world, why would anyone have trust your reasoning or logical skills ever again? Moreover, given how important logical reasoning is to the computer programming, why would anyone ever trust your computer programming skills ever again? Finally, given how important computer programming skills are to being a computer geek, why would anyone ever trust your geek cred ever again?
1)Korea 2) I have yet to meet a cd-rom in this century that didn't just work with linux, no matter what it declared.
After naming an asian company, then stating some vaguely related nonsense about talking inanimate objects, I will now imply there is some sort of link to your sex life: you are impotent.
Despite your pretense of cleverness, I did in fact see what you did there. You pretended that my ad-hominem attack, which trivializes his judgement based on my disbelief of the existence and his subsequent buying of some obscure hardware invalidates his sweeping generalization about an entire industry (an argument silly on its own since driver problems are a universal issue), is somehow the same type of ad-hominem attack as stating random unrelated facts and listing the implications of poor reasoning, reductio-ad-absurdum. Well sir, you are wrong, my blatantly ad-hominem attack (which is pretty absurd in itself) is not the same as your poor attempt at using a witty question to counter it.
Edit: the above run-on sentence is intentionally confusing and absurd.
It has as much to do with the community it attracts as the articles themselves.
Every social news site has it's unspoken core values that can't be parsed out (easily :) with a script. HN has it's libertarians, reddit has it's contrarian only-I-took-the-red-pill mentality, and 4chan has its poop and kiddieporn. Go against the respective grain, and get ostracized.
I know I'm missing the point, but my main reaction to this is naive admiration that Zed can complain about a language in a blog post and get flamed by the freakin' creator of said language.
This could be revolutionary, however email is the way it is because that's just how we've communicated as a species for eons, all the way from letters to tablets to cave paintings. You think carefully about your message, create something representing it, and share it. It seems like Wave is essentially condensing that process into one step, more like a conversation. I'm not sure everyone will welcome that.
It seems to be acting like a lot of communication tools at once. If there's some way to partition the usage up somehow then it's like a combination of several quality tools in the one place with the option to let the borders blur.
It'd be nice to be able to set the communication mode for instance - "this is asynchronous, like an email", and then you don't have to worry about the person you're writing to coming online while you're drafting something you want to word carefully. It sounds like they have something like that but I don't know what the granularity is like.
If it can do that you can have your cake and eat it to, and I'd be pretty keen to give it a go.
Hell, I'd be happy with email/chat/feed reader/blog interface as separate apps in the same page, just so I could get status info from everything in the same place that I do stuff. Being able to drag and drop things between them all has a fair bit of appeal as well.
It's probably a fine line between good integration and a huge shiny mess though.
I am drooling with hacker nerdocity. A beautifully organic 45 year old still-working box passed on from a protohacker connected to a defcon-stickered terminal browsing the web on a cli....I need to look away
Although I shouldn't have let it get to me, it definitely did since we were always competitive. And it took quite a few years before I realized how stupid it was to believe that he could possibly be relying on innate intelligence to know things like obscure Gettysburg lieutenants or isotope neutron counts, whatever.
Anyways, as it turns out, we became roommates after college and I finally got to see the man behind the curtain. The kid's a workhorse! Sure he's still brilliant, but I had no idea how intense his work ethic was. His job requires all sorts of certification exams, and he would be locked in his room 10 hours a day for weeks at a time just memorizing, memorizing, memorizing...
Anyways, I'm sure Einstein wouldn't have wanted people to know that he used flashcards either :)