Operating systems

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, but did they BAN that guy who put it in? Did they? DID they? DID THEY? I'll install OpenOffice again tomorrow and if they haven't fucked up pasting, I'll probably use it again as my primary word processor.

[RetroRomper]

Buuuuuuut then Deus Ex: Human Revolution came out, and I'm never going to play long games in front of a TV. Even if it's the 60" Nigios that Ben just bought. So, welp, Windows.

A friend said "fuck that" and slip streamed Windows XP Pro without IE, any games, accessories, nothing except the base components, so he could access Steam and its plethora of games.

Ubuntu is set up as his main OS and he couldn't be happier with the arrangement.

[RetroRomper]

Yeah, but did they BAN that guy who put it in? Did they? DID they? DID THEY?

Considering he worked for Sun and Oracle laid off the entire OpenOffice team, probably. I'd imagine he now works as a database developer for a porn site of questionable merit, crying himself to sleep at what his life has become.

And please do use LibreOffice...

http://download.documentfoundation.org/ ... _multi.exe

PS And... I'm turning off e-mail notifications so I'm not contacted whenever someone replies to a thread.

[Tdarcos]

And please do use LibreOffice...

I'm downloading it now. Libre Office is very large, almost 200MB, for some reason lately my Comcast Cable internet connection is down to a very slow DSL equivalent of about 80K/sec (not sure if that's KBytes or KBits), so it's going to take quite a while, probably more than an hour (the odd thing is I'm usually doing routinely 2-5Mbps for downloads, but lately it's gotten very slow).

It's Kbytes; I clocked it, for it to increase one meg it took 13 seconds.

At this time Firefox informs me I've downloaded 75%, 144/191 MB and will be about another 10 minutes.

[AArdvark]

I still like ye olde text-only Wordpad. I know, it doesn't spell check, has barely and editing functions and does nothing fancy with the fonts and such, but it hasn't changed in fifteen+ years. It's the one word processor that I can actually write with because I'm not messing about with how it looks. The only time it failed me was when my windows98 (at work) blue-screened on me, and that wasn't it's fault, well not totally. Copy and paste is all I need anyway. I usually always run the finished document through Word2K and spellcheck it like that.


THE
ASCII
AARDVARK

[CO]

I've been running the student version of Windows 7 Ultimate (or whatever) and before that, it was a copy of Windows XP Pro from a volume license from my school's computer lab. The last version of Windows I bought was... Windows 98 SE?

Hah, finally something I can beat you at: I've never purchased an operating system, ever.




*not including the Windows 3.0 which came with my college computer or the windows 7 64 bit that came with my wife's new laptop. Those dollars to mr softy couldn't be helped but they won't get my MS Office money though, office 2010 by torrent is fine.

[Flack]

I'm basically using Google Docs 100% of the time now. It's online, so I have access to my documents from anywhere (including my phone). It does spell-check, and will allow you export into Word format, if need be.

[Tdarcos]

Windows 7 and XP made Linux pointless for a home desktop (work is another thing).

They did? News to me. It's been pointed out that the Aero interface in Vista and whatever else 7 is doing was pretty much already available from various window managers in X. Semi-transparent windows? Been there, done that. It's the applications problem more than anything else. A lot of the applications people need to use to accomplish want they want to do are not natively available for Linux. A lot more are now, but it's still somewhat of a chicken-egg problem.

I nailed it on the head once. I said (wrote) that if the original Napster had been a Linux application, it basically would have cemented the Linux operating system as a serious contender for home applications.

But I'm positive Microsoft will fuck up whatever their next OS is, so long live Ubuntu, I guess.

Actually, Microsoft makes big fuckups (Windows Vista, Microsoft Bob) and small fuckups (Paperclip), the differerence is that they've got smart enough people that they never made a "bet the company fuckup" like so many of their competitors have. It isn't that Microsoft has really done obscenely great, it is that most of their competitors have made obscenely stupid bet-the-company fuckups that killed them.

It's like it has been mentioned in a number of cases that the Philip Morris company made a lot of stupid mistakes, some that were real fuckups that might have killed other companies. They just never made the one "bet the company fuckup" that would have killed them: they never touched the formula, flavor or composition of the company's cash cow, Marlboro cigarettes.

More than anything else, Microsoft has more or less been able to survive by default: most of its competitors committed suicide at one time or another.

I mean, Word Perfect was originally SSI then it changed its name to its flagship word processor. Then they did something stupid and the company ended up getting sold to Novell. Which was probably just as stupid, Novell is not in the applications business, Novell was in the networking business.

But when Windows 95 came along - which made file sharing trivial and almost killed off Novell's business - they needed to figure out new ideas, and I don't think they did anything. Anyway, Novell then sold Word Perfect to Corel, which was a much better fit, either Corel or Adobe would have been good companies to take over Word Perfect, both of them have been involved in document processing for a long time.

In other news, all that open source shit proved it could get fucked when they showed that Open Office was going to be worked on indefinitely. THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT of Open Office is that people were tired with Microsoft fucking around with a word processor that should have been labeled "finished" 15 years ago. Fuck, any Word Processor past version 3 is worthless.

Actually, I found a number of nice features in Word Perfect for Windows version 8 that weren't available in 7, so it was worth the upgrade. I did not, however, find any special advantage to any version above 8; there was an offer of a trial of Word Perfect 10, and I did not find any significant benefit from it that I didn't already have with WP 8.

Of course your statement could essentially be true by considering that WP5 was the last DOS release, WP6.1 was a Windows application (which makes it Version 1), then WP7 came out (which was available in both 32-bit and 16-bit versions so it could be used either on Windows 95 (and later) or Windows 3.1, (and we can consider that to be Version 2), and the version I stopped at, Word Perfect 8 (which could be considered version 3.)

[Tdarcos]

I still like ye olde text-only Wordpad.

I keep a shortcut of Wordpad on my desktop, because it's great for quick looking at files or fast creating quickie notes. It is small and loads Fast, I've sometimes dropped a document's icon on its shortcut, brought up that document, found what I wanted to know, and closed and exited wordpad before OpenOffice.Org had even loaded when doing the same thing (double clicking a document's icon or dropping it on the application), and that's considering that OOO cheats by putting a preloader in the startup folder to try to load part of it before it's needed.

It basically came down to that in a particular case after waiting 2 seconds and OOO hadn't done anything I went to Wordpad and was done before OOO even opened.

[Tdarcos]

Microsoft Windows has something like 85%+ of all computer usage of Intel-based machines. The other 15% is shared by non-Intel (which is the Power-PC, e.g. older Macintosh) or MacOS-based Intel boxes, servers running Linux, Unix or BSD and the occasional desktop machine running Linux or something else.

The market share not being dominated by Windows, is being shared by EVERY OTHER OS. Shocker... And non-intel? You mean anything that isn't x86? If your going to throw RISC / PowerPC based processors in there, 80% of the market is dominated by ARM (based on volume) / MIPS or whatever.

I'm not referring to tablet PCs or things like the iPad or phones, I'm only referring to desktop boxes. If you look inside a GPS in someone's car it's probably running Mobile Linux or one of the other mobile OS', and it probably is an ARM processor because of the better characteristics it has for mobile computing. I don't know if WinCE is very popular or not, but I tell you; the day I hear that any automobile's hardware is run using anything from Microsoft is the day I use every power I have to communicate as widely as possible to STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM THAT CAR BECAUSE THE SOFTWARE WILL EVENTUALLY CRASH AND IT WILL KILL YOU, SOONER OR LATER!

And why are you including servers? Why.... Are... You.... Including.... A... Completely.... Different.... Market.... Segment.... In your half ass analysis and dumbing down of the statistics of an entire industry?

Why do I care? I really don't...

Because Windows still has a important server penetration but Linux is equal there except perhaps for mail and calendaring. Most places running mail are probably running Exchange Server; for Database servers they may, depending on how they are set up, still be using Microsoft's SQL Server as opposed to Sun's MySQL, IBM's DB2, or Oracle's eponymous product (all three of which are available either for Windows or Linux).

There are two types of Linux; boxes used for servers that don't have to work as desktops, and the few that do.

Is there anyone in the audience who doesn't have some smattering of background in IT? Anyone? Why the heck is this guy explaining to me what a server is?

I'm clarifying how I am establishing the estimates I am using.

Now, machines that either run Linux as the primary desktop or in dual boot with Windows have an interesting problem: being able to provide the necessary tools the person needs to do whatever tasks they want to do.

Proof read your posts? I guess you mean "Linux doesn't support some off brand, POS device I bought for $9 from a white van parked behind a gutted Circuit City." Please just say that "Linux sucks because some Chinese manufacturer decided to only support the OS that 90% of the world uses." Or I.E. "Obviously its the fault of the OS for not working with my cheap, half ass device."

You might want to check your facts and you might want to read what I said rather than make up something and assume it's what you thought I said. Tenda is a Chinese wireless manufacturer whose products I purchased inside of Micro Center, a major national electronics chain that I personally have done business with for over 20 years. Micro Center routinely has hundreds of Tenda adapters in their stores. They always work on every computer I've tried them on that will run a USB wireless adapter, mine and other people's and I've found their performance comparable to wireless adapters costing three times as much.

They work, they're inexpensive, and as I said, repeatedly in more than one post, IN AT LEAST ONE RELEASE OF LINUX THE TENDA ADAPTER WORKED ON THE "OUT OF THE BOX" LINUX INSTALLATION WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO INSTALL A DRIVER, SOMETHING THAT WASN'T EVEN POSSIBLE WITH WINDOWS.

This is not some "cheap device bought from a van behind a gutted Circuit City." Also, where exactly do you know of any gutted Circuit City store? Every one I've seen in this area have been snapped up and re-opened by some other retailer because the places are typically prime retail real estate. Maybe where you live the recession is a lot worse.

(mmm... I found rape seeds in my Apple Turnover)

Uh, for several years, because 'rapeseed' has such a bad connotation, the new name for them are "canola" seeds. That's why people buy "canola" oil instead of "rapeseed" oil.

I had one distro that recognized my cheap $9 Tenda wireless card out of the box, I was able to use Firefox and I think I might have even posted a message here.

Good for you!

So much for your bothering to read what I said after you stated how it's a "POS off-brand bought from a white van behind a gutted Circuit city" adapter that Linux doesn't support, after I just said that it did.

With the cracking of the NTFS file system, now a running Linux can read and write to a NTFS-formatted drive on the same machine so it can access the user's existing files as needed.

Cracked? It wasn't cracked, it was at best reverse engineered. Please don't try to paint Linux as a Pirate OS or "viral infection."

I meant "cracked" in the sense that they cracked Microsoft's monopoly on the means to access NTFS both for read and write. Please excuse me if my phrasing was incorrect, I meant it in the sense that you were referring to, that the people reverse engineering the NTFS method had finally cracked the problem.

And a stable NTFS driver has been available for the last EIGHT YEARS. I loaded experimental NTFS patches onto Linux soon after Windows XP was released and Debian has been shipping with NTFS support for the last five.

NTFS write support on Linux took a long time; NTFS read support was out a lot sooner.

I had found before this that the easiest way to transfer files back-and-forth was either to use a floppy disc or a USB thumb drive, because Linux can handle both DOS and DOS-LFN drives (the version of the DOS file system that supports long file names.)

Note to the audience: the sane approach would have been to use FAT32, instead of employing a solution that is more to satisfy self gloating that consists of "Erp derp, I found a clever solution to a problem I created."

That was what I was referring to, I just couldn't remember the common name of "FAT32" at the time and I was referring to it as "DOS-LFN". Exactly what do you think jump drives are formatted for, Macintosh? They're formatted FAT32.

I didn't create any problem, Microsoft did, or rather, the manufacturers of very large hard drives did. NTFS is the default format for XP drives and above a certain size (I got the numbers straight off Microsoft's website) for Windows 2000, the maximum partition size for FAT32 is 32 GB; if it's Windows 98, the maximum size is 127½ GB, so if you have a drive at or above 128 GB you have to use NTFS if you want it as a single volume. So that means that before the problem was solved, either you had to have a separate FAT32 partition or use an external device that is FAT32 formatted (like a jump drive). Once they reverse engineered how to read and write NTFS partitions on Linux that form of sneakernet was no longer needed.

So they're getting there, and it keeps getting better all the time, but Linux still has problems with being transparently usable the way Windows routinely is.

Your right: Where are my multiple 3D work spaces in Linux? Oh wait...

Lets also completely ignore Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, Unity, Ion, etc. as "baby OSes, that I'm obviously qualified to completely discard out of hand."

And you might try learning to use the correct terms and know what you are talking about. None of those are operating systems. They are all desktop environments for X. (I originally thought they were window managers; they are not.)

Or rather, since you lumped them together I'm presuming Unity and ION are also desktop environments although one of the websites I visited which lists desktops and window managers for X doesn't list Unity or Ion. They are application programs that operate the user's desktop on X Windowing System and run with X, which itself is an application program that runs on an operating system.

What exactly are you smoking? Do you have a medical license for it?

And another incompetent who can't think shows his true stripes by hauling out the old and tired ad-hominem treatment because he knows he's incapable of honest conversation.

Of course, the reason being the billions of dollars spent on Windows and the relatively minor amounts of money in comparison available for Linux.

Urgh?

Again, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, there aren't that many things available for ordinary desktop users to do the things they want (there isn't a lot of money available to release Linux ports of PC games, so almost all of them are Windows only), plus most of the development effort in desktop applications goes toward Windows, plus Microsoft makes money selling Windows - which it can thus offer incentives to manufacturers to continue to offer it on their machines - and it's pre-loaded on machines (and Microsoft pulls every stunt it can think of - legal or otherwise - to try to keep manufacturers from putting Linux on their boxes). Thus there's a big pile of resources to support Windows. Linux, not so much.

[RetroRomper]

I'm not referring to tablet PCs or things like the iPad or phones, I'm only referring to desktop boxes.

You and the rest of the world can't figure out if a personal computing device of some kind, should count towards an arbitrary metric.

Why do I care? I really don't...

Because Windows still has a important server penetration but Linux is equal there except perhaps for mail and calendaring. Most places running mail are probably running Exchange Server; for Database servers they may, depending on how they are set up, still be using Microsoft's SQL Server as opposed to Sun's MySQL, IBM's DB2, or Oracle's eponymous product

Microsoft had to work on entering the server market, not Linux. My original comment, highlighted a blatantly half ass effort to magically differentiate desktop and server systems. Your comment and estimation still leaves much to be desired, but I'm enjoying a mulled wine right now... SO BUDDY, ITS OKAY!

I'm clarifying how I am establishing the estimates I am using.

Off hand, ineffectual statistics for an off hand, ineffectual conclusion that offers a ten or twelve year old estimation of an industry your completely apart from.

GOOD ANSWER

You might want to check your facts and you might want to read what I said rather than make up something and assume it's what you thought I said.

You gave some vague statement about how dual boot systems don't solve basic usage problems, then remarked about how a random USB peripheral worked under Linux. I read your comment and it didn't make any sense then, and it makes less now.

This is not some "cheap device bought from a van behind a gutted Circuit City."

Just because you bought it at a computer super store that is important in your life because you haven't moved in the last twenty years, doesn't mean the equipment they sell is "super secret special."

Uh, for several years, because 'rapeseed' has such a bad connotation, the new name for them are "canola" seeds. That's why people buy "canola" oil instead of "rapeseed" oil.

I'm going to get another one later, but they were small, white grapes with a tart taste to compliment the apple in the turnover. Quite good... Not sure if they were rapeseeds though.

So much for your bothering to read what I said after you stated how it's a "POS off-brand bought from a white van behind a gutted Circuit city" adapter that Linux doesn't support, after I just said that it did.

You weren't completely clear and your tone come off as annoyed that it may have took extra steps to work in Linux. Just the result of a poorly written paragraph, as oppose to malice on my part.

I meant "cracked" in the sense that they cracked Microsoft's monopoly on the means to access NTFS both for read and write.

Way to turn around a loaded, misused work... Oh... Your a clever one, arn't ya?

NTFS write support on Linux took a long time; NTFS read support was out a lot sooner.

Arguing over when and how NTFS support was added, just reaffirms that "You Were Right." And no, it wasn't that big of a deal in the hacker space and it didn't take that long to be added to the stable branches of many distros.

And you might try learning to use the correct terms and know what you are talking about. None of those are operating systems.

I realized my mistake after I posted but whatever. Calling a windows manager or a desktop environment the "OS" is about as pertinent as calling Linux, Mac OSX, or Windows an OS when they are actually just names for groupings of various components.

You knew what I was talking about, the rest is just semantics.

And another incompetent who can't think shows his true stripes by hauling out the old and tired ad-hominem treatment because he knows he's incapable of honest conversation.

I really enjoyed the "Do you have a medical license for it?" part. Amused myself for all of two seconds.

Again, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, there aren't that many things available for ordinary desktop users to do the things they want (there isn't a lot of money available to release Linux ports of PC games, so almost all of them are Windows only), plus most of the development effort in desktop applications goes toward Windows, plus Microsoft makes money selling Windows - which it can thus offer incentives to manufacturers to continue to offer it on their machines - and it's pre-loaded on machines (and Microsoft pulls every stunt it can think of - legal or otherwise - to try to keep manufacturers from putting Linux on their boxes). Thus there's a big pile of resources to support Windows. Linux, not so much.

Look, this debate was tired and trollish twelve or thirteen years ago, now its just a waste of time. Linux has matured with numerous window managers, desktop environments, whatever, being available coupled with a level of usability that meets or exceeds Windows.

This whole "Oh no.... There arn't any games" or "where is derr money being put into the OS?" ignores years of discussion around the open source model itself, and just shows that you expect large projects to meet an arbitrary standard to have your seal of approval.

They don't need it, don't care to have it, and arn't aware of either you or me, nor will they halt everything and say "Oh no! Tdarcos is concerned were not doing such such! Pull down the repositories! Rethink the project guidelines! We need this guys support!" A good, mature, usable product has been crafted and released, its out there. Regardless of your opinion of the state of Linux drivers, what it needs to become a "real OS" or whatever, the work has been done.

Seriously, instead of writing these long diatribes do something useful. Draw. Code. Add to the world instead of pointlessly bitch about it.

[pinback]

ITT: People who love their own opinions!