'And then I got onto your point about "processors wearing out" like they're made from leather and wood and another part of me died inside.'
Whooosh.
32991 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"And lets be honest Linux is a PITA as well unless you like trawling through Man files or spending hours searching the net which is a problem when it's the wifi driver that is the issue."
This is a potential problem for any OS.
For some users claims like this make no apparent sense if they've never hit the problem that they have H/W for which their OS provides no drivers.
Nevertheless it's a problem which may well strike if you've got very new H/W for which an older OS has no drivers or, conversely, if you have old H/W and a new OS (specialised kit still depending on XP for instance).
It's exacerbated by the fact that it's often the H/W manufacturer who provides the drivers and they may well have gone out of business old H/W or simply can't be bothered to support more than one version of a single OS in which case you should put the blame where it belongs: on the H/W manufacturer. And exacerbated further if the OS demands that its vendor signs all drivers.
There is, however, one situation in which Linux has an advantage. Just because the manufacturer doesn't support it there's no inhibition on Linux developers who want a particular piece of H/W developing their own drivers so although the vendor's site might not list support for Linux the drivers might be in the kernel or an an additional library anyway.
But it's a problem from which no OS is immune and isn't going to go away.
'"Converting attachments to another file type" - and how exactly do you do that without opening the frigging attachment first?'
Bounce all mail with Office attachments with a message saying they're not accepted, convert to PDF. It'd be unpopular at first but if a few high profile organisations took the lead (say a few govts) then the message might get through.
"How can a public body that is a govermennt department 'privately own' a limited company?" By registering at Companies House.
"Who is/are the owner(s) of this company?" Whoever owns the share(s).
"Is this some sort of ruse to deguise employment by a government dpartment that can avoid Civil Service pay and pensions obligations?" Yes.
"How does the screen narration work in your superior OS?"
I haven't had the need to use this myself fortunately but, as you'd expect, there's quite a lot of assistive stuff in the repositories, largely, I think, based on speech-dispatcher. See it put together in http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html
"Visio is a bit of a bugger - Dia and Co don't cut it "
Enterprise Architect ( http://www.sparxsystems.com ) isn't free in either sense but fairly reasonably priced IIRC and runs on Wine (don't we all?). It's a long time since I had an update (maintenance subscription but you can live without it, IME it's more for features than bug fixes) so they'll have poured even more into it by now.
"To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure more than a handful of publishers around the world have the financial reserves to push back."
I think you should look at this from the other direction. As adblock use grows to become universal do any publishers have the financial reserves to stick with the sinking ship?
"The advertisers seem to see themselves as the victims here"
I'm sure they are. That's the advertisers as in people with a product to sell.
It's the advertising industry that's the problem. They're selling advertising channels to the advertisers and then implementing them in a way that harms everyone. It may only be a few individuals in the industry who have spent the last few years crapping in the nest but it means that there's enough shit around to stick to everyone, advertisers included - and that was even before malvertising came along.
"Shortly thereafter they'll expand what they offer."
Yup. That's why I wrote "trustable" in my comment. As for us all paying the price - no we won't because we'll not trust them enough in the first place to turn off the blockers. The advertising industry has done irreparable harm to its business model. It's time for the publishers to get out and work out their own salvation.
"someone will come up with the concept of Trusted Ads...Then we will be able to turn off our adblockers."
Only if the ads are actually trusted by users, let alone trustable. I think the idea of advertising networks is now so broken than nobody's going to bother turning off blockers to find out.
Maybe a couple of years ago that was a possibility. The advertising industry has spent too long crapping in its nest so now, from the users' PoV, they've all got some sticking to them.
"KISS principle works here, simple static ads are not worth blocking or worry about the bandwidth they use."
I'm not sure of the exact point.
Embedded ads aren't going to be blocked anyway if they're coming from the publisher's server (although it's possible to block them if the publisher uses a different server than that used for the page content). As soon as the publisher hands matters over to a separate network they've lost control. Even if some advertiser tries to send simple static ads over that network they'll get blocked by ad blockers because, on the KISS principle, it's not worth the effort of differentiating them from the problem ads so as to not block them.
"As advertising can be classed as a business expense it's tax-deductable, so the effective cost to someone wanting to advertise a product is considerably less than the price they pay to the advertising agencies."
Money spent to alienate potential customers is still money spent. It comes off the pre-tax profits. Let me translate that into business-speak: it comes off the profits. The govt. take on profits is a separate matter.
"Unfortunately not much more seems to have come of it."
Not much needs to come of it. We're capable of taking action individually without waiting for any govt. to act. In any case I presume that if any action came of a Senate investigation it would only apply in the US (no matter how they seem to believe they can legislate world wide) so for the rest of us it's even more important that we don't have to depend on them.
"small startups often do not have as much invested in legacy systems."
Legacy systems are those which runs the business that brings in the money. If startups are just burning money instead of making it it's no surprise they don't have legacy systems.
There was an article a few weeks ago about Graze. Although relatively new it had started making money and all the new shiny that people had been working on not long ago were now "legacy" and they were looking at newer shiny to replace them. I don't think they were spinning it quite like that but that's how I read it.
"When the less knowledgeable users install say, Mint or Ubuntu, does the installation suggest this or is /home partition automatically created?"
Good question. Don't know because these days I always ignore any recommendations & go for a fully split install:/boot, /, /home, /usr, /usr/local, /var, /opt, /tmp & swap. And preferably with LVM so a good chunk can be held back and added where necessary.
But a separate /home should be a minimum default.
"Anyone who says any Linux distro is easier to install or update than Windows is crazy."
Yup, I'm feeling a bit crazy.
It could be something to do with the time it took to take a brand new W7 laptop and bring it to current with updates (omitting nagware & telemetry of course). An update version that spent hours apparently looking for updates but not doing anything. Time spent googling, being lead to several alleged updates which, on clicking Download went straight to a page thanking me for downloading and giving install instructions but not downloading anything. Then, having got an update version that worked, going through the remaining recommended update descriptions one at a time deciding which to hide & which to install.
I wouldn't tackle that for anybody but my grandkids and even then I was sorely tempted to wipe it & take a few minutes to install Linux. Maybe next year.