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OT, but the word you;re looking for is bogosity

In the end, if people lose work, computers, information, etc in a big scale, probably awareness will be much higher, safer choices will be taken (on client software, i.e.) as the ones that will fall will be probably the ones that always gets infected.

Is like a injection, it hurts a bit, but in the end you will end mostly safe from that kind of malware.

It isn't. That's the point. It's merely a nice gedanken. Note the mention in that definition of how the word has negative connotations.

You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

You've never programmed in COBOL have you?

I think that there's a few issues that means that free desktops need to play "catch up" with the likes of Windows.

When a free software project starts, *GENERALLY* (not all the time) the coders are writing the code because they want/need it. They aren't coding with users in mind, they're coding something that they want and think might be useful. So the project is designed for a skilled computer user, and if usability comes after that as a result of enough requests, it is already "playing second fiddle". The reason that a certain usability feature doesn't get into the code might (but of course not always) be simply because the coder uses the desktop system, and considers the addition to over-simplify the system to the point of almost being patronising (There are many examples where Windows can be considered extremely patronising to a "power user").

Speaking of being patronising, there is also a notable point in regards to the attitude of many geeks/hackers. As the "Portrait of J. Random Hacker" says in the "Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality" section:

Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like 'other people'. Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards self-absorption, intellectual arrogance, and impatience with people and tasks perceived to be wasting their time.
(Emphasis Added)

That, and the brief mention of "Stupid People" in the section entitled "Things Hackers Detest and Avoid" is also part of the problem. Hackers/coders tend to react very badly to timewasting tasks and stupidity, so when an inexperienced user has a problem with a current system, they tend to receive ridicule and/or abuse, rather than their concerns being taken on board. This doesn't happen in every case of course, but the most common answer to a technical question is "RTFM". It's ultimately hard to really take what inexperienced users need on board when you just consider them to be stupid for not being able to use your current system.

Another thing is really the power of the (normally Bash) shell. A lot of *nix users are people who grew up on the system before GUIs really became popular, and they have got so used to a command line system that they often shun the very idea of a GUI system. When you're so comfortable with a shell window where you can do just about anything you need to, there's less of a focus on usability of a desktop system. Provided you have a basic file browser, which is usable and functional, there's a danger of not fully developing the file browser, on the strength of the fact that you can get to where you want to go much more quickly with cd /home/blah or similar at the shell. With Windows, the command line is so utterly piss-poor by comparison (yes you can get 3rd party Unix command line apps, but on it's own, it sucks), you're basically forced to use GUI systems for just about everything.

There's also a bit of a Catch 22 situation about it. Unless you get more inexperienced users on the system, you won't get more design suggestions from the usability viewpoint. But if you don't make the system more usable, you won't get more inexperienced users.

So what to do if you don't have your own basic user focus groups like Microsoft? Well, you use some of the resarch that they have done. While UI designers have been accused many times of making desktop environments too much like Windows, at the end of the day, that is what people are used to. If you want to move a user from Windows to *nix, they will have a much better experience if they are sitting infront of a system which is similar enough to their previous system that they can find their way around with little assistance. I know that many people try to set themselves apart from Windows users (although there is a large degree of elitism about that) but at the end of the day, Microsoft have been de

Here's what I posted a while back about this in my livejournal:

Finally, one of the (vocal minority of) whining lusers who complain about GNOME in every message board and mailing list in existence has decided to get off his ass and do something about it. The result is "

project GoneME", which hopes to eventually fork GNOME. Currently all that there is is a patch that reverses the button order, which the author calls "fixing" the button order.

While the decision to do something other than whining is a laudable one, I don't think much will come of this project because the author displays the same ignorance that characterizes all the other complainers. For instance, he thinks there's little difference between gconf and the windows registry, even though gnome devs have repeatedly explained why that's not the case in a manner even a 12 year old can understand. He also makes the moronic assertion that gconf XML files are "unreadable". They are in fact more readable than old-school plain text config files because they are in a standard format and because each key reports its type. The author doesn't seem to have an open-minded attitude towards programming either. "I for my own never ever used Python and I don't plan to learn or use Python in the future". I think the author believes in writing everything in C for speed. I wonder for how many more years such opinions will continue to persist?

Update: Since I posted this entry he has posted some more ideas on the site.

"Actually I do like GNOME because of the fact that it is written in C (and therefore fits in the UNIX world)".

That confirms what I surmised earlier. But I'm ROTFLMAO at the "fits the UNIX world" comment. Writing everything in C was the UNIX philosophy back in the 80s when the rest of the world was still stuck with assembly. For quite a long time now the UNIX philosophy has been to not write everything in C. The UNIX way is in fact to choose the most high level language that makes sense for the given task. See what ESR's The Art of Unix Programming has to say on the subject of programming languages.

While I agree with elephantum and eightpixelshigh that this project will die, I think that won't happen very soon. My prognosis is as follows:

Everything is going to be hunky dory as long as it is a set of patches to GNOME. They'll revert the button order and remove spatial nautilus and generally undo whatever usability improvements have happened over the last two years. There are quite a few people who will greatly applaud these changes, who think of themselves as "advanced UNIX users" and whom I call "desktop masochists". They want their desktop to be a way to show off their geekiness, and nothing more. They live under the illusion that it makes them "more efficient". (I know a couple such guys in my lab. I will be recommending gomeME to them ;-)

The problem for GoneME will start when they actually decide to fork GNOME. Due to their doing everything in C and in general avoiding any technology invented within the last decade because it is "bloat", GNOME will pull far ahead of them the moment they no longer inherit GNOME code changes. But that'd be the least of their worries. They'll be big on "listening to their users", and everyone will want to do thi

And your periods and commas belong inside the quotation marks.

Not necessarily. At least I can understand where this comes from. It it even described here:

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them.

Try this:

echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max

and then see if your Linux box can handle a million simultaneous TCP connections. When you have rebooted your machine, you will be enlightened.

That's gripping hand to you pal! ... loved that novel.

FACT: YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Who's going to set up an OIF project to keep the cosmos in balance?

Webster is an idiot. Webster has been brainwashed by the media.

ESR wrote something about this yesterday here, about an "hypotetical" Final virus that deletes all (he call it a SciFi story, but lets see how much time takes to become reality), and have some nice consequences, like lot less spam.

Easly like installing CUPS?

This function allows an application to determine whether or not it is being debugged, so that it can modify its behavior.

We call those heisenbugs and they are the bane of a programmer's existence. The whole damn point of a debugger is to replicate the same behavior as normal, not allow the program to choose to exhibit a different behavior.

"I'm going to look at you more closely now. Please act normal. (But it's your call if you don't.)"

Yeah, that "surprise inspection" works great everywhere else, why not in programming? Fucking morons...

I was happier not knowing about this function. soundman32, I shake my fist at thee. :-)

Please read this first.

"Emtabs"? What's wrong with "exabytes"? We call the quantity four million kilobytes four "gigabytes", after all, instead of four "emkibs".

And no, no "emxabs", either -- that's a yottabyte.

I call dibs on the term "emyobs", however. (Hey, it's got at least as good a chance as grouchibytes.)

This is a good discussion, and a lot of people are making excellent points about the ability of open source software to create a positive tech ecosystem within an economy. It's worth pointing out, though already nicely done elsewhere in this discussion, that Gates' understanding of economics was necessarily compromised prior to his talk.

One of my favorite classic arguments against the oss kills jobs fud was the distinction between sale value of software versus use value and where employment comes from as detailed by esr in his prescient essay the magic cauldron .

First, code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. In the pre-microcomputer era it used to be a commonplace that 90% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case -- other industries are much more software-intensive now, and the finance industry's share of the total has accordingly dropped -- but we'll see shortly that there is empirical evidence that around 95% of code is still written in-house.

This code includes most of the stuff of MIS, the financial- and database-software customizations every medium and large company needs. It includes technical-specialist code like device drivers (almost nobody makes money selling device drivers, a point we'll return to later on). It includes all kinds of embedded code for our increasingly microchip-driven machines - from machine tools and jet airliners to cars to microwave ovens and toasters.

Most such in-house code is integrated with its environment in ways that make reusing or copying it very difficult. (This is true whether the `environment' is a business office's set of procedures or the fuel-injection system of a combine harvester.) Thus, as the environment changes, there is a lot of work continually needed to keep the software in step.

This is called `maintenance', and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority (more than 75%) of what programmers get paid to do. Accordingly, most programmer-hours are spent (and most programmer salaries are paid for) writing or maintaining in-house code that has no sale value at all -- a fact the reader may readily check by examining the listings of programming jobs in any newspaper with a `Help Wanted' section.

Scanning the employment section of your local newspaper is an enlightening experiment which I urge the reader to perform for him- or herself. Examine the jobs listings under programming, data processing, and software engineering for positions that involve the development of software. Categorize each such job according to whether the software is being developed for use or for sale.

It will quickly become clear that, even given the most inclusive definition of `for sale', at least nineteen in twenty of the salaries offered are being funded strictly by use value (that is, value as an intermediate good). This is our reason for believing that only 5% of the industry is sale-value-driven. Note, however, that the rest of the analysis in this paper is relatively insensitive to this number; if it were 15% or even 20%, the economic consequences would remain essentially the same.

(When I speak at technical conferences, I usually begin my talk by asking two questions: how many in the audience are paid to write software, and for how many do their salaries depend on the sale value of software. I generally get a forest of hands for the first question, few or none for the second, and considerable audience surprise at the proportion.)

It's a pretty standard metasyntactic variable - names for things you don't really care about (in programming).

See: jargon file. Also check the entry for foo; interesting reading, at least.

It's a pretty standard metasyntactic variable - names for things you don't really care about (in programming).

See: jargon file. Also check the entry for foo; interesting reading, at least.

That cluster could run ARMM, spamming Usenet with unseen efficiency. (Note to self: Insert marketing drivel here. Use "On Demand".)

The notes section of ESR's Magic Cauldron has a wonderful comment that suggests that since programmers and support staff appear on the books as a liability, expanding by hiring more staff is a net loss. However, the aquisition of another software company, which is primarily valuable because it is a bunch of other programmers and support staff, is seen as an investment on the books.

It all seems so bizarre that the factory model treats software as if it has some sale value, when it's really the service provided by the programmers and support staff that has real value. In this topsy turvy way of looking at things the accounting systems artificially encourage mergers rather than increasing staff because the former appears as growth, while the latter appears to be a loss.

All of this is why we end up with huge companies that produce mostly shelfware with a point upgrade cycle that is not backwards compatible so that customers are forced to keep sending in money or be abandonned. An honest service model would be much better for everybody.

The notes section of ESR's Magic Cauldron has a wonderful comment that suggests that since programmers and support staff appear on the books as a liability, expanding by hiring more staff is a net loss. However, the aquisition of another software company, which is primarily valuable because it is a bunch of other programmers and support staff, is seen as an investment on the books.

It all seems so bizarre that the factory model treats software as if it has some sale value, when it's really the service provided by the programmers and support staff that has real value. In this topsy turvy way of looking at things the accounting systems artificially encourage mergers rather than increasing staff because the former appears as growth, while the latter appears to be a loss.

All of this is why we end up with huge companies that produce mostly shelfware with a point upgrade cycle that is not backwards compatible so that customers are forced to keep sending in money or be abandonned. An honest service model would be much better for everybody.

The notes section of ESR's Magic Cauldron has a wonderful comment that suggests that since programmers and support staff appear on the books as a liability, expanding by hiring more staff is a net loss. However, the aquisition of another software company, which is primarily valuable because it is a bunch of other programmers and support staff, is seen as an investment on the books.

It all seems so bizarre that the factory model treats software as if it has some sale value, when it's really the service provided by the programmers and support staff that has real value. In this topsy turvy way of looking at things the accounting systems artificially encourage mergers rather than increasing staff because the former appears as growth, while the latter appears to be a loss.

All of this is why we end up with huge companies that produce mostly shelfware with a point upgrade cycle that is not backwards compatible so that customers are forced to keep sending in money or be abandonned. An honest service model would be much better for everybody.

The notes section of ESR's Magic Cauldron has a wonderful comment that suggests that since programmers and support staff appear on the books as a liability, expanding by hiring more staff is a net loss. However, the aquisition of another software company, which is primarily valuable because it is a bunch of other programmers and support staff, is seen as an investment on the books.

It all seems so bizarre that the factory model treats software as if it has some sale value, when it's really the service provided by the programmers and support staff that has real value. In this topsy turvy way of looking at things the accounting systems artificially encourage mergers rather than increasing staff because the former appears as growth, while the latter appears to be a loss.

All of this is why we end up with huge companies that produce mostly shelfware with a point upgrade cycle that is not backwards compatible so that customers are forced to keep sending in money or be abandonned. An honest service model would be much better for everybody.

Technically, the comma after "Post Anonymously" should be inside the quotation mark. Which is more an error than a typo, but if you're aiming for perfection...

I go with the more logical writing style rather than the archaic version which put punctuation inside the quotes due to typesetting issues. From this page:

"When type was handset, a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble. But apparently only American printers were more attached to convenience than logic, since British printers continued to risk the misalignment of their periods and commas."

I'm still partial to the humor that the programmers added to the system. Like variables that are expressed in microfortnights, or an error message that reads, "Shut 'er down Clancy, she's pumpin' mud."

That's pretty common, you probably emit some of those

By storing the content of the program, and not their silly display preferences, it would load and present to me however I had it set up to display it, not according to their preferences.

One of the obvious benefits is the end of the holy wars over brace and indentation style. Think code should be tabbed out 2 spaces instead of 4? Constantly resisting the urge to reformat everyone else's Java code to 1TBS? Want to program in C using Python-style meaningful whitespace? Not a problem. Just clicky-click on your editor preferences (or :set codingstyle=foo), and you're done.

IMHO dates from long before ichat. It doesn't quite predate me, but does predate my first session at a keyboard (circa 1980). In the days of dial-up bulletin boards and USENET News via uucp, modems were slow, and those acronyms were just the thing to get the point across quickly. If you were reading usenet, you knew what they meant. Some of us old timers still use them reflexively. I find myself explaining them occasionally -- but then I point to the Jargon File, and say RTFM. (apologies, ESR, if this slashdots you...)

IMHO dates from long before ichat. It doesn't quite predate me, but does predate my first session at a keyboard (circa 1980). In the days of dial-up bulletin boards and USENET News via uucp, modems were slow, and those acronyms were just the thing to get the point across quickly. If you were reading usenet, you knew what they meant. Some of us old timers still use them reflexively. I find myself explaining them occasionally -- but then I point to the Jargon File, and say RTFM. (apologies, ESR, if this slashdots you...)

Google is your friend. how you ask questions, is very important. You are expected to try to help yourself first. No one wants to answer the same question fifty times. Try searching before posting your question. Think of the difference between "How do I install driver foo?" and "I get a memory dump error when I install driver foo 1.3 in Distro X.2. I have done x, y, and z. What am I doing wrong?". The first one should be easily answered with a quick websearch. The second one is a much more specific question. It might be answered with a web search but it might be more unique. Most people will probably be willing to try to help with the second.

For Wormux, download the static compiled tarballed and uncompress it somewhere and you should be fine to play.
tar jxvf wormux-static-0.4.0.tar.bz2

True, NT5.x multitasks pretty well IME. My 2000 box runs a similar load to the one you described, plus the odd office app or two, and about 10 tabs in firefox. No dramas, only the odd squeak of annoyance from winamp as my useless softmodem loses the plot occasionally. This is just a p4 2.4 with 512mb, and a slow ol' HDD to boot.

I have noticed similar problems on XP boxes in the past, and I agree with your diagnosis - there's something not quite right somewhere. I don't know much about XP, but in win2000 it's good to occasionally have a look in the task manager's process pane to make sure that you're not running piles of junk in the background. Also check that all your drivers are present and correct - I had awful Heisenbug problems with a flaky driver for the AGP bridge on my motherboard at one stage.

try
$info info
and be treated to an excellent tutorial. All of the problems I have had with info stemmed from NOT reading the first page, which is really short. There seems to be some kind of "...skip over this shit, get me to the good stuff" attitude (which I am often guilty of) that prevents people from seeing introductions as informative. A man page that says 'look at the info page' is infinitely more useful to an inexperienced user than no man page at all, or worse, a link to "no useful man page exists, and yes, this is a bug." As for being shot down in flames, well, that's quite a lot better than being ignored, which is the normal penalty for asking questions in the wrong forum.

no, no, ESR wrote about his troubles setting up a printer

Can we stop giving a soapbox to a man who claims to channel Pan?

And what is exactly wrong in channelling me?

Some spammer decided to joe-job me. Very annoyed. At some point, my domain that they're spoofing mail from is going to get blacklisted -- not because mail is coming from it, but because it appears to be. I havn't seen any spamcop reports or anything similar, but I've seen metric fucktonnes of Win32 worm messages coming into email addresses that never have existed at the same domain that's being joe-jobbed. I really need an antivirus solution built into sendmail. Spamassassin works for 99% of my spam, but these god damn worms are driving me absoltuely insane.

There isn't really all that much you can do about being joe-jobbed, 9 times out of 10 the "admins" for the zombified machine doesn't understand that I'm not the spammer, eventhough I received the bounce for the spam.

Anyone have any good results at trying to get a joe-job to stop?

Therefore, I assume you mean...

When will Sun GPL their Java _implementation_, i.e. their Java Virtual Machine?

I agree that would be nice, because it would give the Open Source community a de facto standard implementation which they could support, and to which they could contribute. It might also increase the popularity of Java.

That is also what Eric Raymond was suggesting a few months ago when he called on Sun to Open Source their JVM.

However, though it would be nice, it's not a necessity.

While Sun's JVM may be proprietary, there are plenty of competing JVM's out there, including some Open Source implementations (e.g. Kaffe, JBoss).

Also, while GPLing Sun's JVM might increase Java's popularity, it must be noted that Java is already the most popular language used in business, as shown by the number of job listings. Dice.com currently shows 7599 job listings for Java, and 7094 for "C OR C++".

Finally, as I said, while Sun's JVM may be proprietary, Java itself is open. Its license allows anyone to use the Java spec to create their own Java implementation. You can even modify or extend Java (as Kaffe did, or as HP did with their embedded Java known as Chai), but then you're not allowed to call the resulting product Java -- Sun does keep tight control over the _word_ Java, such that it can only be applied to certified compatible implementations.

check it out or this. I tend to agree with the first more, but the second also keeps my computer running.

Lie. Corporate America is all about lying; how it's done, when it's done, and whom to lie to.

Or just twist the facts a little. Doctor your resume. Cook your C.V. Overstate your importance.

Or work on Free Software projects and list them all in your resume.

-Jem

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

"What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?"

In my experience, glacially slow printing times can usually be traced back to a third-rate operating system. As you've no doubt discovered since installing Linux, printer hassles are among the countless inconveniences you must suffer if you insist on using an operating system with no polish, no professionalism and no sense of responsibility to the end user. I would suggest buying a Mac, or, at the very least, switching back to Windows XP.

Good luck.

Some say the Second Amendment Protects the First Amendment

"Reichsminister Ashcroft"??? ... you may have violated Godwin's Law