Slashback: Rendering, Munich, Clones

Slashback tonight with a passel of updates, corrections and tangents related to recent Slashdot postings, including GNU/Linux vs. Windows in Munich, Bunnie Huang's book on Xbox hacking, Mozilla's 5-line crash-test, and (sigh) yet another SCO note, but at least it's one to smile at. Read on for the details.

How to impress users. chjones writes "The bug that crashes Mozilla with simple HTML has been fixed in the latest nightly build. This was previously mentioned in a Slashback in response to a similar bug in Internet Explorer. No nightly build of IE appears to be available."

Quiet but sterile, or silent and deadly? JerryKnight writes "With the wider availability of TouchStream keyboards, such as at ThinkGeek, I wonder if these great devices are used by anyone else besides me. Since the last story over a year ago, Fingerworks has made quite a few improvements, such as many firmware upgrades and the (currently still Beta) Gesture Editor. Does anyone else find the gesture/mouse benefits to outweigh the headache of learning zero-force typing?"

Would you like to play a game? bigattichouse writes "When I read the piece on using gaming to keep your brain moving, it reminded me of several articles on coders needing 'ramp-up' time to get into coding. I put together a small freeware game PortaLogica as a preliminary attempt to create a game that would help stimulate coding-related-thought. The game is played using schematic logic gates, and trying to get inputs to match outputs. I'd love to flesh it out a bit more (like writing a KDE or Gnome version)..."

Offically official. Alexander Schatten writes "Although Steve Ballmer interrupted his holiday to try to change the decision of the Munich politicians, after some weeks of discussion Munich decided today to change all 14.000 PCs, Notebooks to Linux. Servers as well as Clients!

One of the main reasons was to avoid a too close binding to specific vendors. A wise decision, one will confirm, especially as Munich is one of the biggest cities in Germany and might be an example for other cities. For more details see: SuSE or heise.de (both in German)"

Buy it while it's legal. An anonymous reader writes "Remember Bunnie Huang? He's the MIT student who first hacked the Xbox. He wrote a book that was supposed to be published by a well-known publisher, but the publisher chickened out, afraid of Microsoft's wrath. Bunnie isn't so scared, however. He's publishing the book himself. The book, "Hacking the Xbox," can be purchased from his website. I just saw Bunnie on TechTV, and he's offering a 20 percent discount to TechTV viewers (Scroll to bottom of article to see the coupon code)."

The famous Finnish art of the insult. scotch51 writes "I followed the links to the Raelians website on Friday after ./ reported Linus Torvalds comparing the amazing SCO lawsuit to the Raelians claims of amazing (bio)technological achievements. Today, wanting to show a friend the Raelians rather pretty twist on the Star of David for their own logo, I see that all pages I'd visited yesterday report blank. "Reveal codes" on every page I visited yesterday reveals only: html body /body /html. Guess that's one way to deal with being slashdotted, or were they perhaps hacked?"

Comments

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[birdman666]

Governments are basically corporations nowadays anyway, at least they're being run like them. And if the government can run on something other than Microsoft, other corporations may take notice and give it a shot.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[Anonymous Coward]

To get corporations to adopt it, you need to make one of the biggest customers use it. If the government is using Linux with say OpenOffice and they will only deal with companies whose files they can read, well, the companies will either switch to OO or make sure that OO can read their documents.

Mozilla bug fixed and apples and oranges

[RhettLivingston]

To compare the release of a fix for a Mozilla bug in a nightly build of the development trunk to the release of an Explorer patch is an apples and oranges comparison at the least. Post the story when the Mozilla bug fix has been run through a complete test cycle and appears in a stable release. Put another way, if Mozilla had a system designed to drive the fix out to every user including the secretaries and the grandmothers in the nursing home (maybe it has, I don't know), you might have a story if they drove their fix out before Microsoft drives theirs out. To know whether the comparison made today means anything, you'd have to know whether Microsoft has fixed this in their internal nightly builds.

Re:Not quite a true victory in munich

[Miguel de Icaza]

Linux on the enterprise (and government) desktop has only just begun.It is therefore difficult to see the trend if you are unaware what the big conversion projects are doing. In this multi-billion contract with the German government IBM will not only be converting all their desktops to SUSE-Linux but they are also charged with developing all the applications necessary, porting many internal office applications based on M$ access, eXcel, VB, SQLserver to KDE/java/MySQL/DB2 (Maybe the German government has come to the KDE teams rescue with much needed cash injection just in time!). This is why many others are sitting on the fence, they say "Oh, great, it has started, let's get in line to be at the counter when the goods are becoming available".

It took the PC about 15 years to take the entreprise.Things like that don't happen overnight. But there is always a point when the critical mass has been reached and from that point on the trend cannot be stopped anymore. Linux is well positioned to reach that critical mass within a few years if ibm/Suse/kde continue to follow their roadmaps as they have done so far.

Alas RedHat indeed.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Alas, RedHat is largely US based.

Alas, Redhat indeed.

As far as I'm concerned RedHat is not ready for prime time - and WON'T be until:

1) Their prepaid included-with-the-expensive-box support continues until your first install is up on the net or LAN (and preferably with a built-from-source kernel), rather than stopping when you first get a login screen.

2) Their quickstart manual includes a clear description (accessable to neophytes - and keystroke-by-keystroke again) of both
* how to install the system (Of particular interest as of 6.x: Tell 'em how to make sane choices for the size of the partitions.) and
* how to obtain and install security upgrades.

3) Their install documentation includes a step-by-step, keystroke-by-kestroke recipe for going:
* from a blank computer and their CDROMs,
* through an intermediate system installed from the CDROM image
* To the SAME system but with the kernel built from the supplied sources.

4) Their in-depth manual includes a section giving a COMPLETE list of the configuration files twiddled by each of the functions of each of the graphic-interface admin tools. (And don't tell me to read the source or look it up on the net. You're a packager. Package it already.)

5) Their quickstart manual tells me how to adjust the screen parameters. (And DON'T tell me to go figure out X. Give a recipe.)

C'mon, guys! Get a tech writer and assign him/her the task with 2), 3), 4), and 5) as the goals.

(And while we're at it, the Gnome and/or KDE crews really ought to do a desktop tool, on the model of Apples', for tuning the screen, and RedHat should have it in the default menus.)

Re:Alas RedHat indeed.

[MikeFM]

Not at all. You can make something BETTER by not copying and not dumbing things down. I for one don't think people as a whole are stupid. UI design should be based on making things easier - not dumber. The difference being that intermediate to expert users should find the interface easy rather than newbies. People will spend much more time being an experienced user than a novice so it doesn't make sense to cater to the novice. Sure there is a fear of learning but that's something people will just have to get over if they want things to be better.

A good example is that many enterprise apps when ported from DOS to Windows tried to be more novice friendly by making moving between fields a mouse action where before they were a TAB action. This requires the users hands to leave the keyboard, find the mouse, find the pointer, move the pointer to the next box, click that box, move back to the keyboard, and resume typing. It wasn't long before many of these programs began adding back in the ability to TAB to the next field. Yes, to newbies the mouse seemed easier.. but experienced workers hated the change and it could badly damage the businesses productivity.

Stability and speed is also important. KDE/Gnome especially IMO are going the wrong way in these areas as they try to satisfy Windows users.

Besides - the desktop is a dying concept. Embedded devices to a large degree will take the place as novice users interface of choice. Why figure out how to do something with a powerful (but possibly complex) interface when you can use a handheld gadget that has three buttons and can do what you need (and only what you need)? Obviously you'll still have desktops just as we still have command line interfaces.. but they'll shift from being a cashcow to being a geek tool.

I predict a near future in which less complex devices, similar to (or the same as) game consoles are used by most people for tasks like web browsing, word processing, etc. The systems will likely run Linux or a similar OS but in a version that has been stripped of anything unneeded.. configured especially for the given hardware and tested for stability. I think they'll have a desktop but given the limited capabilities of the systems that the desktop will be very lightweight. Just to step further out on a limb I'll guess that Apple and Sony will be the two major competitors in this market.

Re:the pain of input devices

[Phs2501]

Probably the best thing to do is simply remap the vi commands to the Dvorak keys in their old QUERTY positions. You will have to remember the vi commands by position instead of letter, but if you've been using vi on QUERTY for any length of time that's how you do it now. That way the old "hjkl" commands will be on dvorak "dhtn" and you will be a happy Dvorak vi user.

I'm sure I've seen vim scripts that do exactly this. Try searching for "dvorak vim".