Open Source Worse than Flying

george writes "In an article published on TheRegister, Otto Z. Stern makes the bold statement that "The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code." Accusing Open Source of being buggy and its devolopers of preoccupation with mudane details."I'm sitting here...wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.""

Comments

Otis Stern is just upset because

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source stole his initials.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[jcr]

Seriously!

Besides, what's this guy's problem anyway? He's got the source, why doesn't he just fix the bugs?

-jcr

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems to me that he is mostly upset because software he does not have to pay for is not being developed in exactly the way he would prefer. i for one do not expect people to whom i am not contributing money or help to give a damn what i personally want from the software they are developing. but i prefer to not have to pay $300 for software developed by people who exhibit the same ammount of apathy towards myself as those who give their product away for free.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[menkhaura]

More insightful than funny IMHO. No one is telling this fucktard to use OSS at gunpoint. He is free to drop his money on Microsoft crap, or Apple crap, or whathever the proprietary fuck other corporations have to offer.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[utnow]

So what you're saying is... you'd have no problem eating dog shit as long as you didn't have to pay the chef.

Your position would hold water IF... and this is a big if... the Linux camp would quit trying to shove their collective ePenis down the throat of every other computer user on the planet who has CHOSEN (in the same way that they have chosen) Windows or OSX instead of Linux. If Linux works for you then fine... but why the ever-present cock-fight. I personally hate Linux. I prefer to do things with my computer other than fixing/configing/updating it. I'm not really a Windows fanatic either... but it's what I need to use in order to have access to my software and my work. I would really like to be able to just use a mac. I don't really care how my computer is doing what it's doing as long as it does. I don't need it to be EXACTLY the way I want in every regard (at the expense of usability). This isn't everyone's feeling and that's fine. Different strokes for different folks.

It's like walking into a room full of americans and screaming "I'm French!!! You're all stupid and wrong!!! We're right for the following reasons:...." You might be absolutely right... but the americans don't care. Every word you waste arguing your point simply drives them more to their defensive stance.

It's not a matter of "I just don't like the open source software/model so I won't use it." or "I should fix this". It's a matter of the open source community screaming "THIS IS BETTER!!!!!!! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND IT BECAUSE YOU'RE DUMB BUT IT'S BETTER!!!!!"

The average person dosen't have the know-how to 'roll their own' anything. If it's not right, then it's just not right and they're not going to fix it. They're going to go back to windows where things feel safe and cozy again, then they're going to be pissed off at the linux fan-boi that told them that Linux was really easy and great since you can just change anything willy nilly.

Ahh... Linux reeks of a dying breed of computer user.... the people who still want to dabble with the way the machine works. The people who still have aspirations of 'changing the world' and being responsible for the next big thing. They've lost touch with the fact that people don't care about any of that anymore. The computer has 'gelled'. There will be some minor changes here and there but for the most part, the days of the 'homebrew' are quickly fading. Slowly but surely you'll start to see the inner workings of the PC hidden behind the glossy panels and wood panels. It happened to the car... You HAD to be an expert on every mechanism of your vehicle if you wanted to get your steam machine moving down the road. There's a decently sized market for people who still tinker in this way, but mostly it's just a tool used by everyone to get from point A to point B. The solenoid has been all but forgotten by the housewives and sorority girls of the planet. It'll happen to the PC (see: Mac) sooner or later.

*I ramble too much...

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[jhoger]

People like you deserve what you get... PCs that are locked down tighter than a DVD player or X-Box.

What you'll get is a world where freedom means having the freedom to rent your computing time from the man as long as you don't break the EULA.

Sorry, that's not for me (or most engineers, for that matter).

-- John.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[DenDave]

Linux reeks of a dying breed of computer user

hrmm.. I think, sir, you have it the wrong way round. What is dying out is the crook who pretends to know what he is doing clicking buttons on an obscure interface and waves his "certified asshole" certificate demanding big pay.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[BoldAndBusted]

They've lost touch with the fact that people don't care about any of that anymore.

Yes, most people never cared about "any of that", now or ever. But, luckily for all of us, some people happily lose touch, and make interesting things.

If people are screaming at you, and you don't like what they are saying, you should probably hang out with some different people. Or at least walk away.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Pieroxy]

So shut the fuck up already

There ya go: All the openness of the open source world right there in your post. Good job.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Lisandro]

So what you're saying is... you'd have no problem eating dog shit as long as you didn't have to pay the chef.

    So, what you're saying is that you have no problem eating dog shit either. After all, millons of satisfied flies can't be wrong.

    If you don't care about much more than using your computer (as you're well entitled to), that's fine. There's much more to the argument besides convenience, as i see it. Most OSS advocates are rather... mmm... fanatical :) in their beleiefs, but they're on the right track IMHO. OSS is more about using your PC in the way you see fit, and that includes being able to modify the software you're using or being able to choose among different software for the same task (open standards et. all). That you may choose not to is of little consequence, as someone might very well do it for you. And this not only applies to Linux as an OS, there's a shitload of perfectly good OSS software for Windows/OSX as well that works and works just fine.

    Now, you want your computer to "just work". In that sense, the Linux desktop has still a lot (a lot!) of work ahead in order to be as dumbproof as, say, Windows or OSX., but i keep finding that when it works, it works just peachy, and even better than their counterparts. I'm constantly reminded of this when i switch to Windows, f.ex.: for every thing that it makes much simpler, there's another that becomes impossible.

    And even considering that, nowadays Linux is damn useable as a "Joe-sixpack" desktop, specially if you choose any of the modern commercial distros available. They take a lot of care in rounding the rough edges, and trust me, you won't even have to bother about fixing/configing/updating it, or more than you would have to with Win/OSX atleast. You should try one - a LiveCDs, for example, lets you boot a complete Linux distro from a CD and take a look at how they work. They might not be for you yet, but i think you'll find them much more usable than you think. We're not all typing obscure commands in consoles all day, you know :)

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[DeafByBeheading]

I only partially agree. Open Source software does have problems. On the other hand, hardware compatibility is hardly a fair target. It's an important issue, but OSS people are reverse-engineering drivers in many cases, instead of having these handed to them by the hardware manufacturer. Actual level of hardware support aside, you can argue, "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because of limited hardware support from manufacturers," but it's just plain ignorant to argue "Oh, Linux is not ready for Joe Consumer because Open Source programmers are teh suck".

And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Kazoo the Clown]

Likely this is just flamebait, as no one so ignorant as this would be likely to find their way to slashdot. Be that as it may...

No, the future will hold at least two separate classes of end-user machines. Limited, easy for morons to use, and something for power users. And the "for dummies" machines have not really arrived yet at all. I expect there will be significant improvements in interface over the next 20 or so years, at least.

My 80 year old mother is a good example-- she has a computer but the toughest part for her is the mouse. She learned to touch-type years ago, and like me, she has 10 fingers that she knows how to use, not just one. The Mouse interface is confusing for many people because the motion you are making is not where the action is, you can't "point-and-click" at what you want, you have to point and click way down and to the right (or left, if you've configured your system for a southpaw) of what it is you are actually looking at. That is not intuitive for many people, it requires the development of some relatively new hand-eye coordination skills. Mom learned to touch-type in her 20's however, so that's not a new skill she needs to learn. Sure, the young won't have that problem, and by the time they get old they'll know how to use a mouse, but mouse-based interfaces remain clumsy, just the same. It's a make-shift solution, not by any means the most efficient, and likely to be a temporary one because of it.

Besides the cognitive disconnect between the intended action and the intending action, there are many shortcomings to the mouse/GUI interface. Among other things, Mouse-based GUI interfaces make you wait for them to finish, while even the old tried-and-true text interfaces didn't make you wait to input, they have a liberating feature known as type-ahead. Even text based menu systems have it-- as you learn the menu options or command line commands, you can type keys far in advance of where the computer is and then walk away, rather than having to wait for the display to come up so you can click on some stupid thing just to get it to go ahead. Future interface designs will no doubt be far more asynchronous, not forcing you to interact with them at their rate, instead interacting with them at your rate. Why not let the computer catch up when it gets around to it rather than slave yourself to its pacing?

Most command line systems have another powerful feature, scripting. The exception to this is Windows, whos native scripting capabilities have been positively Neandertal. And pre OS-X, scripting on the Mac was mostly non-existent. With good scripting capabilities such as on Unix, you can connect together unconnected utilities and iterate, not just macro a sequence of mouse clicks or keyboard entries, or something limited to one application. Need to do something 10,000 times? A recipe for repetitive stress injuries-- start clicking, idiot. Familiarity with command line allows me to do things like that routinely in a short loop. Mice were designed to make the computer "easy-to-use," not because it was a particularly powerful means of control. And while there currently may be many non-textual tasks they are better at, many of those tasks were made non-textual simply because of the mouse/GUI attempt at "easy-to-use." Many of those tasks existed before GUIs, where you didn't need a mouse to perform them. And other tasks such as graphic arts are better performed by a flat panel and pen combination where your action and the computer's reaction are a little more logically connected-- many people are already using them. Mice may seem easy now, but that's because they're pretty simple-minded-- they really don't do all that much and what they do is better tuned for novice tasks, not power-user tasks. But note-- a novice won't necessarily stay a novice forever.

Missing GUI features that are routine in Unix for example-- I can instantly ctl-C interrupt anything that I started running and abort it. Ever accidentally

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Cougem]

So your argument is that he can't moan about open source because he has the choice whether to use it or not?
Fine, well then Linux users should never moan about Windows, since they obviously don't have to use it. And people should never moan about KDE or Gnome either, since they obviously have a choice.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[SilverspurG]

reeks...dying...dabble...lost touch...homebrew...wood panels...steam machine...tinker

Obvious troll.

Woe to you when the day comes that someone ridicules whatever it is that gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. At the end of the day everyone is working on something which is arguably useless and anachronistic. Time to wake up and face reality. Life is pointless.

I think you're jealous because you're being forced to admit that you couldn't figure it out even if you wanted to.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Moflamby-2042]

... The people who still have aspirations of 'changing the world' and being responsible for the next big thing. They've lost touch with the fact that people don't care about any of that anymore.

Wow, that's a stunning statement to read mod'd so high on slashdot (nevermind, upon preview it's knocked to a 2). My comments never clear '1's, but all the same: When I read things like that, I think whatever part of humanity arguing against 'capability for better control over their systems' can keep their fsck'd up propi. OS's and closed softs, and pay for every new capability, and use only software with a tard-GUI slapped on it, buried in EULAs and restrictions and all your programs locked up and drm'd to hell.

'Tinkering' with your system in the way that you misdirect doesn't seem as common. You get drivers you set high level settings in your kernel to pick what you want, etc. Many people aren't attempting mods to drivers or modifying kernel routines or tweaking protocol stacks ever so slightly. (OTOH many are since they can and it is of interest to them).

But the freedom comes both there and much higher levels of control. You can configure the hell out of many software packages, most provide sensible defaults as well. The difference is you have the freedom to alter these. AND if you don't like how it works fundamentally, if you need something more and have the capability or wish to pay somebody who does have the capability, then you/they can change it! It is not illegal to do this w/ OSS. How is seeking this manner of operation everywhere out of touch? It's what should've been done all along. It just takes a while to fix all the mistakes where this isn't done yet.

It is illegal to do w/ proprietary and closed source softs that infest common user's environments. It is this software that will ultimately sink into obscurity hopefully with a kick in its collective ass for all the trouble it's caused as it goes down.

It IS better over here. If scientists have discovered something that 99.99999% of the population do not initially care about and have possibly never heard of but it's achingly better in so many respects, shouldn't they be vocal about it? And when you have defenders of the old crappy ways to do it, who resist this fundamental change in society, shouldn't they be told again and again how this thing that many people do not use is better?

For me I'll stick with the 'lost touch' crowd that hasn't given up to that sad of a state. It's where the stuff with the highest future potential I've seen anywhere is at.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[maxwell demon]

We're not all typing obscure commands in consoles all day, you know :)

Indeed, I'm usually typing obscure commands sitting on a chair in front of the monitor and keyboard. I would hate it to be locked into a console when typing obscure commands.

Ah, and of course I'm also not typing obscure commands all day. After all, I need some time to read Slashdot!

Now, having said that, the Slashdot interface clearly leaves something to desire, even when using Lynx. Why is there no true modular command line interface? I would think of something along the lines of

$ slashdot ls
Glide File Sharing Service Debuts
Your Rights Online: Consumer Strikes Back at Crooked Online Retailer
IT: Open Source Worse than Flying
(etc.)
$ slashdot st IT
slashdot: IT: ambiguous story.
$ slashdot ls IT\*
IT: Open Source Worse than Flying
IT: Security Flaws Allow Wiretaps to be Evaded
$ slashdot st 'IT: O'
george writes "In an article published on TheRegister, Otto Z. Stern makes the
bold statement that "The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be
the progression of open source code." Accusing Open Source of being buggy and
its devolopers of preoccupation with mudane details."I'm sitting
here...wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus
Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that
something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.""
$ slashdot sl 'IT: O'
total: 1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/29/otto_fl y_open/ Accusing Open Source
$ slashdot cs 'IT: O'
total: 464
-1: 8
0: 102
1: 96
2: 173
3: 21
4: 12
5: 52
$

SCNR

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[TheRaven64]

I think what the grandparent post was, somewhat ineloquently, trying to say was that if he didn't pay for the software, or contribute in some other way, then he is not entitled to complain. If he is choosing a Free Software solution in place of a proprietary system, then he has probably saved enough money to pay for a few hours of developer time. If he created a list of his wants for the software, and offered this money to the person who fixed them, then this would be a valid complaint. I doubt he is the only person with that particular model of printer - if others have the same need, then they can add money to the pot to get a driver written.

Free Software is about freedom, not price. The development model is different - you pay up front for the features you want, and then you and anyone else you distribute the code to, can use them for any purpose in perpetuity. People coming in this late in the game and seeing twenty or thirty years of software funded by other people and then complaining that it doesn't precisely fit their needs, without actually being willing to invest any time or money in improving things are no use to the community. It's like people pirating a copy of Windows, and then complaining it doesn't have a feature they need - would you expect Microsoft to give them any sympathy?

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[richlv]

"Windows is an unmaintainable car it has a steering wheel and a go pedal. When it goes wrong you throw it away and get a new car. That makes ownership quite expensive.

Linux is a highly maintainable car it has 4 steering wheels, 84 pedals and a little knob to tweek the engine timing while you are driving along. You have to know every damn thing about it before you can drive it and your constantly tweeking it. That makes ownership quite expensive."

may i offer slightly different analogy ? :)

now, you have two 'types' of cars. one is windows. it is produced by a single company, all spare parts are manufactured by the same company. it comes in slight variety, having several models. you are not able to buy older models, though you can buy a new model, trash it and use some older model.

if something breaks down, it usually is pretty obscure that you get a flashing "service now" that can be deciphered with a specialised hardware that is sold by the same manufacturer.
if some part breaks down, you usually have to change whole lot of parts as they come together and there is no way to exchange smaller parts (for example, no way to exchange wiper arm, you have to exchange whole block). as parts are manufactured by the single company only, they are pretty expensive and obscure (for example, central computer can be changed, but costs quite a lot).
the cars work well on good roads, though breaking down now and then unexpectedly. don't try going offroad, unpaved roads are very, very risku.
it is very easy to service these cars, as kid next doors is ready to help. quality of this kind of service is of a very low level, but readily available. well, sometimes you have to scrap the car after such a service, but it sortaworks most of the time.
all gasoline, windshield fluids, coolants are compatible with this car, though some of them result in breakdown of the car.
the car has some problems with isolation, so you get a lot of different bugs in the car that are annoying at low speeds and often are the cause for the crashes at high speeds.
this car is very easy to obtain, almost all retailers have it.
---------------------

then there's this 'linux' type. they have in common only the engine, all other parts differ. it is offerend by a bunch of vendors, and you can choose any one you like. this might seriously impact the performance, looks and other aspects of the car.
you can get constructor type of the car that you build yourself - involves welding and other obscure things. then you can get one that's pretty complete and polished.
most drivers have difficulties choosing, as there are so many subtypes and vendors.
there are less techies specialised in this type of cars, so their time costs more, but generally they are much better at fixing problems - much of it can be attributes to their enthuasism about these cars (they are builders, owners and drivers at the same time), but having complete information about the car helps a lot. it is also possible to get some handholding when choosing the correct subtype for your needs.

spare parts are available down to every bult&nut, though you have to wait some time for the shipment to arrive.
the car itself is extremly reliable and fast, it can be kept for decades with almost no maintenance.
most liquids are not compatible with it, but careful evaluation when shopping helps to find ones that work. even though gas is available in few selected tanks only, the car uses several times less of it than 'windows' type. also changing colant and other things are very rare.
the car almost never breaks down, and even if it does, it is very easy for a specialised person to diagnose it without that device from the manufacturer and fix it, in most cases even without ordering any spare parts (unlike the other type, where dumping the car is the norm).

also a lot of accessories are manufactured for the 'windows' type only - air refresheners and all that stuff is hard to install in 'linux' type of cars as manufact

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[10Ghz]

Why does he (The Register-guy) think that he's entitled to jack-shit? Seriously? So he uses free software. Does that mean that he can then make demands to the developers? "You gave me this software for free, and I DEMAND that you fix these bugs in your shitty software!". I might understand that line of thinking if he paid for the software. I might understand it if he was forced to use it. But he didn't pay for it, nor is he forced to use it. If it sucks so bad, he could always use something else or fix it himself. But saying something like "hey assholes! Write some drivers so I can use my hardware!" is not very constructive.

It is OK to file bug-reports. It is OK to make suggestions. It is OK to submit patches. It is NOT OK to moan and make demands. Many people just seem to think that by merely using the software, they are somehow entitled to make demands. In reality, they are not entitled to anything. The developers don't owe them anything. In fact, the users owe to the developers! The developers give them great software for free, and some people think that it's the DEVELOPERS who are in debt to the users?!?! Am I in Bizarro-world?

Hell, I even blogged about this just now (not actually related to this story, but another discussion I had just a while ago).

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[DarkOx]

He is mostly crying about drivers. That is stupid the vendor likely provided driver software for the other platforms not their developers. He should be mad at who ever it was that made the printer not OSS they should have given him a driver for the platform if his argument holds up at all. I would say he should stop being an asshole and do some research before buying crap. You don't buy parts for your car until you know you have the right ones for your make and model. Why would you buy parts for your computer without makeing sure they are compatible with the rest of the system or if you do out of lazyness why would you come crying about it when it won't work?

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Kadin2048]

> And to the editors, please don't post any more articles fromt this guy. This barely contained anything about OSS (certainly nothing intelligent), and he's not nearly as funny and clever as he seems to think he is.

Seriously. I'm really beginning to think that we need some sort of moderation scheme for the articles. This one reeks of "-1, Flamebait" like nothing I've ever seen.

It's ignorant, it's uninsightful, and frankly we're not doing anybody any favors by giving it the additional publicity rather than letting it just slip off into the ether to be forgotten. I'm all for the whole 'marketplace of ideas' philosophy and debating down bad memes when they come up, but do we really need to have a 500+ post discussion ever time some fucktard has a brain fart aimed at Linux?

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[indifferent children]

Unlike you I get windows shoved down my throat at work.

Ooh, that's a pane in the neck.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[Kadin2048]

I'm not sure why you got modded down; you're absolutely right in that I think that paragraph sums up what is apparently his entire worldview nicely.

I think that at the end of the day he and I (and I assume most geeks and a lot of computer users) have a fundamental disagreement over what he's saying. I do not think that people who want to dabble with the way the machine works are a "dying breed" at all, except insofar as the computer hardware and software companies are forcing such tinkerers out of existence through sealed boxes. That impulse to tinker is founded on an essential human characteristic, curiosity, which in itself might be described as a desire to simply understand things. Although it's obvious that curiosity is not something which the author possesses, at least to any appreciable degree, there are lots of people (particularly younger ones) who do.

His philosophy is frankly disgusting to me, because it seems to be embracing what I find most disturbing about our culture: that many people find it acceptable to ridicule another's desire to understand, and on some level we find a desire for ignorance to be a laudable goal.

While the "housewives" and "sorority girls" (I won't even get into his obvious sexism, it's too easy) of the world may have forgotten the solenoid, the scientists, engineers, and probably even doctors and lawyers have not, and I think one should carefully consider the place of his two example groups within the power structure of our society. Speaking only for myself, I would certainly want my children to aspire for and to have the ability to achieve better than that.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[wbradney]

Most people wouldn't trust their lives to an airplane if all of the internals mechanics were showing.

They would if they had to get across the Atlantic in six hours, and had a hundred years of precedent that showed that flying across the Atlantic in a glass airplane was quite safe, relatively speaking. The point being that people, by-and-large, make decisions based on their innate sense of risk and reward. Linux users are happy to take more risk, and their reward is more knowledge. Windows users want little risk, and find little reward in knowing how their tools work. The dirty little secret is that the risks are actually the same for both user bases, but the perception of risk can be altered by Marketing.

Re:Otis Stern is just upset because

[NetRAVEN5000]

You people really like pushing the "most people don't know how cars work" thing, don't you? Most people don't know about physics either but someone in my class actually asked why, if you wanted to stop a car going 45 mph, you would try to get it to decelerate instead of "just stopping it". If you don't understand that just locking up the brakes is a bad idea, then you shouldn't be driving a car. Yes, to stop the car you should apply the brakes - but if you locked up the brakes your car may skid out of control and/or flip, and you would probably get some pretty serious whiplash unless your seatbelt's not on.

People who don't know anything about computers could be helping spam mailers out and spreading viruses. Not that they shouldn't be allowed to use computers at all, but they should be using something better and more secure than Windows.

And you don't have to tweak Linux at all if you don't want to - I just popped in the SuSE DVD and it did the rest for me. I had a harder time setting up Windows on my laptop and figuring out how to get that stupid "MSN Messenger" thing to stop showing up, and got a little angry with all the updates I had to do, and the fact that I had to reboot for every single one of them.

Sore PC

[yuckymucky]

He should get that "open sores" PC checked out. That doesn't sound good at all.

Re:Sore PC

[(H)elix1]

He should get that "open sores" PC checked out. That doesn't sound good at all.

I hear you can get that type of problem if you don't practice safe hex...

Re:Sore PC

[YU Nicks NE Way]

We don't use the phrase "safe hex" any more. The more PC term these days is "safer sectors".

Open Sores?

[Frogbert]

If your PC is giving you open sores perhaps you should stop rubbing up against it so hard.

Re:Open Sores?

[somethinghollow]

but UDP never felt so good!

Buggy Browsers

[zbuffered]

Open-source Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out, and it's decidedly less buggy than IE.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Dante Shamest]

I submitted a patch to fix the Firefox name bug, on the basis that it's hard for someone to tell that it's the name of a browser. I suggested renaming the browser to something more marketable, such as Internet Explorer Improved or Internet Surfer or even Free Money, Click Here!.

Got no replies. =(

Re:Buggy Browsers

[ilyaaohell]

I really don't understand this debate at all, or what comments like yours are meant to prove. Both pieces of software are designed by highly experienced software engineers. The only difference being that one group is employed by Microsoft, and the other likely do it in their spare time (they're usually still employed by some big-ass technology company).

Why do people like you insist that there's some kind of a major difference in professionalism between rank-and-file Microsoft programmers who write their software and between those programmers who choose to work on open source projects? In the end, given enough time, both groups of programmers have equivalent education and experience and, given the right environment, will design similarly competent (or incompetent) code. Why is it some kind of a pro-open source argument to say that Firefox is on par with a program developed by an "evil corporation"?

I do agree somewhat with the idea that, for the most part, open source software development leads to a different kind of program with a different set of goals and accomplishments. Some of these are better for the consumer, some are not. The open source communal development paradigm is not the epitome of software design. It has it's uses, but it is not without it's limitation... as the article clearly pointed out.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Evil Adrian]

Why do people like you insist that there's some kind of a major difference in professionalism between rank-and-file Microsoft programmers who write their software and between those programmers who choose to work on open source projects? ... Why is it some kind of a pro-open source argument to say that Firefox is on par with a program developed by an "evil corporation"?

Because a lot of pro-Open-Source people are uninformed and brainwashed by the drivel that gets posted here and elsewhere, and they think that any time you try to make some money by writing software you are somehow running a scam because you aren't donating everything you do to everybody else.

Go ahead and mod me down as Flamebait, but honestly what other explanation is there?

Re:Buggy Browsers

[zbuffered]

Internet Explorer has not been improved since the release of Windows XP (with the exception of lame popup blocking and minor security improvements as a part of XP SP2). FireFox undergoes active improvement and supports features (transparent PNGs) that IE does not. I did not make the larger OSS vs Closed Source argument, just that FF is much better today than IE is. And even more so with the release of 1.5.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[gnuLNX]

uh...dude have you used both browsers in the last year?

No seriously you are totally righ both browsers were developed by highly skilled engineers... No one is dsputing that. However one group of engineers (for whatever reason...boss said so perhaps) has not been competitive in the last 2.5 years...go download Firefox, you can see for your self.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[ilyaaohell]

Well, in that case, comparing Firefox with IE6 is like comparing the intelligence of a 30 year old to that of a 13 year old. "I'm way smarter than you because I've had more time to acquire knowledge!"

When it comes to open source altenatives of programs that actually, you know, have regular update cycles (Photoshop vs Gimp, OpenOffice vs MS Office, etc), the open source version is always trying to play catch-up and rarely actually matches the quality of the original before that original suddenly gets it's next big update and surges further ahead. What is the reason for this? One reason is focused/centralized design, a concept that (from my understanding, at least) is in conflict with open source development.

As the original article pointed out, open source development is usually obsessed with things that, frankly, don't usually require that level of obsession, while ignoring things that actually do need to be looked at. Yes, it ends up GREATELY excelling at the things it obsesses with (security is usually the big example being touted), and that is an important positive aspect of open source development. However, there's a price that's paid for this, in the area where in-house development picks up the slack.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[MikeFM]

My first explanation would probably sound rather rude and that wouldn't really prove anything other than getting into a name calling fight. So to a more useful argument..

I am a big free software advocate. I am a professional programmer that invests much of my time and money sponsoring free software development. A single person could never create, or pay for, every single piece of software they might need to use in this day and age. By working with others we can share what software we can create, and pay for, so that we all benefit. THAT is the entire basis to the concept of free software. There is no rule that you can't also sell software. Obviously many free software supporters do sell the software to great profit.

What you can't do is continue to sell crap. Crap can be defined as software that doesn't work, can't be made to work, and can't be returned. THAT is exactly what the commercial software industry is. You buy a program and half the time it doesn't work well enough to acomplish the things the box claimed it could do. So.. return it and try something else.. oops that's right. They won't take software returns. You can't see the source code so you can't fix it. You're just fucked.

Please make free software and sell it. Make a profit. Hire more programmers. Sell more software. Make more profit. We, the free software community, want you to do this because it makes more software available to us. It makes better software available to us. We'll even help you add features and fix bugs at no cost to you. Maybe you won't be able to sell a poorly supported crappy product with no documentation for $300 but you will be able to sell a good product with good support and documentation for a reasonable price. Sounds like a lot more work for the buck until you consider that the customer will help improve, document, and support your product.

I REALLY say this to hardware companies. Make your product with good, open source, drivers (or well documented specifications) and I'll buy your products. The drivers don't even need to be for my OS of choice (Linux). If they're open source I'll port them myself if needed. I'll pick your product over cheaper products if you do this because I won't need to worry about the product not having drivers or having drivers that suck or no longer work in the future. (I've had to many bits of perfectly good hardware stop working in Windows because the company didn't release drivers for the new version of Windows.) Money is not a problem. I spend a LOT of money on electronics and software. I just want to know your product will work when I need it to and to me that means having the information to write or fix drivers.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[ilyaaohell]

Yes, it's a more modern browser. However, this had NOTHING to do with the fact that Firefox is an open source project. Look at Opera. It, too, is more "modern" than IE6, and that's as much a corporate-produced closed-source program as IE is.

If you really want to start comparing closed and open source accomplishments and try to use web browsers as an example, don't you think that the better comparison would be between Opera and Firefox? I think so. In this case, is Firefox really more advanced? In my personal opinion, it is greately inferior (I use Firefox instead only because I got addicted to some of it's extensions).

In other words... BE FAIR.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[KtHM]

Do you code better when it's something you're interested in, or when you're waiting for 5 o'clock? I think that's what it comes down to.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[SuperBanana]

Open-source Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is out, and it's decidedly less buggy than IE.

Funny. I just got through restarting Firefox 1.5 because, like every other version of Firefox for OS X, the keyboard shortcuts stop working.

Strong words aside, the guy is right. Open Source authors tend to be rather bad about listening to their user base- the snotty answer is "if YOU want it to do X, then code it yourself", and many times reported bugs that are annoying current users are put off or ignored, often because the development version is almost ready to go stable, and fixing the bug would be "a pain".

Then people wonder why reviews of open source distros get panned, why people try it and often run right back to Windows, etc. Open Source software, at least many of the Linux distros, present a rather half-assed front to the user. I've used Linux since about 1995, and I still can't stand all the -bullshit- that's necessary to get hardware working; I last used Linux as a workstation back in 2000, and a few months ago I found not much had changed.

Want an example? I dropped an Ubuntu 5.10 CD into my athlon workstation which has a Geforce3 card in it, and a 17" Viewsonic monitor. When it finished installing, X came up, but at a resolution and frequency rate the monitor didn't support, so I could barely read the screen. I got that fixed, then discovered OpenGL wasn't hardware accelerated, so I installed the nvidia driver package.

X windows promptly locked up on the next reboot, and did so until I removed all the nvidia-related packages. I downloaded drivers from Nvidia's site, and installed them by hand, and it finally worked.

I then tried to figure out how to change my screen saver. It wasn't in the Gnome menus- I finally found it under a "debian" menu elsewhere. Apparently my system has at least two "system settings" menus. What the...

There are some truly brilliant, talented people working on linux and open-source. Unfortuntely, they're bogged down in nearly useless work, or busy infighting. My favorite time-sinks are the incredibly obscure security holes that are so impractical nobody could ever exploit them...

Ask yourself this: what does Linux do better today compared with in 2000, almost 6 years ago? I'm not talking about crap like antialiased text- I mean things that actually MATTER to users...

Ask yourself this as well: when was the last time an open-source project you help out with surveyed its users to find out what was most important to THEM? And then based your efforts off that survey? The m0n0wall group just did that, and I was very pleased to see it happen.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Exaton]

My apologies, but it definitely seems to me that you are omitting some essential points in your comparison between Microsoft and (for instance) the Mozilla Foundation. How about :

• Economic pressure to "get the thing out the door" ? Sure, Microsoft deadlines get as bad a treatment as those of Open Source projects, but the stress is surely much heavier on the individual programmers (keeping one's job, etc.).
• Political guidelines / doctrines, by which Microsoft intentionally does not implement some feature sets, or keeps some mistakes up out of principle or backward compatibility considerations.

Open Source programmers are as free as their code, Microsoft employees (be they eminent experts) are not. OK, so the top-level engineers are still defining the main specs, but the setting is not the same : the corporate environment probably does, in my opinion, cause more bugs to arise.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

"What is the reason for this? One reason is focused/centralized design, a concept that (from my understanding, at least) is in conflict with open source development. "

How about the simplest reason: they have money. They have money to pay many programmers to work full time on the software. They have money to pay QC people to test the software. They have money to create focus groups to test the functionality of the software. They have money to pay managers, who hopefully know how to manage.

Open source development simply means you make an open source product, there are a few commercial companies who do this with a real design team. However, many OSS projects lack the funding required for a proper team and as such make do with what they can. There are advantages as you mentioned to this, and quite a few people who follow this approach would probably not be doing so if it was a traditional system.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[ilyaaohell]

Yes, I will concede that this is a big advantage for open source developers. They, in fact, have many advantages. I do not dispute these things. However, they have many major disadvantages as well (someone elsewhere replied that they do not have the money or research and focus groups that a corporation has).

These "advantages" combine to produce open source software that is regularly updated and patched, and stays on the bleeding edge of fundamental technological innovation. The "disadvantages" combine to produce software that is often and, in quite a few ways, inferior to commercial software equivalents that share a similar update cycle (IE is obviously a poor comparison then because it hasn't been updated in years, so consider a comparison between Firefox and Opera).

Re:Buggy Browsers

[jcr]

I code best of all when I'm seeing my company's stock rising every week.

BTW, my experience in dealing with open source developers is that they're generally somewhat better-than-average coders, and very poorly led. Particularly when they're self-employed.

-jcr

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Ambassador Kosh]

I have been using free software for a long time also. Actually my business could not run without it. I challenge you to find another web app server that has even close to as good of a security system as zope does. I have looked very carefully and it is the finest grained I have ever run across. It is stable, fast, secure and easy for me to add new features to.

There are many excellent pieces of free software that I use every day that don't even have closed source equivalents. Python is a very good free software project and I have not run into any other closed source equivelent that is even close to as productive for me. A big one would be kde. I don't know of anything even close to that for the kinds of things that I do. The KDE io slave system means that from any app I use I can open and save to almost any kind of resource possible. So I can use sftp to open a file remotely in my editor and then just save it all transparently. However that is not all that kde has to offer, kde has a great component system. I configure spell check ONCE for all my apps, I configure how my editor functions ONCE, I configure proxy settings ONCE etc etc. These items are reused all over the system and no other environment I have run into so far can do that.

Koffice is also an excellent piece of software. For what I need an office suite for I don't care about word compatibility and I don't need a huge list of features. I just need to be able to make documents and turn them into pdf files and it does a very good job at that and with very low overhead.

If you don't see any good free software out there then the problem is with your outlook now with the software. People that don't think something exists can't see it no matter how much evidence is given.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[JamesWJohnson]

I believe that the reason that OSS often plays catch up with proprietary software is that a lot of the OSS people still have the mindset of what RMS was setting out to do with the GNU project: create replacement software, not unique software (a lot of GNU software was better than the alternatives, but the point still stands). OpenOffice basically tries to replace MS Word but doesn't work hard enough to try to innovate in other areas, for example. What made Linux viable in the marketplace? Originally, the Apache project. The reason was that Apache actually created something with OSS that hadn't existed before, and all of a sudden there was a definite benefit to using the software other than cost or some intangible ideological benefit. Firefox is the same thing. The developers added functionality that IE didn't have, and now IE is trying to catch up to them. That's why it's becoming so popular. Bottom line is, when OSS stops trying to just replace the predominant corporate solution and create a better solution that just happens to be free is when we win.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Cryptnotic]

I use Firefox instead only because I got addicted to some of it's extensions.

The extensions are the whole point of using Firefox. Adblock and SessionSaver are great. Plus things like gTranslate and Moji and rikaixul are actually amazingly useful things for aspiring bilingual web browsing people.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[einhverfr]

When it comes to open source altenatives of programs that actually, you know, have regular update cycles (Photoshop vs Gimp, OpenOffice vs MS Office, etc), the open source version is always trying to play catch-up and rarely actually matches the quality of the original before that original suddenly gets it's next big update and surges further ahead. What is the reason for this? One reason is focused/centralized design, a concept that (from my understanding, at least) is in conflict with open source development.

Ok. How much better was Office 2000 compared to (the proprietary) StarOffice 5.2? How much better is Office 2003 compared to OpenOffice.org 2.0? What is the trend here?

More importantly, how do lesser known productivity suites compare against these two offerings. My point is that you can't compare the market leader against something with a different development model and expect to get anywhere. Otherwise we end up with statements like:

"When it comes to open source altenatives of programs that actually, you know, have regular update cycles (Apache vs. IIS, OpenSSH v. SSH, etc), the proprietary version is always trying to play catch-up and rarely actually matches the quality of the original before that original suddenly gets it's next big update and surges further ahead. What is the reason for this? One reason is decentralized design and customer-centric development, concepts that (from my understanding, at least) are in conflict with proprietary software development."

The basic issue is simply that the market leader has an advantage in terms of pace of development/resources. While I think that Open SOurce is more efficent in this regard, so each user counts more than in the proprietary world, you can't readily compare Microsoft Office (which arguably has market/monopoly power in the industry) and OpenOffice which commands a very small market. The fact that OOo is not falling that much further behind is actually what is noteworthy here, and this spells trouble for Microsoft.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[killjoe]

"Well, in that case, comparing Firefox with IE6 is like comparing the intelligence of a 30 year old to that of a 13 year old. "I'm way smarter than you because I've had more time to acquire knowledge!""

I don't get what you are saying here. Are you saying firefox is better because it's been around longer? IF so that's wrong. Firefox is mostly new code with very little left over form netscape.

As for other software it seems to be mix and match. Gimp is much better then photoshop in terms of scriptability but it falls behind in other areas. This is because scriptability is very important to a gimp users.

OO started way behind as anybody who ever used the original star office could attest but it's improving faster then ms office is. The question I have is this though. What does MS office do that open office doesn't? It seems to me the only thing it does is open MS office files better, that's it. I have been able to everything I have ever wanted with open office and more (save as PDF, save as flash, text art etc).

On the backend it's MS who is playing catchup. WIth every release SQL server adds features that have been around in postgres for years, visual studio still hasn't caught up to eclipse, IIS is pales in comparison to apache or zope, asp.net has just caught up to where j2ee was year and a half ago (wow we have embraced XML descriptors!)

So you see it's all about priorities. Open source software is more advanced then MS software in the aspects that are important to the open source developers. Once corporations start adopting open office on a larger scale they will pay for features they want by either sponsoring developers or paying bounties, same with all other software.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[xtracto]

In my opinion, the great caveats of OpenSource are:

1. Every programmer wants to do the cool entertaining nice things in the program. But nobody likes to make documentation. Hence we have programs without proper documentation like

Analysis, Requirements specifications document.
Design: Design Specification document [with or without UML, DTDs, etc].
Quality control/assurance: (Quality testing metrics documents).

Nobody (at least not programmers) likes to spend their time doing that, which results in a lot of good Open Source projects (just look at sf.net) that have only the source code available.

2. Design, yes. Unfortunately, Graphic Designers and man/manchine interface developers do value their time. That is why the design of Oper Source programs is usually terrible. And that is why you can not compare what a bunch of programmers do with their free time with a real product. Hint, the big software corporations products have several different departments besides of the programming department.

Of course there are certain programs which have an Ok design, like OpenOffice, (darn, I could not think of another) but of course the majority of those programs (and of the big good OpenSource programs) had its core donated from a profit organization.

About your comment on the comparison of FF against IE6.
comparing Firefox with IE6 is like comparing the intelligence of a 30 year old to that of a 13 year old. "I'm way smarter than you because I've had more time to acquire knowledge!"

I think it does not hold. If firefox is better than IE6 it is because of the developing model of the two programs and because as everybody knows Microsoft did not cared about updating their product after they killed Netscape. I have just looked at the new features on IE7 and it seems quite nice. I am sure, when it arrives it will be a lot better than Firefox. The same with MS Office new version, after it arrives and people start using the "tabbed" menu interface, OpenOffice will seem archaic with its 10 menu/100 submenues interface.

That Open Source will copy the interface, that, everybody knows. Unless there is some kind of I.P. lock that Microsoft holds (which I hope not).

Re:Buggy Browsers

[SilverspurG]

You missed the part back around 1990 when software producers quit producing quality software and began foisting code which would barely pass as beta-test quality onto consumers--and then doubled the price. The current situation is not acceptable and has not been acceptable for 15 years.

At one time companies actually hired people to break software. Then the stock market investors figured out that the profit margin would be higher if they just sell the beta code and let the consumer deal with it. Alpha and beta testing is currently run on a skeleton crew with a skeleton budget for one purpose... someone else's profit. That's what makes it a scam.

Re:Buggy Browsers

[10Ghz]

Want an example? I dropped an Ubuntu 5.10 CD into my athlon workstation which has a Geforce3 card in it, and a 17" Viewsonic monitor. When it finished installing, X came up, but at a resolution and frequency rate the monitor didn't support, so I could barely read the screen. I got that fixed, then discovered OpenGL wasn't hardware accelerated, so I installed the nvidia driver package.

I installed Windows a while ago. After the installation was finished, I noticed that the resolution was something like 640x480 with 256 colors! Drivers for the vid-card weren't installed at all, so there was ZERO hope for 3D-acceleration. Sound-card wasn't installed either. I had drivers for the NIC on CD (luckily), so I could install it offline so I could afterwards hunt for drivers online. I also had to sloinstall AGP-drivers, chipset-drivers and the like. All that was handled automatically in Linux.

Ask yourself this: what does Linux do better today compared with in 2000, almost 6 years ago? I'm not talking about crap like antialiased text- I mean things that actually MATTER to users...

Well, I can have fully-functioning (with drivers and apps installed) Linux-installation in about 30 minutes, whereas with Windows I need to hunt for drivers and apps, because the post-install system is 100% un-usable. The system also ships with lots of great software, whereas Windows does not (so Linux can be used for actual work right after the installation, whereas Windows cannot). latest hardware is supported out-of-the-box, whereas W2K does not (I need to feed it driver-FLOPPIES during installation so it will work with my SATA-drive. Since I don't have floppy-drive anymore, that might cause me problems in the future).

I also have great network-integration in my Linux-desktop, something Windows sorely lacks. Remote-admin-capabilites are great on Linux, less so on Windows.

I happen to use the Apple Keyboard as my keyboard. In Linux, I plugged it in while the system was running, and it worked right away. In Windows, I plugged it in, and it didn't work. It wanted to install drivers for it. fair enough, I asked it to get the drivers from the net, and install them, which it did. It then rebooted the machine. But I then noticed that the keyboard didn't work yet, so I had to fetch my old PS/2-keyboard so I could log on. It then installed more drivers, and rebooted the machine. But it still wouldn't work, and it installed some more drivers. After three reboots, it finally started to work.

In Linux, the installation took about 5 seconds. On Windows, closer to 10 minutes.

But the story doesn't stop there! Few weeks later I moved the computer to different location, and I had to unplug everything. AS I plugged things back in, I noticed that the keyboard didn't work in W2K. So I had to fetch my old keyboard from the storage (a separate building), so I could log in to the machine. W2K then proceeded to reinstall the drivers (with reboots and all), even though the keyboard was already installed once! Apparently Windows got confused because the keyboard was on different USB-port! Needless to say, Linux "just worked".

Re:Buggy Browsers

[Kjella]

Ok. How much better was Office 2000 compared to (the proprietary) StarOffice 5.2? How much better is Office 2003 compared to OpenOffice.org 2.0? What is the trend here?

That's not even the important question. The important question is how much better are the office suites compared to the market's needs? I mean if MS Office goes from 50% to 90% of what the users need, or 90% to 99% or 99% to 99,9%, good for them. Even if they claim OpenOffice isn't catching up to MS Office, it is certainly catching up to the market. Same with GIMP. It might not be catching up to Photoshop any time soon, but for most people it's becoming a very powerful photo editor (though on a personal note, I prefer Paint Shop Pro over either, YMMV). Because ultimately the content is the key, and there's only so much the tool can influence the end result.

The same goes for the desktop, which is really the join of all the applications as well as some system utilities. The free desktop is never going to compare to a "best of breed" desktop where you've put together the most expensive and powerful commercial software available. Does it need to? No. It just needs to fill my needs, which to an ever decreasing degree it does. I don't know where the "cutting edge" is, and I really don't care. And I bet I'm a lot closer to it than 95% of all computer users...

Re:Buggy Browsers

[ookaze]

When it comes to open source altenatives of programs that actually, you know, have regular update cycles (Photoshop vs Gimp, OpenOffice vs MS Office, etc), the open source version is always trying to play catch-up and rarely actually matches the quality of the original before that original suddenly gets it's next big update and surges further ahead

Your sentence is true only if you specifically focus on the features where the FOSS projects play catch-up.
It's completely wrong otherwise. For example, the Gimp has numerous features and plugins more powerful than anything on Photoshop (like the one that remove seamlessly objects from an image, better raw support, ...), same for OOo (PDF, works native on Linux, repair MS Office files, ...).
What you say border to the straw man, as Gimp is not an Open Source version of Photoshop, nor OOo is one of MS Office (they use very different ways to handle the document for example).

What is the reason for this?

there is none because it is a straw man.

One reason is focused/centralized design, a concept that (from my understanding, at least) is in conflict with open source development

BS. Look at Inkscape and how their goal for each version, look at KDE and Gnome for some examples too, and then stop the BS.
I look at Pango, and the focused design was not incompatible with the development.

As the original article pointed out, open source development is usually obsessed with things that, frankly, don't usually require that level of obsession, while ignoring things that actually do need to be looked at

What are those things ?

Yes, it ends up GREATELY excelling at the things it obsesses with (security is usually the big example being touted)

BS again, security is not the greatest thing FOSS focus on. Stability, efficiency, accuracy, interoperability, i18n, accessibility are other areas that FOSS is obsessed with. You say all of this does not require such a level of obsession ?!!

Wow, what an ass

[Zencyde]

Isn't it the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer to provide drivers? Perhaps I am just crazy...but aren't generic drivers a godsend in themselves?

Re:Wow, what an ass

[Leroy_Brown242]

It's the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to provide driver's for a minority operating system?

Re:Wow, what an ass

[J. T. MacLeod]

It could be argued, but honestly, all that's needed is a published specificatin or adhering to a known standard. Not that hard.

Re:Wow, what an ass

[Osty]

There really is no reason for every damn product on the market to need a custom driver though. There should be one interface for a printer, one for a camera, one for a video card, one for a joystick, one for a modem, etc. The consumer needs to demand this.

There already are such standards: printer = postscript, camera = FAT (filesystem for flash memory), video card = VESA, joystick = USB HID, modem = Hayes, etc. The problem is that these either cost way too much (postscript printers, real hardware modems) to be viable in the current consumer market (different from the business market, which is why you should have no problem using multi-thousand dollar "enterprise" printers but can't use your $50 inkjet), or they don't let you use the advanced functionality of the device (video card, joystick). In the first case, consumers aren't going to go back to paying $500 for a printer or $100 for a modem when they can get a $50 printer and $10 modem that work with the 90%+ majority OS. In the second case, while you may get your hardware working, you're going to bitch that you can't use higher resolutions at proper refresh rates or take advantage of all of that hardware acceleration in your $200 video card, or that you can only use two of the ten buttons on your joystick. There's simply no way to design a standard driver that will allow designers to continue to advance their product and still remain competitive (even "standards" like OpenGL allow for extensions, because if it didn't it would've been dead years ago).

Not only will it give us choices as to what OS and software we use with these products but it'll also make computers a lot more stable. A lot of crashes and other common problems are the result of minor incompatibilities between different drivers on the system. Standard drivers can be well tested. A mish mash of random drivers can't be tested well at all.

We'd also be stuck in the early 90s, technology-wise, because nobody could or would advance the state of the art. Standards are all well and good, but you have to be able to extend them for them to remain viable. Look at HTML for example -- the deliberate snubbing of standards by Microsoft and Netscape forced the standard to move forward. Yes, it resulted in crap like <blink> and <marquee>, and it caused a lot of compatibility pain (do you use iframes or layers? IE events or Netscape events?), but if that hadn't happened we'd still be stuck in the days of HTML 3.x, using tables for layout and not having anything close to CSS (or worse, we'd have Netscape's javascript-based style sheet language instead).

Standards are defined by committee, which the absolute worst way to innovate.

Re:Wow, what an ass

[MikeFM]

Postscript isn't a good standard for printers. It offers flexibility that printers just don't honestly need 99% of the time. It's a fine standard for the 1% that do need it but really shouldn't there be a standard for the other 99% of printers? No fancy communications are needed to print. All you really need to do is select a few printing options and transfer raw image data. Heck, get fancy and make it transfer compressed raw image data to speed up printing. Not at all hard - they just don't want such a standard. This would not make printing any worse or more expensive.

FAT isn't a camera standard. It's the filesystem that is used on most memory cards. It's a default standard because it's simple enough to fit within that small space and work in that price of hardware and it works well with Windows. It tells the camera nothing about how to communicate with the computer. Actually a lot of newer cameras are becoming standardized in how they communicate (showing up as a removable drive) which is good. There is no reason for any camera not to follow this standard for still photos. Streaming cameras could use some work on a standardized interface though.

VESA is a loose standard. It's more of a video API than a real driver. It doesn't support required modern features. Video cards need basically the same information to do what they do. Most software already uses standard API's such as DirectX or OpenGL to access these cards. There is no reason that the drivers can't be as standardized as these API's. Doing so might raise the price slightly by moving processing that goes on on the CPU to the card but I doubt it'd be much because the processors of modern video cards are already extremely powerful and flexible.

USB has nothing to with joysticks other than being the generic method by which they connect. It doesn't tell the computer how to understand the joysticks input. Joysticks are fairly standardized but they are growing less standardized and that is bad for stability. Do you want your game to crash in the middle of a firefight because it has a non-standard driver that doesn't work with your video card? Do joysticks even need to be recognized as different from a mouse? Standard mouse drivers understand multiple axis at a high precision and many buttons. What else does a joystick need?

Modems were mostly standardized until some moron invented the concept of a winmodem. Winmodems NEVER work well. They offload hardware processing to the CPU which has the mixed effect of slowing the computer and making the modem less reliable. Brilliant. The difference in price between a real hardware modem and a winmodem? About $10 back in the day - probably less now.

All in all I see no argument for not standardizing. You can allow standards that allow extensions. As you say OpenGL and many others allow that. The difference between that and no standards is that with extensible standards there are fewer places for problems to develop and as standards grow to support new concepts products can be adapted to follow those standards in new versions.

Without standard interfaces the PC probably wouldn't have made the huge impact on our society it did. By following standard interfaces the consumer has choices and can expect things to work together even when made by different manufacturers. The trend towards no standardization is hurting choice and reliability. Would you buy a harddrive that instead of following a SCSI standard decided to implement their own LUCI (Less Universal Connection Interface) interface that wouldn't work with your PC or only if you jumped through a lot of hoops? Probably not.

We are stuck in the 90's technology wise because of lack of standards. Has IE improved since the 90's? Not much. We should have rich interactive websites that degrade cleanly but Microsoft doesn't see supporting these as worth their effort so they've pretty much killed the market. They knew they couldn't compete with the web so they killed the web's development. Yeh, great! IE still doesn't support decent CSS or

Re:Wow, what an ass

[Osty]

Point by point (skipping some that I don't have an argument with):

FAT isn't a camera standard. It's the filesystem that is used on most memory cards. It's a default standard because it's simple enough to fit within that small space and work in that price of hardware and it works well with Windows. It tells the camera nothing about how to communicate with the computer. Actually a lot of newer cameras are becoming standardized in how they communicate (showing up as a removable drive) which is good. There is no reason for any camera not to follow this standard for still photos. Streaming cameras could use some work on a standardized interface though.

FAT is a de facto standard now, which is how standards should be created IMHO. Even my 4.5 year old digital camera hooks up just fine as a USB storage device. There's nothing more that a camera needs to do in terms of PC interaction, and almost every decent camera can do this. And even if your camera doesn't, you should buy a camera that uses removable media so you can always pull the card out and use it in a standard reader instead.

VESA is a loose standard. It's more of a video API than a real driver. It doesn't support required modern features. Video cards need basically the same information to do what they do. Most software already uses standard API's such as DirectX or OpenGL to access these cards. There is no reason that the drivers can't be as standardized as these API's. Doing so might raise the price slightly by moving processing that goes on on the CPU to the card but I doubt it'd be much because the processors of modern video cards are already extremely powerful and flexible.

The problem is that drivers are the abstraction layer for the hardware. By moving to a standard like this, you're essentially saying that your abstraction layer needs to be built into the hardware itself (like nVidia already does to support their unified driver model, where a single driver binary will work for everything from an ancient TNT to the latest GeForce 78xx). Depending on the complexity, you're talking about a lot of added cost for an already expensive product (if you buy bleeding edge, anyway), and don't think for a second that the manufacturers won't pass that cost on to the consumer. At least for video cards, I think the model we already have (standard APIs like DirectX, SDL, and OpenGL to abstract away the hardware) is the right way to go. It may not be 100% perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the old DOS days where every video card had its own special interface.

USB has nothing to with joysticks other than being the generic method by which they connect. It doesn't tell the computer how to understand the joysticks input. Joysticks are fairly standardized but they are growing less standardized and that is bad for stability. Do you want your game to crash in the middle of a firefight because it has a non-standard driver that doesn't work with your video card? Do joysticks even need to be recognized as different from a mouse? Standard mouse drivers understand multiple axis at a high precision and many buttons. What else does a joystick need?

You missed three important letters -- HID, or Human Interface Device. Theoretically, all input devices (keyboards, mice, joysticks, even webcams) should adhere to the HID spec and at least provide basic functionality with a proper generic USB HID implementation. That they don't is a problem, but the standard already exists. Perhaps this is a case where the standard is "bad" (too strict, too vague, not extensible, etc).

Modems were mostly standardized until some moron invented the concept of a winmodem. Winmodems NEVER work well. They offload hardware processing to the CPU which has the mixed effect of slowing the computer and making the modem less reliable. Brilliant. T

Ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thing that is goat-rendering awful is this story.

Linux will never progress very far

[Anonymous Coward]

When the ones developing it are the ones using it all the time. The closer to things you are, the easier it is to lose track of how bad they suck (there's a reason the first thing apple removed from their unix was X11).

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[nukem996]

Whats so bad about X11? Im using x.org right now and everything is working fine. If I loaded KDE on here I could customize it to look basicly like OSX. I never understood why they took out X11, seems like it would make more sense to keep it.

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[Milo77]

Wow. I kinda think that this post proves the previous guy's point exactly. Specifically, where you say that you can configure KDE to basically look like OSX. If you think that a KDE theme is all you need to get the user experience of OSX you're just being silly. If it's "good enough" for you, then you are exactly the person too close to things to see how bad they suck. Further backing up the original guys post is the fact that you are modded so high. I am not sure there is an easy way to cure what appears to be an epidemic of "bad taste" among *nix users. I don't think there is a pill or anything :)

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[jcr]

If I loaded KDE on here I could customize it to look basicly like OSX

The phrase "lipstick on a pig" springs to mind...

-jcr

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[pingveno]

That's the problem: You can customize it to look like Mac OS X. Mac OS X is Mac OS X without even trying. The main thing about Mac OS X is that it has more than just a pretty face (though it certainly has that :-). There's a standard toolkit for applications to access the functionality of the Operating System. There's very little set up, the user doesn't have to even touch a text configuration file or a tar command. And there are subtle things that make the basic Macintosh configuration just.... work. Apple was able to concentrate on making a full toolkit because they didn't have to bend over backwards to work with X11. The Linux desktop has some wonderful features, but I have yet to have everything working together smoothly.

The major problem with X11 is standards. Or rather, lack thereof. X11 started as a research project with no toolkit and no definition of other necessary standards. There have been a host of toolkits built on top of X11; GTK, QT, Motif, Athena, and many others. The more popular ones are reasonably well built and robust, but they will continue having interoperability problems. Copy-and-paste doesn't work consistently, the look and feel of applications varies vastly (compare XPDF to KOffice to Firefox), and there is absolutely no specter of a standard on sound.

When all of these factors come together, they can create a user experience that is almost as painful as flying by commercial jetliner on December 23. But just as I would brave holiday traffic to get to family, I'm willing to work on Linux because

This guy elaborates nicely on the subject: http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000271.html

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[MikeFM]

If you'd grown up with a real OS instead of on Windows you'd use this feature a lot more. Just because you don't think of using this kind of feature doesn't mean it isn't useful. An example from my life. I have a set-top box that runs Linux. Rather than having a hot noisy powerful system in there I chose something quiet which is less powerful. It runs the apps on the server in another room but displays them on the set-top box exactly as if they were local. If I switch rooms I can bring the desktop up on the set-top in that room instead without any problem. All the same files, the same apps, no complex configuration, and no fan noise in any of them. That's just one example of where I use this ability.

Re:Linux will never progress very far

[harmic]

Amen to that.

Back before Windows had terminal server, and before products like Citrix got popular, we *nixers proudly declared the advantages of a network-transparent display system. The world has moved on: Windows has it; plus a host of add-ons that make the whole thing seamless, efficient and fast.

Meanwhile I find it is faster to use VNC over a slow link than raw X protocol... what's with that? VNC is just sending raw graphics updates, you'd think X would be much faster since it could send drawing commands.

In reality, although the X networking was originally designed to allow sending of drawing primitives over the wire, most toolkits work these days by rendering everything at the client end and sending it as bitmaps of one kind or another to the X server. This is largely because of the lack of standardisation and old-fashioned extension methods X makes available.

Sooner or later it will be time to chuck the bathwater out. The baby long since grew into something else.

jeeesus

[know1]

what is this, an attemt to start the biggest flame war ever? we all know this isn't news, it's just the opinion of one idiot. what the hell is it doing on slashdot?

Re:jeeesus

[Comatose51]

I deserve to be heard because I'm an idiot too so mod me up!

All I have to say is close source is better than getting branded by a hot iron. If it was a choice between close source and being branded by a hot iron, I would take close source. At least proprietary software have progressed faster than hot iron branding. Hot iron branding have progressed little since the days of cowboys. You still apply fire to a piece of metal that gets applied to the skin. Proprietary software has definitely progressed beyond that stage.

Re:jeeesus

[JanneM]

The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all. And it works too - as I write, they're probably high-fiving themselves as they see the hit counters spin from the slashdotting.

Re:jeeesus

[David M. Sweeney]

it's just the opinion of one idiot. what the hell is it doing on slashdot?

Man, you MUST be new here.

Re:jeeesus

[pchan-]

You have it wrong. The Reg is a very Open Source friendly publication. They often post about the evils of Microsoft and others. This is just their way of balancing out. Instead of posting an anti-open source article every so often, they just post one huge flaming pile of crap to get it all to balance out in the end. It's like when you help a dozen old ladies across the street, you get to murder one bum and your karma breaks even.

Re:jeeesus

[1u3hr]

The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all.

The Register does run articles like this -- as a joke. And regularly they're picked up by irony-deficient Americans and posted as if they were real. Otto Z Stern is basically a combination of Hunter S Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. Look at the tag to the story:

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.

Re:jeeesus

[Cally]

Lordy, lordy, I'm alnmost lost for words. None of you seem to have realised that the piece is what we in the UK call "satire". That's right, someone's making it up in order to try to be amusing or humourous. Does the name not give that away?! God only knows what the American readership are going to make of Verity Stob...

Re:jeeesus

[strider44]

There's a difference between balanced reporting and posting a huge flaming pile of crap to "get it all to balance out in the end", the difference being why I stopped reading the Register a while ago. I didn't mind their neutral articles one bit but when they drag out their flaming pile of crap it sets my teeth on edge. Ever since their flame-fest on the Wikipedia that lasted for weeks I just stopped reading because it was just too stupid. I don't care for such a holier than thou attitude even if they only bring it out every once in a while.

Re:jeeesus

[arkhan_jg]

"Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest."

I think you've missed that The Register is a british publication. This article is sarcastic satire, nothing more. It might raise page views, but it's not meant as a troll to be take seriously.

I laughed when I read the article. I laughed even louder when I saw how many slashdotters have taken it seriously and leapt to linux's defence, and I say that as a user of linux for 7 years. I mean, come on -

"Meanwhile, I'm sitting here typing away on a 128-processor Unix SMP armed with an ultrasonic file system and jet-fueled partitioning system, wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate" - how could anyone NOT see this is a joke?

Re:jeeesus

[VdG]

I find myself bemused at the outraged responses. Maybe I was deluding myself but I thought that there was a marginally more insightful audience round here.

Oh well; another Merkin stereotype confirmed.

what a flamer

[John Frink]

"The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code." I'm a pilot who happens to like flying as well as open source so screw him!

Re:what a flamer

[FryerTuck]

yes, but do you render goats?

Accusations.

[Southpaw018]

Exactly. Accusations. He doesn't really know what he's talking about...and his article speaks for itself in that context. He really comes off like a fanatic, but I would say: you have an "open source PC." I do too. Mine works. Lots of peoples' do. So...either you're doing something wrong, or perhaps you're a rambling, fanatical curmudgeon. Regardless, have you bought Windows?

Oh, it doesn't appear that you did. At least, if you have, it isn't good enough for you to mention.

Ah, the smell of a failing cause

[schmidt349]

This article reminds me of a fake letter in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Anyone with a good knowledge of politics in the UK at the time should get a kick out of how its tenor is very close to this article.

Dear David Jacobs, East Grinstead, Friday. Why should I have to pay sixty-four guineas each year for my television licence when I can buy one for six. Yours sincerely, Captain R. H. Pretty. PS Support Rhodesia, cut motor taxes, save the Argylls, running-in please pass.

one thing's for sure...

[pohl]

If this were fark, this would be the perfect thread to link to the 'attention whore' girl in the bikini doing hand-stands on the beach.

Who is Otto Z. Stern?

[CyricZ]

Who exactly is Otto Z. Stern? What is his background, credentials, past software development involvement, and so on?

Re:Who is Otto Z. Stern?

[jhermans]

Nobody here seems to realize that Ottot Z. Stern is just a joke. A fictional character.

Re:Who is Otto Z. Stern?

[Gideon]

A troll, written by one of the regular Register staffers, for the apparent purpose of attracting flames from the gullible.

He doesn't exist.

His sole raison d'etre is to get a rise out of people.

For the love of Om, don't feed the troll any more, people!

What is the obsession with printers??

[ACK!!]

I am mean come on this is an alternative OS people !!!!

Give the Open Source guy a few months and generally you will get a driver for your all-in-one printer/fax/washes my car printer thingee. Sometimes yes it takes longer but that is the rub folks you are working off of an alternative OS that most hw manufacturers are never going to directly support. Sometimes the new driver is easy and sometimes without specs... its damn nearly impossible to reverse engineer all of the features. Oh, you don't like that?

Sorry man maybe its time to go back to Windows or Mac OS X.

The linux freaks you see arguing over color schemes are not writing that neat new program or usually that device driver.

Those are fans for the most part not developers.

Yes, in a free world where there are no central authority forcing people to code but folks doing what they want yes sometimes the development process can seem slow and other times there is a burst of activity (note Rhythmbox as of late adding a ton of features after a ton of time where little seemed like it was going on).

Maybe people need to stop criticizing the Open Source community and start focusing on the corporations that make money off of linux and ask why RedHat and Novell and the folks behind Mandriva are not forcing some of their employees to do some of this coding.

But then again what is the obsession with printers?? I have seen this mentioned in a few criticisms of desktop linux but rarely if ever have a problem with Fedora or Suse or Ubuntu anymore. Now, sound in Gnome? That is where I am pulling my hair out!!! Someone replace ESD pleeeeeeeeze.

But I am still grateful for a free OS and all the people using their own time to contribute.

Re:What is the obsession with printers??

[pavera]

I agree what is the obsession with printers?
I mean yeah I guess he's a journalist but wait he's on ONLINE JOURNALIST, how often does he really need to print?
I haven't printed a page of paper since I got out of college. Even then at least 75% of my work was handed in electronically.
My company delivers invoices electronically, we pay invoices electronically, we have 1 printer for 100 people, and most of the time it just sits there idle.

The Open Source solution to printers is to get rid of them and make everything electronic. That's where everything is going, and his rant is calling for open source to stay compatible with 20 year old technology, not move forward to the 21st century. Right now I'm working on a document management system for law offices that will make it so they don't have to have a single piece of paper. If I can get rid of paper in a law office, I can get rid of it anywhere. This should be the goal, not making it easier to make more paper.

Re:What is the obsession with printers??

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard of this one hippie guy who was obsessed with buggy printer drivers, but that was something like 30 years ago.

Isn't a little childish to post troll stories...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

As something serious? Printer drivers are not the problem. It's all the oddball stuff. I'm sitting here trying to make a Corex business card scanner work in linux (anyone good with usbsnoop and usbrobot?).

It takes me longer to look up what chipset a new motherboard has, than it does to do "modprobe blah.ko". And if he'd stop using fruity-assed distros and desktop environments, there might be less debate about color schemes... or maybe he wants all the graphic designers (whose only way to constructively contribute is to give us fancy eye candy) to start writing printer drivers. That's right out of the microsoft playbook, I think.

Okay, WTF is going on?

[Pantero Blanco]

Is someone just trying to provoke Slashdotters into an absolute frenzy lately? I've been seeing a flamebait, as-offensive-as-possible anti-F/OSS story every couple of days, and not the same one over and over again.

I'm all for showing both sides of the fence, but damn, choose people closer to the center instead of moonbat extremists.

commentary

[brennz]

I read the article. Afterwards though, I am more confused.

Was it an overdone example of poor writing, or posing-at-witty critique of OSS?

In the former, it succeeded brilliantly, and the latter, failed just as dramatically.

At least it was more entertaining than another paid microsoft shill's bogus study.

3/10 because I feel generous.

A self-righteous asshole

[symbolic]

or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.

Excuse me, but isn't it the vendor that's respsonsible for providing drivers? If you want to place some blame, jump on their ass.

Linux contributors have tried to pick up some of the slack, but because of the fact that everything that isn't open-source is most likely proprietary, this is not an easy hurdle to overcome.

It's obvious that the Register was looking for filler, because this article wastes a good deal of space with absolutely NOTHING of substance.

Satire in a serious journal. Yawn.

[schmidt349]

A Google search confirms that Mr. Stern is a prolific writer for the Rock All Times, http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/information/, which the BBC describes as "An anarchic and hilarious website featuring highly satirical articles on the world's current affairs." The Register calls it "our new, new favourite site...", which is a dead giveaway. Mr. Stern has also commented that:

• Hilary Rosen is a lesbian.
• Carli Fiorina is a man.
• Only a sniping blogger militia can protect us from exploding Chinamen.

I rest my case.

Re:Full of hot air

[Asprin]

Why is it so hard to understand that one of the reasons Windows is so popular is that it handles all of this automatically. I know I can connect my bluetooth camera to it and it will just work.

You mispelled 'Macintosh'.

Just thought you should know.

Re:Who is Otto Z. Stern? ...some kind of fetishist

[Prairiewest]

Who exactly is Otto Z. Stern? What is his background, credentials, past software development involvement, and so on?

Actually, I'm always open to reading opinions and ideas from people that I have never heard of. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised that these "unknown" people can have truly inspiring or insightful commentary.

No so with Mr. Stern.

I checked out "My prostate's as hard as an opal" and was similarily disappointed with his fetish around his own ass and related body parts. "Big Google is much worse than Big Oil" manages to mention herpes in the first line, and never does get around to making a solid case against Google apologists.

So, it's good that I read through some of his drivel, now I'll know to avoid anything written by him in the future.

I don't know

[rsilvergun]

I've read studies where Hot Branding compares favorably against Microsoft's latest license agreement. But maybe they were funded by Hot Branding Zealots.

Re:The Man is an Idiot

[NineNine]

Sorry, but you couldn't write yourself out of a paper bag.

I'll eat karma on this post. People need to know. I know I'm not a writer, but I'm not assuming that my writing is worth shit.

He hits the nail on the head

[Clockwurk]

Whats the use of pointless eye-candy (like compositing and transparent xterms) when the underlying windowing system (X) is more broken than a New Orleans levee. The big problems in Linux won't ever be addressed because you can't get enough people to agree on a common vision and work to achieve it (well that and the hostility towards commercial developers).

Linux is a lot like windows, each new version is a little bit better, but it is chained to doing many of the important (and broken) things the same as every version before it. Linux won't ever be great when it gets developed a lot like a katamari, layers of hacks that get thicker and thicker as time goes on.

Only Apple (and Steve Jobs) has the guts to throw out all the old garbage (X windows, the many start up daemons, unix copy/paste, gtk) and replace it with fresh new ideas (quartz, launchd, xcode).

Re:He hits the nail on the head

[ChaosDiscord]

...throw out all the old garbage (X windows, the many start up daemons, unix copy/paste, gtk)

What's wrong with X-Windows? The old "It's too slow"? Because locally it's working all in memory, no network, and nice and zippy. What's wrong with the start up daemons? There are lots of them, but you can tweak and tune them. The typical daemons started on a system configured for "workstation" or "desktop" tends to be similar to the number of processes I end up running in Windows XP or Mac OS X. Or is it the method daemons start up with? I find it no more or less confusing the mess that is the combination of Windows services and startup programs. Mac OS X has something similar; it may not be rc scripts, but they're launching stuff like Samba and CUPS just like my Linux box does. Unix copy/paste? What's wrong with it? I copy stuff to and fro quite happily. Or are you whining about the "select is copy, middle click is paste"? Because while you were apparently sleeping, the mainstream stuff all started supporting Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Select-paste still works, but if you don't like you don't have to use it. GTK? Ummm, right.

The reality is that you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.

Re:He hits the nail on the head

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Hah. Name these horrible, life-threatening flaws to linux/X11/whatever that you see going unfixed because of "lack of common vision".

I'd like to hear them.

Re:He hits the nail on the head

[chthonicdaemon]

Unix copy/paste? What's wrong with it? I copy stuff to and fro quite happily. Or are you whining about the "select is copy, middle click is paste"? Because while you were apparently sleeping, the mainstream stuff all started supporting Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V.

Let me see, gnome-terminal: No emacs: No Ctrl+C never work in terminal applications, and I don't think emacs have ever cared about any kind of UI standards.

You cannot expect emacs to adopt Ctrl+C for copying (or any of the other 'UI standards') when it runs on many, many different platforms and has a large user base that likes the bindings just the way they are. Of course, you could re-assign the bindings, or use an emacs that has bindings you like (Aquamacs allows 'normal' Mac bindings). Of course, in terminal Ctrl+C has a predefined meaning (to kill the currently running process). I would feel quite lost of I tried to kill a running console app and got no response.

Your point is probably that we should change from the way that feels natural to us to something that seems natural to other people. Honestly though, the kind of person who likes using Mac shortcuts is not very likely to fire up Emacs or gnome-terminal. If they want to learn these things, surely a natural thing to learn are the keybindings? I guess this just goes back to the point that Linux developers are largely in this to make life better for themselves. It is ok to make things better for other people in the process, but it becomes really difficult to motivate when people want you to do things that are good for them but bad for you.

Congratulations Otto

[Paul Carver]

That article is one of the least coherent things to appear on Slashdot, and that's quite an achievment. I never really liked stream of conciousness in high school and I can't say that I like it any better on a web page than in paperback. I can't imagine what posessed anyone to submit that story or what caused an "editor" to post it. It just doesn't have any content.

John Dvorak

[Cave_Monster]

Sounds like the stuff Dvorak would say. It's really boring reading this crap, yet I think it's on slashdot because it's a guaranteed story to generate posts which surely helps slashdot's income.

Re:Full of hot air

[joelsanda]

It's not a problem if he buys it or codes it his damned self instead of complaining.

I tried three Linux distributions in an attempt to shed Windows (I eventually did and moved back to MacOS). In all three cases the following four things did not work:

• Video Card
• Sound Card
• Printer
• Modem

What was the solution when I called Redhat (for the first distro install) and then posted messages (from my work PC because that one could connect to the Internet) to boards with all the distros? "Just recompile the kernel for your model video card, sound card, and modem."

Yeah. You can imagine how long an OS operating system stayed installed on my home computers.

That's no different than taking a hammer back to the hardware store because the head is loose and having the hardware salesman say "Just reforge the hammer and carve a new handle." I'm interested in computers as a tool, not a way of life.

Having said that, I'm commited to Firefox and had nothing but great luck running Apache (on Windows, not Linux ;-) - so OS is slicker than glossy marketing materials from M$ in many cases, but my experience with Operating Systems is to treat them like guys in suits carrying Bibles and ringing my doorbell.

Re:Otis likes it dry

[SquadBoy]

It's satire. Have you never read El Reg before?

WTF is the world coming to?

I bet he's a Libra

[Mr2cents]

He must be a Libra. The match with this horoscope is really stunning.

Re:Full of hot air

[KylePflug]

Having said that, I'm commited to Firefox and had nothing but great luck running Apache (on Windows, not Linux ;-) - so OS is slicker than glossy marketing materials from M$ in many cases, but my experience with Operating Systems is to treat them like guys in suits carrying Bibles and ringing my doorbell.

You spray your operating system with mace and call the police?!?

Check the URL?

[ian_mackereth]

//yadayada/otto_fly_open

That has to be deliberate!

HP supports an excellent OSS driver project

[wemgadge]

HP has an excellent printer drivers project complete with a working GTK toolbox program: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/> Just install CUPS and then follow the instructions here: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/install.php> as for the Article.. Zern tends to write with his tongue in cheek.

Re:"Otto Z Stern" is a troll

[ian_mackereth]

What? WHAT?! How dare you cast nasturtiums on this esteemed gathering of minds!

To even suggest that Slashdotters would fall for trollish statements and react hotly to perceived criticism of things we hold dear is... is....

...apparently just what we do.

My Issues With OSS

[Jekler]

I love OSS. At least half the applications on my computer are OSS, I'm writing this from FireFox, in the background I have Eclipse and OpenOffice open too. But I still have some issues with OSS.

It's not the quality of what OSS projects produce, it's the difficulty of getting involved. It's like a rite of passage. You can't just open up a compiler, read the source, and start typing code. Getting started is a complicated process. There are numerous OSS projects I'd love to get involved in, but actually setting up my computer to have a functional environment is frequently more work than I can stomach. In comparison, designing and writing code is far easier than configuring my system to prepare to join an OSS project. Some people have said that it's no more difficult than understanding the system at a commercial project, but I disagree. Any commercial projects I've been involved in usually have their computers already configured so you can just start working, no break in stride.

For the most part, the thought of how much work it's going to be to get started keeps me from even taking the first step to get involved. I spent many hours just trying to configure my system to get involved with the Mozilla project, and didn't even get to the point I could review the code because of build problems. And of course real life intervenes so the amount of time I can spend at once trying to configure my system is limited.

Maybe this is a necessary hazing ritual, but in my opinion, the day that software developers don't also need to be System Configuration Experts, the progress of OSS will skyrocket. If there were simply an executable file that you run and it setup a complete environment where you can just start typing code and contribute, OSS would progress at light speed because much less capable developers could still contribute with small bug fixes, or even clarifying comments, adding comments, or just restructuring code modules.

Some people might think that's a bad idea because complete idiots could try to participate, but there's numerous ways around that like ranking/priority systems attached to code reviews (i.e. Positively ranked developers would have their code reviews take precedence over unknown developers, and trolls who not only didn't produce anything valuable, but even wasted reviewers time with complete nonsense pseudo code could have rankings knocked down so they wouldn't even be visible to review)

Okay, wait..

[Arivia]

Otto Z. Stern's articles appear in the Register's humor section as just that-humor articles. Does no one check these things anymore?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Get a life, man ... and contribute

[haraldm]

The Good Thing [TM] with Open Source Software [TM] is - nobody requires you to use it (least of all Microsoft). But you are heartily invited to contribute. OSS is a community thing, not a "I buy this CD and I can blame the vendor for everything else" thing. If you want a product that you can blame a vendor for, get Windows, and hell, there's a lot to blame Microsoft for in Windows. Maybe you like this game better.

Next time do some research before you buy the hardware, and support those vendors that provide working and recent drivers, and tell them about it. Even if you can't program yourself, that would be supporting OSS. As long as you buy stuff from vendors that don't even manage to release the specs (because they are afraid that somebody could clone their crap), shut up and buy proprietary stuff.

Re:Get a life, man ... and contribute

[16K Ram Pack]

I wish I had mod points...

I'm amazed at how many people look at the free lunch of OSS and complain that it's a burger and not the filet mignon they get from the $100 a plate restaurant.

My attitude to OSS is that it's free, and I'm grateful for what I've been given. I contribute bug fixes back, I give feedback, I've made suggestions and donations, and I've provided low-level support (like telling Firefox users to retry their problem using the latest browser, but at least it lowers the queue).

I'm grateful because when I choose to use OSS, it's mostly because of massive cost savings - I got some shareware and some OSS software working together and saved me a few hundred over buying Visio. In addition, it's given me flexibility. I found a .net web control that saved me a few hundred, but I decided that an extra feature was required. I got in there and changed it. Try getting a vendor to make a small change for one customer and see how much it costs you.

You are right about hardware, and even though I've only used Linux a little, I now choose hardware in part on this basis - that it gives me flexibility. My next laptop will probably be Lenovo because they get written up well for Linux compatibility. You can even buy machines like Shuttles that have been tested with Mandrake.

For crying out loud

[Cally]

What wrong with you people?! don't you know irony or satire when you see it? Oh, ... wait. No 'Private Eye' in the land of free speech... Just think of it as IT journalism by Monty Python. I'm really looking forward to seeing the "FotW" and what the Register cha;ps have to say about this mass sense-of-humour failure. Let's just say that I think they might just be ever-so-slightly slightly taking the piss out of the Slashbots...

You know, I think this inability to distinguish irony from sincerity explains a lot about the success of Dubya in hoodwinking Americans into voting for him. He'd've got nowhere in Europe, because he's obviously a clown - obvious to anyone equipped with a sense of humour or of irony, anyway.

Open source programmers need more support?

[Futurepower(R)]

There's definitely a problem with open source development. My guess is that more emphasis should be place on raising money. Maybe open source programmers need more support than they are getting.

There is a HUGE, well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and Memory Hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug.

This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660

The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use with no activity, occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear.

You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html

To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.

The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613

I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. 5) This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. The other bugs aren't specified. 6) You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. 7) I don't like the way you worded your report. 8) Often someone uses the subject to act out anger; that person pretends to be interested in the subject.

I doubt this subject will just go away, not after more than 2 1/2 years of discussion. There has been a Slashdot story about it: Reducing Firefox's Memory Use. There's a lot of discussion in the comments to the story that the problem is a bug, rather than just something that needs improving.

Other people have raised the issue, all somewhat inaccurately, since the "memory leak"

Blaming Ubuntu for NVIDIA's faults

[Johan Palmqvist]

Isn't it a bit ironic that you're bashing open source when you're also telling us that you're having the hardware related problems with NVIDIA's open source hostile hardware (which they don't release specifications for) and their own CLOSED SOURCE proprietary drivers? Blame NVIDIA for that, not Ubuntu.

Damnit!

[CitizenJohnJohn]

With the 20 second delay that Slashdot enforces between hitting 'Reply' and 'Submit', it's going to take me at least two hours to post "You have been trolled" to everyone who took this utterly obvious piece of satire at face value.

Linux does mobile computing better

[SpooForBrains]

Ask yourself this: what does Linux do better today compared with in 2000, almost 6 years ago? I'm not talking about crap like antialiased text- I mean things that actually MATTER to users...

There are myriad examples. KDE makes Windows 2000 look like a dinosaur. I shall give you one example where Linux makes my life about a thousand times easier:

Mobile computing. Linux ROCKS the laptop, and here's why. I have to make frequent site visits. Each site I visit has a different network infrastructure. So I use SCPM, which is basically profile management. When I visit a new site, I create a new profile and set up all the networking settings, file shares and so on. So then, when I visit that site, I just have to choose that profile, and SCPM transparently swaps out all my configuration files, restarts all the networking services, and I'm up and running in about fifteen seconds.

Quetion answered?

Hardware Drivers for Linux

[dwandy]

The sooner Linux users stop buying closed driver only crap, the sooner we can all stop suffering.

I doubt that 5% of the PC market will have any impact on hardware vendors.
I would argue quite the opposite: We need to write our own drivers where and whenever possible, as this makes more hardware Linux compatible. The larger the compatibility list, the more people will want it on their desktop, the more people using it, the more likely that a hardware mfg decides that writing and supplying drivers is a competative advantage they can use to sell their product.

I think the lack of drivers has two sources:
(1) - 5% market share. As a 'producer' it doesn't make necessarily make sense to spend time capturing such a small percentage of the market - write for Windows and you get in the order of 90% of the market.
(2) - OSS people do the work for you. As a 'producer' having someone else 'pay' for the work means more profit for you.

The closed-source option has neither of these two disadvantages ... and in my opinion the only way to overcome them is to play along with #2 until #1 is no longer true ...

Wow this article is retarded

[namain]

OK first off, I am a pilot, I support and use many common Open Source projects (Fedora, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org) and I read the full article.

Now on to the rant!

This guy doesn't even attempt to understand the mechanics behind the scenes of an airline. There are anywhere from 20 to 550 people on a single flight. The fact that there are so many people alone is reason enough for so much security on an airline. As soon as you step onto the aircraft your safety is that airline's reasonability. The long wait is also caused by the number of people that are all on one flight. You if you can only process 5 people a minute, with the larger flights that means that it will take nearly an hour to process them all at peak efficency. Unfortuantly people show up late and not everything is going to happen at peak efficency, so you have to show up early if you want to make it to the aircraft still feeling safe. As far as making you wait in the terminal with stupid people, well he must just get bad flights. I have made a few good friends in my travels.

Now to the open source issue. The problems that he described aren't so much with the acutal process of open source but rather with people arguing over insignifigant things which leads to delays in parts of the programs that really matter. This unfortunatly is a problem that cannot be helped in a large democratic like environment. With any majority rules system of decision there will be conflicts of interests between the participants. I have not had any real problems with drivers on my own linux box, granted I do have some pretty old hardware. But the Linux environment is still under heavy development so I would let that slide. Mozilla Firefox has already become far better than their Microsoft IE and with Sunbird well on the way the Tunderbird/Sunbird combo will be much better than Outlook.

Re:Oblig. Spelling Nazi

[Reverend528]

Cars produced by apple all have 2 engines, one big one kludged onto a smaller one. Apple's cars have many of the features of a linux vehicle, but you wouldn't know, because everything is hidden under a dashboard that can only be removed with excessive force. The only thing that drivers are granted access to is a steering wheel, which is located in the upper left corner of the car. Because there are no pedals, all apple vehicles drive at the same speed all the time. Apple drivers insist that the speed is "fast" because there are two engines, but many windows and linux drivers debate this.

Despite the absurd usability problems that are created by having only one poorly-placed steering wheel, many Apple users insist that their cars are "more user-friendly". They also insist that they are "thinking differently", despite the fact that all of their cars look exactly the same.

Shut up already!

[psyon1]

...maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.

I think 90% of the Linux/FreeBSD/Other complaints I hear, is about hardware not working properly. People seem to blame the operating system for the lack of drivers for their hardware. Last I looked, hardware manufacturers are responsible fro writing the drivers. Hardware is NOT submitted to Microsoft for drivers to be made. We are fortunate enough that we have some very talented developers who DO make drivers for hardware, not because they have to, but because they can. Someday maybe people will call manufacturers and complain there is not a driver for other operating systems, but until then, I hope they at least realize, its not the fault of the operating system.

Best Quote Ever

[MrCopilot]

My objective has never been to perpetuate the myth of goodness within the annals of respectability but rather to grab goodness by the gonads and then splatter these nuts of decency against the public wall of justice. In short, I'm after progress, while these others are happy to wallow in the filth of achievements past.

Ewwwwwwwwww. Amusing but ewwww.

Re:Trollicious!

[Transmogrify_UK]

No, it's not really an apt analogy because they simply don't make cars with hoods welded shut. Your ingredients/nutritional information label analogy doesn't really work either, because I can't buy food without nutrional information or ingredients in this country (the UK), although you can in France interestingly enough. I know exactly what my computer is doing with the information I give it. I control what information goes in and what goes out. I don't disagree with open source software and the movement, in fact most of the applications I use on a day to day basis (firefox, open office, thunderbird among others) are open source, but my operating system of choice is windows because I'm comfortable with it, it lets me do exactly what I want to do and not concern myself with anything else and I know EXACTLY what is happening with the information I give it. I'd know in an instant if data I'd supplied it with is going to some spurious target I hadn't allowed. With 15 years of Windows experience, I'd like to think I'm pretty competant and aware of the pitfalls of using Windows.

Our morals are doing just fine then.

[Kaptain Kruton]

Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He criticizes the fact that planes don't fly faster without stopping to think why that is. He criticizes the people that promote opensource. He criticizes opensource, while doing it in a way that seems to say opensource is linux. Open sourced includes a lot more things than that. After all of the insults, the article states he is a director at a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. There is a difference between insulting and informing on the negative aspects and, apparently, he does not know it.