It's going to be great. ET will shoot at TIE fighters with a walkie talkie while the genie from Aladdin flies around on a magic carpet. Harrison Ford will probably play a cameo both as Indianna Jones and as an octagenarian Han Solo.
Does this mean I can rewrite the absolutely wretched media player interface? Ford's SYNC is a whole lot of meh, why bother as it comes out of the box. There's almost not one single useful thing about any of it, and I'd love to be able to hack on it and try to make something useful out of it. Otherwise I just have a lot of useless buttons on my steering wheel and my dashboard.
If anything, the problem is now that your data might live forever and also be out of your control.
Not if the hard disk AND its twin backup both crash when you're trying to transfer the data somewhere else. I lost 80,000 of my dead mother's photographs. I can hear her screaming at me now, lamenting "Only pixels! My life's work is only a bunch of fucking pixels!"
How right she was, it turns out. Oops. I fucked up and lost your life's work, Mom. My bad. I wish I had printed more of them.
I started trying to teach my kid something about electronics the other day. I tore apart some broken dongle or other to show him what capacitors and stuff look like. But I didn't recognize any of the multicolored 1 mm sq. little bits of stuff stuck to the board.
So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 10 years ago to show him what capacitors and stuff look like, and the little multicolored bits were about 3 mm sq. Not much of an improvement. I'm almost positive I probably identified one of the bits correctly as a germanium diode though.
So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 20 years ago, and lo, there were capacitors and stuff there, but knowing what capacitors used to look like in the dark ages isn't that useful really. It wasn't a very productive day.
5. Linux Desktop Users for the most part hate new technology.
Not unjustifiably so. The older generation Wacom stuff worked beautifully. Wear it out, go buy the most similar thing still available for sale, download an experimental driver, upgrade your entire operating system, replace half the packages on your operating system with other packages from a PPA to get the driver to work, and then your new thing you paid big money for mostly half works. Older hardware is a much safer bet on Linux. It takes drivers a long time to catch up whenever there's some new product line instead of a minor evolution of the old product line.
I've used splash screens to dedicate things to fallen loved ones. If there isn't a splash screen, another good place is in the about box, and another is the release note.
I've put dedications in several places in honor of several lost friends and family. It may be easier to get away with such things in the FOSS world, I guess. Anyway, the response from users was always such that I never felt I'd gone too far with any of the dedications. As a meme in the world of code, I think dedicating your work to someone you've lost is reasonable, as long as you don't go nuts and make it too annoying.
We did C64 BASIC in some class I had in middle school. I had a low opinion of these things, since I had a TRS-80 Color Computer at home, which I perceived to be a superior platform (perhaps erroneously, in retrospect). In high school, the "computer science" class had an Apple//e or two, while they had the most low end available IBM PS/2s in the business classroom as part of the vocational education program; for teaching kids Word Perfect and so forth.
The official curriculum had something to do with writing stuff in either Apple BASIC or maybe Apple C on the//e, but I hated that green monochrome POS, and insisted on doing all my projects in Turbo BASIC and later Turbo Pascal on my PC at home, and bringing them to school on a floppy to run on the PS/2 in the business classroom.
Thinking back, I don't guess I was taught in high school so much as I taught my teacher.
I keep skimming that headline, and every time I read it as a robot to foil meth exams.
We have lots of roving gangs of meth cookers who go around doing everything they can to foil the government's attempts to avoid selling them Sudafed. It's a big problem that could get even bigger if this Fujitsu robot really helps them foil meth exams.
Please allow me to be the first to bow to our meth addicted, toothless hillbilly Fujitsu robot overlords.
I'll believe it when I see it. 54.5 mpg? We have a LONG way to go.
I'm stuck with a long and miserable commute, and I'm highly motivated to maximize my fuel economy. I couldn't afford a hybrid, even with all the incentives, so I got the most fuel efficient conventional car I could lay my hands on at the time. I get 38.0 mpg, which isn't bad, but the difference between this and my last car makes 54.5 mpg look impossibly far away.
This thing weighs 1/3 what my old car did, has fewer cylinders, more than a liter less displacement, it's miserably cramped with no room to haul anything larger than a couple of small duffle bags. For all this sacrifice, I gained about 10 mpg. I don't think I could get the other ~20 in anything that could actually survive driving 100 miles a day through the mountains surrounded by 18-wheelers. This miserable little econobox is plenty torture enough, thanks.
...the number of people getting pulled over for speeding would drop to almost zero, and road rage will evaporate.
But rage at the government for increasing taxes will go up several fold. Gigantic swaths of the USA would have to figure out how to deal with the loss in revenue if drivers lost the ability to volunteer to pay these unofficial taxes.
The problem hasn't been with the Linux desktop UI for about 10 years now. Gnome 2 was fine. KDE 2 or 3.x was fine.
The problems are to do with driver support, upgrade breakage, package manager brain damage and ABI breakage scaring off commercial software.
Years ago, I saw a printer on clearance at Walmart that had a picture of Tux right on the box. Tux! On the box! If that doesn't say "Linux compatible" then I don't know what does. I was shocked and awed, and bought the printer immediately.
What resulted from that buying experience is a very good example of what's wrong with "desktop Linux" (ie. casual home users browsing the web, maybe writing a term paper, sharing some photos with Grandma, etc.) in general. True, the actual GUI side of things has been quite good for at least 10 years now, but the "desktop experience" is so much more than just being able to interact effectively with your computer. One thing these folks are wont to do is go to Walmart and buy a printer. Buy a printer with a picture of your operating system right on the box, and you can't go wrong. Right?
Wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. The printer was a cheap Lexmark. They justified putting Tux on the box because it shipped with an RPM for Red Hat 6.x or so that provided flawless support for the printer. The only problem was I was running Debian, and the supported version of Red Hat was by then two or three years old. Nobody running any kind of system that was current at the time of purchase could do anything with that driver.
At the heart of the RPM was some binary blob, and after much mucking about using alien to convert the RPM into a.deb, and then hacking on assorted things following assorted clue trails, I actually got the damn thing working beautifully. For awhile. I felt so good about the whole thing that I took it upon myself to write the missing HOWTO for this thing, to leave a trail for future generations to follow.
The problem with that was a fruit fly farted, and the tiny puff of wind was enough to blow the entire delicate house of cards into a pile of rubble. I never got that damn printer to work again, and I got emails from people for another seven years asking me why my HOWTO wasn't working. The answer is because you can't provide Linux support by shipping a binary blob bound up inside a package intended for one version of one distro. You have to support 11 trillion possible permutations (actually more like infinity cubed permutations), and the only practical way to do that is ship source code, and let each individual or package maintainer compile it in whatever unique-as-a-snowflake environment it finds itself in.
That's just never going to happen, and so the fundamental hardware compatibility problem is just flat out impossible to solve. Even if you choose your components wisely and cautiously, with lots of research before you buy anything, it's still entirely too easy to end up in driver hell. Driver hell after all these years. It seems impossible, but there it is.
When your downloading like 1meg a minute, a new version of linux takes 6/hours/.
The first time I did a net install of Debian, I tied up my phone line for 36 hours to download the "minimal network install CD" or whatever they called it. I think it was 150 MB or so. Then I had to flesh out the skeleton by downloading countless additional packages.
...Windows users that happily steal anything that isn't nailed down and pass it around to random strangers.
I'll never forget the time I gave a copy of OpenOffice.org to a coworker who was talking about going over to so-and-so's house to "get the office put on" her new computer.
" Hey, here, try this, you can have a copy free and give as many copies away as you like, and it's all perfectly legal!"
"Well, I looked at that thingie you gave me, and it looked slightly different, so I went over to so-and-so's house and got my computer fixed."
"What do you mean 'fixed?' You mean you pirated a copy of some rather expensive commercial software? The last time I bought a copy of Microsoft Office, I paid almost $400 for it."
"$400?! Why would you pay $400? Just go over to so-and-so's house and get the office put on. It's free."
"Sigh."
The whole thing makes me think what a dumbass I am. I haven't pirated software since I was old enough to have a job. I switched to Linux 13 years ago in part because software was just too damn expensive, and putting up with all of Linux's crap is very cheap compared to all the money I saved on software. Thousands and thousands of dollars by now, surely. It's so cool walking past a software store, because there's nothing in there that would run on my computer anyway.
Watching desktop Linux slowly spiraling toward the big hole in the bottom of the toilet all these years isn't so gratifying though.
But people who always needed the power of a PC will continue needing one so they aren't going to go away.
The other side of the coin is that PCs have had enough capacity on every front for years now that the only unavoidably compelling reason to buy a new one is when something finally stops working.
I haven't really felt like my new computer was significantly better or faster at anything in maybe 10 years now. I don't play games. I do develop software, and it's always nice to shave a little bit off the compile time, but if a compiler is too fast, that just eats up my/. time anyway, so why spend the money?
Plus the economy has sucked for the past few years, and I'm perpetually broke. I guess that does factor in.
I guess it applies everywhere people speak English. Inflammable has the prefix in- that's most closely related to the English word "in," and could be interpreted as something like "capable of bursting into flames." English has another prefix in- that means "not," and is found in words like "inconceivable" and "incredible."
I want to say the two conflicting meanings of in- come into English straight through from Latin, which also had both meanings in different contexts. I want to say that, but I'm not asserting that, because I'm too lazy to go do the research in order to either support or refute my claim.
Slashdot Mirror
It's going to be great. ET will shoot at TIE fighters with a walkie talkie while the genie from Aladdin flies around on a magic carpet. Harrison Ford will probably play a cameo both as Indianna Jones and as an octagenarian Han Solo.
Does this mean I can rewrite the absolutely wretched media player interface? Ford's SYNC is a whole lot of meh, why bother as it comes out of the box. There's almost not one single useful thing about any of it, and I'd love to be able to hack on it and try to make something useful out of it. Otherwise I just have a lot of useless buttons on my steering wheel and my dashboard.
If anything, the problem is now that your data might live forever and also be out of your control.
Not if the hard disk AND its twin backup both crash when you're trying to transfer the data somewhere else. I lost 80,000 of my dead mother's photographs. I can hear her screaming at me now, lamenting "Only pixels! My life's work is only a bunch of fucking pixels!"
How right she was, it turns out. Oops. I fucked up and lost your life's work, Mom. My bad. I wish I had printed more of them.
I started trying to teach my kid something about electronics the other day. I tore apart some broken dongle or other to show him what capacitors and stuff look like. But I didn't recognize any of the multicolored 1 mm sq. little bits of stuff stuck to the board.
So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 10 years ago to show him what capacitors and stuff look like, and the little multicolored bits were about 3 mm sq. Not much of an improvement. I'm almost positive I probably identified one of the bits correctly as a germanium diode though.
So I tore apart some broken dongle or other from 20 years ago, and lo, there were capacitors and stuff there, but knowing what capacitors used to look like in the dark ages isn't that useful really. It wasn't a very productive day.
...Some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe....
The most stupidly expensive wood lathe I can find is only $7500. Who turns bowls on a $25,000 lathe?
Grep maintainer quitting. 900 billion people use grep. Somebody else will maintain it. Nothing to see here, move along.
I personally think that everyone here is so willing to kill each other because we have so little vacation time. Damned Protestant work ethic!
Also, we're too broke to afford vacations even when we have time.
B) Good point; I mean, where the hell would an orbiting nuclear power plant get power from?
From puppies running around on little wheels. Obviously.
Let's play a game: name an inspirational figure from history, and lets all find a way to tear them down.
George Jetson!
5. Linux Desktop Users for the most part hate new technology.
Not unjustifiably so. The older generation Wacom stuff worked beautifully. Wear it out, go buy the most similar thing still available for sale, download an experimental driver, upgrade your entire operating system, replace half the packages on your operating system with other packages from a PPA to get the driver to work, and then your new thing you paid big money for mostly half works. Older hardware is a much safer bet on Linux. It takes drivers a long time to catch up whenever there's some new product line instead of a minor evolution of the old product line.
Why would I be aware of that? I was born in the 1900s.
Uhh, you'd be aware of that because you were, uhhh, well educated? Just going out on a limb here.
I've used splash screens to dedicate things to fallen loved ones. If there isn't a splash screen, another good place is in the about box, and another is the release note.
I've put dedications in several places in honor of several lost friends and family. It may be easier to get away with such things in the FOSS world, I guess. Anyway, the response from users was always such that I never felt I'd gone too far with any of the dedications. As a meme in the world of code, I think dedicating your work to someone you've lost is reasonable, as long as you don't go nuts and make it too annoying.
We did C64 BASIC in some class I had in middle school. I had a low opinion of these things, since I had a TRS-80 Color Computer at home, which I perceived to be a superior platform (perhaps erroneously, in retrospect). In high school, the "computer science" class had an Apple //e or two, while they had the most low end available IBM PS/2s in the business classroom as part of the vocational education program; for teaching kids Word Perfect and so forth.
The official curriculum had something to do with writing stuff in either Apple BASIC or maybe Apple C on the //e, but I hated that green monochrome POS, and insisted on doing all my projects in Turbo BASIC and later Turbo Pascal on my PC at home, and bringing them to school on a floppy to run on the PS/2 in the business classroom.
Thinking back, I don't guess I was taught in high school so much as I taught my teacher.
(Fine. You find a rhyme for 'Neanderthalensis')
Supercalifragilisticexpialidensis.
Mandrake, Debian, Kubuntu
I keep skimming that headline, and every time I read it as a robot to foil meth exams.
We have lots of roving gangs of meth cookers who go around doing everything they can to foil the government's attempts to avoid selling them Sudafed. It's a big problem that could get even bigger if this Fujitsu robot really helps them foil meth exams.
Please allow me to be the first to bow to our meth addicted, toothless hillbilly Fujitsu robot overlords.
I'll believe it when I see it. 54.5 mpg? We have a LONG way to go.
I'm stuck with a long and miserable commute, and I'm highly motivated to maximize my fuel economy. I couldn't afford a hybrid, even with all the incentives, so I got the most fuel efficient conventional car I could lay my hands on at the time. I get 38.0 mpg, which isn't bad, but the difference between this and my last car makes 54.5 mpg look impossibly far away.
This thing weighs 1/3 what my old car did, has fewer cylinders, more than a liter less displacement, it's miserably cramped with no room to haul anything larger than a couple of small duffle bags. For all this sacrifice, I gained about 10 mpg. I don't think I could get the other ~20 in anything that could actually survive driving 100 miles a day through the mountains surrounded by 18-wheelers. This miserable little econobox is plenty torture enough, thanks.
...the number of people getting pulled over for speeding would drop to almost zero, and road rage will evaporate.
But rage at the government for increasing taxes will go up several fold. Gigantic swaths of the USA would have to figure out how to deal with the loss in revenue if drivers lost the ability to volunteer to pay these unofficial taxes.
The problem hasn't been with the Linux desktop UI for about 10 years now. Gnome 2 was fine. KDE 2 or 3.x was fine.
The problems are to do with driver support, upgrade breakage, package manager brain damage and ABI breakage scaring off commercial software.
Years ago, I saw a printer on clearance at Walmart that had a picture of Tux right on the box. Tux! On the box! If that doesn't say "Linux compatible" then I don't know what does. I was shocked and awed, and bought the printer immediately.
What resulted from that buying experience is a very good example of what's wrong with "desktop Linux" (ie. casual home users browsing the web, maybe writing a term paper, sharing some photos with Grandma, etc.) in general. True, the actual GUI side of things has been quite good for at least 10 years now, but the "desktop experience" is so much more than just being able to interact effectively with your computer. One thing these folks are wont to do is go to Walmart and buy a printer. Buy a printer with a picture of your operating system right on the box, and you can't go wrong. Right?
Wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. The printer was a cheap Lexmark. They justified putting Tux on the box because it shipped with an RPM for Red Hat 6.x or so that provided flawless support for the printer. The only problem was I was running Debian, and the supported version of Red Hat was by then two or three years old. Nobody running any kind of system that was current at the time of purchase could do anything with that driver.
At the heart of the RPM was some binary blob, and after much mucking about using alien to convert the RPM into a .deb, and then hacking on assorted things following assorted clue trails, I actually got the damn thing working beautifully. For awhile. I felt so good about the whole thing that I took it upon myself to write the missing HOWTO for this thing, to leave a trail for future generations to follow.
The problem with that was a fruit fly farted, and the tiny puff of wind was enough to blow the entire delicate house of cards into a pile of rubble. I never got that damn printer to work again, and I got emails from people for another seven years asking me why my HOWTO wasn't working. The answer is because you can't provide Linux support by shipping a binary blob bound up inside a package intended for one version of one distro. You have to support 11 trillion possible permutations (actually more like infinity cubed permutations), and the only practical way to do that is ship source code, and let each individual or package maintainer compile it in whatever unique-as-a-snowflake environment it finds itself in.
That's just never going to happen, and so the fundamental hardware compatibility problem is just flat out impossible to solve. Even if you choose your components wisely and cautiously, with lots of research before you buy anything, it's still entirely too easy to end up in driver hell. Driver hell after all these years. It seems impossible, but there it is.
When your downloading like 1meg a minute, a new version of linux takes 6 /hours/.
The first time I did a net install of Debian, I tied up my phone line for 36 hours to download the "minimal network install CD" or whatever they called it. I think it was 150 MB or so. Then I had to flesh out the skeleton by downloading countless additional packages.
Man I used to have patience and dedication.
Three words; Dungeons Of Dagorath. I wore out a keyboard on that game.
Which, incidentally, you can dig up and run on Linux in all its incredibly crappy old school goodness. It really takes you back.
...Windows users that happily steal anything that isn't nailed down and pass it around to random strangers.
I'll never forget the time I gave a copy of OpenOffice.org to a coworker who was talking about going over to so-and-so's house to "get the office put on" her new computer.
" Hey, here, try this, you can have a copy free and give as many copies away as you like, and it's all perfectly legal!"
"Well, I looked at that thingie you gave me, and it looked slightly different, so I went over to so-and-so's house and got my computer fixed."
"What do you mean 'fixed?' You mean you pirated a copy of some rather expensive commercial software? The last time I bought a copy of Microsoft Office, I paid almost $400 for it."
"$400?! Why would you pay $400? Just go over to so-and-so's house and get the office put on. It's free."
"Sigh."
The whole thing makes me think what a dumbass I am. I haven't pirated software since I was old enough to have a job. I switched to Linux 13 years ago in part because software was just too damn expensive, and putting up with all of Linux's crap is very cheap compared to all the money I saved on software. Thousands and thousands of dollars by now, surely. It's so cool walking past a software store, because there's nothing in there that would run on my computer anyway.
Watching desktop Linux slowly spiraling toward the big hole in the bottom of the toilet all these years isn't so gratifying though.
Sigh.
But people who always needed the power of a PC will continue needing one so they aren't going to go away.
The other side of the coin is that PCs have had enough capacity on every front for years now that the only unavoidably compelling reason to buy a new one is when something finally stops working.
I haven't really felt like my new computer was significantly better or faster at anything in maybe 10 years now. I don't play games. I do develop software, and it's always nice to shave a little bit off the compile time, but if a compiler is too fast, that just eats up my /. time anyway, so why spend the money?
Plus the economy has sucked for the past few years, and I'm perpetually broke. I guess that does factor in.
It moderately pisses me off...
Put me down in the severely pissed off column.
I really can't come up with anything more worthwhile or meaningful to do, so I fart in their general direction.
Inflammable means flammable? What a country.
I guess it applies everywhere people speak English. Inflammable has the prefix in- that's most closely related to the English word "in," and could be interpreted as something like "capable of bursting into flames." English has another prefix in- that means "not," and is found in words like "inconceivable" and "incredible."
I want to say the two conflicting meanings of in- come into English straight through from Latin, which also had both meanings in different contexts. I want to say that, but I'm not asserting that, because I'm too lazy to go do the research in order to either support or refute my claim.