Re:Groundbreaking & retail?
on
Wearable PCs
·
· Score: 1
``Uh, so new and interesting prototypes shouldn't be discussed here, on the site for geeks who are interested in cutting edge, non mainstream technology?''
\begin{sarcasm}
That's right. He doesn't want to see it posted on Slashdot unless he can buy from the Sharper Image catalog. It was such a waste of his time that he had to take time to post a snide comment about its being put up on the site.
This is all starting to remind me of an old science fiction story, Catman, in which the main character was part of a group of people that started replacing parts of their bodies with metal and assorted electronics. I guess the goal was to become totally machine. I wish I could remember the author but I think it was in the first Dangerous Visions collection. I've seen several movies that I'd bet were influenced by it.
Back in the mid '80s I was working on some early GPS equipment (large 19" rack mount stuff) that was being controlled with a PDP-11. We were located in southern Ohio where it turns out that damned few radio stations broadcast past, say, 1:00 AM. In the middle of the night it got pretty damned boring sitting around collecting data with nothing to listen to. Since we usually had to track satellites in the wee hours (since the full complement of SVs hadn't been launched yet) we sometimes kept ourselves amused by turning on a radio in the lab that would pick up the emissions from the PDP as well as the GPS receivers. After a little while you could tell what part of the control software was running, whether the receivers were tracking a satellite that was rising or one that was setting, and whether they'd switched to a different satellite.
OK! Let's cut the ``if you've got nothing to hide'' garbage.
This latest attempt to get access into each and every American's household is nothing more than a direct assault on the use of something that's not illegal and turning it into an excuse to harrass law-abiding citizens. Do any of the ``if you've got nothing to hide'' types really think that anyone who purchases over the counter or downloads a copy of any type of encryption software isn't going to wind up in a DoJ database somewhere? Puhleez!
The Janet Reno/Louis Freah (sp?) crowd have already got their hooks into enough of our private information now (or can get into it at the drop of a hat). They now want to get at without anything like probably cause. Oh yah! That's right: ``If you've got nothing to hide''...
I'm not normally paranoid about this. But the last couple of months, Feds have been proposing some damned frightening stuff. I'm not sure who I'm going to be voting for in 2000, except I'm sure it won't be Gore as he'll probably agree to anything that Reno wants to do. With Tipper as ``First Busybody'' and Reno running the DoJ nobody'll be safe from Government intrusions.
Whine! Whine! Whine! All you do is whine!
on
The Future of GNOME
·
· Score: 1
``All the icons down the left have that awful RedHat logo on them, it just doesn't work at all''
I'd assumed that the reason that the desktop icons had the RedHat logo on them was that they were ``links'' back to web pages on www.redhat.com and it made sense to me. If you don't like that icon... change it.
``No one can find the default GNOME setup easy to use or user friendly.''
I doubt that that particular generalization is valid. I found the default settings OK but not quite to my liking (perhaps a little annoying). Big deal. Change 'em. I found the default settings for CDE on DEC UNIX and HP/UX fairly execrable as well (hey, I'm not a big CDE fan but it's better than nothing; certaintly better than the Win95 laptop I have to use to read the company cc:mail). Again, big deal. Change 'em.
Geez. Can't find anything more important to whine about than the default icons? You GUI whiners slay me. ``[insert-despised-vendor-name here], their distribution blows chow because it come out of the box exactly the way I like it.'' Puhleez.
Good point. I've seen way too many six-figure executives fritzing away the afternoon creating Powerpoint presentations on their $5000 laptops instead of handing them off to someone trained to do great looking graphics.
``Years ago, when my father needed a part, he simply went to the dealership, told them the part number, they got one out of the bin, he paid, and then he left. Now, he goes to the same dealership, and tells them the part number. They punch it into a computer, and everyone waits while the computer searches the dealership's inventory, and finally prints out a page of information at the end of the counter. Then, whoever is working at the dealership reads the printout, goes to the bin, and finally gets the part.''
Gosh, sorry to hear about your father having to wait. While the computer isn't necessarily making his life easier or shopping quicker, have you considered the impact it's had on the gardening suppy house owner's business. The business owner might actually get to go home to his wife and kids instead of staying in the office until all hours tallying up the days sales and manually adjusting the inventory. While there are always some improvements that can be made in the name of efficiency -- perhaps moving some areas of the business around can improve productivity and/or reduce the amount of time it takes to handle a customer purchase. Sounds like that's the real problem your father was experiencing and if his gardening supply house cares even a whit about it's customers they'll do something about it -- if they know that it's a problem.
I too have seen some pretty boneheaded setups at businesses that try to get cheap and buy one printer then have all the clerks waiting for printouts or falling all over themselves trying to get at the damned thing because it stuffed under the counter. On the other hand, it's been years (guess I'm dating myself here) since I've pulled up to a store and seen a sign on the door:
I doubt that this is a very heavily used function on the internet but please tell me why anyone would add so much additional verbiage to something that gets transmitted across the internet. Even if it doesn't hurt most peoples' response time, you think that NSI would realize that what ever box is supplying the whois responses now has twice as much data to pump out. I did a sample whois query and it took well over 10 seconds for the response to complete. Not that whois has ever been all that speedy to reply but that EULA-type statement sure came out fast! I guess NSI wanted to give me time to read the legalese before I hit ^C, eh? Don't they care about the extra load they're putting on their own systems? Is this negligible to them? Are they just being stubborn boneheads since Congress has been looking at them more closely? I suppose that the truth is that they don't care since they've already got your registration fee.
Interesting idea. I used to run a verion of SVR4.2 that originated with the old UNIX Laboratories (or whatever it was called before being sold to Novell and, later, SCO). It had a journaled file system (vxfs?). If that was part of the deal when SCO got hold of Unixware, that'd be a great addition to the Open Source code collection... provided that there aren't other licensing issues covering the filesystem.
Digital used to show off their new disk drives at the trade shows using versions that had clear cases (at least the tops were clear). They'd have them running off some system that sat there and accessed them randomly so you could see the heads seek. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a working drive connected to an old VAX and moving mail back and forth between Maynard and the folks at the trade show. Anyway, it was pretty cool at the time.
After having worked on computer systems for too long, all I can say about anyone wanting a clear computer case is:
``Are you nuts?''
Any computer equipment after it's been running for a month or so is going to be filled with a fine dust that's going to make your clear case look absolutely disgusting. Electronic equipment has a tendancy to attract superfine dust that's nearly impossible to clean off unless you want to completely disassemble the entire thing and dip the case in some industrial cleaner.
Unless you have a clean-room environment to place one of these systems, do yourself a favor and avoid these cases.
Back in the '70s most 35mm cameras came in a brushed silver finish, perhaps with a little faux leather (i.e. textured plastic) to provide a little grip. The ``Professional'' black finish always cost more.
On computer cases, I think that most of the places I've visited lately on the Web offer at least some of their cases in black.
``...from Reno's letters to Warssanaw (I probably didn't spell that right) countries that she would just as soon have crypto be inaccessable to ANYONE.''
I suspect that Reno and company would just as soon we didn't seal our envelopes before we put them in the mail either.
The news is that the crime rate in the U.S. has been declining. Guess if your job is catching bad guys and there's fewer of them around, you find a way to make more people out to be bad guys.
I can't say who I'd vote for in the 2000 elections but I'm afraid of Gore winning as he might decide to keep Reno on board. (Uuugggh!)
Unfortunately, now I really have to start considering whether home schooling is the way to go. I have twins that'll be ``in the system'' in a year or so and I'm already worried about the quality of education they'll be getting. This decision makes me that much more fearsome of what they'll be ``learning''.
A lot of the coverage I've heard about the Kansas decision is predicting that it won't be long before a lot of states adopt this policy.
When I was in college, I spent part of one summer working for a crew of people doing general maintenance in a Catholic grade school. During lunch breaks I used to check out the textbooks in the classrooms to see what sort topics were being covered. The ``science'' textbooks were scary; it was as though they'd just recently bought into the idea that the Earth orbited the Sun. I can see the schools in many areas adopting this curriculum and the same bland, "let's not offend the religious fundamentalists" brand of textbooks and when that happens I fear for the level of science awareness.
Did anyone else notice that nearly every paragraph included a caveat from Burst:
``I'm not counseling you to move away from Windows...''
This was nothing more than a couple of web pages full of weasel words.
When Linux finally does take over a larger market share, ol' Jesse will be able to say:
``See, I told you so.''
If it doesn't, ol' Jesse will still be able to say:
``See, I told you so.''
I wish his boss would wake up and tell Jesse:
``Hey! Your column is boring! Do you really have a point of view? Or are you really as wishy-washy as your columns read?''
And for a laugh, take a look at the "talkbacks". A sampling of the replies that were negative toward the rise of Linux seemed to all come from people who were either MCSEs or working toward that certification. Translation: "I don't want to have to learn something new!" (you should say this aloud with a whiny voice)
I can remember having that attitude when I started programming.
``I'm the only one who's ever going to use these programs. It'll always be obvious what they do, why they do it that way, and how''.
BZZZZZZTTT! Wrong!
I have many old floppies with code from those days on them that I would just as soon rewrite from scratch than attempt to figure how they worked. I'm sure some of these old programs might be worth modifying to be useful again or contain some code snippets that could be re-used. But without the comments and accompanying documentation, it just isn't worth the time anymore to have to put on the ``code archeologist's'' hat in order to find the useful stuff.
Go ahead and take that attitude now; you'll come to regret it when you get older. Or, perhaps, when you take that attitude into a job interview.
Having a plan in the form of some written specs is very valuable when embarking on a coding project. I was managing a decent sized project some years ago and we went through the process of a preliminary design followed by a review, a critical design, again, followed by a review, etc. If this sounds too rigid, well, we did it to satisfy the people who were paying the bills (we were contractors to the Army). Since our system had to interact with flight critical equipment, we pretty much had to do it their way. We actually got off pretty easy. If we had had to adopt their methodologies in toto we would have had to hire a boatload of subcontractors.
For many of the people on the team, it was the first time they'd had to sit down and actually plan what they were going to do before they started doing it. It was painful for these folks but, you know what, the hardware and software that we produced worked the first time. When additional software modules were introduced for testing... they worked the first time. I suppose that much of that might have happened without the highly structured design work that was done up front. But I don't think that the coding and testing phases would have gone anywhere nearly as smoothly if we hadn't done it this way. We would have spent way too much time rewriting code that didn't allow additional modules to be added later. Our data structures would have been modified too many times and adding each additional function would have been a separate nightmare.
Maybe I was lucky and had great programmers (I'd like to think that I was able to put together a crack team.)
As another example, take a look at the way the basic building blocks of the internet came to be. I don't think the IETF documents for the various protocols were written after the fact.
An interesting study was done some years ago. I think it was at McGill Univ. Teams of engineering students were assembled to build the same thing. One team built the project and wrote the documentation and the user manual afterward; the other team did all the documentation first. The team that did the documentation beforehand produced a product that worked better and more closely met the design goals. Not proof that this is the best way; just another example showing that it seems to work better when you do it that way.
Let's face it, programmers hate doing documentation. Just look at the spotty documentation for some important areas of Linux. The manpages and the info pages are often out of sync (why must this be?). The LDP project needs to be better supported and, dammit, the developers need to be major contributors. Maybe they shouldn't write the prose (they're often much, much better at C/C++ than English) but the technical input needs to be there. Pass the documentation back and forth a couple of times until it's correct and is readable by people of different levels of UNIX experience. This is the stuff that the new users are told to read in order to get Linux to work. If the documentation sucks, then that's the impression they're going to have of Linux as a whole. If Linux works but they can't figure out how then it's all going to look like Black Magic and its adoption will slow or decline. Do any developers out there look for assistance from the user community to help write the documentation, manpages, etc.
I realize that this got slightly off the original topic but I feel that the two go hand-in-hand. Now that I got that off my chest...
The fact that different manufacturers can't decide on how to describe their disk capacity indicates the need for the IEEE proposal.
I used to laugh when a certain company used to have ads listing their disk drives capacities as ``NNN mB''. (I guess only an engineer would see the humor... Guess it comes from turning to the old ``Technically Speaking'' column in IEEE Spectrum and reading it before any other articles.)
``we need more federal laws! And we need mandatory blocking programs everywhere to [say it with me, everyone] Protect The Children!''
That's Washington for yah! Does anyone else want to vomit like I do when they have to listen to these clowns in D.C. get behind the nearest podium full of microphones to announce how whatever it was that they've done whether it be passing some ridiculous statute or spending bill or signing another executive order was to protect the children?
This is about as repulsive as the anti-gun, anti-nuke, anti-internet-porn, anti-whatever whackos who have to drag their kids along with them to the marches and protests and have them waering or carrying signs. It sure doesn't produce any sympathy for their cause with me. Instead it just tells me that they're desperate and te way to garner support for their ``cause'' is getting the press to film those sweet, little big-eyed kids who are against nuclear weapons, oil spills, etc., gauls me no end.
I'd be tempted to move onto to something else when I thought that Linux had gotten stagnant and that it had reached a point where there was nothing new that could be done with it.
Do I see that happening? No! Not for the foreseeable future. Now if some absolutely fantastic system comes out of a research lab that totally blows away anything and everything that's currently in use and I/we just have to get in on it... well, then maybe, especially if that breakthrough is in the area of software. On the other hand, if that breakthrough happens to be in hardware, I suspect that someone will have ported Linux over to it within a matter of weeks and we won't have to leave Linux behind.
\begin{offtopic} Speaking of porting... What's the current status of some of the porting projects like VAX Linux? Most of the home pages for these projects don't seem to have been updated for an awfully long time. All the latest ports seem to be geared toward personal computers. There's a ton (or ten) of perfectly good VAX hardware out there that would probably be better of running Linux than winding up in the town dump. Did the people on these projects decide that the hardware was just getting too old? \end{offtopic}
``A reader writes "Apparently frustrated by the crackdown on SPAMers by ISPs around the world, a group of Davis, California innovators [1] made headlines this week in the Sacramento Bee by unveiling their "intergalactic communication system (U.S. Patent Pending) [2]" which will beam unsolicited email into outer space. According to one of the founders, "this is the ultimate expression of free speech", but it will cost the general public $10.95 [3] to have a 1000 word message launched."''
[1] - It's amazing what passes for innovation nowadays.
[2] - I'm not sure what more amazing: a) that they thought this was an idea worth patenting or b.) that the U.S. Patent Office will probably award the patent!
[3] - How many bozos at this price will it take for this group of innovators to become millionaires? Sadly, it'll this'll probably happen too.
Seeing as how the Andromeda galaxy (our closest neighboring galaxy if you don't count the Magellanic Clouds) is 2e+06 lights away, I wouln't ask for a return receipt for that e-mail if I were you.
As an aside, when I used Alta Vista to find info on Andromeda galaxy, the page contained a link labeled "The RealNames link takes you directly to Andromeda Galaxy.". Now those guys at RealNames are doing some real innovation!
Slashdot Mirror
\begin{sarcasm}
That's right. He doesn't want to see it posted on Slashdot unless he can buy from the Sharper Image catalog. It was such a waste of his time that he had to take time to post a snide comment about its being put up on the site.
\end{sarcasm}
This is all starting to remind me of an old science fiction story, Catman, in which the main character was part of a group of people that started replacing parts of their bodies with metal and assorted electronics. I guess the goal was to become totally machine. I wish I could remember the author but I think it was in the first Dangerous Visions collection. I've seen several movies that I'd bet were influenced by it.
I've always wondered why MS can't seem to make a decent, stable product. Your comment:
I guess that might explain it, eh? If they can't even use their own product...
Back in the mid '80s I was working on some early GPS equipment (large 19" rack mount stuff) that was being controlled with a PDP-11. We were located in southern Ohio where it turns out that damned few radio stations broadcast past, say, 1:00 AM. In the middle of the night it got pretty damned boring sitting around collecting data with nothing to listen to. Since we usually had to track satellites in the wee hours (since the full complement of SVs hadn't been launched yet) we sometimes kept ourselves amused by turning on a radio in the lab that would pick up the emissions from the PDP as well as the GPS receivers. After a little while you could tell what part of the control software was running, whether the receivers were tracking a satellite that was rising or one that was setting, and whether they'd switched to a different satellite.
Don't you mean Root Boy Slim???
OK! Let's cut the ``if you've got nothing to hide'' garbage.
This latest attempt to get access into each and every American's household is nothing more than a direct assault on the use of something that's not illegal and turning it into an excuse to harrass law-abiding citizens. Do any of the ``if you've got nothing to hide'' types really think that anyone who purchases over the counter or downloads a copy of any type of encryption software isn't going to wind up in a DoJ database somewhere? Puhleez!
The Janet Reno/Louis Freah (sp?) crowd have already got their hooks into enough of our private information now (or can get into it at the drop of a hat). They now want to get at without anything like probably cause. Oh yah! That's right: ``If you've got nothing to hide''...
I'm not normally paranoid about this. But the last couple of months, Feds have been proposing some damned frightening stuff. I'm not sure who I'm going to be voting for in 2000, except I'm sure it won't be Gore as he'll probably agree to anything that Reno wants to do. With Tipper as ``First Busybody'' and Reno running the DoJ nobody'll be safe from Government intrusions.
I'd assumed that the reason that the desktop icons had the RedHat logo on them was that they were ``links'' back to web pages on www.redhat.com and it made sense to me. If you don't like that icon... change it.
I doubt that that particular generalization is valid. I found the default settings OK but not quite to my liking (perhaps a little annoying). Big deal. Change 'em. I found the default settings for CDE on DEC UNIX and HP/UX fairly execrable as well (hey, I'm not a big CDE fan but it's better than nothing; certaintly better than the Win95 laptop I have to use to read the company cc:mail). Again, big deal. Change 'em.
Geez. Can't find anything more important to whine about than the default icons? You GUI whiners slay me. ``[insert-despised-vendor-name here], their distribution blows chow because it come out of the box exactly the way I like it.'' Puhleez.
Good point. I've seen way too many six-figure executives fritzing away the afternoon creating Powerpoint presentations on their $5000 laptops instead of handing them off to someone trained to do great looking graphics.
Gosh, sorry to hear about your father having to wait. While the computer isn't necessarily making his life easier or shopping quicker, have you considered the impact it's had on the gardening suppy house owner's business. The business owner might actually get to go home to his wife and kids instead of staying in the office until all hours tallying up the days sales and manually adjusting the inventory. While there are always some improvements that can be made in the name of efficiency -- perhaps moving some areas of the business around can improve productivity and/or reduce the amount of time it takes to handle a customer purchase. Sounds like that's the real problem your father was experiencing and if his gardening supply house cares even a whit about it's customers they'll do something about it -- if they know that it's a problem.
I too have seen some pretty boneheaded setups at businesses that try to get cheap and buy one printer then have all the clerks waiting for printouts or falling all over themselves trying to get at the damned thing because it stuffed under the counter. On the other hand, it's been years (guess I'm dating myself here) since I've pulled up to a store and seen a sign on the door:
No internet access at home, eh?
I doubt that this is a very heavily used function on the internet but please tell me why anyone would add so much additional verbiage to something that gets transmitted across the internet. Even if it doesn't hurt most peoples' response time, you think that NSI would realize that what ever box is supplying the whois responses now has twice as much data to pump out. I did a sample whois query and it took well over 10 seconds for the response to complete. Not that whois has ever been all that speedy to reply but that EULA-type statement sure came out fast! I guess NSI wanted to give me time to read the legalese before I hit ^C, eh? Don't they care about the extra load they're putting on their own systems? Is this negligible to them? Are they just being stubborn boneheads since Congress has been looking at them more closely? I suppose that the truth is that they don't care since they've already got your registration fee.
Interesting idea. I used to run a verion of SVR4.2 that originated with the old UNIX Laboratories (or whatever it was called before being sold to Novell and, later, SCO). It had a journaled file system (vxfs?). If that was part of the deal when SCO got hold of Unixware, that'd be a great addition to the Open Source code collection... provided that there aren't other licensing issues covering the filesystem.
Digital used to show off their new disk drives at the trade shows using versions that had clear cases (at least the tops were clear). They'd have them running off some system that sat there and accessed them randomly so you could see the heads seek. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a working drive connected to an old VAX and moving mail back and forth between Maynard and the folks at the trade show. Anyway, it was pretty cool at the time.
After having worked on computer systems for too long, all I can say about anyone wanting a clear computer case is:
Any computer equipment after it's been running for a month or so is going to be filled with a fine dust that's going to make your clear case look absolutely disgusting. Electronic equipment has a tendancy to attract superfine dust that's nearly impossible to clean off unless you want to completely disassemble the entire thing and dip the case in some industrial cleaner.
Unless you have a clean-room environment to place one of these systems, do yourself a favor and avoid these cases.
Back in the '70s most 35mm cameras came in a brushed silver finish, perhaps with a little faux leather (i.e. textured plastic) to provide a little grip. The ``Professional'' black finish always cost more.
On computer cases, I think that most of the places I've visited lately on the Web offer at least some of their cases in black.
I suspect that Reno and company would just as soon we didn't seal our envelopes before we put them in the mail either.
The news is that the crime rate in the U.S. has been declining. Guess if your job is catching bad guys and there's fewer of them around, you find a way to make more people out to be bad guys.
I can't say who I'd vote for in the 2000 elections but I'm afraid of Gore winning as he might decide to keep Reno on board. (Uuugggh!)
...to be out of the U.S. educational system.
Unfortunately, now I really have to start considering whether home schooling is the way to go. I have twins that'll be ``in the system'' in a year or so and I'm already worried about the quality of education they'll be getting. This decision makes me that much more fearsome of what they'll be ``learning''.
A lot of the coverage I've heard about the Kansas decision is predicting that it won't be long before a lot of states adopt this policy.
When I was in college, I spent part of one summer working for a crew of people doing general maintenance in a Catholic grade school. During lunch breaks I used to check out the textbooks in the classrooms to see what sort topics were being covered. The ``science'' textbooks were scary; it was as though they'd just recently bought into the idea that the Earth orbited the Sun. I can see the schools in many areas adopting this curriculum and the same bland, "let's not offend the religious fundamentalists" brand of textbooks and when that happens I fear for the level of science awareness.
Are you talking about MS SMS or Shared Medical Systems software?
Oh, wait. Never mind. Both software packages suck like a tornado.
Did anyone else notice that nearly every paragraph included a caveat from Burst:
This was nothing more than a couple of web pages full of weasel words.
When Linux finally does take over a larger market share, ol' Jesse will be able to say:
If it doesn't, ol' Jesse will still be able to say:
I wish his boss would wake up and tell Jesse:
And for a laugh, take a look at the "talkbacks". A sampling of the replies that were negative toward the rise of Linux seemed to all come from people who were either MCSEs or working toward that certification. Translation: "I don't want to have to learn something new!" (you should say this aloud with a whiny voice)
Ah, youth!
I can remember having that attitude when I started programming.
BZZZZZZTTT! Wrong!
I have many old floppies with code from those days on them that I would just as soon rewrite from scratch than attempt to figure how they worked. I'm sure some of these old programs might be worth modifying to be useful again or contain some code snippets that could be re-used. But without the comments and accompanying documentation, it just isn't worth the time anymore to have to put on the ``code archeologist's'' hat in order to find the useful stuff.
Go ahead and take that attitude now; you'll come to regret it when you get older. Or, perhaps, when you take that attitude into a job interview.
Having a plan in the form of some written specs is very valuable when embarking on a coding project. I was managing a decent sized project some years ago and we went through the process of a preliminary design followed by a review, a critical design, again, followed by a review, etc. If this sounds too rigid, well, we did it to satisfy the people who were paying the bills (we were contractors to the Army). Since our system had to interact with flight critical equipment, we pretty much had to do it their way. We actually got off pretty easy. If we had had to adopt their methodologies in toto we would have had to hire a boatload of subcontractors.
For many of the people on the team, it was the first time they'd had to sit down and actually plan what they were going to do before they started doing it. It was painful for these folks but, you know what, the hardware and software that we produced worked the first time. When additional software modules were introduced for testing... they worked the first time. I suppose that much of that might have happened without the highly structured design work that was done up front. But I don't think that the coding and testing phases would have gone anywhere nearly as smoothly if we hadn't done it this way. We would have spent way too much time rewriting code that didn't allow additional modules to be added later. Our data structures would have been modified too many times and adding each additional function would have been a separate nightmare.
Maybe I was lucky and had great programmers (I'd like to think that I was able to put together a crack team.)
As another example, take a look at the way the basic building blocks of the internet came to be. I don't think the IETF documents for the various protocols were written after the fact.
An interesting study was done some years ago. I think it was at McGill Univ. Teams of engineering students were assembled to build the same thing. One team built the project and wrote the documentation and the user manual afterward; the other team did all the documentation first. The team that did the documentation beforehand produced a product that worked better and more closely met the design goals. Not proof that this is the best way; just another example showing that it seems to work better when you do it that way.
Let's face it, programmers hate doing documentation. Just look at the spotty documentation for some important areas of Linux. The manpages and the info pages are often out of sync (why must this be?). The LDP project needs to be better supported and, dammit, the developers need to be major contributors. Maybe they shouldn't write the prose (they're often much, much better at C/C++ than English) but the technical input needs to be there. Pass the documentation back and forth a couple of times until it's correct and is readable by people of different levels of UNIX experience. This is the stuff that the new users are told to read in order to get Linux to work. If the documentation sucks, then that's the impression they're going to have of Linux as a whole. If Linux works but they can't figure out how then it's all going to look like Black Magic and its adoption will slow or decline. Do any developers out there look for assistance from the user community to help write the documentation, manpages, etc.
I realize that this got slightly off the original topic but I feel that the two go hand-in-hand. Now that I got that off my chest...
The fact that different manufacturers can't decide on how to describe their disk capacity indicates the need for the IEEE proposal.
I used to laugh when a certain company used to have ads listing their disk drives capacities as ``NNN mB''. (I guess only an engineer would see the humor... Guess it comes from turning to the old ``Technically Speaking'' column in IEEE Spectrum and reading it before any other articles.)
That's Washington for yah! Does anyone else want to vomit like I do when they have to listen to these clowns in D.C. get behind the nearest podium full of microphones to announce how whatever it was that they've done whether it be passing some ridiculous statute or spending bill or signing another executive order was to protect the children?
This is about as repulsive as the anti-gun, anti-nuke, anti-internet-porn, anti-whatever whackos who have to drag their kids along with them to the marches and protests and have them waering or carrying signs. It sure doesn't produce any sympathy for their cause with me. Instead it just tells me that they're desperate and te way to garner support for their ``cause'' is getting the press to film those sweet, little big-eyed kids who are against nuclear weapons, oil spills, etc., gauls me no end.
Talk about your child exploitation...
I'd be tempted to move onto to something else when I thought that Linux had gotten stagnant and that it had reached a point where there was nothing new that could be done with it.
Do I see that happening? No! Not for the foreseeable future. Now if some absolutely fantastic system comes out of a research lab that totally blows away anything and everything that's currently in use and I/we just have to get in on it... well, then maybe, especially if that breakthrough is in the area of software. On the other hand, if that breakthrough happens to be in hardware, I suspect that someone will have ported Linux over to it within a matter of weeks and we won't have to leave Linux behind.
\begin{offtopic}
Speaking of porting... What's the current status of some of the porting projects like VAX Linux? Most of the home pages for these projects don't seem to have been updated for an awfully long time. All the latest ports seem to be geared toward personal computers. There's a ton (or ten) of perfectly good VAX hardware out there that would probably be better of running Linux than winding up in the town dump. Did the people on these projects decide that the hardware was just getting too old?
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[1] - It's amazing what passes for innovation nowadays.
[2] - I'm not sure what more amazing: a) that they thought this was an idea worth patenting or b.) that the U.S. Patent Office will probably award the patent!
[3] - How many bozos at this price will it take for this group of innovators to become millionaires? Sadly, it'll this'll probably happen too.
Seeing as how the Andromeda galaxy (our closest neighboring galaxy if you don't count the Magellanic Clouds) is 2e+06 lights away, I wouln't ask for a return receipt for that e-mail if I were you.
As an aside, when I used Alta Vista to find info on Andromeda galaxy, the page contained a link labeled "The RealNames link takes you directly to Andromeda Galaxy.". Now those guys at RealNames are doing some real innovation!