There is a large amount of non-working code produced these days. Probably 50%(just a guess based on personal experience) of sites written in dreamweaver or frontpage have some sort of invalid or defective code.
I'll go out on a limb here and say 20% of Peoplecode is defective/buggy. Probably a higher percentage with.net. The fact that it runs(barely) doesn't make it good. The fact that nobody has buffer-overflowed it(yet) does not make it good.
I'm pretty sure a large amount of programmers in Asia just copy/paste code from the internet, run a quick test to see if it works, and then rebrand it as their own original code. Nothing wrong with reuse, but to say they produce working code may be a misnomer in the majority of cases.
btw thanks for modding me down as a troll just because I my comment disagrees with yours. MOD TROLL
Here's what will happen with open borders: every con job on the planet will come to the US, set up shop, and plunder as much as they can. Black market shops will pop up overnight, selling knock-offs, and then be gone the next day.
Americans will be left with shoddy goods, no more warranty validity, no jobs, etc. After these shops leave, they'll leave behind a bunch of refuse to be cleaned up(or not). It's kind of like a flea-market where nobody cleans up.
Police will be busy chasing down criminals, crime will rise, and Americans will have all their good stuff stolen or vandalized.
After everybody's poor and miserable, they'll all go to Europe in search of a better life...
How about just declaring companies like Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, et al as foreign companies? After all, 90% of their workforce is foreign, their offices are all in India, etc. Hey why not make them abide by the truth in advertising laws? Maybe Vista should have "Made in India" on it so people can start to associate "Made in India" with all the pieces of crap that come from there. Norton Go-back anyone? Symantec internet worm protection? lol
Openoffice was created by Sun... A for-profit company. They sued and won against Microsoft for anti-trust actions. You paint a rosy picture but the truth is that you now believe your own lies and are regurgitating something you'd hear at a Microsoft convention.
Call it what you want, but the people who use the system for good purposes are the exception. As soon as these douchebags from India get their green-cards, they set up a sweat-shop in the US and sell H1-B visas to people in India. I don't know what world you live in but it sounds really shiny and happy.
Well you scabs can have the call-center jobs all day long. It doesn't take any skill to do data entry and read from a script.
Same thing for.net, VB, et al. Anybody can copy/paste script code and make a few things work. How about programming a scientific instrument? A car computer? An online banking system? An air-traffic control tower?
Do you really think you can compete with Americans for these jobs with your fake credentials you bought on the street-corner or your wannabe-degree where you can resit the exam 8 times until you pass or else bribe the teacher?
You can't get the same(or better) education in India/China/Vietnam/Malaysia. Maybe in Singapore/Japan/Taiwan, but guess what? They cost as much as the US!!
I recently compared a US Bachelor's degree to an Asian equivalency and found that a BS from a State Uni is the same as a PhD in Asia but no thesis is required for the BS(except in the case of honors). How you like them apples? BTW I squeezed by for under $16k in the US but I paid some tuition as I went, got loans, grants etc. From what I understand tuition has risen 20-50% since I went to school back in 2005.
I'm a Linux programmer from the US. I don't do programming anymore because the pay is crap, hours suck, no job security, and whimsical companies.
The truth is, I make more now teaching English than as a programmer with 13 years in IT. Can you guess why? Because I suck at programming? Nope. Because I don't have experience? Nope. Because there are no jobs available? Nope. It's because any company can go get an H1-B worker who will work for beans, overtime without pay, etc. Of course, many of those companies call me to come in and fix the screw-ups made by their cheap labourers but I just tell them "too bad, I no longer work for corporations like that". It's like I'm on strike... As are a number of my friends who have gone on to other occupations as a direct result of the H1-B visa scam.
It's not competition when the foreign workers and companies have an unfair advantage. Aren't they tax-exempt for their first year? How much do they pay for their fake degrees? Fake experience?
In Thailand we get one week to get out of the country. Just go to Mexico and get a tourist visa, ya scab. Or get an extension, or find a new job... There are only 7 days in a week, btw.
Why do you fly to America and work for these companies then if it's so bad? If they lied about the working conditions and pay, you have every right to sue them in small claims court. It costs about $25 to file and a day off work for the hearing...
Because your employer runs microsoft and has never heard of a server... Plus the network keeps going down due to cheap hardware overloaded by hacked windows machines? I have to run all my own servers off my laptop and frequently have to resolve ip conflicts because retards put in just any ole IP in their computer.Not to mention completely incompetent computer staff.
Imagine working in IT for 13 years, spending all your free time learning programming, Databases, OSes, hardware, protocols, etc. and then one day you have to sit next to a "Dot Net programmer" from India who went to a tech school for 6 months and doesn't know what a debugger is or how/where to read a server log message. Then they stare at you, amazed at your skills and bewildered by your abilities to install a CRM server, a Cisco firewall, a VPN, a corporate LAN, etc.
So you look over at them and say "You're a programmer? How much do you make?"
Answer: "Yes, $6/hr"
"And who do you work for?"
Answer: "I work for a recruiting company run by Indians with operations offshore and small offices throughout the US. We have contracts with governments, telecom companies, and several large corporations. We are also a Microsoft Gold Partner."
Q: "You mean like Qwest, Comcast, the city of Denver, etc?"
A: "Yes, how did you know?"
"My friends were laid off from all those places"
That was when I dropped my career and started over in a completely different field. Now I make more money, work less hours, have 8 weeks paid holiday, and am in high demand throughout the world.
I suggest everyone else do the same and let the world have their "made in India" windows Vista and.net apps. Just think of computers as a hobby, join the open source movement, and laugh at these companies as they go down the tubes.
Ironically, not a week goes by that I don't get an email from a recruiter... even though I haven't posted my resume in over 2 years.
There really is a shortage of skilled IT workers because we've all gotten out of the market because we're tired of being treated like crap and changing jobs every 3 months when our incompetent CTO has a brain-fart and decides to install Siebel, MS CRM, Oracle, Peoplesoft, or some other piece of crap from India that costs more than 10 US programmers for 10 years.
"Thumbs up their asses... Thumbs up their asses..."
Shit, I even did a spell as a labourer and made more than programmers. How you like them apples?
Liquid Nitrogen is very cheap. We got it for free, minus the electricity to run the compressor. I'm glad this technology has finally reached the market.
The high-temperature superconducting material can be a little pricey but it's probably the same as high-grade copper. Besides, you only need a small cross-section compared to copper.
I think this will be a big deal once power companies find out about it and do the math.
In Asia, plagiarism is common. It is a HUGE problem. I bet most University graduates in Asia plagiarized their thesis and other work. It's sooo obvious, just look at their publications and read their books. It's like they just took someone else's book and shuffled the chapters, changing a few words here and there. They submit it, it passes the automated plagiarism detector, and poof! they're a goddam genius!!! PhD! Woo!
Then you ask them a simple question that's in their field and they have no clue. But you said in your thesis... Or What was your thesis about?
From what I gather, many of these students go to US universities, get their degrees there and come back to Asia and make top dollar. The universities just turn a blind eye and take as much money as possible. It's sad but true.
As a math teacher in high school, I catch cheaters almost every test. Almost all of my students copy homework and hand in identical assignments. This is ingrained in them from previous teachers. It's rampant.
I do face-to-face quizzes and see 5 kids with 90% and 30 with 5-40%. I finally switched to electronic grading/testing with randomized question order and randomized answer order. It saves me a lot of hassle and identifies the cheaters rapidly.
I don't give homework anymore. It's all done in class and closely monitored. Many students hate me but the bright ones finish early and have free time while I focus on the rest.
I can't imagine this working at a university with classes of 100+ students. I remember 10 Saudis got expelled(almost) at my university when they got caught cheating. I guess they just took their money elsewhere and the professor was back-shelved. By the time I finished my Physics degree, there were only 5 people remaining. I had people try to copy my work and ride my coat-tails but I just told them I didn't know the answers so they went elsewhere.
In the end, the bright kids went to grad school, the cheaters went into the private sector, and the minorities and women all got free rides whether they cheated or not or were bright or not.
I also remember being the authority on computers for all the IT students. "What's extreme programming?", "What's a cluster for?", "Can I run Linux on Windows?" "What's that command to see the file permissions in OSX?" hehe
As for doing extra work, it's up to the student to ask the professor what's an acceptable level of work. I took a lot of "C"'s unnecessarily because I killed myself trying to learn a subject I like, rather than focusing on my grades. Now I'm considered an "average" person even though I got a B+ in Quantum Mechanics II. Go figure...
I was planning to GRE into grad school but they switched to a subjective essay grading methodology which means you have to know which position is popular with the graders on a wide range of subjects. Since I'm a dissident, I would score low.
So... the end result is a Math teacher rather than a Fusion researcher and the people doing the fusion research haven't found anyone to copy lately so there haven't been any significant breakthroughs. Oh wait! They found ice on Mars! Whoopee! Oil and gas, oil and gas...
Sorry LANL and DARPA, I hope you enjoy your minorities and women.:)
I agree the American dream has become a nightmare. I finally gave up during the housing bubble and moved to Asia. After losing job after job to India and the Philipines, I'd never be able to afford a house in the US. Add to that draconian security, everything overpriced, everything's illegal, the gov't has overthrown the people, etc.
Now I bike to work, live cheaply, and have a relatively decent job with security. I also don't have to sit in a cubicle:) and can go fishing without a license, if I break the law I pay a $5 fine, and I get to spend most of the money I earn how I choose.
APT is a package manager which uses repositories. It's great and I use it, but it requires someone to create a repository with a package for my platform. I think APT is a good start but in the future it would be great if it could grab any software for which the source is available, resolve all dependencies, compile, and install it. Maybe even ask me if I want to make a desktop icon or menu shortcut.
One example game I tried recently is called Cube or Sauerbraten. It wasn't in the repo so I downloaded it. The canned binaries don't run on my amd64 so I had to compile it from source. I did use Synaptic to search for and install the dev libraries needed but it was the usual: try to compile, wait for errors, figure out which library is needed, then try again. I know this is getting less common and things have improved, but I do like having the latest version of software when the developers release it, rather than when it gets added to the repo a few months later. A perfect example is Wine. It's constantly updated and new releases are always coming out. Each release adds significant support for things I like to do. They probably have their own repo I could add but it won't have an amd64 package. So in turn I manually override the repo version, download and compile the latest. I am learning SVN and it's helping to keep things current but it's still a pain to track down all the latest releases when my computer could automagically do it for me(similar to apt but one step higher).
You pose an excellent question and the industry does need an exact measure to gauge one sysadmin against another. Uptime is obviously a good metric. I think you can break it down into Individual and collective uptime as well. If your server is slow, everyone is slow. It may be up but it sucks.
A good sysadmin has 99% uptime on servers and 99% uptime on individuals. A good sysadmin costs $90,000 in the USA. A bad sysadmin has 80% uptime and costs $40,000 in the USA. You can pay less for a sysadmin but that's like asking your neighbor's kid to rebuild the engine on your mercedes because he can do oil changes.
I like to think of my profession, System Administrator, like that of a car mechanic. It helps put it into perspective for non-computer people. You can think of replacing your server like replacing your engine. How much is that worth? Who would you trust to do that? Would you take your Merceds to Wal-Mart for an engine rebuild? Equivalently, would you take your server to Best-Buy for an upgrade? Hell NO!! You're going to get the best mechanic you can.
Seriously people, it's time we organize and form a computer workers union. We can set standards so script kiddies from India don't come in and screw up our voting machines.
I want to play a fun game that works. I'd even pay for it. I just want to go look at games, pick one, buy it, and click "install". Right now I play crap-shoots with wine and barely anything works at all. If it does work it takes forever to load and can't read the hard drive or some bs bug.
I think the root of the problem is that there is no standard way to make a game that rocks for Linux and install it. With window$ you just double-click on an exe. With Linux you download a tarball, go to the command line, do a tar zxvf thefile, cd to the directory, type./configure and then wait. Then it spits out an incomprehensible error message 800 lines before the end of running so you have to scroll back to find out that libgcpoop.so is missing. So you search for that and never find it unless you're lucky and figure out that installing mp3lib gives you libgcpoo.so and then you can proceed to the next error.
So maybe we just need a standard library? Possibly a meta-library that programs can reference at install and automatically install the missing libraries? Heck you could even make a games library that has all functionality of previously built libraries, you just need to know which library to instantiate... This gives rise to the need for a wiki for the standard libraries so that someone can start from scratch and learn all the libraries and use them.
Another thing that would make life great for us all would be a standardized CVS or SVN type package manager that allows us to just double-click a file and it installs from SVN the latest stable or dev package and keeps it up to date. Then developers don't even have to worry about packaging for distros, repositories become extinct, and the developer-to-user lifecycle is improved. You know you could even just write a Firefox extension which will take any SVN link, install and keep current that software.
Maybe if you threw a bunch of programmers at this you'd solve umpteen of the other posts you see here. Many people are reporting distro probs, repository probs, updating probs, lack of standardization, etc.
Oh and while I'm dreaming here, let's just scrap the keyboard/mouse and go with full-blown voice recognition so we don't even have to type. We just say whatever and point, maybe use a gyro-mouse or glove but no keyboard. I think this has already been solved with hidden markov models but you need a bunch of programmers to implement it and make all apps work with it. How cool would it be to just ask your computer a question and it tells you a pretty good answer? You know like the star trek computer. I mean come on people, this IS the 21st century and we DO have 64 bit processors with 4GB RAM...
As for all the "let's do this to make Linux more acceptable to mainstream audiences" comments, I say we should do absolutely nothing to make Linux like that. Forget OSX(Oh s3x) and Micro$oft... They are failing because they suck. Linux is succeeding because we do what we want, not what some corporate mainstream media tells us we want. Let's make Linux what we want, not what we think other people want...
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There is a large amount of non-working code produced these days. Probably 50%(just a guess based on personal experience) of sites written in dreamweaver or frontpage have some sort of invalid or defective code. I'll go out on a limb here and say 20% of Peoplecode is defective/buggy. Probably a higher percentage with .net. The fact that it runs(barely) doesn't make it good. The fact that nobody has buffer-overflowed it(yet) does not make it good.
I'm pretty sure a large amount of programmers in Asia just copy/paste code from the internet, run a quick test to see if it works, and then rebrand it as their own original code. Nothing wrong with reuse, but to say they produce working code may be a misnomer in the majority of cases.
btw thanks for modding me down as a troll just because I my comment disagrees with yours. MOD TROLL
Here's what will happen with open borders: every con job on the planet will come to the US, set up shop, and plunder as much as they can. Black market shops will pop up overnight, selling knock-offs, and then be gone the next day.
Americans will be left with shoddy goods, no more warranty validity, no jobs, etc. After these shops leave, they'll leave behind a bunch of refuse to be cleaned up(or not). It's kind of like a flea-market where nobody cleans up.
Police will be busy chasing down criminals, crime will rise, and Americans will have all their good stuff stolen or vandalized.
After everybody's poor and miserable, they'll all go to Europe in search of a better life...
Hence the endless cesspool of fakes buying H1-B visas and running wages down.
How about just declaring companies like Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe, et al as foreign companies? After all, 90% of their workforce is foreign, their offices are all in India, etc. Hey why not make them abide by the truth in advertising laws? Maybe Vista should have "Made in India" on it so people can start to associate "Made in India" with all the pieces of crap that come from there. Norton Go-back anyone? Symantec internet worm protection? lol
Openoffice was created by Sun... A for-profit company. They sued and won against Microsoft for anti-trust actions. You paint a rosy picture but the truth is that you now believe your own lies and are regurgitating something you'd hear at a Microsoft convention.
Well then there are cheap knock-offs. For example: people with bad English.
I'm already on strike. Told Microsoft to piss off the other day... Seems like every day I get recruiters from India... oh nevermind
Call it what you want, but the people who use the system for good purposes are the exception. As soon as these douchebags from India get their green-cards, they set up a sweat-shop in the US and sell H1-B visas to people in India. I don't know what world you live in but it sounds really shiny and happy.
By working code, do you mean they can copy/paste someone else's work and put their name on it? Oh yes I see now...
Well you scabs can have the call-center jobs all day long. It doesn't take any skill to do data entry and read from a script. .net, VB, et al. Anybody can copy/paste script code and make a few things work. How about programming a scientific instrument? A car computer? An online banking system? An air-traffic control tower?
Same thing for
Do you really think you can compete with Americans for these jobs with your fake credentials you bought on the street-corner or your wannabe-degree where you can resit the exam 8 times until you pass or else bribe the teacher?
You can't get the same(or better) education in India/China/Vietnam/Malaysia. Maybe in Singapore/Japan/Taiwan, but guess what? They cost as much as the US!!
I recently compared a US Bachelor's degree to an Asian equivalency and found that a BS from a State Uni is the same as a PhD in Asia but no thesis is required for the BS(except in the case of honors). How you like them apples? BTW I squeezed by for under $16k in the US but I paid some tuition as I went, got loans, grants etc. From what I understand tuition has risen 20-50% since I went to school back in 2005.
I'm a Linux programmer from the US. I don't do programming anymore because the pay is crap, hours suck, no job security, and whimsical companies. The truth is, I make more now teaching English than as a programmer with 13 years in IT. Can you guess why? Because I suck at programming? Nope. Because I don't have experience? Nope. Because there are no jobs available? Nope. It's because any company can go get an H1-B worker who will work for beans, overtime without pay, etc. Of course, many of those companies call me to come in and fix the screw-ups made by their cheap labourers but I just tell them "too bad, I no longer work for corporations like that". It's like I'm on strike... As are a number of my friends who have gone on to other occupations as a direct result of the H1-B visa scam.
It's not competition when the foreign workers and companies have an unfair advantage. Aren't they tax-exempt for their first year? How much do they pay for their fake degrees? Fake experience?
In Thailand we get one week to get out of the country. Just go to Mexico and get a tourist visa, ya scab. Or get an extension, or find a new job... There are only 7 days in a week, btw. Why do you fly to America and work for these companies then if it's so bad? If they lied about the working conditions and pay, you have every right to sue them in small claims court. It costs about $25 to file and a day off work for the hearing...
Because your employer runs microsoft and has never heard of a server... Plus the network keeps going down due to cheap hardware overloaded by hacked windows machines? I have to run all my own servers off my laptop and frequently have to resolve ip conflicts because retards put in just any ole IP in their computer.Not to mention completely incompetent computer staff.
Imagine working in IT for 13 years, spending all your free time learning programming, Databases, OSes, hardware, protocols, etc. and then one day you have to sit next to a "Dot Net programmer" from India who went to a tech school for 6 months and doesn't know what a debugger is or how/where to read a server log message. Then they stare at you, amazed at your skills and bewildered by your abilities to install a CRM server, a Cisco firewall, a VPN, a corporate LAN, etc. So you look over at them and say "You're a programmer? How much do you make?" Answer: "Yes, $6/hr" "And who do you work for?" Answer: "I work for a recruiting company run by Indians with operations offshore and small offices throughout the US. We have contracts with governments, telecom companies, and several large corporations. We are also a Microsoft Gold Partner." Q: "You mean like Qwest, Comcast, the city of Denver, etc?" A: "Yes, how did you know?" "My friends were laid off from all those places" That was when I dropped my career and started over in a completely different field. Now I make more money, work less hours, have 8 weeks paid holiday, and am in high demand throughout the world. I suggest everyone else do the same and let the world have their "made in India" windows Vista and .net apps. Just think of computers as a hobby, join the open source movement, and laugh at these companies as they go down the tubes.
Ironically, not a week goes by that I don't get an email from a recruiter... even though I haven't posted my resume in over 2 years.
There really is a shortage of skilled IT workers because we've all gotten out of the market because we're tired of being treated like crap and changing jobs every 3 months when our incompetent CTO has a brain-fart and decides to install Siebel, MS CRM, Oracle, Peoplesoft, or some other piece of crap from India that costs more than 10 US programmers for 10 years.
"Thumbs up their asses... Thumbs up their asses..."
Shit, I even did a spell as a labourer and made more than programmers. How you like them apples?
Liquid Nitrogen is very cheap. We got it for free, minus the electricity to run the compressor. I'm glad this technology has finally reached the market. The high-temperature superconducting material can be a little pricey but it's probably the same as high-grade copper. Besides, you only need a small cross-section compared to copper. I think this will be a big deal once power companies find out about it and do the math.
In Asia, plagiarism is common. It is a HUGE problem. I bet most University graduates in Asia plagiarized their thesis and other work. It's sooo obvious, just look at their publications and read their books. It's like they just took someone else's book and shuffled the chapters, changing a few words here and there. They submit it, it passes the automated plagiarism detector, and poof! they're a goddam genius!!! PhD! Woo!
Then you ask them a simple question that's in their field and they have no clue. But you said in your thesis... Or What was your thesis about?
From what I gather, many of these students go to US universities, get their degrees there and come back to Asia and make top dollar. The universities just turn a blind eye and take as much money as possible. It's sad but true.
As a math teacher in high school, I catch cheaters almost every test. Almost all of my students copy homework and hand in identical assignments. This is ingrained in them from previous teachers. It's rampant.
:)
I do face-to-face quizzes and see 5 kids with 90% and 30 with 5-40%. I finally switched to electronic grading/testing with randomized question order and randomized answer order. It saves me a lot of hassle and identifies the cheaters rapidly.
I don't give homework anymore. It's all done in class and closely monitored. Many students hate me but the bright ones finish early and have free time while I focus on the rest.
I can't imagine this working at a university with classes of 100+ students. I remember 10 Saudis got expelled(almost) at my university when they got caught cheating. I guess they just took their money elsewhere and the professor was back-shelved. By the time I finished my Physics degree, there were only 5 people remaining. I had people try to copy my work and ride my coat-tails but I just told them I didn't know the answers so they went elsewhere.
In the end, the bright kids went to grad school, the cheaters went into the private sector, and the minorities and women all got free rides whether they cheated or not or were bright or not.
I also remember being the authority on computers for all the IT students. "What's extreme programming?", "What's a cluster for?", "Can I run Linux on Windows?" "What's that command to see the file permissions in OSX?" hehe
As for doing extra work, it's up to the student to ask the professor what's an acceptable level of work. I took a lot of "C"'s unnecessarily because I killed myself trying to learn a subject I like, rather than focusing on my grades. Now I'm considered an "average" person even though I got a B+ in Quantum Mechanics II. Go figure...
I was planning to GRE into grad school but they switched to a subjective essay grading methodology which means you have to know which position is popular with the graders on a wide range of subjects. Since I'm a dissident, I would score low.
So... the end result is a Math teacher rather than a Fusion researcher and the people doing the fusion research haven't found anyone to copy lately so there haven't been any significant breakthroughs. Oh wait! They found ice on Mars! Whoopee! Oil and gas, oil and gas...
Sorry LANL and DARPA, I hope you enjoy your minorities and women.
I agree the American dream has become a nightmare. I finally gave up during the housing bubble and moved to Asia. After losing job after job to India and the Philipines, I'd never be able to afford a house in the US. Add to that draconian security, everything overpriced, everything's illegal, the gov't has overthrown the people, etc. Now I bike to work, live cheaply, and have a relatively decent job with security. I also don't have to sit in a cubicle :) and can go fishing without a license, if I break the law I pay a $5 fine, and I get to spend most of the money I earn how I choose.
APT is a package manager which uses repositories. It's great and I use it, but it requires someone to create a repository with a package for my platform. I think APT is a good start but in the future it would be great if it could grab any software for which the source is available, resolve all dependencies, compile, and install it. Maybe even ask me if I want to make a desktop icon or menu shortcut.
One example game I tried recently is called Cube or Sauerbraten. It wasn't in the repo so I downloaded it. The canned binaries don't run on my amd64 so I had to compile it from source. I did use Synaptic to search for and install the dev libraries needed but it was the usual: try to compile, wait for errors, figure out which library is needed, then try again. I know this is getting less common and things have improved, but I do like having the latest version of software when the developers release it, rather than when it gets added to the repo a few months later. A perfect example is Wine. It's constantly updated and new releases are always coming out. Each release adds significant support for things I like to do. They probably have their own repo I could add but it won't have an amd64 package. So in turn I manually override the repo version, download and compile the latest. I am learning SVN and it's helping to keep things current but it's still a pain to track down all the latest releases when my computer could automagically do it for me(similar to apt but one step higher).
You pose an excellent question and the industry does need an exact measure to gauge one sysadmin against another. Uptime is obviously a good metric. I think you can break it down into Individual and collective uptime as well. If your server is slow, everyone is slow. It may be up but it sucks.
A good sysadmin has 99% uptime on servers and 99% uptime on individuals. A good sysadmin costs $90,000 in the USA. A bad sysadmin has 80% uptime and costs $40,000 in the USA. You can pay less for a sysadmin but that's like asking your neighbor's kid to rebuild the engine on your mercedes because he can do oil changes.
I like to think of my profession, System Administrator, like that of a car mechanic. It helps put it into perspective for non-computer people. You can think of replacing your server like replacing your engine. How much is that worth? Who would you trust to do that? Would you take your Merceds to Wal-Mart for an engine rebuild? Equivalently, would you take your server to Best-Buy for an upgrade? Hell NO!! You're going to get the best mechanic you can.
Seriously people, it's time we organize and form a computer workers union. We can set standards so script kiddies from India don't come in and screw up our voting machines.
I want to play a fun game that works. I'd even pay for it. I just want to go look at games, pick one, buy it, and click "install". Right now I play crap-shoots with wine and barely anything works at all. If it does work it takes forever to load and can't read the hard drive or some bs bug.
./configure and then wait. Then it spits out an incomprehensible error message 800 lines before the end of running so you have to scroll back to find out that libgcpoop.so is missing. So you search for that and never find it unless you're lucky and figure out that installing mp3lib gives you libgcpoo.so and then you can proceed to the next error.
I think the root of the problem is that there is no standard way to make a game that rocks for Linux and install it. With window$ you just double-click on an exe. With Linux you download a tarball, go to the command line, do a tar zxvf thefile, cd to the directory, type
So maybe we just need a standard library? Possibly a meta-library that programs can reference at install and automatically install the missing libraries? Heck you could even make a games library that has all functionality of previously built libraries, you just need to know which library to instantiate... This gives rise to the need for a wiki for the standard libraries so that someone can start from scratch and learn all the libraries and use them.
Another thing that would make life great for us all would be a standardized CVS or SVN type package manager that allows us to just double-click a file and it installs from SVN the latest stable or dev package and keeps it up to date. Then developers don't even have to worry about packaging for distros, repositories become extinct, and the developer-to-user lifecycle is improved. You know you could even just write a Firefox extension which will take any SVN link, install and keep current that software.
Maybe if you threw a bunch of programmers at this you'd solve umpteen of the other posts you see here. Many people are reporting distro probs, repository probs, updating probs, lack of standardization, etc.
Oh and while I'm dreaming here, let's just scrap the keyboard/mouse and go with full-blown voice recognition so we don't even have to type. We just say whatever and point, maybe use a gyro-mouse or glove but no keyboard. I think this has already been solved with hidden markov models but you need a bunch of programmers to implement it and make all apps work with it. How cool would it be to just ask your computer a question and it tells you a pretty good answer? You know like the star trek computer. I mean come on people, this IS the 21st century and we DO have 64 bit processors with 4GB RAM...
As for all the "let's do this to make Linux more acceptable to mainstream audiences" comments, I say we should do absolutely nothing to make Linux like that. Forget OSX(Oh s3x) and Micro$oft... They are failing because they suck. Linux is succeeding because we do what we want, not what some corporate mainstream media tells us we want. Let's make Linux what we want, not what we think other people want...