Linux has suffered tremendeously due to this disregard of the normal, non-geek user. You know, the kind of person whose VCR flashes "12:00" because the UI on VCRs is total shit and only geeks really bother with it because we are the only ones who consider bugs and technical problems to be a challenge instead of, say, bugs and technical problems.
There's another explanation, as stated in Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming: the interface of Unix systems, whose culture was inherited by Linux, was designed with the philosophy that the user understands his/her own machine better than anyone else and he/she knows what is needed and how to make it possible. This is much more important than being able to "work out of the box". Unfortunately, for most average users this doesn't work. They don't bother to learn it even if it has been made much less challenging thanks to the modern desktop distros.
You know why the fscking Sina is hosting the "petition"? Because there are a whole shit load of nationalism extremist fanboys here in China (many of them are teens), and they are the group that makes a great portion of netizens and bloggers. They are the ones that clicks the ads and pays online and they don't think much. If you want profit, get your network traffic from them. It's relatively easy.
Most of netizens in China don't bother to think twice. They are used to "learn" things from websites like Sina, where there's a muddled-up mixture of blind, pro-govn't news, sports, entertainment, p0rn, and ads. Most of them are not able to read in another language. They believe in what they are told. Those nationalism fanboys is a subset of them.
However, there are also people who have a good habit of reading and thinking. They read news from Western media also, e.g. International Herald Tribune, Spiegel, and Financial Times (just name a few that are not banned by the Great Firewall). They don't easily believe in them either, as they don't completely believe the govn't.
If you can read in Chinese, you would realize there are not only one voice in China. Things are like everythere: most of people don't read or think, while others make a multitude of voices.
Sorry I think I made a mistake. The guys in Guangzhou are complaining, but Beijing users is OK to connect to the site.
In Beijing, it was the HTTPS site of Wikipedia that had been re-banned. I was always using this HTTPS version, in fear of possible man-in-the-middle attack conducted by the communist authority.
If you're a developer and you need a full-blown IDE you may need to run VisualStudio and XP or Vista on the machine you use for development. A full-blown IDE makes me slow. Use EMACS instead, a full-blown free Operating System.
Disclaimer first: I didn't read the book so I may be wrong.
I'm glad to see such a book coming out. Though I don't like Ubuntu (I use a Fedora system), I like the idea of the book.
Some of us have argued that the Ubuntu community serves as a better source of knowlege. But a book is a different thing. I can tell from some of my personal experience.
I code Python programs in my spare time, and I'm trying to integrate Python in my physics studies. When I was learning Python from scratch, the only source I have were the docs (Tutorial and Library Reference) that came with it, the pydoc program, some open-source programs (which were too hard for me to fully analyze then), the mailing list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup. I made a bootstrapping start from them, and I could code something that worked then. Well I still paid the money to buy a printed book (Alex Martelli's "Python in a Nutshell"), since reading a book in my hand is a better, systematic approach to organize my knowledge on the topic, and more fun as well. I can read about almost everyting related to the language's semantics without having to optically parse the BNFs in the documentation.
Now it comes to a book for a popular, desktop-user oriented distro, it's quite different OK? Yes it is, but the learning mechanism is similar. For a typical desktop user, she has some docs from the vendor, the community-based forums (compared with c.l.python), example configuration files and shell scripts (compared with Python example sourcecode, also note that the users may not really understand them), however there's really not many choices for a decent book. I found O'Reilly has some titles like "Hacking Ubuntu Linux" and "Ubuntu for Non-Geeks", but just imagine the poor number of desktop Linux titles in a bookstore, compared to the multitude of Windows-related books (at least it is so here, in China, and most of the Windows books really suck).
Among the desktop users, only a small portion of them have a good understanding of their machines. I guess this proportion must be higher for Linux users, but it is also likely that most of (I mean most of) Ubuntu users are the least technical savvy of Linux-based distros' users, given the design goal of the distribution. On the other hand, they chose to use Linux for a reason. That may be mandatory if it's required for your job, but many of them are at least interested in something that has freedom built in the designers' mind, something that gains its position for its quality instead of marketing and user locking-in. These people are the fraction who has a desire to free their minds and learn, and I hope they can enjoy a book written for them.
BTW I hope there's a book that serves as an "Introduction to Computers" based on a general Unix-like platform. I hope such a book could exist so that an average user can learn more about the basic ideas behind the daily stuff on a computer, e.g. how programs are executed, how networking are possible, how to make best use of filesystems, the mindset of security, as well as information-related skills. Not everybody is computer-literate as/. readers, and they need education like this to satisfying their needs, as well as saving a lot of time dealing with "luser" problems.
We would have no so-called ANSI C. MSFT's "Open Taxpayer's Compatible C Library" would have become ANSI standard, as well as a subset of some ISO standard. It would come in the form of some Windowns PE binary.dll or.lib files, which, according to the spec, is Windows 95 compatible. <windows.h>, which would be part of the standard headers, had been written in an encrypted binary format that only MS Visual C++ preprocessor could read. Linux and gcc would have died since they fail to link with the MS C, which is used in all bussiness apps, schools, CS department of universities. All copies of K&R would have been burned.
The entire history before the rise of M$ has been re-written and approved as an ISO standard. Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Jonny von Neumann would have not existed. William "The Borg" Gates is the founder of Computer Science. Slashdot is running C# since there's no Perl. Perl has not ever existed.
As for me, I would be quietly sitting in front of my node in a computer lab, hacking my.emacs file in my idle time, as usual.
I fail to see anything innovative in Blackboard's product. See my journal entry. The bogus web app I mentioned was Blackboard's. I'm not sure but it's quite likely they still have patent rights for their crapware here in China.
Or try Opera's "Accessibility Layout" stylesheet. It turns off image display and turn the page into a mild green color. Opera can disable images without changing the CSS too.
I'm sorry, but Olympic Games are going to be held in August, and I suppose that is during the summer holiday in almost all of the universities in China, I suppose? Do you stay in school during holidays? Hard-working..
Here in my college, many of the students stay at the campus even if it's the summer holiday. Some of them just can't afford the ticket home. We use to have choices, and now they say 'Go home. This place is not for you.' Not everyone can happily accept this.
I am from Beijing and I really wish the game could be canceled.
In Soviet China, the games play you. Yes it's true. I live in my college (a public one, funded by the govn't) where more than 80% of the students are from other places outside Beijing, me included. We will be forced to leave our campus before the Olympic games open, because the college's gym shall be used by the athelets as a place of training (some say they are the USA swimming team). The college has decided so, but offers no single bit of solution for our accomodation during that period. I guess most of us may have to go home --- for quite a few of us this means a long journey across the country, at a considerable cost. For those who has a job here this would mean further loss. I feel I'm being treated as an undesirable, troublesome one who is best kept clear from the city in which I have been living for three years. We are not free to travel or stay as we wish within our own country, or even within our own city.
Thanks to the Olympic games China is drawing increasingly more attentions of the world. I hope that, as a result of the pressure from both within and outside, the govn't would take some measures for us. This is hardly likely, though.
Now something on topic. Removing the Olympics from the IOC? Not likely. Canceling the games? The IOC members are very experienced in politics, and politics has nothing to do with human rights. They can't be ignorant to the massacre taking place in China, but that has nothing to do with their business. They have a perfect alibis: the IOC is not an organization for settling political affairs. We do our own business.
Recently, the Olympic firetorch is going on its tour around the world, including Lhasa, Tibet. I can hardly imagine this.
And a tip for some of you who may want to travel to China for watching the Games: you have to be prepared for the Internet experience in China which is far from yours in your home. Want to know more about a game? There's no Wikipedia. Want home news? A lot of media websites banned. Want watch video from YouTube? No way. Want to read your emails? If you've done many "undesirable " searches on Google you may have trouble accessing your gmail account, as some of my friends have noted. Slashdot? I can only hope the best. It seems that they havnt been keeping an eye on slashdot now. I guess most of the decision makers have no idea of what Slashdot is like...
Agree with parent post. OO.o spreadsheet is good for visualizing the data in a WYSIWYG manner. I think (I may be wrong) a spreadsheet app.'s job is to tabulate first, and all the calculation/display stuff go to the second. This is analogous to that within a Makefile it is the rules that's the most important --- macros, functions and bell & wistles the second.
If you want good statistics experience you have R. If you want control over the details of the calculation and algorithm you have plain old C to crunch the floating point numbers. If you want high-quality diagrams to be inserted into LaTeX you can try matplotlib with the PDF backend (that requires Python, and Python modules such as NumPy are also doing pretty well in numerical jobs). I don't think any spreadsheet could win big outside its intended area.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another explanation, as stated in Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming: the interface of Unix systems, whose culture was inherited by Linux, was designed with the philosophy that the user understands his/her own machine better than anyone else and he/she knows what is needed and how to make it possible. This is much more important than being able to "work out of the box". Unfortunately, for most average users this doesn't work. They don't bother to learn it even if it has been made much less challenging thanks to the modern desktop distros.
I've read a similar article on theregister.com: Web infection attacks more than 100,000 pages. There are also some interesting discussions over there.
This is a SQL injection, which is not specific to IIS. Any server-side program that fails to validate the input is subjected to this kind of exploit.
Use a password string that is long enough to crash the keyl0ggers.
I'm terribly sorry. I was browsing at +1 and failed to follow the parenting threads, and was wondering why you are getting this to post...
Don't click that. It may crash your browser.
You know why the fscking Sina is hosting the "petition"? Because there are a whole shit load of nationalism extremist fanboys here in China (many of them are teens), and they are the group that makes a great portion of netizens and bloggers. They are the ones that clicks the ads and pays online and they don't think much. If you want profit, get your network traffic from them. It's relatively easy.
Most of netizens in China don't bother to think twice. They are used to "learn" things from websites like Sina, where there's a muddled-up mixture of blind, pro-govn't news, sports, entertainment, p0rn, and ads. Most of them are not able to read in another language. They believe in what they are told. Those nationalism fanboys is a subset of them.
However, there are also people who have a good habit of reading and thinking. They read news from Western media also, e.g. International Herald Tribune, Spiegel, and Financial Times (just name a few that are not banned by the Great Firewall). They don't easily believe in them either, as they don't completely believe the govn't.
If you can read in Chinese, you would realize there are not only one voice in China. Things are like everythere: most of people don't read or think, while others make a multitude of voices.
For different working environment, e.g. with different "general background" color/brightness, you may need different color combination.
Well, nothing could prevent the eyes' fatigue if you keep on looking at the screen too long.
Sorry I think I made a mistake. The guys in Guangzhou are complaining, but Beijing users is OK to connect to the site.
In Beijing, it was the HTTPS site of Wikipedia that had been re-banned. I was always using this HTTPS version, in fear of possible man-in-the-middle attack conducted by the communist authority.
However, this is still a setback.
It is banned again. I'm in Bejing, and some people in Guangzhou confirmed it, too.
I have an earlier Firehost posting telling the story of the unbanning. Unfortunately, we have to fsck The Firewall again.
Since MS is going to break compatibility, the WINE team would have a lot of headache.
Disclaimer first: I didn't read the book so I may be wrong.
I'm glad to see such a book coming out. Though I don't like Ubuntu (I use a Fedora system), I like the idea of the book.
Some of us have argued that the Ubuntu community serves as a better source of knowlege. But a book is a different thing. I can tell from some of my personal experience.
I code Python programs in my spare time, and I'm trying to integrate Python in my physics studies. When I was learning Python from scratch, the only source I have were the docs (Tutorial and Library Reference) that came with it, the pydoc program, some open-source programs (which were too hard for me to fully analyze then), the mailing list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup. I made a bootstrapping start from them, and I could code something that worked then. Well I still paid the money to buy a printed book (Alex Martelli's "Python in a Nutshell"), since reading a book in my hand is a better, systematic approach to organize my knowledge on the topic, and more fun as well. I can read about almost everyting related to the language's semantics without having to optically parse the BNFs in the documentation.
Now it comes to a book for a popular, desktop-user oriented distro, it's quite different OK? Yes it is, but the learning mechanism is similar. For a typical desktop user, she has some docs from the vendor, the community-based forums (compared with c.l.python), example configuration files and shell scripts (compared with Python example sourcecode, also note that the users may not really understand them), however there's really not many choices for a decent book. I found O'Reilly has some titles like "Hacking Ubuntu Linux" and "Ubuntu for Non-Geeks", but just imagine the poor number of desktop Linux titles in a bookstore, compared to the multitude of Windows-related books (at least it is so here, in China, and most of the Windows books really suck).
Among the desktop users, only a small portion of them have a good understanding of their machines. I guess this proportion must be higher for Linux users, but it is also likely that most of (I mean most of) Ubuntu users are the least technical savvy of Linux-based distros' users, given the design goal of the distribution. On the other hand, they chose to use Linux for a reason. That may be mandatory if it's required for your job, but many of them are at least interested in something that has freedom built in the designers' mind, something that gains its position for its quality instead of marketing and user locking-in. These people are the fraction who has a desire to free their minds and learn, and I hope they can enjoy a book written for them.
BTW I hope there's a book that serves as an "Introduction to Computers" based on a general Unix-like platform. I hope such a book could exist so that an average user can learn more about the basic ideas behind the daily stuff on a computer, e.g. how programs are executed, how networking are possible, how to make best use of filesystems, the mindset of security, as well as information-related skills. Not everybody is computer-literate as /. readers, and they need education like this to satisfying their needs, as well as saving a lot of time dealing with "luser" problems.
In my college, everybody seems to be choosing the software and hardware with the highest bogosity.
We would have no so-called ANSI C. MSFT's "Open Taxpayer's Compatible C Library" would have become ANSI standard, as well as a subset of some ISO standard. It would come in the form of some Windowns PE binary .dll or .lib files, which, according to the spec, is Windows 95 compatible. <windows.h>, which would be part of the standard headers, had been written in an encrypted binary format that only MS Visual C++ preprocessor could read. Linux and gcc would have died since they fail to link with the MS C, which is used in all bussiness apps, schools, CS department of universities. All copies of K&R would have been burned.
The entire history before the rise of M$ has been re-written and approved as an ISO standard. Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Jonny von Neumann would have not existed. William "The Borg" Gates is the founder of Computer Science. Slashdot is running C# since there's no Perl. Perl has not ever existed.
As for me, I would be quietly sitting in front of my node in a computer lab, hacking my .emacs file in my idle time, as usual.
> "Adobe also released an alpha of Flex Builder for Linux Monday."
Is GNU gonna be sued because of the name "flex"?
Ray tracing to debut in Direct X11
Python maybe? It's quite close to your spec I think.
I fail to see anything innovative in Blackboard's product. See my journal entry. The bogus web app I mentioned was Blackboard's. I'm not sure but it's quite likely they still have patent rights for their crapware here in China.
Or try Opera's "Accessibility Layout" stylesheet. It turns off image display and turn the page into a mild green color. Opera can disable images without changing the CSS too.
And there is Lynx...
and remember that "use-friendly" == "programmer-hostile"
are they going to Patent this?
Here in my college, many of the students stay at the campus even if it's the summer holiday. Some of them just can't afford the ticket home. We use to have choices, and now they say 'Go home. This place is not for you.' Not everyone can happily accept this.
I am from Beijing and I really wish the game could be canceled.
In Soviet China, the games play you. Yes it's true. I live in my college (a public one, funded by the govn't) where more than 80% of the students are from other places outside Beijing, me included. We will be forced to leave our campus before the Olympic games open, because the college's gym shall be used by the athelets as a place of training (some say they are the USA swimming team). The college has decided so, but offers no single bit of solution for our accomodation during that period. I guess most of us may have to go home --- for quite a few of us this means a long journey across the country, at a considerable cost. For those who has a job here this would mean further loss. I feel I'm being treated as an undesirable, troublesome one who is best kept clear from the city in which I have been living for three years. We are not free to travel or stay as we wish within our own country, or even within our own city.
Thanks to the Olympic games China is drawing increasingly more attentions of the world. I hope that, as a result of the pressure from both within and outside, the govn't would take some measures for us. This is hardly likely, though.
Now something on topic. Removing the Olympics from the IOC? Not likely. Canceling the games? The IOC members are very experienced in politics, and politics has nothing to do with human rights. They can't be ignorant to the massacre taking place in China, but that has nothing to do with their business. They have a perfect alibis: the IOC is not an organization for settling political affairs. We do our own business.
Recently, the Olympic firetorch is going on its tour around the world, including Lhasa, Tibet. I can hardly imagine this.
And a tip for some of you who may want to travel to China for watching the Games: you have to be prepared for the Internet experience in China which is far from yours in your home. Want to know more about a game? There's no Wikipedia. Want home news? A lot of media websites banned. Want watch video from YouTube? No way. Want to read your emails? If you've done many "undesirable " searches on Google you may have trouble accessing your gmail account, as some of my friends have noted. Slashdot? I can only hope the best. It seems that they havnt been keeping an eye on slashdot now. I guess most of the decision makers have no idea of what Slashdot is like...
In Beijing, many of the TOR nodes are operated by the govn't.
Agree with parent post. OO.o spreadsheet is good for visualizing the data in a WYSIWYG manner. I think (I may be wrong) a spreadsheet app.'s job is to tabulate first, and all the calculation/display stuff go to the second. This is analogous to that within a Makefile it is the rules that's the most important --- macros, functions and bell & wistles the second.
If you want good statistics experience you have R. If you want control over the details of the calculation and algorithm you have plain old C to crunch the floating point numbers. If you want high-quality diagrams to be inserted into LaTeX you can try matplotlib with the PDF backend (that requires Python, and Python modules such as NumPy are also doing pretty well in numerical jobs). I don't think any spreadsheet could win big outside its intended area.