For a GUI to be learnable by the complete novice, a graphical (not text-based) help system is needed. We often take for granted such metaphors as "icons" "folders" and "windows" but for someone who knows nothing at all about computers and GUI's these are nothing but church items, office supplies and architechtural features. Because of this it is almost impossible to actually write about the interface in terms that people will understand; you will have to take for granted that the user is already familiar with a vast inventory of non-obvious technichal terms. Thus for the complete novice a text-based help system like that of Windows and the various Linux GUI's is less adequate.
This is one area where the MacOS excels. If you want to find out how to add an iconic menu item to the "Launcher" (a tool that lets you start programs with one click ), the help system will show you step by step, drawing big red circles around where you are supposed to click, and moving files around in the file manager to show you what "drag-click," "window" and "icon" mean.
Such a system is too much for your typical Slashdot hacker - by the time you've gotten here you already know the jargon and may find such a system patronizing. But for the intelligent novice this is extremely useful. It gives users the freedom to experiment: if they trust that the help system is really helpful they will be more likely to take risks while learning to use the machine, and will consequently learn more and have a richer experience.
Cool. Now maybe I can run something other than a Redhat knock-off on my PPC machines. (yeah, yeah, I know... SuSE... but I don't want rpm) I have 3 oldish Macs on my network running Linux and have been dreaming about making a Slackware-like distro for them, but have been just too lazy to figure out how to do it. Anyone want to help?
This was a nice little article - it's great to see some high-profile recognition for Linux on one of its non-x86 architechtures. I've been using LinuxPPC since the 3.0 release in February 98. These earlier libc5-based versions of LinuxPPC were tough to deal with - amost nothing ever compiled out of the box, XFree86 didn't work, compiling kernels was an adventure and performance was slow. (At least this was my experience). I use Linux on an Intel machine at work and have the "1999Q3" release of LinuxPPC on my home computer, a PowerMacintosh 7600. The two compare favorably. Now glibc based, compiling important Linux apps is almost never a problem with LinuxPPC. For testing and development, it runs Apache 1.3.12 with mod_ssl, PHP4, MySQL 3.23.14, kernel 2.2.14, etc, etc, etc. Suffice it to say that it *can* be used for "serious computing" and is fully up-to-date with the latest kernel and apps. I also find that Linux makes efficient use of its 132 MHz 604 processor, and is plenty fast. Since the change to XFree86, X runs *much* faster on this computer. The only major problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that GNOME is painfully slow. Since I don't use GNOME apps that much, though, this is not a problem for me. If you tried LinuxPPC a while ago and were underwhelemed, give it another crack now. It's improved by leaps and bounds and you probably won't be disappointed unless you simply don't like Linux on any architechture. Mac users who consider themselves "power users" should definitely try it. I still use MacOS on occaison, and in fact still like it quite a bit - I grew up with it. But so many Mac users are stuck in the rut of thinking there's only one way to do things and that theirs is the best. I know because I used to be one of those people! LinuxPPC shows that "there's more than one way to do it" and can help you gain a better understanding of computers, regardless of what OS you choose to use day in and day out.
The reason behind the "no new laws" (or "not a lot of new laws") announcement has more to do with the Internet's enormous influence on the US economy than any respect for privacy. Passing more anti-privacy laws might slow down the nascent economic juggernaut that is the Internet and upset powerful corporations like Time-Warner/AOL. For that reason alone the gov't makes the claim that no new laws are needed.
But... Just wait a few years until the Internet is even more established in the US economy and more people rely on it in their daily lives. Right now, many people in the US are still extremely worried about privacy and because of that do not shop online. The mega-corporations and the gov't hope that announcements like those of today will help bring about a change in this attitude. Once this is accomplished and there is a greater social acceptance of and reliance on the Internet, more and more anti-privacy laws will be proposed - most likely under the hypocritical guise of extending our privacy! The US government serves the interest of the large corporations - that's why Attoney General Reno was flanked by a "top lawyer from AOL" and not a top lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, who probably were not even consulted.
The USA has roughly 4% or the world's population and about 50% of the world's prisoners - the majority of which have been convicted of non-violent crimes. This speaks volumes for our tendency to want to solve every social problem by passing laws and putting people in jail. Unless we don't get complacent, it's only a matter of time before we lose what privacy we have left not only on the internet.
Prediction: within the next 10 years, some US state will arrest, convict and execute someone for violating new Internet laws.
As a former graduate student and "Teaching Assistant" this article came as no surprise to me.
When I began my first year at the University of deleted, I was informed approximately two weeks prior to the start of classes that I would be teaching a section of Freshman English. Never mind the fact that my background was in Linguistics, not English, or that I had not one day of teaching experience. Never mind also that I had previuosly been told that I would have no more than 10 hours per week of work to do in order to receive a funding to continue my studies. Upon complaining to my advisor that this was probably not such a good thing for me or my potential students, I was told that although he agreed with me, there was not other way around the situation because funding was so limited. Since the university was paying my tuition in exchange for this job (and believe me, I was thankful for that), I decided to make the best of it and try to learn from the experience.
Many of my fellow English teachers that year were first timers like me. It would probably frighten many of you to know how truly underprepared many of them were. Some of them were so scared that they cancelled several classes throughout the semester, while others dodged the responsibility by showing lots of films. Some of the teachers were really scared of their students and would give them "academic candy" by letting them read junk articles and novels.
In spite of being pretty nervious for the first few weeks I actually enjoyed the teaching experience. I learned that high school seniors are often getting a much better education than they are typically believed to. Many of my students were bright, witty, and accomplished writers. Not all of them were super-motivated academic acheivers, but you can't expect people to be too excited about Freshman English anyway. I had a few students hand in papers with "sloppy quoting," i.e., plaigerism, but it was probably more out of fear ignorance than a desire to cheat. A few of my students were poorly prepared academically, but that's always the case. The vast majority of the students though, made a good effort throughout the year and to the best of my knowledge did not download papers off the internet. You can tell if someone consistently makes the same good kind of comments or the same mistakes that they are probably writing the papers for themself. As long as students feel that their instructor cares about what he or she does, and treats the students with some respect, they probably will feel confident enough to try out their own writing and not cheat.
Anyway, what really does not surprise me about this article is that teachers would use an electronic grading machine. The reason I am not surprised is because I dropped out of grad school at the end of the year. I enjoyed teaching, but I could not handle the pressure to keep up with my own classes (12 graduate credits), grade 21 6 or 7 page papers every other week, read articles and novels, and prepare interesting lectures twice a week. I felt that I had to cut back on one thing every week: one week I would do a good job with the lectures and leave off the rest; the next week I would focus on my own classes, etc. Something always got left aside and my own "academic performance" suffered.
This is what it comes down to. Universities are not willing to pay for real instructors for young students any more. They have a fundamental disrespect for the students coming out of high school and don't bother to ensure them good quality instruction at the Freshman level because they think it's a waste of time. What they do instead is find poorer graduate students and make them bust their butts teaching in order to pay their way through school, all the while telling them that they are doing them a big favor. In the end, everybody loses out except for the adminsitrators who put the savings in their pockets. (the president at that university earns $100,000+ per year and recently had the university buy him a house). As someone who has seen it from the other side, I know that they are wrong, but as long as it is an issue of money, the situation will continue to deteriorate and eventually Americans will have to travel to another country for education - or better yet - pick up the books and educate themselves.
I think it's only fitting that the Linux box got cracked first, even if it was sort of a cheap way to do it - not because NT is a better designed or more secure OS (yeah, right), but because of all the fire-breathing anti-MS fanatics who think that even in the hands of a newbie administrator Linux servers are more secure than Fort Knox. (I refer any readers back to some of the/. posts when Hotmail was cracked - many people immediately assumed it was an NT problem without knowing any of the details.)
The best aspects of open source movement are its emphasis on choice and community - contests like this make some of the open source folks look like the same kind of supercompetitive, manipulating people they usually bash.
The year-based approach to version numbers seems especially inappropriate for an OS like Linux, where the speed of development is faster than for an OS like Windows. It's not entirely bad for Windows to be released with a year-based name, since it's more user-friendly for the home market and Microsoft doesn't release more than one version per year anyway.
Since the Linux market tends right now to be based on very knowledgable computer users (who at least don't mind names like Linux 2.1.134pl6), and since new versions of Linux distributions can sometimes be released more than 2 or 3 times a year, the name-based approach loses its appeal here. The old scheme is more informative to more people.
But who really cares what it's called anyway? The important thing is to commend the folks at LinuxPPC for what seems like some great work. It's come a long, long way from just two versions back, whatever the heck you want to call it.
Does this bother anyone else? In order to read the article you had to click on 7 links and be exposed to 3 or 4 advertisiements per page. This seems to be a trend on the big news sites. For the folks on a 14.4 in Brazil and Indonesia this pretty much makes some sites inaccessible and adds useless junk to the total bandwidth load of the 'net.
I just ordered Red Hat, Debian and Slackware distros, and it was $8 for the whole thing, not just for one CD. I was surprised, I thought it was $8 a CD too, but it's actually a really good deal!
There is also some data for Africa and central Asia. One particularly nice fact is that in Chad, Niger and Liberia, 100% of all their reported web servers are running Linux.
Of course, there are less than 25 total servers between these three countries, but in the days prior to Linux and Free BSD there probably would have been zero. Who can afford or get access to Windows NT Server in Chad? Microsoft's east Africa support site is littered with information on how to stop "piracy." The closed software model makes poor people interested in computing into criminals.
These data from Africa are evidence of Linux's awesome potential to give developing countries the chance to make their voices and concerns heard. This is exactly what has happened in Chiapas, Mexico, where the lives of Native American activists have been saved because of their ability to send email to concerned people in the rest of Mexico and in foreign countries. These people in turn put pressure on the Mexican government to keep their abuses of human rights in check.
This article utilizes one of the most blatantly false means of argumentation commonly found in the press today, which I call "argumentation by personification," since I don't know if there's an accepted term for it.
This type of argument involves putting up a person as a representative of a concept you dislike, and then ridiculing this person to convince people to share your view. Here's an example:
"...young Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, whose anti-Microsoft pronouncements started to sound like some kind of call for jihad."
What does this have to say about the Linux operating system? Nothing at all, really. It's just a subjective way to say that Linus was strongly criticising Microsoft.
A more insidious way (frequently used by MS) to use this argument tactic is to not openly ridicule your subject, but paint a reasonable picture of them that is however, somehow flawed:
"It's very easy (and pretty accurate as well) to cast Torvalds in the role of a St. George jousting with the dragon of Microsoft... but I need to tell you that sometimes its OK to root for the dragon."
So here we go. Linux Torvalds (whoops... I mean _Linus_) is an arrogant, youthfully ignorant and violent little guy. Therefore, you should not use the Linux operating system, but "root" for an operating system conceded to be inferior and backed by a corporate "dragon."
You find the same nefarious arguments in scandal sheets like Newsweek, which recently published on their cover a spectral, corpse-like photo of the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, next to the words "The face of evil." NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia is often referred to as "bombing Milosevic." As far as I have heard, however, Milosevic's house has not been the target of any bombs.
It's obviously in the interest of the US government and the large corporations to distract people from the fact that most of the people dying as a result the bombing campaign in the Balkans are not war criminals, but ordinary civilians. If the press focused on this fact, there might be a lot more outrage about what is happening there and has happened in places like Iraq (Saddam Hussein), Panama (Manuel Noriega), Japan (Hito) and Germany (Hitler), to name just a few places that were bombed by the US this century and personified by the press in an effort to garner support for the bombings. [1]
Coates should not be believed when he states that
"...[programmers] would have us reinvent the wheel by wasting billions more hours creating applications to take advantage of Linux and make Torvalds' colleagues at Linux software houses like Red Hat Inc. and Caldera Systems Inc. rich..."
because he insinuates that professional organizations like Red Hat "Inc." and Caldera Systems "Inc." are quaint, unprofessional "software houses" that are simultaniously scheming, wheedling corporate entities trying to get rich by using Torvalds. The imagry is unsupported and uninformative.
I don't wish to condemn Coates's article entirely: he does state the true (but obvious) point that Linux lacks the huge number of software titles that have made Windows so successful. That's a really powerful argument, and I for one will not urge anyone to switch to Linux until it has AOL, Seinfeld screensavers and talking paperclips. [2]
[1] I make no judgements here whether any of these bombings were justifiable. The relevant fact is, that in each case, the US press personified the countries as identical to their leaders. [2] Which, of course, is an example of the same tactic I'm criticizing Coates for.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one area where the MacOS excels. If you want to find out how to add an iconic menu item to the "Launcher" (a tool that lets you start programs with one click ), the help system will show you step by step, drawing big red circles around where you are supposed to click, and moving files around in the file manager to show you what "drag-click," "window" and "icon" mean.
Such a system is too much for your typical Slashdot hacker - by the time you've gotten here you already know the jargon and may find such a system patronizing. But for the intelligent novice this is extremely useful. It gives users the freedom to experiment: if they trust that the help system is really helpful they will be more likely to take risks while learning to use the machine, and will consequently learn more and have a richer experience.
Cool. Now maybe I can run something other than a Redhat knock-off on my PPC machines. (yeah, yeah, I know... SuSE... but I don't want rpm) I have 3 oldish Macs on my network running Linux and have been dreaming about making a Slackware-like distro for them, but have been just too lazy to figure out how to do it. Anyone want to help?
in only a half hour. How's that for a Unix advertisment?
This was a nice little article - it's great to see some high-profile recognition for Linux on one of its non-x86 architechtures. I've been using LinuxPPC since the 3.0 release in February 98. These earlier libc5-based versions of LinuxPPC were tough to deal with - amost nothing ever compiled out of the box, XFree86 didn't work, compiling kernels was an adventure and performance was slow. (At least this was my experience). I use Linux on an Intel machine at work and have the "1999Q3" release of LinuxPPC on my home computer, a PowerMacintosh 7600. The two compare favorably. Now glibc based, compiling important Linux apps is almost never a problem with LinuxPPC. For testing and development, it runs Apache 1.3.12 with mod_ssl, PHP4, MySQL 3.23.14, kernel 2.2.14, etc, etc, etc. Suffice it to say that it *can* be used for "serious computing" and is fully up-to-date with the latest kernel and apps. I also find that Linux makes efficient use of its 132 MHz 604 processor, and is plenty fast. Since the change to XFree86, X runs *much* faster on this computer. The only major problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that GNOME is painfully slow. Since I don't use GNOME apps that much, though, this is not a problem for me. If you tried LinuxPPC a while ago and were underwhelemed, give it another crack now. It's improved by leaps and bounds and you probably won't be disappointed unless you simply don't like Linux on any architechture. Mac users who consider themselves "power users" should definitely try it. I still use MacOS on occaison, and in fact still like it quite a bit - I grew up with it. But so many Mac users are stuck in the rut of thinking there's only one way to do things and that theirs is the best. I know because I used to be one of those people! LinuxPPC shows that "there's more than one way to do it" and can help you gain a better understanding of computers, regardless of what OS you choose to use day in and day out.
The reason behind the "no new laws" (or "not a lot of new laws") announcement has more to do with the Internet's enormous influence on the US economy than any respect for privacy. Passing more anti-privacy laws might slow down the nascent economic juggernaut that is the Internet and upset powerful corporations like Time-Warner/AOL. For that reason alone the gov't makes the claim that no new laws are needed.
But...
Just wait a few years until the Internet is even more established in the US economy and more people rely on it in their daily lives. Right now, many people in the US are still extremely worried about privacy and because of that do not shop online. The mega-corporations and the gov't hope that announcements like those of today will help bring about a change in this attitude. Once this is accomplished and there is a greater social acceptance of and reliance on the Internet, more and more anti-privacy laws will be proposed - most likely under the hypocritical guise of extending our privacy! The US government serves the interest of the large corporations - that's why Attoney General Reno was flanked by a "top lawyer from AOL" and not a top lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, who probably were not even consulted.
The USA has roughly 4% or the world's population and about 50% of the world's prisoners - the majority of which have been convicted of non-violent crimes. This speaks volumes for our tendency to want to solve every social problem by passing laws and putting people in jail. Unless we don't get complacent, it's only a matter of time before we lose what privacy we have left not only on the internet.
Prediction: within the next 10 years, some US state will arrest, convict and execute someone for violating new Internet laws.
Great - now I can fry eggs easily while traveling! Just flip the laptop over and apply butter liberally.
As a former graduate student and "Teaching Assistant" this article came as no surprise to me.
When I began my first year at the University of deleted, I was informed approximately two weeks prior to the start of classes that I would be teaching a section of Freshman English. Never mind the fact that my background was in Linguistics, not English, or that I had not one day of teaching experience. Never mind also that I had previuosly been told that I would have no more than 10 hours per week of work to do in order to receive a funding to continue my studies. Upon complaining to my advisor that this was probably not such a good thing for me or my potential students, I was told that although he agreed with me, there was not other way around the situation because funding was so limited. Since the university was paying my tuition in exchange for this job (and believe me, I was thankful for that), I decided to make the best of it and try to learn from the experience.
Many of my fellow English teachers that year were first timers like me. It would probably frighten many of you to know how truly underprepared many of them were. Some of them were so scared that they cancelled several classes throughout the semester, while others dodged the responsibility by showing lots of films. Some of the teachers were really scared of their students and would give them "academic candy" by letting them read junk articles and novels.
In spite of being pretty nervious for the first few weeks I actually enjoyed the teaching experience. I learned that high school seniors are often getting a much better education than they are typically believed to. Many of my students were bright, witty, and accomplished writers. Not all of them were super-motivated academic acheivers, but you can't expect people to be too excited about Freshman English anyway. I had a few students hand in papers with "sloppy quoting," i.e., plaigerism, but it was probably more out of fear ignorance than a desire to cheat. A few of my students were poorly prepared academically, but that's always the case. The vast majority of the students though, made a good effort throughout the year and to the best of my knowledge did not download papers off the internet. You can tell if someone consistently makes the same good kind of comments or the same mistakes that they are probably writing the papers for themself. As long as students feel that their instructor cares about what he or she does, and treats the students with some respect, they probably will feel confident enough to try out their own writing and not cheat.
Anyway, what really does not surprise me about this article is that teachers would use an electronic grading machine. The reason I am not surprised is because I dropped out of grad school at the end of the year. I enjoyed teaching, but I could not handle the pressure to keep up with my own classes (12 graduate credits), grade 21 6 or 7 page papers every other week, read articles and novels, and prepare interesting lectures twice a week. I felt that I had to cut back on one thing every week: one week I would do a good job with the lectures and leave off the rest; the next week I would focus on my own classes, etc. Something always got left aside and my own "academic performance" suffered.
This is what it comes down to. Universities are not willing to pay for real instructors for young students any more. They have a fundamental disrespect for the students coming out of high school and don't bother to ensure them good quality instruction at the Freshman level because they think it's a waste of time. What they do instead is find poorer graduate students and make them bust their butts teaching in order to pay their way through school, all the while telling them that they are doing them a big favor. In the end, everybody loses out except for the adminsitrators who put the savings in their pockets. (the president at that university earns $100,000+ per year and recently had the university buy him a house). As someone who has seen it from the other side, I know that they are wrong, but as long as it is an issue of money, the situation will continue to deteriorate and eventually Americans will have to travel to another country for education - or better yet - pick up the books and educate themselves.
I think it's only fitting that the Linux box got cracked first, even if it was sort of a cheap way to do it - not because NT is a better designed or more secure OS (yeah, right), but because of all the fire-breathing anti-MS fanatics who think that even in the hands of a newbie administrator Linux servers are more secure than Fort Knox. (I refer any readers back to some of the
The best aspects of open source movement are its emphasis on choice and community - contests like this make some of the open source folks look like the same kind of supercompetitive, manipulating people they usually bash.
The year-based approach to version numbers seems especially inappropriate for an OS like Linux, where the speed of development is faster than for an OS like Windows. It's not entirely bad for Windows to be released with a year-based name, since it's more user-friendly for the home market and Microsoft doesn't release more than one version per year anyway.
Since the Linux market tends right now to be based on very knowledgable computer users (who at least don't mind names like Linux 2.1.134pl6), and since new versions of Linux distributions can sometimes be released more than 2 or 3 times a year, the name-based approach loses its appeal here. The old scheme is more informative to more people.
But who really cares what it's called anyway? The important thing is to commend the folks at LinuxPPC for what seems like some great work. It's come a long, long way from just two versions back, whatever the heck you want to call it.
Could you please stop putting all the little plugs for "Everything" on the Slashdot news stories?
Does this bother anyone else? In order to read the article you had to click on 7 links and be exposed to 3 or 4 advertisiements per page. This seems to be a trend on the big news sites. For the folks on a 14.4 in Brazil and Indonesia this pretty much makes some sites inaccessible and adds useless junk to the total bandwidth load of the 'net.
Oh well, there's always Lynx.
I just ordered Red Hat, Debian and Slackware distros, and it was $8 for the whole thing, not just for one CD. I was surprised, I thought it was $8 a CD too, but it's actually a really good deal!
There is also some data for Africa and central Asia. One particularly nice fact is that in Chad, Niger and Liberia, 100% of all their reported web servers are running Linux.
Of course, there are less than 25 total servers between these three countries, but in the days prior to Linux and Free BSD there probably would have been zero. Who can afford or get access to Windows NT Server in Chad? Microsoft's east Africa support site is littered with information on how to stop "piracy." The closed software model makes poor people interested in computing into criminals.
These data from Africa are evidence of Linux's awesome potential to give developing countries the chance to make their voices and concerns heard. This is exactly what has happened in Chiapas, Mexico, where the lives of Native American activists have been saved because of their ability to send email to concerned people in the rest of Mexico and in foreign countries. These people in turn put pressure on the Mexican government to keep their abuses of human rights in check.
This article utilizes one of the most blatantly false means of argumentation commonly found in the press today, which I call "argumentation by personification," since I don't know if there's an accepted term for it.
This type of argument involves putting up a person as a representative of a concept you dislike, and then ridiculing this person to convince people to share your view. Here's an example:
What does this have to say about the Linux operating system? Nothing at all, really. It's just a subjective way to say that Linus was strongly criticising Microsoft.
A more insidious way (frequently used by MS) to use this argument tactic is to not openly ridicule your subject, but paint a reasonable picture of them that is however, somehow flawed:
So here we go. Linux Torvalds (whoops... I mean _Linus_) is an arrogant, youthfully ignorant and violent little guy. Therefore, you should not use the Linux operating system, but "root" for an operating system conceded to be inferior and backed by a corporate "dragon."
You find the same nefarious arguments in scandal sheets like Newsweek, which recently published on their cover a spectral, corpse-like photo of the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, next to the words "The face of evil." NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia is often referred to as "bombing Milosevic." As far as I have heard, however, Milosevic's house has not been the target of any bombs.
It's obviously in the interest of the US government and the large corporations to distract people from the fact that most of the people dying as a result the bombing campaign in the Balkans are not war criminals, but ordinary civilians. If the press focused on this fact, there might be a lot more outrage about what is happening there and has happened in places like Iraq (Saddam Hussein), Panama (Manuel Noriega), Japan (Hito) and Germany (Hitler), to name just a few places that were bombed by the US this century and personified by the press in an effort to garner support for the bombings. [1]
Coates should not be believed when he states that
because he insinuates that professional organizations like Red Hat "Inc." and Caldera Systems "Inc." are quaint, unprofessional "software houses" that are simultaniously scheming, wheedling corporate entities trying to get rich by using Torvalds. The imagry is unsupported and uninformative.I don't wish to condemn Coates's article entirely: he does state the true (but obvious) point that Linux lacks the huge number of software titles that have made Windows so successful. That's a really powerful argument, and I for one will not urge anyone to switch to Linux until it has AOL, Seinfeld screensavers and talking paperclips. [2]
[1] I make no judgements here whether any of these bombings were justifiable. The relevant fact is, that in each case, the US press personified the countries as identical to their leaders.
[2] Which, of course, is an example of the same tactic I'm criticizing Coates for.