I don't think they can really standardize - or would want to. I was involved in a project with Foreign Affairs a few years ago where we used MySQL. At that time a big worm - Slammer - hit MS SQL and we watched all the online services go offline one after another because they all had a vulnerable setup. Ours, of course, was fine.
They want to create more FUD. I know a lot of shrill voices here don't like Java (sometimes for good reasons, no language is all things), but the JVM is the alternative to CLR/Mono. Check http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm to see what I mean.
Novell produces Mono, and there is now a window where organizations can consider it "safe" to use - safe from patent and other "IP" discrimination. That window may be enough to distract people from the Java/JVM alternative, and if they manage any kind of dominance they can just close Novell's window or maintain them as their pet, and the market could be sewn up. They can harm Linux, Java, and Free/Open software - their biggest competitors - at the same time.
I barely use Mac apps and have had several that depend on others before they can run. One dependency was Growl, I don't recall the others (which is part of the problem when the system doesn't manage it for you).
You selectively didn't reply to most of my message, which is typical since the previous "Mr. I have to immediately interject cause I love Mac" wasn't noticing I was referring to better finding, installing, and updating of system wide software, but I have noticed that just about every Apple update has requested restarting, including iTunes. My more dedicated Mac friends say to just ignore such requests, which sounds iffy.
Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine that the "check for updates" menu option applies to all software on the system. Now stop dreaming, Apple doesn't want it to happen.:)
Mac doesn't manage dependencies at all. So everything is a monolithic glob, or you have to manually install some other required piece of software.
Mac doesn't manage system wide updates at all. For every app, you have to hope it has a "check for update" option, somewhere. With Linux package managers, it's across the system, for all applications. Mac will never do this, because Apple vs Mac developers is a dysfunctional relationship, Apple wants to make it awkward so they can unfairly compete when they feel like it.
Finally, Mac apps and updates are often lazy, and request the system is restarted. Linux packages rarely do this.
I don't know what your Linux package management experiences are, but I've rarely had any issues installing, updating and removing apps, although granted on systems like Debian they are not the most up to date, which rarely matters over the advantages of everything being managed.
You shouldn't be installing things like Firefox manually. Any decent distribution (Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora, etc) have much better application management than Windows (or the Mac). They handle finding, installing, and updating mainstream apps for you.
If you really want to know where an application is, and are using the shell (command line), use the "which" command.
$ which firefox/usr/bin/firefox
If you want the basics, as another poster said, everything that is yours is in your home directory, which means when switching computers you just copy that directory and you're done. Otherwise, you might want to scan a document on Linux file system layout standards, but for typical desktop uses you probably don't need to.
Well, you're describing a dedicated geek scenario. Ordinary people (what I was talking about) are induced into installing all manner of software, which rarely directly works in their favour. And you're still describing a reality where people have to spend a considerable amount of effort on something that has nothing to do with their main goals. Maybe for them the general purpose operating system, particularly Windows, may have outlived its usefulness.
We know, Linux doesn't support all new hardware well. It can't, without significant vendor cooperation. You have to research what will work well, which does suck.
On the other hand, I had an older tv tuner card, that I couldn't get working under Windows. I tried several fresh installs of Windows, using different drivers for the tuner, and none would work. With Linux, it just worked. I've had this experience with other hardware as well (sound cards, etc). As well, there is the base fact you can scale Linux down to do tasks like a smart router, file server, media system, etc, you don't have this kind of choice with Windows.
A lot of hardware is being abandoned with Vista, and this is being promoted as a feature by MS - Stimulate the economy! Quite irresponsible when most of that hardware would still serve its purpose perfectly well and e-waste is a known major problem.
My mom, who runs Windows, called me because she was having a problem with "Norton Virus." I was going to correct her that it's "Norton Antivirus," then I realized she was right.
I don't run Windows, but everyone I know who does (mostly extended family members) is always asking about issues they're having. Watching the set up and operation of these programs, it's no wonder. The whole thing is a sick joke.
. i know, i know, that's what expose is for, but it's something that i've grown accustomed to in all those years when I was using windows. and, in my opinion it is faster to switch between two (for example) open documents in word using alt-tab than it is switching between two open documents in pages using F10+click
You know about alt-backtick, right?
I dislike exposé too (along with a lot of other things Mac), but alt tab + alt-backtick is a nice combination.
Since it will work as an applet, the Java version is probably the best response to MS embedding their 3d map server in an IE browser using ActiveX (or whatever it's called now). This will enable next gen web pages to have really nice controls, and it will all be open source/free data. That's very exciting.
I think the Java naysayers have out of date opinions, JVMs of the past few years are not much trouble to set up and have very good performance. They may use more memory, but if you have a gig in your system you'll be fine. Just look at all the people using Azureus.
It's interesting to see the community pick up the Windows only version, and it'll probably be nicer than the Java version for the first while, but ultimately the Java version is a very interesting development.
I was referring about the computer clubs, where apparently homebrew computer builders and coders got together and exchanged. I have read an article that talked about their reaction to Gate's commercialization, but I can't find it now. It may not have been called open source, but that culture existed.
Microsoft didn't always suck... From my reading of history, Microsoft, and Bill Gates in particular, distinguished themselves by focusing on proprietary code, rather than the culture of free code that was present at the time. Depending on your POV (imagine if a services, rather than proprietary software culture were dominant, and it were just assumed that your software's capabilities would become part of the common pool), they sucked from the start.
You probably have an established, server class system. I was using a desktop board, which claimed to support up to 8 GB but really doesn't. As more memory becomes more common, this kind of issue should go away.
You are trivializing this. I recently built a PC with 4 GB of RAM, and have been introduced to the world of pain this means in the mainstream PC world. Starting with the fact many boards only have two slots, and 2 MB chips are incredibly expensive, next on to BIOS compatibility issues, then on to operating system compatibility issues. Maybe in a year this will be a non issue, but for now it's painful, and it means so many more PCs are effectively obsoleted by "improvements" that can't even be explained clearly. http://www.chrisjordan.com/
You may be right, I know they had a lot of early problems because they use "livescript" (java applet connected to javascript), but because Firefox has asserted itself and, well, time has passed, I guess it isn't much of an issue now. There was an issue with the census within the past year, however.
I was really talking generally of the internet/web as a vendor neutral space, particularly in the public sphere. For example, the LCBO's original web site was 100% Flash, and you'll sometimes see sites that require Flash for content that could have easily been more standard.
The Government of Canada uses a public key infrastructure system, that only works in some browsers. Famously for the past census, only some people could access it.
Some important sites, such as banks and airlines, don't support other browsers or require plugins as well. It is getting better with the important cross platform critical mass of Firefox, but far from perfect.
Is it a public highway, or something designed only for Ford Explorers(tm)?
This is already done for spam mail with rbl, spamcop, maps, but it's a constant battle and just makes things more complex - imagine if a sincere mom and pop domain ended up on a blacklist - and really doesn't help.
This could get worse as the exploiters get smarter. They are automatically generating realistic web sites based on word associations, which will fool search engines and the public, much like spam content is picking up context.
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
With the money spammers are making, you have to wonder what they are doing behind the scenes to shore up their position. They are completely amoral as long as the money keeps rolling in.
The web could become as useless as email. Soon we'll need a turing test for each letter typed.
Tags are a relatively new phenomenon as people discovered they can tag using tools like del.icio.us. But are tags, labels and directories the same thing? I've heard people say so, but I think ultimately "directories," or hierarchical categories, are most useful.
For example, the same word can mean different things in a different context (river: bank, or institution: bank, or even colour: black, lastname: black), and a larger number of tags is simply unwieldy. Better to have a browser interface. The best of which is combined with a keyword search (which should be combined with a sense-sensitive thesaurus so concepts are not repeated - wordnet has a number of libraries that could be suitable).
I'm working on something like this for a health project, but I'm not going to have the time to complete it in full glory.
In a way, though, the only difference is identifying a "separator" - if there were a common convention for hierarchies, based on some existing concept, like directory paths, xpath expressions, etc, we'd have the best of both worlds. But having normal people use these conventions would need to be part of the conversion. THEN we could have the same system for organizing everything.
Real tie in between desktop and server apps is a killer feature, and collaboration is a very meaningful feature to a lot of people. The average Slashdot hack may not recognize this, but people like Dries (founder of Drupal, a php web "cms") do... http://buytaert.net/sharepoint-2007
We're looking at Jahia ourselves, would you mind sending me an email as I have some questions.
I can't agree with you. I have noticed many companies and projects based in France. For example, eXo, VLC and Nuxeo. In contrast, I rarely see projects based in the UK, etc. It's anecdotal, but there seems to be a lot of entrepreneurship.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think they can really standardize - or would want to. I was involved in a project with Foreign Affairs a few years ago where we used MySQL. At that time a big worm - Slammer - hit MS SQL and we watched all the online services go offline one after another because they all had a vulnerable setup. Ours, of course, was fine.
They want to create more FUD. I know a lot of shrill voices here don't like Java (sometimes for good reasons, no language is all things), but the JVM is the alternative to CLR/Mono. Check http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm to see what I mean.
Novell produces Mono, and there is now a window where organizations can consider it "safe" to use - safe from patent and other "IP" discrimination. That window may be enough to distract people from the Java/JVM alternative, and if they manage any kind of dominance they can just close Novell's window or maintain them as their pet, and the market could be sewn up. They can harm Linux, Java, and Free/Open software - their biggest competitors - at the same time.
I barely use Mac apps and have had several that depend on others before they can run. One dependency was Growl, I don't recall the others (which is part of the problem when the system doesn't manage it for you).
:)
You selectively didn't reply to most of my message, which is typical since the previous "Mr. I have to immediately interject cause I love Mac" wasn't noticing I was referring to better finding, installing, and updating of system wide software, but I have noticed that just about every Apple update has requested restarting, including iTunes. My more dedicated Mac friends say to just ignore such requests, which sounds iffy.
Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine that the "check for updates" menu option applies to all software on the system. Now stop dreaming, Apple doesn't want it to happen.
Well good for you, but I was responding to someone who called himself a newbie, in that case it's best for them to go with the packaged option.
What does opt stand for anyway? Oh, never mind.
Mac doesn't manage dependencies at all. So everything is a monolithic glob, or you have to manually install some other required piece of software.
Mac doesn't manage system wide updates at all. For every app, you have to hope it has a "check for update" option, somewhere. With Linux package managers, it's across the system, for all applications. Mac will never do this, because Apple vs Mac developers is a dysfunctional relationship, Apple wants to make it awkward so they can unfairly compete when they feel like it.
Finally, Mac apps and updates are often lazy, and request the system is restarted. Linux packages rarely do this.
I don't know what your Linux package management experiences are, but I've rarely had any issues installing, updating and removing apps, although granted on systems like Debian they are not the most up to date, which rarely matters over the advantages of everything being managed.
You shouldn't be installing things like Firefox manually. Any decent distribution (Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora, etc) have much better application management than Windows (or the Mac). They handle finding, installing, and updating mainstream apps for you.
/usr/bin/firefox
If you really want to know where an application is, and are using the shell (command line), use the "which" command.
$ which firefox
If you want the basics, as another poster said, everything that is yours is in your home directory, which means when switching computers you just copy that directory and you're done. Otherwise, you might want to scan a document on Linux file system layout standards, but for typical desktop uses you probably don't need to.
Well, you're describing a dedicated geek scenario. Ordinary people (what I was talking about) are induced into installing all manner of software, which rarely directly works in their favour. And you're still describing a reality where people have to spend a considerable amount of effort on something that has nothing to do with their main goals. Maybe for them the general purpose operating system, particularly Windows, may have outlived its usefulness.
We know, Linux doesn't support all new hardware well. It can't, without significant vendor cooperation. You have to research what will work well, which does suck.
On the other hand, I had an older tv tuner card, that I couldn't get working under Windows. I tried several fresh installs of Windows, using different drivers for the tuner, and none would work. With Linux, it just worked. I've had this experience with other hardware as well (sound cards, etc). As well, there is the base fact you can scale Linux down to do tasks like a smart router, file server, media system, etc, you don't have this kind of choice with Windows.
A lot of hardware is being abandoned with Vista, and this is being promoted as a feature by MS - Stimulate the economy! Quite irresponsible when most of that hardware would still serve its purpose perfectly well and e-waste is a known major problem.
My mom, who runs Windows, called me because she was having a problem with "Norton Virus." I was going to correct her that it's "Norton Antivirus," then I realized she was right.
I don't run Windows, but everyone I know who does (mostly extended family members) is always asking about issues they're having. Watching the set up and operation of these programs, it's no wonder. The whole thing is a sick joke.
The "cure" is probably worse than the disease.
No, its actually Apple-backtick as another posted mentioned.
. i know, i know, that's what expose is for, but it's something that i've grown accustomed to in all those years when I was using windows. and, in my opinion it is faster to switch between two (for example) open documents in word using alt-tab than it is switching between two open documents in pages using F10+click
You know about alt-backtick, right?
I dislike exposé too (along with a lot of other things Mac), but alt tab + alt-backtick is a nice combination.
Since it will work as an applet, the Java version is probably the best response to MS embedding their 3d map server in an IE browser using ActiveX (or whatever it's called now). This will enable next gen web pages to have really nice controls, and it will all be open source/free data. That's very exciting.
I think the Java naysayers have out of date opinions, JVMs of the past few years are not much trouble to set up and have very good performance. They may use more memory, but if you have a gig in your system you'll be fine. Just look at all the people using Azureus.
It's interesting to see the community pick up the Windows only version, and it'll probably be nicer than the Java version for the first while, but ultimately the Java version is a very interesting development.
I was referring about the computer clubs, where apparently homebrew computer builders and coders got together and exchanged. I have read an article that talked about their reaction to Gate's commercialization, but I can't find it now. It may not have been called open source, but that culture existed.
You probably have an established, server class system. I was using a desktop board, which claimed to support up to 8 GB but really doesn't. As more memory becomes more common, this kind of issue should go away.
Yes, and it makes getting to 4 GB with two slots so much more difficult.
Oh. Sorry, I must be obsessed with my own woes (and anyone else's who tries to go to 4GB for development, virtualization, etc).
;)
By way of a feeble attempt at recovery, you are paying too much for RAM.
You are trivializing this. I recently built a PC with 4 GB of RAM, and have been introduced to the world of pain this means in the mainstream PC world. Starting with the fact many boards only have two slots, and 2 MB chips are incredibly expensive, next on to BIOS compatibility issues, then on to operating system compatibility issues. Maybe in a year this will be a non issue, but for now it's painful, and it means so many more PCs are effectively obsoleted by "improvements" that can't even be explained clearly. http://www.chrisjordan.com/
You may be right, I know they had a lot of early problems because they use "livescript" (java applet connected to javascript), but because Firefox has asserted itself and, well, time has passed, I guess it isn't much of an issue now. There was an issue with the census within the past year, however.
I was really talking generally of the internet/web as a vendor neutral space, particularly in the public sphere. For example, the LCBO's original web site was 100% Flash, and you'll sometimes see sites that require Flash for content that could have easily been more standard.
The Government of Canada uses a public key infrastructure system, that only works in some browsers. Famously for the past census, only some people could access it.
Some important sites, such as banks and airlines, don't support other browsers or require plugins as well. It is getting better with the important cross platform critical mass of Firefox, but far from perfect.
Is it a public highway, or something designed only for Ford Explorers(tm)?
This is already done for spam mail with rbl, spamcop, maps, but it's a constant battle and just makes things more complex - imagine if a sincere mom and pop domain ended up on a blacklist - and really doesn't help.
This could get worse as the exploiters get smarter. They are automatically generating realistic web sites based on word associations, which will fool search engines and the public, much like spam content is picking up context.
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
With the money spammers are making, you have to wonder what they are doing behind the scenes to shore up their position. They are completely amoral as long as the money keeps rolling in.
The web could become as useless as email. Soon we'll need a turing test for each letter typed.
Tags are a relatively new phenomenon as people discovered they can tag using tools like del.icio.us. But are tags, labels and directories the same thing? I've heard people say so, but I think ultimately "directories," or hierarchical categories, are most useful.
For example, the same word can mean different things in a different context (river: bank, or institution: bank, or even colour: black, lastname: black), and a larger number of tags is simply unwieldy. Better to have a browser interface. The best of which is combined with a keyword search (which should be combined with a sense-sensitive thesaurus so concepts are not repeated - wordnet has a number of libraries that could be suitable).
I'm working on something like this for a health project, but I'm not going to have the time to complete it in full glory.
In a way, though, the only difference is identifying a "separator" - if there were a common convention for hierarchies, based on some existing concept, like directory paths, xpath expressions, etc, we'd have the best of both worlds. But having normal people use these conventions would need to be part of the conversion. THEN we could have the same system for organizing everything.
Real tie in between desktop and server apps is a killer feature, and collaboration is a very meaningful feature to a lot of people. The average Slashdot hack may not recognize this, but people like Dries (founder of Drupal, a php web "cms") do... http://buytaert.net/sharepoint-2007
We're looking at Jahia ourselves, would you mind sending me an email as I have some questions.
vid_sdcybrthng@zooid.org
Thanks!
I can't agree with you. I have noticed many companies and projects based in France. For example, eXo, VLC and Nuxeo. In contrast, I rarely see projects based in the UK, etc. It's anecdotal, but there seems to be a lot of entrepreneurship.