How to make a more inviting Linux platform for endlessly creative application programmers?
So far, the endless appeals to fix what you don't like in the OS are causing almost all curious application developers (both budding and experienced) to get up and walk away. I believe this is a larger factor than the MS monopoly/network effect, and that the success of Apple supports my view.
Notice that the report was issued by the EPA, and what seems like a trifling amount of money for the federal gov't could represent a very significant impact to the environment. On page 8 of the summary it projects the CO2 emissions that could be avoided under the different scenarios.
Windows is certified, both in FIPS and Common Criteria. This allows corporate legal, should something happen, show the auditors, press, and possibly law enforcement (as some SOX or HIPAA violations mean prison time) documentation that every piece of the system, from the OS on up, is certified secure.
Then Windows proves the worthlessness of FIPS. Thank you for making that abundantly clear for me: a datum I will keep filed in my mental rolodex, so that the next time FIPS comes up I can remind myself how much time/money I should spend on a meaningless standard.
There are those that want to take away those rights and most people do not know what they are nor do they care.
The only speech rights granted to corporate oligarchs is the one that allows them to stand on a public sidewalk politely handing out pamphlets. MINUS their LLC protections.
They have no more right to astroturf the public spectrum with their intense greed than they have the right to paper all the streets and sidewalks with propaganda.
This takes way more work, and there will be a popup that says "This certificate has not been signed by a trusted authority, someone might be trying to sniff you out". No one with a tiny bit of computer security knowledge would fall for this, but a clueless user who clicks "Allow" on everything probably would be.
And I try to educate everyone I know about handling certificate warnings. They are all worried about Internet insecurity, and I tell them their connection (assuming they have a clean systems) WILL be very secure if the browser displays the lock symbol and they have not chosen to bypass a certificate warning.
This, along with making people more aware of address domains in pages and emails, is what everyone frequenting these techie/nerd sites should be explaining to everyone around them. Tell them that whatever confidence they got from "doing things" on the Internet by clicking on pretty pictures is probably false and they may need to learn crucial (if simple) rules before they get in trouble.
The Internet now is like the common roadway in the 1920s: No one has taken drivers' ed, and even basic computer literacy courses don't teach about SSL!
Trojans are another huge problem, and should scarcely exist. However our modern GUI interfaces have been designed to pictographically confuse data with code, as documents and the programs that use them usually have the same/similar icons. BeOS was an exception where all code was shown with a '!' prefix. I think Ubuntu has been trying out a similar scheme. No script or binary should EVER be allowed to look like a jpeg or other data file.
As ajs pointed out, the hypothesis is concerned with much smaller extinction events than the large ones you listed.
However there is at least one supportable theory for several of the larger ones: Death by hydrogen sulfide eruptions. Briefly, global warming leads to ocean anoxia and the spread H2S-spewing bacteria; death of aerobic ocean life accelerates the bacteria growth in a positive feedback until H2S concentrations also begin to spew from the oceans and kill life on land.
My, the Ubuntu calvary is sounding awfully down on modern user interfaces these days.
Of course, its all about you, right? Ubuntu's mission statement and target audience has "seasoned user and slashdot reader" written all over it. (Or not.)
There is a high-priority, confirmed bug in the Ubuntu tracking system that basically says adding shares from the k/ubuntu gui won't work in the vast majority of circumstances. But luck you, you were able to use someone else's printer as a client. Adding shares is unlikely to succeed.
The comment about fstab is way wide off the mark. I would never ask friends or associates to do such a thing, nor even set it up for them myself because its not something they can maintain and even an expert helping them over the phone would tend to get lost.
Firewall is installed on ubuntu, and enabled by default. The lack of open ports on a default install makes this less of an issue too.
My bad. I should have mentioned the firewall next to my comment about security-through-omission, then. Not knowing what ports are blocked must do wonders for troubleshooting.
Widescreen and laptop screen support is very uneven even in 7.04. Ubuntu would do well to do 60% as well adjusting to primary screens as any Mac from 10.3-on can accommodate a secondary display. I have plugged my OS X laptops into a LOT of misc secondary screens over the years and OS X has failed to do a perfect job not even once.
With Ubuntu's tiny installed base, there are probably 50x more Ubuntu users struggling with their xorg.conf then there are Mac users struggling with their displays. They are all over the Internet, from boards like ubuntu.org to linuxquestions.org. Its almost like Internet litter.
disk encryption. If I have a zip file with a password then I can click on it, enter the password and browse/edit files on it using a finder-like interface. That seems very like disk encryption to me.
I'll let that beauty speak to the slashdot audience for itself.
Sound is largely a fixed problem now, your desktop environment provides a sound server and everything connects to it. Not perfect, but not a problem for normal users.
No it isn't fixed, especially for normal users with budget sound hardware (only one hardware channel). Not if they have Skype, Flash, RealPlayer, Audacity or any number of typical apps that use sound running in the background. The user should not even have to be aware of what a sound server is! But userspace refuses to standardize on a sound server, so if a user ventures outside of the Gnome or KDE repository-supplied walled-garden then they will have to grapple with an issue which cannot be satisfactorily resolved until Linus & co. change the kernel's default behavior.
If you think Ubuntu is the OS for the Slashdot crowd, then I would say that's an accurate assessment and the more power to you. But I wish Canonical would quit with the "simple, everyman's OS" pretense until they shape up.
We wouldn't even need to raise the question of a "next internet" if people were trained to pay attention to the domain info in their browser address bar, and in the links underneath their mouse pointer. That's in addition to using and paying attention to certificates/SSL status as you pointed out.
Every person who opens a browser window should have an intense awareness of the various certificate alerts that the browser may display (what what to do about them).
That all is not a lot to ask of the average Internet user. I'd even bet its far less complicated and frustrating than what a "Next Internet" with remote attestation scheme would demand from users' time and attention.
As soon as you start installing services like samba (goodness knows having it installed by default is too much to ask) then those ports are vulnerable. Its like security through feature-omission. Installing a firewall front-end like Guarddog or Firestarter means having to connect to the Internet first... oops!
And then when you end up doing tech support for your Ubuntu-using pals/coworkers, you have to be able to remember how to navigate Guarddog AND Firestarter (or other firewall front-ends that are currently fashionable).
What about installing audio/video niceties? Well, have you seen the install instructions for Automatix2? Talk about intimidating. Then when the Ubuntu user gets through all of that, they find the pretty Automatix icon can't launch the application (it does nothing); launching it from the CLI is recommended.
Ubuntu doesn't recognize an IBM docking station IF its plugged-in at boot time. I have to unplug-replug for it to recognize the hardware.
It's not about me. I am an expert, and a distro like Ubuntu is only likely to annoy someone like myself.
However, for the people to whom I recommend alternatives to Windows, all this is a very big deal. There is far too much that Canonical has overlooked to date that keeps me from mentioning it to otherwise curious computer users.
And I have to say that Ubuntu is pretty disappointing, even compared to other Linux distros.
File/print sharing is impossible to setup through the GUI (even though the GUI will let you tinker and give you the impression that samba is supposed to work). You have to edit smb.conf radically to get anywhere. Luckily I have a running Xandros Linux system that produces working samba configurations that I can copy to Ubuntu.
Once you basically get sharing working, the GUI still provides no convenient way to actually mount shares.
OS X has all this covered in the GUI, and quite elegantly too.
Security: Ubuntu is very poor in this area and I do not recommend it for any laptop user who is not an IT expert. They only recently got WPA working, and the rest of the OS lacks standard firewall, VPN and disk encryption configurations. In OS X, these capabilities are built-in controlled with the click of a few checkboxes.
As for other Linuxes, SuSE also covers the above essential features although samba is rather awkward (at least it is workable). Xandros covers these features in spades (especially samba). Unfortunately both distros are now in bed with Microsoft and I am helping a friend switch to Ubuntu as a result.
I'll only touch on the mishandling of widescreen monitors and getting different sound apps to coexist-- these are typical Linux maladies. The rotten sound architecture alone (where access implies an exclusive lock on the sound card unless special precautions are taken by the app programmers, the exact opposite of how audio should be handled on personal computers) pretty much makes Linux ultimately unsuitable for 70% of the desktop users out there.
The Ubuntu "just works" philosophy seems to operate on the assumption that ease of use is achieved by avoiding any features that might possibly cause problems or confusion. IMO the clean interface lulls people into a reverie that raises their tolerance for all of the frustration and CLI work they'll be lured into. Granted, a GUI ought to be clean, but also must be capable, and Ubuntu's does not achieve the latter.
The test is for in-memory exploits which do not get written to disk. The malware may not persist through a reboot, but many crucial systems have long uptimes.
That's a main point in my GP post: The intent doesn't even matter because using the comments area as loophole to publish violent rhetoric could be a part of someone's M.O. And accidentally spreading the rhetoric is negligent anyway.
I simply don't monitor comments on my website (some other types of content besides blog posts permit them, or I would have said "blog") and frankly I think that is the way to go. Because if you remove some comments, you can be stuck removing other comments... but then, this is the US. I still reserve the right to remove whatever I like, of course, and if something is illegal or just nasty and I notice it then I remove it. But if I had a policy of policing then I would have to follow that policy.
If you provide some of the content on your site (the blog entries and misc. comments) then you may be responsible for the other comments posted there if they are violent, even here in the USA.
Incitement to violence isn't protected speech anywhere, and bloggers have to police their comment areas for such comments (or else leave yourself in the position of promulgating them).
It's too easy to cop-out with "oh someone else posted that comment" if one's intent is to spread violence. If the blogger left the comment there for a significant period of time, then he is probably guilty. And if the comments were too much for him to police himself, then he should have hired someone or limited the number of comments.
Novell should move to Europe (where the SuSE distro probably should have stayed, in hindsight) and tear up their MS patent agreement into little pieces.
Or heck, Red Hat (having rejected MS patents outright) could even go first, with Linus in tow.
It would make perfect sense if the MS threats weren't also aimed at users.
...in the dishwasher, dried then for a week and they worked. But I can't remember if I used soap. My inclination would be to use a few drops of regular dish detergent in place of the dishwasher stuff.
Look, this is based on direct observation, so why don't you take your patronizing attitude and blow it out your ass?
Based on your own direct observation, selective memory and biases perhaps. But of course, its all about you and your lazy opinion that cannot be bothered to cite studies or trends.
Don't try to distract people from my message with misdirection.
And what about your off-topic, anti-union ranting?
But Xandros, as you said, is a small fish. Perhaps in their position they think any publicity is good.
BTW, I have used Xandros since it was Corel 1.0 and know its technical specs well. Starting with Xandros 3 SP2, the distro veered back to close proximity with Debian as a function of using DCC (what they initially called the Debian Common Core). It has had a very high degree of interoperability with Debian Sarge repositories from that point. Xandros 4 was a disappointment, as it was also Sarge-based leaving users with a very outmoded distro. Its been generally understood that Xandros was supposed to track to Debian Stable, not Debian "Legacy".
If I had anything to say to Xandros execs, it would be that cuddling up to MS didn't help Corel in the end either.
Slashdot Mirror
Even laptops have drive bays and PC Card slots ya know, and there's no reason (not even looks) why iMacs couldn't have these features.
How to make a more inviting Linux platform for endlessly creative application programmers?
So far, the endless appeals to fix what you don't like in the OS are causing almost all curious application developers (both budding and experienced) to get up and walk away. I believe this is a larger factor than the MS monopoly/network effect, and that the success of Apple supports my view.
Notice that the report was issued by the EPA, and what seems like a trifling amount of money for the federal gov't could represent a very significant impact to the environment. On page 8 of the summary it projects the CO2 emissions that could be avoided under the different scenarios.
Then Windows proves the worthlessness of FIPS. Thank you for making that abundantly clear for me: a datum I will keep filed in my mental rolodex, so that the next time FIPS comes up I can remind myself how much time/money I should spend on a meaningless standard.
The only speech rights granted to corporate oligarchs is the one that allows them to stand on a public sidewalk politely handing out pamphlets. MINUS their LLC protections.
They have no more right to astroturf the public spectrum with their intense greed than they have the right to paper all the streets and sidewalks with propaganda.
And I try to educate everyone I know about handling certificate warnings. They are all worried about Internet insecurity, and I tell them their connection (assuming they have a clean systems) WILL be very secure if the browser displays the lock symbol and they have not chosen to bypass a certificate warning.
This, along with making people more aware of address domains in pages and emails, is what everyone frequenting these techie/nerd sites should be explaining to everyone around them. Tell them that whatever confidence they got from "doing things" on the Internet by clicking on pretty pictures is probably false and they may need to learn crucial (if simple) rules before they get in trouble.
The Internet now is like the common roadway in the 1920s: No one has taken drivers' ed, and even basic computer literacy courses don't teach about SSL!
Trojans are another huge problem, and should scarcely exist. However our modern GUI interfaces have been designed to pictographically confuse data with code, as documents and the programs that use them usually have the same/similar icons. BeOS was an exception where all code was shown with a '!' prefix. I think Ubuntu has been trying out a similar scheme. No script or binary should EVER be allowed to look like a jpeg or other data file.
I know that was just a joke, but KDE4 prereleases are already being made available by the Kubuntu team for 7.04 and 7.10.
As ajs pointed out, the hypothesis is concerned with much smaller extinction events than the large ones you listed.
However there is at least one supportable theory for several of the larger ones: Death by hydrogen sulfide eruptions. Briefly, global warming leads to ocean anoxia and the spread H2S-spewing bacteria; death of aerobic ocean life accelerates the bacteria growth in a positive feedback until H2S concentrations also begin to spew from the oceans and kill life on land.
Of course, its all about you, right? Ubuntu's mission statement and target audience has "seasoned user and slashdot reader" written all over it. (Or not.)
There is a high-priority, confirmed bug in the Ubuntu tracking system that basically says adding shares from the k/ubuntu gui won't work in the vast majority of circumstances. But luck you, you were able to use someone else's printer as a client. Adding shares is unlikely to succeed.
The comment about fstab is way wide off the mark. I would never ask friends or associates to do such a thing, nor even set it up for them myself because its not something they can maintain and even an expert helping them over the phone would tend to get lost.
My bad. I should have mentioned the firewall next to my comment about security-through-omission, then. Not knowing what ports are blocked must do wonders for troubleshooting.
Widescreen and laptop screen support is very uneven even in 7.04. Ubuntu would do well to do 60% as well adjusting to primary screens as any Mac from 10.3-on can accommodate a secondary display. I have plugged my OS X laptops into a LOT of misc secondary screens over the years and OS X has failed to do a perfect job not even once.
With Ubuntu's tiny installed base, there are probably 50x more Ubuntu users struggling with their xorg.conf then there are Mac users struggling with their displays. They are all over the Internet, from boards like ubuntu.org to linuxquestions.org. Its almost like Internet litter.
I'll let that beauty speak to the slashdot audience for itself.
No it isn't fixed, especially for normal users with budget sound hardware (only one hardware channel). Not if they have Skype, Flash, RealPlayer, Audacity or any number of typical apps that use sound running in the background. The user should not even have to be aware of what a sound server is! But userspace refuses to standardize on a sound server, so if a user ventures outside of the Gnome or KDE repository-supplied walled-garden then they will have to grapple with an issue which cannot be satisfactorily resolved until Linus & co. change the kernel's default behavior.
If you think Ubuntu is the OS for the Slashdot crowd, then I would say that's an accurate assessment and the more power to you. But I wish Canonical would quit with the "simple, everyman's OS" pretense until they shape up.
No kidding.
We wouldn't even need to raise the question of a "next internet" if people were trained to pay attention to the domain info in their browser address bar, and in the links underneath their mouse pointer. That's in addition to using and paying attention to certificates/SSL status as you pointed out.
Every person who opens a browser window should have an intense awareness of the various certificate alerts that the browser may display (what what to do about them).
That all is not a lot to ask of the average Internet user. I'd even bet its far less complicated and frustrating than what a "Next Internet" with remote attestation scheme would demand from users' time and attention.
As soon as you start installing services like samba (goodness knows having it installed by default is too much to ask) then those ports are vulnerable. Its like security through feature-omission. Installing a firewall front-end like Guarddog or Firestarter means having to connect to the Internet first... oops!
And then when you end up doing tech support for your Ubuntu-using pals/coworkers, you have to be able to remember how to navigate Guarddog AND Firestarter (or other firewall front-ends that are currently fashionable).
What about installing audio/video niceties? Well, have you seen the install instructions for Automatix2? Talk about intimidating. Then when the Ubuntu user gets through all of that, they find the pretty Automatix icon can't launch the application (it does nothing); launching it from the CLI is recommended.
Ubuntu doesn't recognize an IBM docking station IF its plugged-in at boot time. I have to unplug-replug for it to recognize the hardware.
It's not about me. I am an expert, and a distro like Ubuntu is only likely to annoy someone like myself.
However, for the people to whom I recommend alternatives to Windows, all this is a very big deal. There is far too much that Canonical has overlooked to date that keeps me from mentioning it to otherwise curious computer users.
And I have to say that Ubuntu is pretty disappointing, even compared to other Linux distros.
File/print sharing is impossible to setup through the GUI (even though the GUI will let you tinker and give you the impression that samba is supposed to work). You have to edit smb.conf radically to get anywhere. Luckily I have a running Xandros Linux system that produces working samba configurations that I can copy to Ubuntu.
Once you basically get sharing working, the GUI still provides no convenient way to actually mount shares.
OS X has all this covered in the GUI, and quite elegantly too.
Security: Ubuntu is very poor in this area and I do not recommend it for any laptop user who is not an IT expert. They only recently got WPA working, and the rest of the OS lacks standard firewall, VPN and disk encryption configurations. In OS X, these capabilities are built-in controlled with the click of a few checkboxes.
As for other Linuxes, SuSE also covers the above essential features although samba is rather awkward (at least it is workable). Xandros covers these features in spades (especially samba). Unfortunately both distros are now in bed with Microsoft and I am helping a friend switch to Ubuntu as a result.
I'll only touch on the mishandling of widescreen monitors and getting different sound apps to coexist-- these are typical Linux maladies. The rotten sound architecture alone (where access implies an exclusive lock on the sound card unless special precautions are taken by the app programmers, the exact opposite of how audio should be handled on personal computers) pretty much makes Linux ultimately unsuitable for 70% of the desktop users out there.
The Ubuntu "just works" philosophy seems to operate on the assumption that ease of use is achieved by avoiding any features that might possibly cause problems or confusion. IMO the clean interface lulls people into a reverie that raises their tolerance for all of the frustration and CLI work they'll be lured into. Granted, a GUI ought to be clean, but also must be capable, and Ubuntu's does not achieve the latter.
That claim about colluding nodes in DC was false.
The test is for in-memory exploits which do not get written to disk. The malware may not persist through a reboot, but many crucial systems have long uptimes.
Its speech that calls for violence.
That's a main point in my GP post: The intent doesn't even matter because using the comments area as loophole to publish violent rhetoric could be a part of someone's M.O. And accidentally spreading the rhetoric is negligent anyway.
If you provide some of the content on your site (the blog entries and misc. comments) then you may be responsible for the other comments posted there if they are violent, even here in the USA.
Incitement to violence isn't protected speech anywhere, and bloggers have to police their comment areas for such comments (or else leave yourself in the position of promulgating them).
It's too easy to cop-out with "oh someone else posted that comment" if one's intent is to spread violence. If the blogger left the comment there for a significant period of time, then he is probably guilty. And if the comments were too much for him to police himself, then he should have hired someone or limited the number of comments.
Novell should move to Europe (where the SuSE distro probably should have stayed, in hindsight) and tear up their MS patent agreement into little pieces.
Or heck, Red Hat (having rejected MS patents outright) could even go first, with Linus in tow.
It would make perfect sense if the MS threats weren't also aimed at users.
...in the dishwasher, dried then for a week and they worked. But I can't remember if I used soap. My inclination would be to use a few drops of regular dish detergent in place of the dishwasher stuff.
Many self-contradictory comments on MS patent deals from Carmony: http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/20 07/06/a_slight_differ.html
Based on your own direct observation, selective memory and biases perhaps. But of course, its all about you and your lazy opinion that cannot be bothered to cite studies or trends.
And what about your off-topic, anti-union ranting?
Pixel is an excellent paint program.
For creating web pages, you may want to try Quanta Plus.
Those stats are interesting.
But Xandros, as you said, is a small fish. Perhaps in their position they think any publicity is good.
BTW, I have used Xandros since it was Corel 1.0 and know its technical specs well. Starting with Xandros 3 SP2, the distro veered back to close proximity with Debian as a function of using DCC (what they initially called the Debian Common Core). It has had a very high degree of interoperability with Debian Sarge repositories from that point. Xandros 4 was a disappointment, as it was also Sarge-based leaving users with a very outmoded distro. Its been generally understood that Xandros was supposed to track to Debian Stable, not Debian "Legacy".
If I had anything to say to Xandros execs, it would be that cuddling up to MS didn't help Corel in the end either.
...from a firestorm of free controversy, uh, publicity.