Why is it that a multi-billion dollar company needs to compare itself to software created in a "garage"?
It's doubtful that they need to, but hey, when you've got money to burn, why not? (Note that this is one of the advantages of actually making money from your software.) It's a drop in the bucket for them, and has done a good job of countering all the suckers who bought into the "Linux can do it all" hype.
Linux and *BSD are both free and created by hundreds of people all over the world.
Nice that it's free and all, but lately it sure looks like you get what you paid for. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good thing that there are good, powerful OSes out there for cheapskates and the underprivileged out there -- I do so hate to come off as elitist -- but when you get out in the cutthroat business world, one realizes that there is a lot more to cost and efficiency than initial costs. And that gives you a hint why Linux has been such a non-player among big business, despite its freeware status.
Microsoft is running scared.
Ahh yes, the scared thing. You know, I have this theory that it's every nerd's goal in life to have at least one popular entity -- whether a popular person, like a jock, or a popular company, like Microsoft -- afraid of them. Well, certainly not every nerd, but an awful lot of them, if listening to Linux fanatics telling us over and over again how they've got everyone running scared is any indication. Guys, I think you've got some issues from your old school days that you need to work out. [zico@milan zico]$ whereis eliza
I know it makes you feel all proud and full of yourself, but here's why it's no big deal: Microsoft is afraid of everyone. Yes, that's why they're enormously successful, that's why they sometimes overstep their bounds and get Janet Reno busting their hump, and yes, that's why their stockholders just shake their heads and laugh at people like you.
I would expect Linux to loose to NT because NT has such a large financial backing (iow: buy the reviews you need).
That's good, I expected Linux to lose to NT as well. Guess neither of us were even close to being disappointed.:)
Can we get someone neutral like Consumer Reports to test Linux, NT, and Solaris? Linux, Solaris and *BSD would win hands down over NT.
Yeah, I'm sure Consumer Reports will get to their big Networking OS issue as soon as they're done with their comparison of the AS/400 and the ClearPath HMP IX. Glad you know so much to state who would win, since other outfits actually benchmarking these things are proving you wrong left and right.
Again, why is CDROM.COM running FreeBSD and not NT if IIS is soooo cool? Probably because NT is a POS and M$ knows it.
Okay, I've gotta hand it to you, you win the lamest argument of the month award. Runner-up: "Why is$any_site_but_a_FreeBSD_onerunning$any_OS_but_FreeBSDif FreeBSD is soooo cool? Probably because FreeBSD is a POS and it's maintainer$ know it." Must be an awful lot of "uncool" sites out there, since so few commercial ones use FreeBSD.
[What does Microsoft preach?] Mostly their own products' superiority, and the supposed "freedom" one can gain from using said products.
And I guess this is in stark contrast to, say, Linus, who never misses an opportunity to promote FreeBSD, or Larry Elison -- I've heard he sends out mailers praising the quality of Informix.
If you don't know what to fix until your competition tells you, you've got more problems than you know about. Ditto if you think SMP is the only thing that needs work.
Thanks for posting that link, it was pretty amusing. Seeing how so many people were clamoring for tests using dynamic, rather than just static, web pages, this study should make them happy. -[[ Takes another look at the graph of Linux's dynamic performance compared to NT's and shudders ]]- Ummm, then again, maybe not.:)
First, to answer your comments. I actually don't think your page is ugly -- it's got a nice, clean look to it -- but you've got to admit that it's incredibly simplistic, and I did say "and/or" when I made the comment about the pages. Like I said, doing a page like that is very trivial, so I can see why people like yourself don't understand why people use WYSIWYG tools for non-trivial pages.
About your content vs. design argument, I have to ask, "What's wrong with having both?"
Just to see the kind of output it created, I decided to recreate your web page using FrontPage 2000. And no, I didn't import your page into FP2K, I wrote my own from the ground up. Some notes about the process:
I began soon after the beginning of the Pacers-Bucks game tonight, and i finished before the start of the second half. This included actually watching the game, and taking a call from a pal (Wanted some help downloading RedHat 6.0 and what he needed to do to burn it onto a CD and install it, heh.). Any typing necessary was done by myself, except only for cutting and pasting your descriptions (e.g., "- a small hit counter for web pages, to be used with ssi.")
I'm not sure where your complaint about superfluous table creation in WYSIWYG editors comes from. You can take a look at my version of your page at http://members.tripod.com/turnipfarm/jcs.htm. Go ahead and view the source, and you'll see that there are no more tables in my document than in yours. And whaddaya know, no frames either.
I inserted the HTML 4.0 DOCTYPE declaration (transitional) into your page, then ran it through the W3C validator. The validator had a field day with errors on your page.
I ran the page that FP2K created through the W3C validator, and the only two errors that appeared were (1) the page had no DTD, and (2) a Bold end tag was situated by itself within an anchor container. This second thing happened 4 times. I don't know whether or not you can tell FP2K to always insert the doctype, I just fixed it instead of looking. As for the second problem, it's a known bug within the FrontPage beta, so I would imagine that they'll fix it. Either way, both problems were fixed in under 3 minutes. So much for producing non-compliant HTML.
The readability of the HTML output by FP2K was very good (I just stuck to the defaults, although I could've had it produce differently formatted code.) By contrast, the readability of your HTML was very poor. I'd much prefer to maintain pages output by FP2K.
As for my own pages, they're all at client sites, and I'm not going to divulge my client list. Whether or not I know anything about page design doesn't change my point about the list of web pages that I posted; i.e., it's not going to make any of them less simplistic and/or less ugly. I'm not making any claims to be the God of HTML, just making an observation that the ones in this thread who seemed aggressively against WYSIWYG tools all had ugly and/or simplistic web pages. (Actually, that's not quite true -- I do have some personal pages that I've thrown up just to let some friends download music samples -- all done in vi only, and very ugly, I might add.
ESR's HTML Hell Page? Damn, I thought that was his home page. Talk about ugly! (Hey you cretins! I'm talking about his page, not his picture! Sheesh!;-) )
Feel free to use that W3C-validated page I created if you want. You just need to take out that damned JavaScript block that Tripod automagically inserts into pages. Likewise, I'll take that page down right away if you'd prefer (all the links on it still point to your site) -- I just wanted to let you see what kind of HTML that FrontPage 2000 was spitting out.
Heh, they finally changed the one thing that's been the biggest annoyance throughout the history of Notepad: instead of CTRL-F for Find, you had to go through the Edit Menu and choose Search. Ugh.
I always have my systems set up to send the file to UltraEdit whenever Notepad is called, so it doesn't effect me anyway, but you try and tell me that's not worth the price of the upgrade right there, baby!;-)
Frames are for idiots. They flat don't work on many browsers,
And my CDs don't work in my old eight track player. Damn!
and core-dump many they're theoretically supposed to work in.
If tags his browser can't handle are crashing his browser, maybe he ought to start using a decently-written one.
They eat up precious screen space with frame widget cruft.
Perhaps Mr. Raymond is too ignorant to know that frame widgets are only present on web pages that were written that way. It's ridiculously simple to write a web page which shows no visible sign of frame usage, if that's what you want to do.
And, used with sufficient ingenuity, they make it almost impossible to work out where you've been and how to get back to where you got there from.
Ahhh, used with sufficient ingenuity. So he at least admits that this isn't a necessity, but a result of poor design. Oh well, that's irrelevant, since of course, we all know that frames are for idiots.
Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:
Mark Hughes (http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/) Okay, so this one's from yesterday's discussion on live updates of web pages, but after reading his quote, "We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it," and then seeing his web site, I just couldn't resist.:-)
In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.
Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.
I've seen a lot more servers get rooted that didn't have FrontPage extensions installed. So maybe FrontPage extensions are actually improving server security.
Too bad the "FM" for FTP doesn't list more modern and easier methods to do what the questioner wants to accomplish. WebDAV is much superior to FTP for these purposes, but if you enjoy hangin' with the dinosaurs with your beloved FTP mastery (har har), I won't stand in your way.
Why not come with a standard set of keyboard combos that everyone is used to, letting them change it if they want to? Who the hell wants to go through all the combinations to have to set their own? Lemme guess, you enjoy hand-editing your XF86Config file, right?
I've read only the first page so far, and I'd be annoyed if an employee gave me this and expected me to read this. This guy needs to have someone go over it to rewrite it for regular humans -- it's clear that it was written by a geek. Examples from the first page:
The whole GNU/GPL thing. Other than the fact that this is one of the last things on managers' minds, the author subjects us to things like:
"Free software programmers often display a wacky sense of humour." Wheeee.
"[Stallman] uses the word "hacker" in the positive sense of master programmer, reserving the word "cracker" for people who break into systems.
The disagreement that Stallman has with Linus about the name. Come on, please remember the audience.
The link to the audio file of Linus's pronunciation of Linux. *cringe* Again, while geeks eat this stuff up, it elicits "And I'm spending my time reading this why?" reactions from most others.
When writing for humans, a good test is to run it past your girlfriend or mother (provided that they're non-geeks) and see if it can hold their interest.
I'll leave some of the sillier pro-Linux claims that I noticed in this article for later discussion when I have a little free time.;-)
Using ALT instead of CTRL for action combos on the Win32 versions would be a disastrous mistake, because everybody and their sister expects to use CTRL for them (ALT combos being used to access the menu bar). As for why I would expect N or O to be used for New and Open, that's because every version of Netscape and IE that I've used, on every platform on which I've used them, have used those two. Why would they annoy users by changing these?
As far as the final version, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the CTRL combos will be present. I was just throwing out a suggestion that they start coding them in (I would think that it'd be one of the simpler coding tasks in the entire project), so that some of us keyboard-oriented users could start racking up a lot more usage, helping them iron out bugs in the process.
Sure, it's probably way down on their list of priorities, but not being able to CTRL-N for a new window or CTRL-O to open up a box for me to type in a new URL means that I end up playing around with these new releases for maybe 20 minutes before returning to the ease of IE. I know for sure I'd be more willing to use it for longer stretches if I didn't have to reach for the mouse to get just about anything done.
FWIW, M5 blew up on me within the first 3 minutes that I was trying it out. And no, I wasn't trying any funky pages -- only Example2 and goto.com -- and I had no other apps running at the time. Please tell me that the bug situation is better than this, especially when there's so much still missing. (And yes, I was a good little trooper and let it send my system info to mozilla.org after the crash.)
Random note: "M5" looks a lot like "MS" at 4:15am.
Well, when it's daytime in the U.S. there's a great deal more net traffic than at any other point of the day, so you'll probably get some slowdown due to that. It's very noticeable to me. I can't say that I notice much speed difference at this site whether I'm using Netscape on RH Linux or IE on Win2K or Win98 (at least for pages I haven't seen) and I haven't used Lynx for perusing Slashdot in ages.
Not to jump on the bashing bandwagon, since I'm sure that Rob's aware of the frustrations out there, but...I personally hardly ever get timeouts when browsing here, but a large percentage of the time I'm sitting here looking at the ad banner for an agonizingly long time before the rest of the page loads. In fact, this is the only web site for which I turn off image loading, simply because it's too frustrating otherwise. (Well, I sometimes do with DejaNews, too -- hey, isn't that run on Linux as well? Hmmmm...;-) ).
Because I had read the archive list last night (I had already seen Russinovich's article) -- I had been hoping Slashdot would post a link so that everyone else could see it. Thanks for posting the link for others, I didn't have it on me when I posted earlier. About the pathetic and laughable thing: I would imagine that more substantive critiques have since been added to the subset which I read last night. However, a good deal of the ones I read were just hands-over-the-ears attacks, rather than a willingness to look at Russinovich's critiques objectively -- a bit below the standards I would expect for a dev list. Even so much to the point where it seemed as if Russinovich's knowledge of the Linux kernel after perusing the source surpassed some of the people responding to him.
Yes, and I keep mine at -1 usually because of what I was just complaining about: legitimate posts sometimes getting knocked down because they happen to criticize Linux. It would be easier to set my own filter higher if I knew that the only thing I would be missing was flamebait garbage or a post from someone else whose stuff is usually obnoxious garbage. Especially on threads that get as long as ones like this, it would make reading all the potentially worthwhile ones much quicker.
I've actually noticed that a lot lately. When the moderation system was first implemented, it seemed like good posts got moderated up, obnoxious flames got moderated down, and most stayed the same, no matter the OS-slant of the writer. (Well, except for _one_ annoying tendency that's been there throughout -- the longer the post, the greater chance of getting moderated up, even when it's complete pablum. Makes me wonder if Katz is doing the moderating;-))
Lately, however, it seems like a lot of posts that are critical of Linux in non-inflammatory ways are getting moderated down, long posts espousing the virtues of Linux get moderated up, no matter how trite, and inflammatory posts by Linux fanatics don't get touched. It's as if there are some moderators out there who are trying to keep legitimate criticisms of Linux from most readers. Lame.
Along the same line, why hasn't Slashdot put up Mark Russinovich's dissection of Linux's enterprise OS merits? I admit that I didn't submit it, but only because I'm sure that other people have. Is it because since even the people on the Linux kernel list have done such a pathetic job of refuting his claims, you figure that most people here would just embarrass the Linux movement with their own answers? C'mon, give 'em a chance! Hell, please just post a link to the kernel list archive where they tried to rebut him, that's good for a lot of laughs.
I can't think of anything more worthy of worship than self-proclaimed rebels. No, really.
Cheers, ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Civic virtue? Spare us the lecture, please.
on
Free Red Hat 6.0 CDs
·
· Score: 1
Hey, I paid my civic virtue by downloading and sitting through annoying IBM banner ads, getting spam from AOL, and wasting my time having to change the default home pages on all my browsers back after they've all been changed to NetCenter by Netscape. All of these companies have donated heavily to RedHat, so they can consider my civic duty paid many times over by proxy.
If they ever do make it difficult to obtain a RedHat version for free, I'll say, "Hello, Debian!" and kindly tell RedHat to take their request for "civic virtue" and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
You do know that the whole internet thing is international, right? In fact, I couldn't even find a U.S. site that had RedHat 6.0 for quite a while -- I ended up downloading it from a site in the U.K. -- ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk.
Slashdot Mirror
It's doubtful that they need to, but hey, when you've got money to burn, why not? (Note that this is one of the advantages of actually making money from your software.) It's a drop in the bucket for them, and has done a good job of countering all the suckers who bought into the "Linux can do it all" hype.
Nice that it's free and all, but lately it sure looks like you get what you paid for. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good thing that there are good, powerful OSes out there for cheapskates and the underprivileged out there -- I do so hate to come off as elitist -- but when you get out in the cutthroat business world, one realizes that there is a lot more to cost and efficiency than initial costs. And that gives you a hint why Linux has been such a non-player among big business, despite its freeware status.
Ahh yes, the scared thing. You know, I have this theory that it's every nerd's goal in life to have at least one popular entity -- whether a popular person, like a jock, or a popular company, like Microsoft -- afraid of them. Well, certainly not every nerd, but an awful lot of them, if listening to Linux fanatics telling us over and over again how they've got everyone running scared is any indication. Guys, I think you've got some issues from your old school days that you need to work out.
[zico@milan zico]$ whereis eliza
I know it makes you feel all proud and full of yourself, but here's why it's no big deal: Microsoft is afraid of everyone. Yes, that's why they're enormously successful, that's why they sometimes overstep their bounds and get Janet Reno busting their hump, and yes, that's why their stockholders just shake their heads and laugh at people like you.
That's good, I expected Linux to lose to NT as well. Guess neither of us were even close to being disappointed. :)
Yeah, I'm sure Consumer Reports will get to their big Networking OS issue as soon as they're done with their comparison of the AS/400 and the ClearPath HMP IX. Glad you know so much to state who would win, since other outfits actually benchmarking these things are proving you wrong left and right.
Okay, I've gotta hand it to you, you win the lamest argument of the month award. Runner-up: "Why is $any_site_but_a_FreeBSD_one running $any_OS_but_FreeBSD if FreeBSD is soooo cool? Probably because FreeBSD is a POS and it's maintainer$ know it." Must be an awful lot of "uncool" sites out there, since so few commercial ones use FreeBSD.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Slashdot Realist
All the tech people I know run Linux and prefer to use it.
You really should get out and try the real world sometime, it's a pretty nice place.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Slashdot Realist
And I guess this is in stark contrast to, say, Linus, who never misses an opportunity to promote FreeBSD, or Larry Elison -- I've heard he sends out mailers praising the quality of Informix.
Damn that Microsoft!
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've no doubt if MacOS released a new version it'd be up here [...]
Ummm, you mean like Mac OS 8.6 that Apple released yesterday?? I must've missed that particular Slashdot thread...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If you don't know what to fix until your competition tells you, you've got more problems than you know about. Ditto if you think SMP is the only thing that needs work.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Just bear in mind that the absence of a glowing review is not necessarily a slam, and that criticisms don't necessarily constitute FUD.
Welcome! I can tell that you're new to Slashdot. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Thanks for posting that link, it was pretty amusing. Seeing how so many people were clamoring for tests using dynamic, rather than just static, web pages, this study should make them happy. -[[ Takes another look at the graph of Linux's dynamic performance compared to NT's and shudders ]]- Ummm, then again, maybe not. :)
In case anyone got discombobulated with your tagging error, they can go to, 2256617,00.html?chkpt=hpqs00019
http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755
to see the study.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
??
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
First, to answer your comments. I actually don't think your page is ugly -- it's got a nice, clean look to it -- but you've got to admit that it's incredibly simplistic, and I did say "and/or" when I made the comment about the pages. Like I said, doing a page like that is very trivial, so I can see why people like yourself don't understand why people use WYSIWYG tools for non-trivial pages.
About your content vs. design argument, I have to ask, "What's wrong with having both?"
Just to see the kind of output it created, I decided to recreate your web page using FrontPage 2000. And no, I didn't import your page into FP2K, I wrote my own from the ground up. Some notes about the process:
As for my own pages, they're all at client sites, and I'm not going to divulge my client list. Whether or not I know anything about page design doesn't change my point about the list of web pages that I posted; i.e., it's not going to make any of them less simplistic and/or less ugly. I'm not making any claims to be the God of HTML, just making an observation that the ones in this thread who seemed aggressively against WYSIWYG tools all had ugly and/or simplistic web pages. (Actually, that's not quite true -- I do have some personal pages that I've thrown up just to let some friends download music samples -- all done in vi only, and very ugly, I might add.
ESR's HTML Hell Page? Damn, I thought that was his home page. Talk about ugly! (Hey you cretins! I'm talking about his page, not his picture! Sheesh! ;-) )
Feel free to use that W3C-validated page I created if you want. You just need to take out that damned JavaScript block that Tripod automagically inserts into pages. Likewise, I'll take that page down right away if you'd prefer (all the links on it still point to your site) -- I just wanted to let you see what kind of HTML that FrontPage 2000 was spitting out.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Heh, they finally changed the one thing that's been the biggest annoyance throughout the history of Notepad: instead of CTRL-F for Find, you had to go through the Edit Menu and choose Search. Ugh.
I always have my systems set up to send the file to UltraEdit whenever Notepad is called, so it doesn't effect me anyway, but you try and tell me that's not worth the price of the upgrade right there, baby! ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
And my CDs don't work in my old eight track player. Damn!
If tags his browser can't handle are crashing his browser, maybe he ought to start using a decently-written one.
Perhaps Mr. Raymond is too ignorant to know that frame widgets are only present on web pages that were written that way. It's ridiculously simple to write a web page which shows no visible sign of frame usage, if that's what you want to do.
Ahhh, used with sufficient ingenuity. So he at least admits that this isn't a necessity, but a result of poor design. Oh well, that's irrelevant, since of course, we all know that frames are for idiots.
Now, if I can quote myself:
BEGIN QUOTE
ESR is an idiot.
END QUOTE
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:
In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.
Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've seen a lot more servers get rooted that didn't have FrontPage extensions installed. So maybe FrontPage extensions are actually improving server security.
Anecdotal evidence sure is fun...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Too bad the "FM" for FTP doesn't list more modern and easier methods to do what the questioner wants to accomplish. WebDAV is much superior to FTP for these purposes, but if you enjoy hangin' with the dinosaurs with your beloved FTP mastery (har har), I won't stand in your way.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Why not come with a standard set of keyboard combos that everyone is used to, letting them change it if they want to? Who the hell wants to go through all the combinations to have to set their own? Lemme guess, you enjoy hand-editing your XF86Config file, right?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've read only the first page so far, and I'd be annoyed if an employee gave me this and expected me to read this. This guy needs to have someone go over it to rewrite it for regular humans -- it's clear that it was written by a geek. Examples from the first page:
When writing for humans, a good test is to run it past your girlfriend or mother (provided that they're non-geeks) and see if it can hold their interest.
I'll leave some of the sillier pro-Linux claims that I noticed in this article for later discussion when I have a little free time. ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Using ALT instead of CTRL for action combos on the Win32 versions would be a disastrous mistake, because everybody and their sister expects to use CTRL for them (ALT combos being used to access the menu bar). As for why I would expect N or O to be used for New and Open, that's because every version of Netscape and IE that I've used, on every platform on which I've used them, have used those two. Why would they annoy users by changing these?
As far as the final version, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the CTRL combos will be present. I was just throwing out a suggestion that they start coding them in (I would think that it'd be one of the simpler coding tasks in the entire project), so that some of us keyboard-oriented users could start racking up a lot more usage, helping them iron out bugs in the process.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Sure, it's probably way down on their list of priorities, but not being able to CTRL-N for a new window or CTRL-O to open up a box for me to type in a new URL means that I end up playing around with these new releases for maybe 20 minutes before returning to the ease of IE. I know for sure I'd be more willing to use it for longer stretches if I didn't have to reach for the mouse to get just about anything done.
FWIW, M5 blew up on me within the first 3 minutes that I was trying it out. And no, I wasn't trying any funky pages -- only Example2 and goto.com -- and I had no other apps running at the time. Please tell me that the bug situation is better than this, especially when there's so much still missing. (And yes, I was a good little trooper and let it send my system info to mozilla.org after the crash.)
Random note: "M5" looks a lot like "MS" at 4:15am.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Well, when it's daytime in the U.S. there's a great deal more net traffic than at any other point of the day, so you'll probably get some slowdown due to that. It's very noticeable to me. I can't say that I notice much speed difference at this site whether I'm using Netscape on RH Linux or IE on Win2K or Win98 (at least for pages I haven't seen) and I haven't used Lynx for perusing Slashdot in ages.
Not to jump on the bashing bandwagon, since I'm sure that Rob's aware of the frustrations out there, but...I personally hardly ever get timeouts when browsing here, but a large percentage of the time I'm sitting here looking at the ad banner for an agonizingly long time before the rest of the page loads. In fact, this is the only web site for which I turn off image loading, simply because it's too frustrating otherwise. (Well, I sometimes do with DejaNews, too -- hey, isn't that run on Linux as well? Hmmmm... ;-) ).
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Because I had read the archive list last night (I had already seen Russinovich's article) -- I had been hoping Slashdot would post a link so that everyone else could see it. Thanks for posting the link for others, I didn't have it on me when I posted earlier. About the pathetic and laughable thing: I would imagine that more substantive critiques have since been added to the subset which I read last night. However, a good deal of the ones I read were just hands-over-the-ears attacks, rather than a willingness to look at Russinovich's critiques objectively -- a bit below the standards I would expect for a dev list. Even so much to the point where it seemed as if Russinovich's knowledge of the Linux kernel after perusing the source surpassed some of the people responding to him.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yes, and I keep mine at -1 usually because of what I was just complaining about: legitimate posts sometimes getting knocked down because they happen to criticize Linux. It would be easier to set my own filter higher if I knew that the only thing I would be missing was flamebait garbage or a post from someone else whose stuff is usually obnoxious garbage. Especially on threads that get as long as ones like this, it would make reading all the potentially worthwhile ones much quicker.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've actually noticed that a lot lately. When the moderation system was first implemented, it seemed like good posts got moderated up, obnoxious flames got moderated down, and most stayed the same, no matter the OS-slant of the writer. (Well, except for _one_ annoying tendency that's been there throughout -- the longer the post, the greater chance of getting moderated up, even when it's complete pablum. Makes me wonder if Katz is doing the moderating ;-))
Lately, however, it seems like a lot of posts that are critical of Linux in non-inflammatory ways are getting moderated down, long posts espousing the virtues of Linux get moderated up, no matter how trite, and inflammatory posts by Linux fanatics don't get touched. It's as if there are some moderators out there who are trying to keep legitimate criticisms of Linux from most readers. Lame.
Along the same line, why hasn't Slashdot put up Mark Russinovich's dissection of Linux's enterprise OS merits? I admit that I didn't submit it, but only because I'm sure that other people have. Is it because since even the people on the Linux kernel list have done such a pathetic job of refuting his claims, you figure that most people here would just embarrass the Linux movement with their own answers? C'mon, give 'em a chance! Hell, please just post a link to the kernel list archive where they tried to rebut him, that's good for a lot of laughs.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Linux. You get what you pay for.
I can't think of anything more worthy of worship than self-proclaimed rebels. No, really.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Hey, I paid my civic virtue by downloading and sitting through annoying IBM banner ads, getting spam from AOL, and wasting my time having to change the default home pages on all my browsers back after they've all been changed to NetCenter by Netscape. All of these companies have donated heavily to RedHat, so they can consider my civic duty paid many times over by proxy.
If they ever do make it difficult to obtain a RedHat version for free, I'll say, "Hello, Debian!" and kindly tell RedHat to take their request for "civic virtue" and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
You do know that the whole internet thing is international, right? In fact, I couldn't even find a U.S. site that had RedHat 6.0 for quite a while -- I ended up downloading it from a site in the U.K. -- ftp://unix.hensa.ac.uk.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com