If I was donating any food to Zimbabwe, I'd want to be in the lead truck and personally ensure fair distribution. The country is following the dismal tradition of using food as a political tool. I.e., the people who support the Other Side don't get any. See this BBC report from May
Re:I don't like sheriff. they are a bad band.
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RPM Dependency Graph
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Easy == Download, then click on new icon on desktop.
That's how a standard packaging system needs to work. Put in options for command line use and to see and modify where the files go for obvious reasons.
Re:When will we get a proper packaging system?
on
RPM Dependency Graph
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· Score: 1
Sadly, like almost every post here suggesting ways to make Linux more usable and popular, this post is drawing a sprinkling of ill-founded defensive replies from folks who seem to see increased ease of use and increased popularity as a threat. No one is suggesting turning Linux into another Windows. But, some focus on ease of use and a standard approach to installing and removing software is overdue if Linux is going to make serious inroads into a customer base beyond the very small segment of the population that actually enjoys writing code and running networks.
Over the last several years, I've tried Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo, and probably some others I can't remember. Geez. I even had Minix installed on a B&W ThinkPad 500 way back when. All packaging systems seem to break at some point as you introduce "foreign" software. In my experience, this usually happens when you need to remove or upgrade some piece of code in order to keep your New Favorite Toy happy, but, guess what, your packaging system thinks every other package on your system is dependent on that code.
"Choice" turns out to be equivalent to being held hostage to a single vendor.
The number of posts here from people who give credence to the lunar-landing-as-hoax nonosense is scary. Is this embarrassing, often willful, ignorance, representative of the Slashdot audience?
Sadly, many posts here reflect an attitude "How Stupid Can They Be?" What about the responsibilty of the people who work at all those web hosting companies to help their customers retain the degree of privacy they want?
Just block some IP ranges, add robots, use anonymizers, etc., etc. Well folks, it isn't reasonable to expect the general population to know about such things. They just wanna use the web.
Yes, you can use robots.txt or block IP ranges, but that presumes: (A) you know how to do that, and (B) you are able to actually make the changes. That's too much to expect for anyone using a commercial or free webhosting facility, especially those that are entirely point-and-click driven. Some hosters may already be doing this, but it'd be nice if they made this point-and-click easy: "Don't let search engines index your pages?" "Yes" enables robots.txt, etc.
Of course Mozilla's market share is miniscule. Their distribution channel is a web site. That means Average User is unlikely to install it on a whim, because you won't go looking for the Mozilla site until after you've decided to install it. (The site itself seems designed for developers more than consumers: too many choices.)
This all reflects the continuing dissonance between open source as a Microsoft desktop challenger and open source as a sub-culture within the tech community.
Because, with rare exception, you don't have the ability to choose your cable or telephone provider. I.e., regardless of where you live, some corporation as an effective monopoly. Because they have that monopoly, they -- not you -- control the services and programming they provide. Both telephone and cable Internet providers have the ability to monitor and intervene in the flow of data to and from your phone and/or computer.
This is Slashdot, after all, so it is difficult to tell if your post is serious or tongue-in-cheek. But...casting this as an effort to "get free stuff off the net" will be seen as tantamount to supporting an effort to legalize shoplifting. If Disney, Hollings, etc., are able to successfully paint their opposition as people who just want to steal what other honest people buy, then the net, at least in the U.S., will become as "free" as the cable or telephone industries.
1.Provide (a lot) more financial support for organizations working to ensure a free Internet
2. Do NOT cast this as an exclusively open source effort.Everyone one using the Internet is at risk.
3. U.S. residents: Learn, understand and publicize the impact of current and potential U.S. legislation on the rest of the world. The Internet does not belong to one country.
4. U.S. residents: Ensure that candidates running against Hollings, etc., take the right positions -- organize, be visible and noisy. Let Congress know the cost of voting wrong. Don't waste sparse resurces: Organize and focus on a single candidate with the best chance of unseating the incumbent.
5. Don't buy products and services from the wrong companies. Again, be visible and noisy. Tell people about it -- put it on your website, in your email sig, box those CD's up and take them back to the shop where you purchased them, etc.
6. Try a targetted boycott: Demonstrate clout by killing sales of a particular product.
7. Stop watching commercial television. If you have cable, cut back to the minimum package.
8 Get the right perspective. This is about free speech, not about making infinite copies of commercial CD's.
>>"...information the plaintiffs are seeking is filed with the state Division of Elections...she couldn't provide it because it includes trade secrets of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., which manufactures the machines."
Doesn't the right to vote take precedence over a perceived obligation to protect "trade secrets"?
Ya know, like many folks, my first language was BASIC. I always thought Micrsoft's QuickBasic 4.5 was a pretty decent DOS implementation. (They also marketed a more expensive developers version.) I lost interest when they conjured up Visual Basic. Given the fact that it was so blinkin' easy to use, it would be kinda nice to see a grown-up BASIC for Linux. Add some regular expression capability and a new file handling scheme, tho.
I lived west of London for a few years about 10 years ago, with my last trip there a couple years ago. I'd happily pay 107 quid a year to have access to UK television here in the States.
Agree, the license fee and the license police are a pain, but the programming on BBC, ITV, etc., is more varied, more interesting, and less demeaning than the drivel we pay for in the U.S. Consider that most of us pay several hundred dollars annually for cable or dish access to... American television.
Yes, yes, yes. Preferably preserving the ability to go mucking about at your own risk. Otherwise, hide as much of the nitty-gritty details as possible. Even people who enjoy getting down into the weeds are wasting too much time getting things to work and not enough time using software. Re: Linux, all the different distributions trying to do the same thing in different ways just muddy the waters.Dstributions need to agree to use the same installation program, to put the same files in the same place, etc. Standardize, standardize, standardize.
While I'm ranting, I'll beat on this dying horse: someone needs to figure out a standardized way of installing new software that works smoothly across distributions. RPM's, deb's, gentoo's emerge, FreeBSD's ports don't cut it. I've used 'em all, and they all fall short.
Agree, based on my experience as the de facto tech guy in an office of a few hundred. There, I checked out colleagues computer savvy with this little test:
) Using an application of your choice, create a new file. Save it.
2) Close that application.
3) Using any other application, find that file.
Most people thought I was joking, but hardly anyone could pass the test. (If memory serves, those who found the file knew how to use the "search" function in Windows Explorer. I don't recall anyone ever demonstrating the slightest awareness of directories and the file system. You'd be surprised at the number who couldn't remember the name of their file.
If all installations on all Linux kernels across all distributions are that easy, why hasn't some enterprising chap encapulated "compile the module...depmod -a,modprobe" into a nice little Universal Install Routine?
Good point about the impact of the development model. Since consumers expect shrinkwrapped products to be fully baked -- and don't know/care about any development model -- are current vendors trading in essentially "beta" code and poisoning the waters for a "finished" desktop Linux?
Hard for me to find fault with this piece. He's saying that the investment of personal time and resources it takes to get Linux set up as a marginally useful desktop isn't worth the benefits the OS returns when all is said and done. After using a b-a-t-c-h of different distributions during the last several years, I'm now running Redhat 7.3 with Ximian Gnome on this desktop. So far, so good. But the next time it won't let me do something I want to do without reading umpteen man pages and spending hours trolling Google (like installing a printer or talking to my cable internet connection) I suspect I'll ditch it for good.
If Linux was a car, it would still be that old junker that Uncle Fred keeps in his garage and tinkers with every weekend. He's having fun, but most everyelse just wants to drive someplace.
Don't know the details, but recent techniques permit enough compensation for atmospheric distortion to allow some Earth-bound telescopes to produce images better than Hubble.
An obvious contradiction exists between a desire to see more people use Linux and a desire to constrain Linux users to "intelligent people". Equating lack of intelligence with Windows usage is an emotional assertion that can't be substantianted and serves to alienate potential Linux users who have every reason to be turned off by such insults.
After being responsible for a few projects that were populated by both designers and programmers, I find that the best situation is working with folks grounded in one discipline but with enough awareness of what's happening in the other to make rational decisions. The worst situation is depending on somone who thinks only one of the disciplines is needed -- e.g., a designer who thinks the purpose of the site is to look pretty, or a programmer who thinks that "Anyone Who Doesn't Know How to Make This Thing Work Shouldn't Be Here in the First Place."
I've had "designers" deliver pages prototyped in Photoshop as finished product, and "developers" who didn't know how (or see any reason) to change "Submit" to "Search" on a form built to gather a search query.
Then you're only convincing the True Believers. If you want to escape the Linux Ghetto, you need to pay attention to the habits and expectations of the market you are targetting.
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If I was donating any food to Zimbabwe, I'd want to be in the lead truck and personally ensure fair distribution. The country is following the dismal tradition of using food as a political tool. I.e., the people who support the Other Side don't get any. See this BBC report from May
That's how a standard packaging system needs to work. Put in options for command line use and to see and modify where the files go for obvious reasons.
Over the last several years, I've tried Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, FreeBSD, Gentoo, and probably some others I can't remember. Geez. I even had Minix installed on a B&W ThinkPad 500 way back when. All packaging systems seem to break at some point as you introduce "foreign" software. In my experience, this usually happens when you need to remove or upgrade some piece of code in order to keep your New Favorite Toy happy, but, guess what, your packaging system thinks every other package on your system is dependent on that code.
"Choice" turns out to be equivalent to being held hostage to a single vendor.
The number of posts here from people who give credence to the lunar-landing-as-hoax nonosense is scary. Is this embarrassing, often willful, ignorance, representative of the
Slashdot audience?
About this dependence on connecting with Microsoft computers: What happens to Windows machines that aren't connected to the net?
Just block some IP ranges, add robots, use anonymizers, etc., etc. Well folks, it isn't reasonable to expect the general population to know about such things. They just wanna use the web.
This all reflects the continuing dissonance between open source as a Microsoft desktop challenger and open source as a sub-culture within the tech community.
Because, with rare exception, you don't have the ability to choose your cable or telephone provider. I.e., regardless of where you live, some corporation as an effective monopoly. Because they have that monopoly, they -- not you -- control the services and programming they provide. Both telephone and cable Internet providers have the ability to monitor and intervene in the flow of data to and from your phone and/or computer.
This is Slashdot, after all, so it is difficult to tell if your post is serious or tongue-in-cheek. But...casting this as an effort to "get free stuff off the net" will be seen as tantamount to supporting an effort to legalize shoplifting. If Disney, Hollings, etc., are able to successfully paint their opposition as people who just want to steal what other honest people buy, then the net, at least in the U.S., will become as "free" as the cable or telephone industries.
1.Provide (a lot) more financial support for organizations working to ensure a free Internet
2. Do NOT cast this as an exclusively open source effort.Everyone one using the Internet is at risk.
3. U.S. residents: Learn, understand and publicize the impact of current and potential U.S. legislation on the rest of the world. The Internet does not belong to one country.
4. U.S. residents: Ensure that candidates running against Hollings, etc., take the right positions -- organize, be visible and noisy. Let Congress know the cost of voting wrong. Don't waste sparse resurces: Organize and focus on a single candidate with the best chance of unseating the incumbent.
5. Don't buy products and services from the wrong companies. Again, be visible and noisy. Tell people about it -- put it on your website, in your email sig, box those CD's up and take them back to the shop where you purchased them, etc.
6. Try a targetted boycott: Demonstrate clout by killing sales of a particular product.
7. Stop watching commercial television. If you have cable, cut back to the minimum package.
8 Get the right perspective. This is about free speech, not about making infinite copies of commercial CD's.
>>"...information the plaintiffs are seeking is filed with the state Division of Elections...she couldn't provide it because it includes trade secrets of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., which manufactures the machines."
Doesn't the right to vote take precedence over a perceived obligation to protect "trade secrets"?
Only if all developers stop using HTML.
Agree, the license fee and the license police are a pain, but the programming on BBC, ITV, etc., is more varied, more interesting, and less demeaning than the drivel we pay for in the U.S. Consider that most of us pay several hundred dollars annually for cable or dish access to... American television.
While I'm ranting, I'll beat on this dying horse: someone needs to figure out a standardized way of installing new software that works smoothly across distributions. RPM's, deb's, gentoo's emerge, FreeBSD's ports don't cut it. I've used 'em all, and they all fall short.
) Using an application of your choice, create a new file. Save it.
2) Close that application.
3) Using any other application, find that file.
Most people thought I was joking, but hardly anyone could pass the test. (If memory serves, those who found the file knew how to use the "search" function in Windows Explorer. I don't recall anyone ever demonstrating the slightest awareness of directories and the file system. You'd be surprised at the number who couldn't remember the name of their file.
If all installations on all Linux kernels across all distributions are that easy, why hasn't some enterprising chap encapulated "compile the module...depmod -a,modprobe" into a nice little Universal Install Routine?
Good point about the impact of the development model. Since consumers expect shrinkwrapped products to be fully baked -- and don't know/care about any development model -- are current vendors trading in essentially "beta" code and poisoning the waters for a "finished" desktop Linux?
If Linux was a car, it would still be that old junker that Uncle Fred keeps in his garage and tinkers with every weekend. He's having fun, but most everyelse just wants to drive someplace.
...at the folks pointing their own humongous telescope at this planet.
Don't know the details, but recent techniques permit enough compensation for atmospheric distortion to allow some Earth-bound telescopes to produce images better than Hubble.
An obvious contradiction exists between a desire to see more people use Linux and a desire to constrain Linux users to "intelligent people". Equating lack of intelligence with Windows usage is an emotional assertion that can't be substantianted and serves to alienate potential Linux users who have every reason to be turned off by such insults.
I've had "designers" deliver pages prototyped in Photoshop as finished product, and "developers" who didn't know how (or see any reason) to change "Submit" to "Search" on a form built to gather a search query.
Then you're only convincing the True Believers. If you want to escape the Linux Ghetto, you need to pay attention to the habits and expectations of the market you are targetting.