I can personally verify that cycling while drunk is stupid. After a night drinking a friend and I convinced each other to tour the local "House of Ill Repute" while I was in a country (really most countries) where such things are legal, accepted and taxed. Anyway I kept accidently jumping up and down off the curb and finally hit a section of curb that I didn't see and went head over handlebars onto the cement. Luckilly for me I have a small, thick skull and didn't suffer anything more than superficial damage but still . . . Dumb.
I agree. I would also add that removing the drinking age entirely may be desireable. I have lived some time in other countries (although I am from and currently live in Wisconsin) and haven't seen the massive social desintegration that is predicted if one lowers the drinking age. In many countries (Germany was were I was at) the drinking laws are almost non-existant, if you can reach the bar they will serve you. This leads to a much more mature attitude regarding consumption of alcaholic beverages and generally makes for more reasonable, adult-like persons, as opposed to the overgrown children I see around myself every day (caveat, I am exposed to a "higher" educational system every working day, full of students)
It happens that my father is a police officer locally, he would like to see the driving laws tightened in this area as well (as well as the Huber work law, allowing people to go to/from work while in jail, inmates just wander off after work and when they are recaptured are put back on Huber.) Most of the DUIs he deals with are repeat (5-10+) offenders, many who don't have licenses (which of course does nothing to prevent you from actually hopping behind the wheel and taking off). It is the incorrigables, the people who just won't learn, that cause the most trouble, he figures that greater than 99% of the people he arrests are people he has arrested before.
EMACS is the way to go. A guy who works on hardware/software for sale to blind people showed up at a LUG meeting a couple of months ago. I recommended that instead of trying to shoehorn some stupid GUI and a screenreader into a handheld device (Graphical -> Blind ?? WTF. Doesn't make any sense to me) he should just use Linux as a microkernel for EMACS. EMACS can do everything you need it to do; web, email, news, text editing, file management and all the internals are exposed so you could write your own communications layer for hotsyncing and hooks for EMACSSpeak. I think the functionality gained by using an EMACS solution far outweighs the learning curve in getting there for an uninitiated user. EMACS is like having your own personal AI to help you.
Yep, I agree wholeheartedly. I was about to post the same thing but I see that you have already done it. Please Moderate this up, up, up.
Anime would be the only thing that could handle all the movie in all its glory, without really breaking a sweat. The only problem is that they probably wouldn't want to make multiple 2hr episodes (although that would be Great) so you would still have problems with much of the story details having to be cut out. No problems finding your Hiro (pun) or Y.T./Raven stuff.
There is some reason why they don't encourage Novell and MS trained admins, because they can easily leave for a higher paying, less stress job outside the Military. Where I worked sysadmin tasks fell squarely on the local users, computer admin support was disruptive to non-existant. The local users were supposed to manage their own server so at one point they paid for someone to go to Novell training (the users main job was Air Traffic Control, IIRC, which he still had to pull shifts for and stay certified in.) A couple of months later he left for a much, much higher paying job ($50K+ as opposed to $20-30K in service) and left a half configured Novell server behind that no one knew how to use. When I got there people weren't sharing files at all and using MS Networks for file and print (or sneakernet) because they didn't know how to use the server (setup print queues, etc. anything more than adding and removing users from NWAdmin was too much) I created directories for my users, edited the container logon script to map drives, setup printers on JetDirect, etc. but what a pain.
They are "upgrading" to a NT system because they think that it will be "easier to use", of course they are just fooling themselves. Where I currently work we use Novell and ZENWorks to manage Windows workstations and there isn't anything better or easier to use, it just requires a little elbow grease. For managing Windows workstations Novell is the best thing going (even if NetWare OS is crufty and really only good for file/print duty)
Amen to that, the Weather software I used, AWDS (Automated Weather Distribution System), was very ugly and crufty (and no hope of Y2K compliance, I hope they aren't still trying to use it). It was designed in the '80s but never funded or fielded untill the '90s, but they didn't update their hardware or software specs so people got 10 year old technology at 10 year old prices (remember how much that 40MB HDD cost 15 years ago). It ran on a "Barco Chromatics" machine running what appeared to be a Unix variant (never heard of them, but at least we were able to cannablize the SCSI drives for our 386 desktop machines (in 1997!))
Many of the features didn't work, or were too slow, it had much that was tailored to the Meterologist (ability to define some custom algorythms and do interesting data analysis (LGGs)) but were pretty useless to the work-a-day Forecaster and the features that would have helped were incomplete or broken (useless satellite images, poor/late vector charts from Global Weather, etc.)
They've been patching this system for many, many years and have almost got it useable but because it doesn't even have a hope of Y2K compliance they have to scrap it. Of course when I left last May the next system appeared to still be in the planning stages, without any code actually written. Well they were going to move everything to the WWW, I hope it worked out for them.
Yeah, I just got out of the Military about a year ago and some of this stuff is just funny (well not really). The system we had ran on SunOS 4.1.3 on new(! in 1997 !) SPARCStation 20s. You weren't supposed to be able to get a command shell but oclock was in your startup, just set an alarm and set xterm as the program to run when the alarm goes off, viola! I never tried to get root, although I could have used it a few time instead of trying to work with tech support when something went awry, there were a few known security vulnerabilities, like in tooltalk, that probably never got fixed (in 1999!)
I don't think that this is some unsolvable technical problem. If this fails it is going to be legislative, not technical.
They don't have to use a statefull firewall, they can just block individual IP addresses.
Moore's law, if routers aren't fast enough now, they will be soon.
It doesn't have to be fast, just acceptable for the major population, and that means slow, low bandwidth browsing. A 1 second added hesitation when browsing probably wouldn't be immediately noticed.
If they want to bankroll this they could probably make it happen. Yes, MP3 pirates (using the word loosely) would probably find annother means of distribution (different ports, changing servers frequently, free accounts, etc.) but it could be very effective against the average Joe surfer. Most people aren't technically inclined enough to try very hard to find this stuff, if they (the Government) can make it difficult or inconvienent then they have achived their objective.
This sounds like the Condor system at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have only read a little about it but as I understand, it works as you describe. Check out their homepage at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor.
I think this is a very good idea. I would like to see service contracts, including remote admining of a system, included with system purchases.
Only major problem is security, how much do you trust this person or company to root around on your computer. Would the average user be able to find out if the admin copied the answers to their purity test, would you be able to tell?
I've seen this a lot. Many systems have 20-50 icons on the desktop, that is how we ship them now. Utterly confusing and worthless, I can never find anything, because they are always sorted differently on every machine, very cluttered.
Also most users refuse to run at resolutions greater than 800x600, some 640x480. And the new machines have Matrox G400 video with like 32MB RAM (and some are shipping with dualhead !!). What a waste.
It seems to me that the CLI is the closest thing to the "Star Trek" voice activated interface you describe. Where else could you tell your computer to 'Update all programs, mail me the results" or one I used recently "find/usr -name *.h | xargs grep foofunction". You could even X-ify it by putting a "| xmessage -file -" at the end, or do it by voice by cutting the first column (before the colon) and dumping to a text-to-speach package.
A CLI is a full-on object-oriented interface that would be difficult to impossible to represent graphically, but one is welcome to try
I agree that it could be easier (MacOS X, MacOS X) but I think that your statements about reworking the filesystem are off base.
Programs should automatically integrate with the menu system (KDE/GNOME/FVWM/etc.), I think Debian does this, but that doesn't require any filesystem standard changes
Having seperate directories for anything but large collections of programs (KDE/GNOME) is kludgy. By having stuff installed in/usr and/usr/local the user doesn't have to know where it is actually installed, the files will all be in the system path. It is easy to install new system libraries and programs without disturbing your existing config (/usr/local) while giving all programs immediate access to the new software's capabilities. Having everything in the path also make it easier to write desktop icons for the same reason.
Linux is extremely usable for business, and mostly usable for home use. Mainly because a home user is at some time, probably want to significantly change their configuration--add new hardware, etc. Business users are usually going to have locked down desktops and only run a few Office type apps, of which there are several suites.
Installing software is not that hard, just look at Corel Linux and their front end to Debian apt-get. You just select the program you want from a list of all available software for your platform and install. Click, click. Unfortunately it is not that easy on other distros yet. I would like to see a Universal Source Package, something like automake for package managers. Just make a way to monitor what files are installed and what dependancies exist (ldd, etc) and create entries in your package management database (RPM, DEB, BSD, etc.) As long as your install routines follow the filesystem standard you should be OK.
I also have to mention MacOS X again, if Apple can make UNIX easy enough for Mac People then we should be able to do at least as well. I feel like I should repeat that last sentance!
This is totally off-topic but you wouldn't know where I could find these "MMJ" cables and a MMJ-->9 pin RS-232 adapter. I just happend to buy an old VT420 for pennies, I intend to connect it to one of my Linux boxen. Unfortunately I have no cable. Learning that the cable type is "MMJ" is a big help. If you have any more info I would love to hear it. Mark Tinberg
The Corel filemanager, based on KDE, has this functionality. The KDE2 filemanager will have this as well. There are several other programs like LinNeighborhood that do this too. Love the freshmeat.
That reminds me, at a place I used to work they had the Kronos timecard system. It uses a barcode reader for the timecards and some DOS software to read the logs, the logs interface into the payroll system. IIRC that could only talk NetBEUI to the NT server they were using, which made the server config just one notch more complicated and made the routing just one notch harder.
I wouldn't worry too much about Caldera (or Lineo, they are two seperate but related companies). I use the OpenLinux distro and have been happy with it, they released their COAS (Caldera Open Admin System) and Lizard (Linux Install wiZARD) as open source. Heck Caldera wrote the Linux IPX stack that has been part of the kernel for like 5 years+.
The proprieatary stuff they mentioned may refer to their web browser (WebSpyder based on the DOS shareware prog Arachne, which I don't know the license of) or something to with the 32bit protected mode API that ships with DR-DOS. Speaking of DR-DOS, anyone remember when they open sourced it and called it OpenDOS? I think they closed the source because of developer disinterest but I could be wrong.
I'll say it again, we are nowhere near and probably never will be near, this concern. Just because it's "Made for RedHat" doesn't mean it won't work just fine on other distros. Linux is Linux. Now getting official support, that may be annother matter. Vendor support needs to be distro neutral, the configuration differences between distros are too small for there to be any technical reason why they cannot support every Linux distro out there. It would be more helpful for them to say, "We support Product-X with Linux 2.2.x and GLIBC 2.1".
I agree with one sentament, the Word Processing/Office Suite market hasn't had any major technical innovation in 10 years. There is very little that I couldn't do with my old, circa 1989, copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 that I can do now.
Not that there hasn't been better, innovative ways to work with words, like LyX (which is based on tech that is older than the hills, TeX and LaTeX) but they haven't caught on. People still make slides as if they were (and some still are) being printed on film, people write letters as if they are using a dumb typewriter (tab stops, underlining, manual labor in formatting, etc.). The only one of these softs that is much different is LyX, everything else is the same old hat.
PS. The preceding post is probably not worth a -1 Troll and should be remoderated up IMHO
I was trying to do something like this at a community center our LUG was helping setup. Right now they are using Windows95 as a microkernel for StarOffice, but as you all know Windows is anything but "micro".
What I wanted to do was migrate them to was very simple local installations of Linux, X and SO only (maybe using remote boot images from the Linux Terminal Server Project. It would have been great, I could have them boot and load SO from a local HDD but have their home directories and mail on the server. SO can do mail, calendar, web browsing, Java, as well as word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, database, etc. so the local admin would only have one program and file tree to maintain.
Unfortunately this won't happen now because they hired a Windows guy to admin and teach, who doesn't know the first thing about Linux. He got frustrated the first day (probably a permissions thing on the Samba shares, maybe he wasn't logging in as himself, who knows?) so he fdisked and formatted the server, without even asking us for help. He is using Win95 File and Print sharing instead of a Samba server, what a maroon.
Hear hear. I've recently taken to do presentations for my local LUG and find LyX 1.1.2 a great benefit. It is pretty easy to learn (took about a day or two of use, would have been less if I wasn't fighting with KLyX first) and generates really nice documents. Not only is the formats for printing nice but with LaTeX2HTML you get great HTML copy as well as PostScript.
Once you figure out the interface (which is really ugly IMHO) it helps you out in many ways, like the fact that the Table of Contents object in your document is a clickable button that brings a popup with a tree of your document structure, just click on the area you want and you are whisked there.
This is weird but very similar to how New Deal Office (Former GEOS/GEOWorks) works. It has 5 user levels, at the lower level you get less options in most programs, in the higher level you get all the options. That way users don't get confused when they start out but they can step up as they go along (oh, and the user level is adjustable for each major program individually).
I've had good luck with CUPS the Common Unix Printing System. It supports LPD, SMB, AppleTalk, TCP (JetDirect), and the new IPP RFC (Internet Printing Protocol). Also the company that makes it Easy Software Products makes a graphical configurator (not needed) and a set of high quality print filters (very nice) based on GhostScript and.ppd files.
Slashdot Mirror
I can personally verify that cycling while drunk is stupid. After a night drinking a friend and I convinced each other to tour the local "House of Ill Repute" while I was in a country (really most countries) where such things are legal, accepted and taxed. Anyway I kept accidently jumping up and down off the curb and finally hit a section of curb that I didn't see and went head over handlebars onto the cement. Luckilly for me I have a small, thick skull and didn't suffer anything more than superficial damage but still . . . Dumb.
I agree. I would also add that removing the drinking age entirely may be desireable. I have lived some time in other countries (although I am from and currently live in Wisconsin) and haven't seen the massive social desintegration that is predicted if one lowers the drinking age. In many countries (Germany was were I was at) the drinking laws are almost non-existant, if you can reach the bar they will serve you. This leads to a much more mature attitude regarding consumption of alcaholic beverages and generally makes for more reasonable, adult-like persons, as opposed to the overgrown children I see around myself every day (caveat, I am exposed to a "higher" educational system every working day, full of students)
It happens that my father is a police officer locally, he would like to see the driving laws tightened in this area as well (as well as the Huber work law, allowing people to go to/from work while in jail, inmates just wander off after work and when they are recaptured are put back on Huber.) Most of the DUIs he deals with are repeat (5-10+) offenders, many who don't have licenses (which of course does nothing to prevent you from actually hopping behind the wheel and taking off). It is the incorrigables, the people who just won't learn, that cause the most trouble, he figures that greater than 99% of the people he arrests are people he has arrested before.
EMACS is the way to go. A guy who works on hardware/software for sale to blind people showed up at a LUG meeting a couple of months ago. I recommended that instead of trying to shoehorn some stupid GUI and a screenreader into a handheld device (Graphical -> Blind ?? WTF. Doesn't make any sense to me) he should just use Linux as a microkernel for EMACS. EMACS can do everything you need it to do; web, email, news, text editing, file management and all the internals are exposed so you could write your own communications layer for hotsyncing and hooks for EMACSSpeak. I think the functionality gained by using an EMACS solution far outweighs the learning curve in getting there for an uninitiated user. EMACS is like having your own personal AI to help you.
Yep, I agree wholeheartedly. I was about to post the same thing but I see that you have already done it. Please Moderate this up, up, up.
Anime would be the only thing that could handle all the movie in all its glory, without really breaking a sweat. The only problem is that they probably wouldn't want to make multiple 2hr episodes (although that would be Great) so you would still have problems with much of the story details having to be cut out. No problems finding your Hiro (pun) or Y.T./Raven stuff.
BTW: Anyone find Y.T. in The Diamond Age.
They are "upgrading" to a NT system because they think that it will be "easier to use", of course they are just fooling themselves. Where I currently work we use Novell and ZENWorks to manage Windows workstations and there isn't anything better or easier to use, it just requires a little elbow grease. For managing Windows workstations Novell is the best thing going (even if NetWare OS is crufty and really only good for file/print duty)
Amen to that, the Weather software I used, AWDS (Automated Weather Distribution System), was very ugly and crufty (and no hope of Y2K compliance, I hope they aren't still trying to use it). It was designed in the '80s but never funded or fielded untill the '90s, but they didn't update their hardware or software specs so people got 10 year old technology at 10 year old prices (remember how much that 40MB HDD cost 15 years ago). It ran on a "Barco Chromatics" machine running what appeared to be a Unix variant (never heard of them, but at least we were able to cannablize the SCSI drives for our 386 desktop machines (in 1997!))
Many of the features didn't work, or were too slow, it had much that was tailored to the Meterologist (ability to define some custom algorythms and do interesting data analysis (LGGs)) but were pretty useless to the work-a-day Forecaster and the features that would have helped were incomplete or broken (useless satellite images, poor/late vector charts from Global Weather, etc.)
They've been patching this system for many, many years and have almost got it useable but because it doesn't even have a hope of Y2K compliance they have to scrap it. Of course when I left last May the next system appeared to still be in the planning stages, without any code actually written. Well they were going to move everything to the WWW, I hope it worked out for them.
Yeah, I just got out of the Military about a year ago and some of this stuff is just funny (well not really). The system we had ran on SunOS 4.1.3 on new(! in 1997 !) SPARCStation 20s. You weren't supposed to be able to get a command shell but oclock was in your startup, just set an alarm and set xterm as the program to run when the alarm goes off, viola! I never tried to get root, although I could have used it a few time instead of trying to work with tech support when something went awry, there were a few known security vulnerabilities, like in tooltalk, that probably never got fixed (in 1999!)
I don't think that this is some unsolvable technical problem. If this fails it is going to be legislative, not technical.
If they want to bankroll this they could probably make it happen. Yes, MP3 pirates (using the word loosely) would probably find annother means of distribution (different ports, changing servers frequently, free accounts, etc.) but it could be very effective against the average Joe surfer. Most people aren't technically inclined enough to try very hard to find this stuff, if they (the Government) can make it difficult or inconvienent then they have achived their objective.
This sounds like the Condor system at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have only read a little about it but as I understand, it works as you describe. Check out their homepage at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor.
I think this is a very good idea. I would like to see service contracts, including remote admining of a system, included with system purchases.
Only major problem is security, how much do you trust this person or company to root around on your computer. Would the average user be able to find out if the admin copied the answers to their purity test, would you be able to tell?
I've seen this a lot. Many systems have 20-50 icons on the desktop, that is how we ship them now. Utterly confusing and worthless, I can never find anything, because they are always sorted differently on every machine, very cluttered.
Also most users refuse to run at resolutions greater than 800x600, some 640x480. And the new machines have Matrox G400 video with like 32MB RAM (and some are shipping with dualhead !!). What a waste.
It seems to me that the CLI is the closest thing to the "Star Trek" voice activated interface you describe. Where else could you tell your computer to 'Update all programs, mail me the results" or one I used recently "find /usr -name *.h | xargs grep foofunction". You could even X-ify it by putting a "| xmessage -file -" at the end, or do it by voice by cutting the first column (before the colon) and dumping to a text-to-speach package.
A CLI is a full-on object-oriented interface that would be difficult to impossible to represent graphically, but one is welcome to try
I agree that it could be easier (MacOS X, MacOS X) but I think that your statements about reworking the filesystem are off base.
I also have to mention MacOS X again, if Apple can make UNIX easy enough for Mac People then we should be able to do at least as well. I feel like I should repeat that last sentance!
Email is supposed to by Mark Tinberg mtinberg@compuserve.com
This is totally off-topic but you wouldn't know where I could find these "MMJ" cables and a MMJ-->9 pin RS-232 adapter. I just happend to buy an old VT420 for pennies, I intend to connect it to one of my Linux boxen. Unfortunately I have no cable. Learning that the cable type is "MMJ" is a big help. If you have any more info I would love to hear it.
Mark Tinberg
The Corel filemanager, based on KDE, has this functionality. The KDE2 filemanager will have this as well. There are several other programs like LinNeighborhood that do this too. Love the freshmeat.
That reminds me, at a place I used to work they had the Kronos timecard system. It uses a barcode reader for the timecards and some DOS software to read the logs, the logs interface into the payroll system. IIRC that could only talk NetBEUI to the NT server they were using, which made the server config just one notch more complicated and made the routing just one notch harder.
I wouldn't worry too much about Caldera (or Lineo, they are two seperate but related companies). I use the OpenLinux distro and have been happy with it, they released their COAS (Caldera Open Admin System) and Lizard (Linux Install wiZARD) as open source. Heck Caldera wrote the Linux IPX stack that has been part of the kernel for like 5 years+.
The proprieatary stuff they mentioned may refer to their web browser (WebSpyder based on the DOS shareware prog Arachne, which I don't know the license of) or something to with the 32bit protected mode API that ships with DR-DOS. Speaking of DR-DOS, anyone remember when they open sourced it and called it OpenDOS? I think they closed the source because of developer disinterest but I could be wrong.
I'll say it again, we are nowhere near and probably never will be near, this concern. Just because it's "Made for RedHat" doesn't mean it won't work just fine on other distros. Linux is Linux. Now getting official support, that may be annother matter. Vendor support needs to be distro neutral, the configuration differences between distros are too small for there to be any technical reason why they cannot support every Linux distro out there. It would be more helpful for them to say, "We support Product-X with Linux 2.2.x and GLIBC 2.1".
I agree with one sentament, the Word Processing/Office Suite market hasn't had any major technical innovation in 10 years. There is very little that I couldn't do with my old, circa 1989, copy of WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 that I can do now.
Not that there hasn't been better, innovative ways to work with words, like LyX (which is based on tech that is older than the hills, TeX and LaTeX) but they haven't caught on. People still make slides as if they were (and some still are) being printed on film, people write letters as if they are using a dumb typewriter (tab stops, underlining, manual labor in formatting, etc.). The only one of these softs that is much different is LyX, everything else is the same old hat.
PS. The preceding post is probably not worth a -1 Troll and should be remoderated up IMHO
I was trying to do something like this at a community center our LUG was helping setup. Right now they are using Windows95 as a microkernel for StarOffice, but as you all know Windows is anything but "micro".
What I wanted to do was migrate them to was very simple local installations of Linux, X and SO only (maybe using remote boot images from the Linux Terminal Server Project. It would have been great, I could have them boot and load SO from a local HDD but have their home directories and mail on the server. SO can do mail, calendar, web browsing, Java, as well as word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, database, etc. so the local admin would only have one program and file tree to maintain.
Unfortunately this won't happen now because they hired a Windows guy to admin and teach, who doesn't know the first thing about Linux. He got frustrated the first day (probably a permissions thing on the Samba shares, maybe he wasn't logging in as himself, who knows?) so he fdisked and formatted the server, without even asking us for help. He is using Win95 File and Print sharing instead of a Samba server, what a maroon.
Hear hear. I've recently taken to do presentations for my local LUG and find LyX 1.1.2 a great benefit. It is pretty easy to learn (took about a day or two of use, would have been less if I wasn't fighting with KLyX first) and generates really nice documents. Not only is the formats for printing nice but with LaTeX2HTML you get great HTML copy as well as PostScript.
Once you figure out the interface (which is really ugly IMHO) it helps you out in many ways, like the fact that the Table of Contents object in your document is a clickable button that brings a popup with a tree of your document structure, just click on the area you want and you are whisked there.
Anyway, Go LyX 1.1.2!
Oh, don't be a troll, you just can't make a Windows -> FreeBSD comparason. FreeBSD is an Open Source, Unix OS that is very reliable.
This is weird but very similar to how New Deal Office (Former GEOS/GEOWorks) works. It has 5 user levels, at the lower level you get less options in most programs, in the higher level you get all the options. That way users don't get confused when they start out but they can step up as they go along (oh, and the user level is adjustable for each major program individually).
I've had good luck with CUPS the Common Unix Printing System. It supports LPD, SMB, AppleTalk, TCP (JetDirect), and the new IPP RFC (Internet Printing Protocol). Also the company that makes it Easy Software Products makes a graphical configurator (not needed) and a set of high quality print filters (very nice) based on GhostScript and .ppd files.