Seems very similar to OS X. Right now, I'm running a Ubuntu box; I found I didn't need root, but enabled it because it, well, it was kinda creepy. Fun fact: IIRC, enabling the root account on an OS X box voids the warranty (someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
I suppose I'll also have to forget all the OS X training I've had. The new fileselector is truly terrible even when compared to NeXT/OS X. They use this terrible concept of buttons to take the place of a useful feature. It's an improvement over the standard GTK+ dialog (at least that part is) but it's like saying that getting hit over the head is better than a severe beating.
I ran GNOME 2.6 for a month. I switched back to KDE.
I found things that I thought were right in GNOME and wrong in KDE; I switched back to KDE, though, because it's a working project, not a conceptual model like GNOME.
And before you look at that UID and think "WTF does he use KDE? Did he finally just start using Linux or something?" well, cram it. I happen to like having a GUI, and as the most complete Free system for *n?x, KDE it is.
Wow, and it's really hard to support VIA processors. No, really, it is. I mean, it's so hard to find a way to support the darn things.
I'm running Debian on a VIA-based box (as my main machine, in fact) and the real secret is don't compile in optional i686 instructions. GCC is braindead in this regard. It doesn't build binaries that do conditional checking; it just goes right ahead as if nothing were wrong. Then you'll get a helpful, meaningful message for any binary built to target i686-type processors:
"Illegal instruction"
Don't trust any software that can't support VIA processors.
Well, apparently Connolly contracted a developer to modify GPLed Mambo code, and when the contractor gave the code back to the original authors, Connolly went apeshit stupid and started threatening to sue Mambo users if they didn't stop using the "illegal" code.
Since my attempts to visit the Furthermore site greet me only with stories about the fight against Mambo, it's hard to tell if they were just selling a service, or if they sell licenses to Furthermore. If it's the latter, I'd STFU if I were Connolly, since he's the one doing illegal things.
Bah. If "the alternatives suck" was the only reason, people would still be using WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Word can't hold a candle to WordPerfect.
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice won't beat Office until vendors stop bundling Microsoft Office and start bundling StarOffice. That's how Microsoft won the war. Don't tell me it's superiority; it was because it was "free."
I'm sitting here at work, posting a comment on Slashdot, and as I type this, a Lexar JumpDrive is plugged into my keyboard.
To think that at some companies there is at least one immediate-termination violation here is frightening. My company seems to love the fact that I take stuff home; as an hourly employee, I don't get paid for the work I do at home!;-D
The thing is, if audiophiles wanted to hear damn-near-prefect signals, they wouldn't be playing records on their tube-amp setups.
I guess I'm an anomaly; I was born in 1975, and grew up hearing audio as presented by American vinyl. Don't believe the hype; engineers did horrible things to audio to make LPs sound good; if you think it's terrible that MP3s use filters to cut down on artifacts, you should hate vinyl. On top of that most the time I heard said records through a tube amp. It sounds warm, yes, but you're not getting the full range of human-hearing-range audio. I can make a transistor amp sound warm, dang it, with the right level of signal degradation.
Ditto. Using UNIX-style systems since late 1996, and I use KDE. I get so sick of the gits on Slashdot assuming that only drooling morons use KDE and GNOME.
Hell, I had trouble with a Lexar JumpDrive (a USB solid-state storage device) today on Windows XP. Had the thing in my pocket, at my parents' house, and they wanted me to touch up a photo but seemed reluctant for me to take the original. OK, no problem. So I sat down at their computer, fired up their image-editing software, and set the scanner to scan at 1200dpi, grayscale. Then:
1. I plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive. 2. I went to My Computer, and was delighted to learn that the JumpDrive hadn't been detected. 3. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive. 4. Went into the Control Panel and Device Profiles, only to find that some sort of obscure-sounding USB device was misconfigured. Since they have a largely from-the-factory-setup Dell, I thought that had to be my hardware. Let Windows search for the drivers; it failed. 5. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive. 6. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive. 7. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive. 8. Restarted the XP machine, because my parents said they'd had the machine "acting squirly for a while." 9. Waited for restart, opened My Computer. 10. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive. 11. Went to the Lexar website looking for 3rd-party drivers. None available or needed. 12. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive. 13. Went to the Dell website. Waited for an eternity for the site to load. 14. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive to get a specific model number, and typed it into a Search box. 15. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive. 16. Raise an eyebrow since the device was autodetected and properly configured without human intervention.
Contrast this with my experience with a relatively user-unfriendly Linux install:
1. Plug in the Lexar JumpDrive. 2. Do some command-line magick to find that it's set up as/dev/sda1. 3. Edit/etc/fstab. 4. Set up a KDE device icon. 5. Click on the icon. Note: from now on, clicking on the icon mounts the device and opens a Konqueror window, while right-clicking gives me an unmount option.
Agreed. The name is more descriptive. I'm sure we've all had a well-meaning relative send us a forward of a fictional Abbott and Costello routine about the names of Microsoft products. Somehow "Windows" means "Operating System" and "Office" means "Word Processor, Presentation App, Spreadsheet, Low-End Desktop Publishing, and Database Frontend"
This may be a copy-and-paste, but I have to agree. When I'm given the choice of Enterprise vs. Stargate SG-1, and want to watch Stargate because it's deeper, there's something very wrong.:-D
Um, yes, there is an advantage. That's what the journal is for (duh.)
It astounds me that your post was marked as "Informative," because it's downright wrong.
Now, if you're talking about fsck after a certain number of boots, or a full fsck for whatever reason, then no, there's no advantage over ext2. It's ext2 + improvements + journal, for the most part.
For my money, using ext3 without btree hash dirs is stupid nowadays. Go back and bench reiser vs. ext3. ext3 is usually still slower, but the gap is narrower nowadays.
You know, I used to say the same thing. I recently moved *from* Gentoo *to* Debian, and I have a few things to say on the subject.
See, the thing is, Debian tries to be this safe-as-milk Linux distribution. Packages are compiled (in most cases) in the most generic way possible. There are exceptions, such as kernel images, but other than that, on x86, it's i386 all the way. That cuts down on performance a little.
Having said that, now that I've bothered to configure my Debian system, I don't notice much of a difference at all in performance.
What did I do? I took a bit of what I had learned in the Gentoo world and applied it to Debian. I'm not running syslog/klog anymore; instead, I'm running metalog in async mode. I have all my partitions mounted with the noatime option, and the reiserfs partitions are mounted with notail. I made the root partition ext3; I formatted the partition to have sparse superblocks and to use btree hash directory structures. I've added local changes to tweak harddrive performance. Finally, I audited what services needed to be running and got rid of anything that wasn't necessary. I'm not done yet, either. Doing things like switching to faster, lighter getty alternatives help, and there are other speed improvements that can be made.
Much is made of custom CFLAGS in the land of Gentoo, but the real power (if you start at stage1) is being able to build a smarter, lighter Linux system from the beginning.
These are all things that some Linux-on-the-desktop distribution could do automagically, naturally, if you're thinking "yeah, buddy, sounds *reeeeal* easy har har har." Well, it wasn't that bad, and I relieved myself of the headache of devoting my main box to building KDE packages. Some joker with a blazing-fast P4 and several megatons of RAM can do that for me.;-D
I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.
Ah, yes -- the GNOME document written by GNOME developers to describe how GNOME apps work. Anyone who disagrees with the way an app looks will more than likely be referred to this document as being the authority on how GNOME apps should look, and complaining about how an app looks and works when the app is HIG-compliant is the quickest way to have your complaint labeled as "stupid."
Get a clue, people. When many people complain about the same thing--when users complain about it--it's not the users' fault. And if you think the users are stupid, and that they're at fault, PLEASE STOP DEVELOPING SOFTWARE. YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS MAKING "USER-FRIENDLY" SOFTWARE IF YOU DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT THE USER.
*Ahem.* I can't stress that enough! If your attitude is that the user is "stupid" because button order is "backward", don't call the person stupid. The user, after all, expects an app to behave a certain way. Who did you write the software for? That's right: The USER. If you're grumbling about the idiot user not knowing how the app behaves because the user is ignorant of the HIG, maybe, oh just maybe, for a change, perhaps the HIG is wrong?
Moses didn't bring the HIG down from On High. Stop treating it that way, admit that the GNOME HIG isn't perfect, revise it and unfuck the monumental fuck-up. Well, maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but you get my point. If you haven't gotten my point yet, perhaps you're too dense to step foot outside your house in the morning!;-D
But on a more serious note, folks, if y'all are so worried about the user, maybe you need to worry about the users for a change, rather than about how you can follow some obscure usability study, or about finding ways to dumb down your apps. Users aren't as stupid as you think they are, and no matter what your friendly local user-interface researcher has told you, users can tell you what works for them and what doesn't. Give it a try, willya?
Seriously, are there any losers out there that can't deal with PDF anymore? It seems odd, but then again, it should be no more than a minor annoyance. Even KDE users get a nice embedded view of a PDF nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, shit. That's embarrassing.
Typos happen. *shrug*
You can't tell me a misplaced apostrophe is a typo, though. Look at a QWERTY keyboard, and you'll see how it happened.
Oh, dear God.
An introcuction to the apostrophe seems to be necessary.
What you said was: "Wikipedia let us any third grader edit articles willy nillie."
An apostrophe is not a decoration.
Wordiness was all the rage in the 19th century; it's the 21st century now.
You wouldn't say that if you knew how much they had charged for, say, photos of this event. ;-D
Seems very similar to OS X. Right now, I'm running a Ubuntu box; I found I didn't need root, but enabled it because it, well, it was kinda creepy. Fun fact: IIRC, enabling the root account on an OS X box voids the warranty (someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
I suppose I'll also have to forget all the OS X training I've had. The new fileselector is truly terrible even when compared to NeXT/OS X. They use this terrible concept of buttons to take the place of a useful feature. It's an improvement over the standard GTK+ dialog (at least that part is) but it's like saying that getting hit over the head is better than a severe beating.
I ran GNOME 2.6 for a month. I switched back to KDE.
I found things that I thought were right in GNOME and wrong in KDE; I switched back to KDE, though, because it's a working project, not a conceptual model like GNOME.
And before you look at that UID and think "WTF does he use KDE? Did he finally just start using Linux or something?" well, cram it. I happen to like having a GUI, and as the most complete Free system for *n?x, KDE it is.
I'm running Debian on a VIA-based box (as my main machine, in fact) and the real secret is don't compile in optional i686 instructions. GCC is braindead in this regard. It doesn't build binaries that do conditional checking; it just goes right ahead as if nothing were wrong. Then you'll get a helpful, meaningful message for any binary built to target i686-type processors:
"Illegal instruction"
Don't trust any software that can't support VIA processors.
Well, apparently Connolly contracted a developer to modify GPLed Mambo code, and when the contractor gave the code back to the original authors, Connolly went apeshit stupid and started threatening to sue Mambo users if they didn't stop using the "illegal" code.
Since my attempts to visit the Furthermore site greet me only with stories about the fight against Mambo, it's hard to tell if they were just selling a service, or if they sell licenses to Furthermore. If it's the latter, I'd STFU if I were Connolly, since he's the one doing illegal things.
Bah. If "the alternatives suck" was the only reason, people would still be using WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Word can't hold a candle to WordPerfect.
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice won't beat Office until vendors stop bundling Microsoft Office and start bundling StarOffice. That's how Microsoft won the war. Don't tell me it's superiority; it was because it was "free."
I'm sitting here at work, posting a comment on Slashdot, and as I type this, a Lexar JumpDrive is plugged into my keyboard.
;-D
To think that at some companies there is at least one immediate-termination violation here is frightening. My company seems to love the fact that I take stuff home; as an hourly employee, I don't get paid for the work I do at home!
The thing is, if audiophiles wanted to hear damn-near-prefect signals, they wouldn't be playing records on their tube-amp setups.
I guess I'm an anomaly; I was born in 1975, and grew up hearing audio as presented by American vinyl. Don't believe the hype; engineers did horrible things to audio to make LPs sound good; if you think it's terrible that MP3s use filters to cut down on artifacts, you should hate vinyl. On top of that most the time I heard said records through a tube amp. It sounds warm, yes, but you're not getting the full range of human-hearing-range audio. I can make a transistor amp sound warm, dang it, with the right level of signal degradation.
Ditto. Using UNIX-style systems since late 1996, and I use KDE. I get so sick of the gits on Slashdot assuming that only drooling morons use KDE and GNOME.
Hell, I had trouble with a Lexar JumpDrive (a USB solid-state storage device) today on Windows XP. Had the thing in my pocket, at my parents' house, and they wanted me to touch up a photo but seemed reluctant for me to take the original. OK, no problem. So I sat down at their computer, fired up their image-editing software, and set the scanner to scan at 1200dpi, grayscale. Then:
/dev/sda1. /etc/fstab.
1. I plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
2. I went to My Computer, and was delighted to learn that the JumpDrive hadn't been detected.
3. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
4. Went into the Control Panel and Device Profiles, only to find that some sort of obscure-sounding USB device was misconfigured. Since they have a largely from-the-factory-setup Dell, I thought that had to be my hardware. Let Windows search for the drivers; it failed.
5. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
6. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
7. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
8. Restarted the XP machine, because my parents said they'd had the machine "acting squirly for a while."
9. Waited for restart, opened My Computer.
10. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive.
11. Went to the Lexar website looking for 3rd-party drivers. None available or needed.
12. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
13. Went to the Dell website. Waited for an eternity for the site to load.
14. Unplugged the Lexar JumpDrive to get a specific model number, and typed it into a Search box.
15. Plugged in the Lexar JumpDrive.
16. Raise an eyebrow since the device was autodetected and properly configured without human intervention.
Contrast this with my experience with a relatively user-unfriendly Linux install:
1. Plug in the Lexar JumpDrive.
2. Do some command-line magick to find that it's set up as
3. Edit
4. Set up a KDE device icon.
5. Click on the icon. Note: from now on, clicking on the icon mounts the device and opens a Konqueror window, while right-clicking gives me an unmount option.
Or, on Mac OS X:
1. Plug in the Lexar JumpDrive.
Agreed. The name is more descriptive. I'm sure we've all had a well-meaning relative send us a forward of a fictional Abbott and Costello routine about the names of Microsoft products. Somehow "Windows" means "Operating System" and "Office" means "Word Processor, Presentation App, Spreadsheet, Low-End Desktop Publishing, and Database Frontend"
*shrug*
This may be a copy-and-paste, but I have to agree. When I'm given the choice of Enterprise vs. Stargate SG-1, and want to watch Stargate because it's deeper, there's something very wrong. :-D
Using four pixels demonstrates a concern for book learning and formal rules?
Huh?
I hate to pick nits, but OpenOffice already supports databases directly stored in files. It's just that they're dBase files.
Yeah, real shame about IBM's patent on the same technology...
Um, yes, there is an advantage. That's what the journal is for (duh.)
It astounds me that your post was marked as "Informative," because it's downright wrong.
Now, if you're talking about fsck after a certain number of boots, or a full fsck for whatever reason, then no, there's no advantage over ext2. It's ext2 + improvements + journal, for the most part.
For my money, using ext3 without btree hash dirs is stupid nowadays. Go back and bench reiser vs. ext3. ext3 is usually still slower, but the gap is narrower nowadays.
You know, I used to say the same thing. I recently moved *from* Gentoo *to* Debian, and I have a few things to say on the subject.
;-D
See, the thing is, Debian tries to be this safe-as-milk Linux distribution. Packages are compiled (in most cases) in the most generic way possible. There are exceptions, such as kernel images, but other than that, on x86, it's i386 all the way. That cuts down on performance a little.
Having said that, now that I've bothered to configure my Debian system, I don't notice much of a difference at all in performance.
What did I do? I took a bit of what I had learned in the Gentoo world and applied it to Debian. I'm not running syslog/klog anymore; instead, I'm running metalog in async mode. I have all my partitions mounted with the noatime option, and the reiserfs partitions are mounted with notail. I made the root partition ext3; I formatted the partition to have sparse superblocks and to use btree hash directory structures. I've added local changes to tweak harddrive performance. Finally, I audited what services needed to be running and got rid of anything that wasn't necessary. I'm not done yet, either. Doing things like switching to faster, lighter getty alternatives help, and there are other speed improvements that can be made.
Much is made of custom CFLAGS in the land of Gentoo, but the real power (if you start at stage1) is being able to build a smarter, lighter Linux system from the beginning.
These are all things that some Linux-on-the-desktop distribution could do automagically, naturally, if you're thinking "yeah, buddy, sounds *reeeeal* easy har har har." Well, it wasn't that bad, and I relieved myself of the headache of devoting my main box to building KDE packages. Some joker with a blazing-fast P4 and several megatons of RAM can do that for me.
How do you emulate an 8 inch drive?
Forks, which Apple is moving away from?
Oog.
Ah, yes -- the GNOME document written by GNOME developers to describe how GNOME apps work. Anyone who disagrees with the way an app looks will more than likely be referred to this document as being the authority on how GNOME apps should look, and complaining about how an app looks and works when the app is HIG-compliant is the quickest way to have your complaint labeled as "stupid."
Get a clue, people. When many people complain about the same thing--when users complain about it--it's not the users' fault. And if you think the users are stupid, and that they're at fault, PLEASE STOP DEVELOPING SOFTWARE. YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS MAKING "USER-FRIENDLY" SOFTWARE IF YOU DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT THE USER.
*Ahem.* I can't stress that enough! If your attitude is that the user is "stupid" because button order is "backward", don't call the person stupid. The user, after all, expects an app to behave a certain way. Who did you write the software for? That's right: The USER. If you're grumbling about the idiot user not knowing how the app behaves because the user is ignorant of the HIG, maybe, oh just maybe, for a change, perhaps the HIG is wrong?
Moses didn't bring the HIG down from On High. Stop treating it that way, admit that the GNOME HIG isn't perfect, revise it and unfuck the monumental fuck-up. Well, maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but you get my point. If you haven't gotten my point yet, perhaps you're too dense to step foot outside your house in the morning!
But on a more serious note, folks, if y'all are so worried about the user, maybe you need to worry about the users for a change, rather than about how you can follow some obscure usability study, or about finding ways to dumb down your apps. Users aren't as stupid as you think they are, and no matter what your friendly local user-interface researcher has told you, users can tell you what works for them and what doesn't. Give it a try, willya?
Seriously, are there any losers out there that can't deal with PDF anymore? It seems odd, but then again, it should be no more than a minor annoyance. Even KDE users get a nice embedded view of a PDF nowadays.