Environment and upbringing play some role as well. Small children (toddlers+) are equally interested in pretty much everything because everything is new to them. As their character becomes better defined, they will lean towards something, not necessarily because of an innate preference but because of external factors, e.g. "more toys of that type" or "parents engaging in activities of this type more". I am too lazy to look this up but my guess is that children whose parents are artists will more likely become artists as well, and people who grow up in a mist of numbers (math) will become better at math, simply because there's plenty of math to go around them.
* No GUI for a lot of small-thing configuration activities; * Invariably having to drop to terminal to do this and that; * When I double-click on an "executable" I want it to execute, not open it in whatever equivalent of Notepad there is; * I want my updates to install as seamlessly as possible, e.g. download and install updates in the background then let me know I need to restart (if that's the case), much like Android does; * App store for my favorite flavor, where I could sort by features, not by category; * While you're at it, give the applications proper names. A Text editor named "Kate"? A streaming application called "XBMC"? A music placer called "Clementine", "Banshee" or "Amarok"? Please... * Make it absurdly easy to mount an ISO or browse a network/network share. * Enable "Win" key functionality and try to replicate as many "Win"+key commands to make former Windows-based power users feel at home (Win+R, Win+Arrows). * Make it easy to search for files and folders. Many times I copied a file or downloaded a file and I had no idea where it was, searching for it yielded no results but manually browsing around eventually found it. Y U NO SEARCH???
The above are off the top of my head and represent just a little part of my overall "user-inducing frustration" that pretty much every Desktop Linux flavor thrown at me so far.
I don't know how to best emphasize on this: as a desktop user, I simply loathe having to open terminal and drop to root 50 times a day, when whatever I have to do should involve a right-click and picking a menu entry or a couple checkmarks selected in a configuration GUI window. People eventually start doing everything as root and then they are laughed at for "not being secure". Well, doh. It's the OS pushing that behavior, not the user choosing it deliberately.
I'm not spreading shit, dumbass, I live on a different continent and here where I am people just make do, they don't appear on TV saying "hey we have cars but we don't have GAS MONEY".
Yeah, I saw a documentary about poor people in the US - they were wearing nice clothing and were complaining they have no money for GAS and had to ditch their TV. I have to say it: you have a very weird definition of "poor".
Semantics. You can call it however you want, for all I care. The term was coined not because it's similar from a venue or ruleset perspective, but because: 1. They are played; 2. They're played competitively; 3. They had to be compared with something that's known to a large amount of people.
Book versus E-book. Magazine versus eZine. Mail versus e-mail. eSports are more closely related to sports than extreme ironing, but who am I to judge?
Disclaimer: I don't practice (because I suck) or watch eSports (because I find them boring to watch).
* Naïve people unfamiliar with local gang activity patterns * Suicidal depressives * etc...
Those guys would go to the wrong places themselves anyway, autonomous cars notwithstanding. On top of that, Autonomous cars could have a certain form of biometric identification implemented (FPR, iris recognition or both), therefore effectively blocking any unauthorized person from giving commands.
Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?
A gazillion. But the analogy is incorrect. Music is entertainment and nothing more. Science is much, much more than that.
Again, mindset. Documentation should not be perceived as "optional bone thrown to the hungry masses". It's part of the process. You actually START with it, during the design phase. You explain how the application works, to yourself, then as you code you develop that document as well. My project already has 3 large mindmaps where I write everything, from descriptions to formulas to examples. That is before one single line of code is written, and each column, table and SQL script has descriptions and explanations. Is it tedious? Hell yeah. Is it helpful? Enormously so. My time spent writing megabytes of plaintext is time saved while developing and building a wiki later on.
And if, months or years from now, I get bored or caught up in something else, someone else could simply pick up from where I left and continue developing right away, the chances of that happening being directly proportional to the clarity of documentation.
Oracle software is particularly bad about this, as well as being broken in ways that make it almost nonfunctional for many of it's advertised purposes.
I actually prefer it that way. Simple enough for the knowledgeable, with drill-down capability for those who need more detail about step X or have a custom configuration that needs taken care of. Beats man pages anyway.
I just said I am not an end user. I have a project which requires a complex database and a dedicated server. I don't need an user-oriented distro. I need an "enterprisey" one:)
If someone comes along and gives you a free hamburger, you don't complain that they didn't bring fries and a drink.
But if the hamburger tastes bad and you are not sure what's in it,. you might want to ask. And if you ask and are given an answer like "hey it's free, eat it or GTFO" it doesn't make the giver less of an asshole.
True words, I've seen people who behaved like that. Here's a funny story that I was involved in a couple years ago.
My desk was at the time located on a developer-heavy floor, very silent, with everybody neck-deep into their code. They generally regarded me as "the uninitiated", treating me with contempt, at most. Hardly ever anyone talking to me. Two developers were sitting across my desk and they were smokers, so we occasionally ended up on the balcony together. One day, they were talking about an application UI bug which they were trying to fix. I, as a non-developer, was ignored, of course, but I was shamelessly eavesdropping in the hopes I would learn something from their... um, well, gibberish (of sorts). The UI bug was around some fields not being populated automatically when values were selected in others. Think of it as a chain of picklists with dynamically populated List-Of-Values. I gathered my strengths and asked them whether it could be the fact that some picklists are populated in the wrong chronological order. They looked at me in a weird way, said nothing, then thrown their cigarette butts and went inside. I felt like a kid asking "Mooom, what's a dick?" during Uncle Moke's funeral. Couple hours pass and they come to me and ask me whether I would join them for another cigarette. I was very much surprised. On the balcony, they told me I was actually right and the bug was fixed. Glad I could help. They respected me and talked to me a lot more after that, and I helped them crush a few more bugs by just listening to them while they explained what was wrong and brainstorming what might cause it. We still keep in touch even if they moved to a different company.
While the above wall of text is a bit offtopic, the idea is that if a developer treats everyone else as if they are no good, he might miss opportunities.
I write code as a hobby and *gasp* I thoroughly document it, and in all fairness I don't do it for my customers (I have none) but for myself. I realized, couple decades ago, that if I don't comment my code it's a lot more difficult for me to remember what I did months or years later.
Both. The difference between FOSS and paid software responses is probably due to the fact that people who moderate, help and answer on paid software communities might get warned or fired if they misbehave.
I remember that I have installed a Linux server back in 2000 for the purpose of hosting an IRC server and tried installing a shell, basically a bot which would moderate certain channels. It was a pet project of mine, but for some reason the IRC shell was misbehaving. I don't really remember what the problem was but I clearly remember that I went to a LUG (Linux Users Group) mailing list and posted everything that I tried, I was instantly mocked as a script kiddie and made fun of, etc.
Few years later I tried using Wine under Red Hat and there was a sound issue (no sound). Again, I posted on a forum about that, I was called an idiot for not being able to figure it out. I admit my experience with Linux is fairly limited, but I'm willing to learn. However, I am not willing to learn against all odds. To make an analogy, if you want to teach your kid to ride a bike, you don't hop him on and shove him down a hill, laughing and calling him idiot when he falls and bruises a knee. You'll end up with a wimp instead of a bike racer.
Last year I installed a commercial Linux flavor together with a commercial database on a dedicated machine, it worked fine until I shut down the machine, physically moved it and restarted it. The DB wouldn't start. I posted on their forums, got 3 pages of troubleshooting replies, with lists of commands, and when all that failed someone was kind enough to remotely connect to my machine and troubleshoot the issue himself, and all that during the trial period, before I even paid a dime. For security reasons, he didn't connect directly to my server, but we established a remote session to my desktop and I manually entered my credentials for remote connection, so it was all good. Unrelated, but it was a product whose maker is kind of hated here on/. I still have that DB online, although I still haven't bought support from them. No doubt that advanced support would likely cost a lot, but now I have backups and it's a dev environment so no biggie if I have to reinstall.
As for your own experience: maybe you are more advanced than me and you hit the brick wall further down the path, hence the different experience.
Wait, wait. We're talking about different things here. In a dev house, as you call it, there's going to be different people with different jobs. The developer writes code and comments it, then there's a content writer who does the documentation. Also these tend to be for-profit organizations which don't do much OFSS (if any at all).
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Environment and upbringing play some role as well.
Small children (toddlers+) are equally interested in pretty much everything because everything is new to them. As their character becomes better defined, they will lean towards something, not necessarily because of an innate preference but because of external factors, e.g. "more toys of that type" or "parents engaging in activities of this type more".
I am too lazy to look this up but my guess is that children whose parents are artists will more likely become artists as well, and people who grow up in a mist of numbers (math) will become better at math, simply because there's plenty of math to go around them.
* No GUI for a lot of small-thing configuration activities;
* Invariably having to drop to terminal to do this and that;
* When I double-click on an "executable" I want it to execute, not open it in whatever equivalent of Notepad there is;
* I want my updates to install as seamlessly as possible, e.g. download and install updates in the background then let me know I need to restart (if that's the case), much like Android does;
* App store for my favorite flavor, where I could sort by features, not by category;
* While you're at it, give the applications proper names. A Text editor named "Kate"? A streaming application called "XBMC"? A music placer called "Clementine", "Banshee" or "Amarok"? Please...
* Make it absurdly easy to mount an ISO or browse a network/network share.
* Enable "Win" key functionality and try to replicate as many "Win"+key commands to make former Windows-based power users feel at home (Win+R, Win+Arrows).
* Make it easy to search for files and folders. Many times I copied a file or downloaded a file and I had no idea where it was, searching for it yielded no results but manually browsing around eventually found it. Y U NO SEARCH???
The above are off the top of my head and represent just a little part of my overall "user-inducing frustration" that pretty much every Desktop Linux flavor thrown at me so far.
I don't know how to best emphasize on this: as a desktop user, I simply loathe having to open terminal and drop to root 50 times a day, when whatever I have to do should involve a right-click and picking a menu entry or a couple checkmarks selected in a configuration GUI window. People eventually start doing everything as root and then they are laughed at for "not being secure". Well, doh. It's the OS pushing that behavior, not the user choosing it deliberately.
Wasn't "HH" forbidden in Germany? Arguably Austria too?
Fibonacci FTW.
633K out of how many? What's the percentage again? How does it stand against the rest of the world?
Take a look then come back... coward.
I'm not spreading shit, dumbass, I live on a different continent and here where I am people just make do, they don't appear on TV saying "hey we have cars but we don't have GAS MONEY".
Yeah, I saw a documentary about poor people in the US - they were wearing nice clothing and were complaining they have no money for GAS and had to ditch their TV.
I have to say it: you have a very weird definition of "poor".
Semantics.
You can call it however you want, for all I care. The term was coined not because it's similar from a venue or ruleset perspective, but because:
1. They are played;
2. They're played competitively;
3. They had to be compared with something that's known to a large amount of people.
Book versus E-book. Magazine versus eZine. Mail versus e-mail.
eSports are more closely related to sports than extreme ironing, but who am I to judge?
Disclaimer: I don't practice (because I suck) or watch eSports (because I find them boring to watch).
This would be a great idea for a Twilight Zone episode... oh wait...
* Naïve people unfamiliar with local gang activity patterns
* Suicidal depressives
* etc...
Those guys would go to the wrong places themselves anyway, autonomous cars notwithstanding.
On top of that, Autonomous cars could have a certain form of biometric identification implemented (FPR, iris recognition or both), therefore effectively blocking any unauthorized person from giving commands.
+1 funny!
Firstly, if we stick with the music analogy, how many artists or tracks have you discovered by random, and in doing so expanded your listening choices?
A gazillion.
But the analogy is incorrect. Music is entertainment and nothing more. Science is much, much more than that.
Again, mindset.
Documentation should not be perceived as "optional bone thrown to the hungry masses". It's part of the process. You actually START with it, during the design phase. You explain how the application works, to yourself, then as you code you develop that document as well.
My project already has 3 large mindmaps where I write everything, from descriptions to formulas to examples. That is before one single line of code is written, and each column, table and SQL script has descriptions and explanations. Is it tedious? Hell yeah. Is it helpful? Enormously so. My time spent writing megabytes of plaintext is time saved while developing and building a wiki later on.
And if, months or years from now, I get bored or caught up in something else, someone else could simply pick up from where I left and continue developing right away, the chances of that happening being directly proportional to the clarity of documentation.
Oracle software is particularly bad about this, as well as being broken in ways that make it almost nonfunctional for many of it's advertised purposes.
Really?
http://www.oracle.com/technetw...
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E282...
Yes, Oracle documentation is inherently complicated, because its products are very complicated. Comprehensive documentation tends to be that way.
I actually prefer it that way. Simple enough for the knowledgeable, with drill-down capability for those who need more detail about step X or have a custom configuration that needs taken care of.
Beats man pages anyway.
I feel you, bro...
I just said I am not an end user. I have a project which requires a complex database and a dedicated server. I don't need an user-oriented distro. I need an "enterprisey" one :)
If someone comes along and gives you a free hamburger, you don't complain that they didn't bring fries and a drink.
But if the hamburger tastes bad and you are not sure what's in it,. you might want to ask. And if you ask and are given an answer like "hey it's free, eat it or GTFO" it doesn't make the giver less of an asshole.
True words, I've seen people who behaved like that.
Here's a funny story that I was involved in a couple years ago.
My desk was at the time located on a developer-heavy floor, very silent, with everybody neck-deep into their code. They generally regarded me as "the uninitiated", treating me with contempt, at most. Hardly ever anyone talking to me. Two developers were sitting across my desk and they were smokers, so we occasionally ended up on the balcony together. One day, they were talking about an application UI bug which they were trying to fix. I, as a non-developer, was ignored, of course, but I was shamelessly eavesdropping in the hopes I would learn something from their... um, well, gibberish (of sorts). The UI bug was around some fields not being populated automatically when values were selected in others. Think of it as a chain of picklists with dynamically populated List-Of-Values.
I gathered my strengths and asked them whether it could be the fact that some picklists are populated in the wrong chronological order. They looked at me in a weird way, said nothing, then thrown their cigarette butts and went inside. I felt like a kid asking "Mooom, what's a dick?" during Uncle Moke's funeral.
Couple hours pass and they come to me and ask me whether I would join them for another cigarette. I was very much surprised. On the balcony, they told me I was actually right and the bug was fixed.
Glad I could help.
They respected me and talked to me a lot more after that, and I helped them crush a few more bugs by just listening to them while they explained what was wrong and brainstorming what might cause it. We still keep in touch even if they moved to a different company.
While the above wall of text is a bit offtopic, the idea is that if a developer treats everyone else as if they are no good, he might miss opportunities.
I don't use Linux for day-to-day work (or fun). I use RHEL and CentOS.
Further proof that what I'm saying makes sense. Thank you.
I write code as a hobby and *gasp* I thoroughly document it, and in all fairness I don't do it for my customers (I have none) but for myself. I realized, couple decades ago, that if I don't comment my code it's a lot more difficult for me to remember what I did months or years later.
Both.
The difference between FOSS and paid software responses is probably due to the fact that people who moderate, help and answer on paid software communities might get warned or fired if they misbehave.
I remember that I have installed a Linux server back in 2000 for the purpose of hosting an IRC server and tried installing a shell, basically a bot which would moderate certain channels. It was a pet project of mine, but for some reason the IRC shell was misbehaving. I don't really remember what the problem was but I clearly remember that I went to a LUG (Linux Users Group) mailing list and posted everything that I tried, I was instantly mocked as a script kiddie and made fun of, etc.
Few years later I tried using Wine under Red Hat and there was a sound issue (no sound). Again, I posted on a forum about that, I was called an idiot for not being able to figure it out. I admit my experience with Linux is fairly limited, but I'm willing to learn. However, I am not willing to learn against all odds. To make an analogy, if you want to teach your kid to ride a bike, you don't hop him on and shove him down a hill, laughing and calling him idiot when he falls and bruises a knee. You'll end up with a wimp instead of a bike racer.
Last year I installed a commercial Linux flavor together with a commercial database on a dedicated machine, it worked fine until I shut down the machine, physically moved it and restarted it. The DB wouldn't start. I posted on their forums, got 3 pages of troubleshooting replies, with lists of commands, and when all that failed someone was kind enough to remotely connect to my machine and troubleshoot the issue himself, and all that during the trial period, before I even paid a dime. For security reasons, he didn't connect directly to my server, but we established a remote session to my desktop and I manually entered my credentials for remote connection, so it was all good. Unrelated, but it was a product whose maker is kind of hated here on /. I still have that DB online, although I still haven't bought support from them. No doubt that advanced support would likely cost a lot, but now I have backups and it's a dev environment so no biggie if I have to reinstall.
As for your own experience: maybe you are more advanced than me and you hit the brick wall further down the path, hence the different experience.
True, but it might antagonize other posters. :)
Rarely would a constructive discussion stem from that kind of foul-word-peppered root
Wait, wait. We're talking about different things here.
In a dev house, as you call it, there's going to be different people with different jobs. The developer writes code and comments it, then there's a content writer who does the documentation. Also these tend to be for-profit organizations which don't do much OFSS (if any at all).