I believe it's possible to eliminate greed by creating very, very stable societies, which is possibly what religions try to do. It's not been very successful so far, I'll grant you.
I think there's more of a chance by setting up societies which allow people to basically remain children, psychologically. Opportunities for play + no perceived threats might do it, and I think we are slowly moving in that direction (often in a three steps forward, two steps back kind of a way.)
My passion is actually remarkably ephemeral these days. I'm getting to that Zen point where I'm not really sure I mind too much what happens next, but every now and then an opportunity arises to drop in the odd comment, so I do it.
Real businesses.. those real businesses and real society seem to have done a pretty good job of trashing the economy, the environment, and often people's own health. Are you sure sure y'all don't feel the need for any help, yet?;-)
Actually, I'm not convinced you're really on the side of the greedy, and I notice you don't claim to be. After all, properly greedy people presumably spend all their time out there making money (and/or having sex), not pricking other people's bubbles in/. comments;-) I'm guessing you've learnt to accomodate the status quo in order to survive, which is fine (after all, survival is prerequisite for doing anything interesting), but I reckon it's worth keeping an eye on possible futures - you never know when an opportunity might arise to nudge things in a saner direction when nobody's looking!
ideas on organization are always in competition. what is the yardstick we use to measure them? simple monetary success or monetary failure.
But maybe that won't be the criterion that people involved actually use. IME, the more people really enjoy what they do, the happier they are just to be able to cover basic living costs. If the company were to tick over for a decade or so generating enough income for the people involved to live on without screwing anybody over or trashing the environment, I think that might meet quite few people's ideas of "success."
I like to believe that I can see a distinct cultural change happening these days: people want to remain child-like for longer, and are increasingly resistant to anything that forces them to grow up. This has its downsides, of course, as anybody with conservative tendencies will have noticed (and I have a few myself): failure to take responsibility, solipsism / narcissism, selfishness. But the flip-side is that people don't want to live with the sort of constant low-grade background anxiety that the current socio-economic system generates, and want to be able to play, i.e. do creative stuff they like. We may be able to transcend that Darwinian struggle, and if the opportunity's there, it's worth making the attempt..
Sure, but by the model they've outlined, you won't earn anything for it unless other contributors find it valuable.
And they might. Back in the late 90s, I spent "far too much time" reading and browsing when I should have been coding, but the flip side was that I knew just enough about all sorts of emerging technologies to judge whether it was worth us investing them, and to recommend them to my colleagues. (The running joke became that I knew everything, but actually I knew just enough about a lot of things to know where to go for more information.)
It sounds like a fairly reasonable pragmatic approach to enable bootstrapping of the system. Hopefully in the short-term the prospect of $$$ will override people's moral objections to the closed-source core, and in the long-term it would prove itself unnecessary, or at the very least the closed core would be accessible to enough users/developers that everybody would know somebody who they trusted who could access that core..
In the short- to medium- term: the company can decide to contract that stuff out, presumably.
Long-term: you might be surprised how many people would happy doing something relatively menial if they're doing it for people they like and in the aid of cause that seems worthwhile. The biggest problem I can see is getting people to notice the small stuff enough to allow the guy who cleans the loos to get some money..
if I upmod some stranger, he gets a bigger piece of the pie - every upmod I do makes my take smaller.
Only if the pot stays the same size. If your upmod encourages someone to make the product / company more competitive, and the revenue grows, you both win.
I reckon a lot of people object to socialism, and in particular communism as practiced in the last century, because of a sense that it's being forced on them.
If it comes about naturally and organically, managing to grow from within the existing economic situation, that's a whole other thing, and much more interesting.
It's possible to do things like marketing and sales well and ethically. If you actually believe in a product and have a genuine interest in helping your customers, so you're basically acting as a liaison between the customer and the company, rather than an employee of the latter.
I think most "open" programmers would respect that sort of marketing. There'd probably even be significant overlap between the two jobs..
Nobody's mentioned the Cluetrain Manifesto yet. Have we got a generation of slashdotters who weren't around at the time who need to be pointed at it?
I've always figured women are just more sensible and are quietly mulling over the details while the men are concocting grand plans to conquer the world / explain the origins of the universe / wipe the floor with the competition / eradicate terrorism. I presume the biological or cultural origins of the latter are in the need to have men around to supply essential protein (by killing it - requiring a certain amount hubris!) and protect the tribe from other men, with the former is something to do with child-rearing: caring for a young child basically means paying close attention to it.
Whatever it is, it's obviously overridable, but there is a definite trend..
So long as the OS scheduler is smart enough to keep each process on the same core to avoid cache thrashing, all the while num_procs < num_cores.. This was a problem at one point - I presume it's been fixed by now.
My great-uncle was A. S. Neill - sadly he died before I was born.
I think these ideas are finally catching on, but it remains to be seen whether they'll manage to set the world alight or just get blown out. There seems to be a developing kernel of kids in the 1/2 generation or so below me (Gen Y — they're not all narcissistic solipsists, thankfully!) who "get it" and haven't (yet) been broken by the realities of adult life. Maybe they'll make it through, either with the assistance of their elders or through their own strength..
Incidentally, learning may not survive starvation, but I think wisdom does. As it's pretty much all I've been left with, I'm hoping it will one day turn out to be useful..:/
The "workaround" is understanding how the platform you're targeting actually works rather than making guesses. fsync() and even fdatasync() have been around for ages and are documented. *NIX directories have always just been more or less lists of (name,inode_no) tuples, which is why hard links are part of the platform. There isn't really any magical connection between an inode and the directories it happens to be listed in.
Ted knows this stuff inside and out and is almost ridiculously reasonable compared to many people I've met with his level of expertise. The patches to enable the actual workaround were available pretty much at the same time the awareness of this bug hit the mainstream. Given the flak he was taking, the fact that he expressed his opinions about the way some of the userspace software may or may not have been behaving doesn't seem unreasonable.
The answer here is (1) roll out the workaround so nobody is horribly surprised when the latest distros ship with ext4, and (2) for developers to _listen_ to the guy who knows what he's talking about and fix their apps, ideally by providing some standard functions in the GNOME / KDE / etc. libs to handle the common situation, thus allowing the full performance advantages to be extracted from all the hard work that's been put into ext4 (and other file systems.)
There are a relatively small number of people in the world who are worth listening to when they say something. Take a lesson from a guy with a 3 digit UID (sorry to pull rank, but sometimes it has to be done!), and let me tell you that Ted Ts'o is one of them.
I don't see how teaching people to play team sports is anywhere near as important as teaching citizenship. Society doesn't fall apart just because 5% of the kids don't want to play football, but it just might if 5% grow up to be narcissistic, sociopathic solipsists in charge of the banking system:/
I agree with you that streaming done as you describe sucks. It should be done per subject, because most people are good something, and few are good at everything. And it should focus more on (sorry, buzz-word coming up) "joined up thinking" and not just storing information and performing exercises faster.
[..] If you are unwilling to change your circumstances, stop whining.'
I've heard this quite a lot over the years, and the sort of people it comes from are usually people who have started out with some sort of an edge, either their own talents and drive, or family support / money, or just luck (IME, being born into one of the right generations is a big part of that!) Then they like to pull up the drawbridge behind them, either because they've made themselves comfortable and don't like to think about anybody else, or because they're actually still insecure about their position and don't want the competition.
Yes, maybe people who end up broken are fragile, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have contributed to society at a pretty sophisticated level if they'd been allowed to quietly specialize rather being repeatedly (metaphorically) beaten. I've been "reforged" (nice analogy BTW), and the process has only made me more convinced that the only way modern civilization has a future is if we can treat the next generation substantially differently. Individualism has its limits: money only has value when there's a stable financial system to spend it in, and pretty sea-side holiday homes will disappear under rising sea levels in just the same way that the slums in Bangladesh do..
I guess it depends on your ego. I was pretty smart at math and hard sciences (back in the day - have forgotten most of it now!), got pretty frustrated when I was younger, and really enjoyed it when I got older and was in a class with people of similar ability.
The flip side, though, is that there was plenty of stuff I wasn't particularly good at: languages and PE in particular. I would much rather have been in a group without all the little polyglots for languages, where we could have taken things slower and been treated a bit more with kid gloves (I went to quite a high-achieving private school and some of teachers could be a bit brutal, in a purely verbal sense of course.) And I wouldn't have minded doing exercise so much if it hadn't been competitive, and I wasn't constantly being verbally abused by some meathead on the sidelines who fancied that he was being "encouraging."
The real problem is a broad social one of course, and it's a bit of a vicious circle. If the smart, hot-housed kids weren't put under such intense parental / teacher pressure to perform (but were still given opportunities to develop), and weren't picked on by the others, they might not become such narcissists. If the goal of the talented kids was not to earn $$$ and climb to the top of the greasy pole, but rather to contribute back to society, then the less talented might not resent them, and might actually be able to engage to a greater extent in the more sophisticated parts of our culture. Plus the talented kids might feel more like coming back into education as teachers, and contribute to the levelling out of all of the differences in the non-genetic aspects of "talent", which I suspect are at least as important as the genetic ones..
It rather depends where you draw the boundaries of "job." Producing genius code is good, but being able to maintain a product long-term is what actually earns the $$$ for the company (in a sane economy.)
On the subject of House: do you think in real life that the hospital wouldn't simply have been bankrupted by lawsuits years ago?
Of course, one of the other ideas House conveys is that is possible to manage the mavericks. I would like to think that there are people out there who admire talent and are prepared to put up with (a certain level of) insanity in order be that talent's "interface" to the outside world..
There's a fine line, I think. All kids should certainly be taught respect for others and society, regardless of their talents.
On the other hand, subjecting smart kids to excruciatingly slow tuition along with everybody else because streaming is seen as un-egalitarian is a pretty effective form of torture, as is forcing them to endure bullying while trying to play team sports that they don't understand and are no good at, for example.
I'm willing to buy into the idea that all people are equal, but not that they are identical, and our culture increasingly cannot cope with people who are not exactly the same as everyone else. People with talent can serve society by developing that talent and using it to help society, if they're given the opportunity: otherwise they just end up broken and resentful.
It sounds like you're thinking about assigning bigger addresses only to clients, i.e. the ones initiating the connections. That's fine, but at some point we're going to need to assign the new, bigger addresses to servers, and that's a bit of a different issue (and of course with P2P, everybody's a server.) For servers listed in DNS you could I suppose do the reverse of what something like totd does, and return a fake IPv4 address to the old IPv4-only client, but.. yuck.
At some point new code will have to be deployed, and we've done the work on IPv6 now, it's ready to go. I'll concede that if something simpler had been proposed originally, it might have seemed less scary and so been deployed quicker..
It seemed to be fashionable when I was at school. Drove me nuts, mainly because I couldn't do it convincingly;-)
The core of X was never really designed for writing apps with directly. At the very least it was expected that people use Xt. The question in my mind has always been whether separating widget drawing and window management from basic region handling was efficient enough, and whether it made things too complicated. Here's a thought: given that GTK+ now uses Cairo most places, and Cairo can target DirectFB, how hard would it be to run GNOME or Xfce without X?
I seem to recall having to delete some files from somewhere after disabling session saving in Xfce (~/.cache/sessions maybe?) Either that or closing everything and quitting to save an empty session first, and then disabling it;-)
Sadly with IPv6 it's the only way to do it. There's no way to extend the address space in a compatible manner, because there's no way for an old node to indicate a new node as a destination address. So it's not a question of IPv6 being badly designed, it's a question of whether to transition at all, or stick with an ever-growing stack of increasingly rickety hacks that may eventually fall over (how many layers of NAT does it take before P2P apps like VOIP can't punch their way through? Excuse me if I don't want to find out the hard way.)
It was just one of those nasty intersections between real-world usage patterns and and unexpected consequences of an intended feature (isn't the whole point of extent-based filesystems that we can do stuff like delayed allocation?) Sadly, I guess Canonical can't yet afford to pay to have hundreds of users sitting in labs typing randomly at PCs like MS can.. but OTOH, isn't a beta release a good substitute?
And let's not forget, Ted produced patches PDQ. He had a bit of moan at the same time, but he did produce patches. That ranks pretty low on the prima-donna scale in my book:-)
Where does this stupid *cough* gag come from? It's really lame.
Oh, I dunno, I find it less irritating on screen than when it's done IRL;-)
I agree that the Windows API sucks. But let's be fair: the X Window System API sucks even more and has been around almost as long. The big difference is that there are some decent APIs running on top of X that impose some sanity, whereas Microsoft keeps bungling every new GUI platform it creates.
I don't know that X sucks, per-se, it's just become quite a large pile of layers over the years, the same as Windows. The difference is that the layers in the Windows stack "feel" thicker. Still, I had high hopes for Berlin / Fresco at one point, but that seems to be a dead project now. At least some people are still concerned with tidying up X..
Back On Track: I'd rather have the tech-savvy bar set lower: that's what's going to drive the adoption. It's simple, really: people want computers that work. Their definition of work is "I can igure out how to make the computer do what I want". The easier that is perceved to be (let's try and make that match reality), the better looking the (Linux) offer is.
Yup, me too. But the openness of the market should make that more plausible, regardless of the occasional dotty upstream decision. The GNOME guys may have messed up here, and Ubuntu copied them, but there's no reason why a downstream netbook vendor, say, had to follow them. Anyone who has to field tech support calls presumably has an incentive to do some usability testing before shipping stuff, and could easily have decided to stick on 8.04 and backport if necessary. Likewise a university or large company with its own IT department..
IOW, people can engage at the level that's appropriate. If you want it to "just work", and someone to kick when it doesn't, buy a box with a support contract. If you want it to work pretty well but also want to have the choice to try the cool new stuff every now and then, and give feedback directly to the developers regarding bugs and future features, something like Ubuntu's going to be more appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it's possible to eliminate greed by creating very, very stable societies, which is possibly what religions try to do. It's not been very successful so far, I'll grant you.
I think there's more of a chance by setting up societies which allow people to basically remain children, psychologically. Opportunities for play + no perceived threats might do it, and I think we are slowly moving in that direction (often in a three steps forward, two steps back kind of a way.)
My passion is actually remarkably ephemeral these days. I'm getting to that Zen point where I'm not really sure I mind too much what happens next, but every now and then an opportunity arises to drop in the odd comment, so I do it.
Real businesses .. those real businesses and real society seem to have done a pretty good job of trashing the economy, the environment, and often people's own health. Are you sure sure y'all don't feel the need for any help, yet? ;-)
Actually, I'm not convinced you're really on the side of the greedy, and I notice you don't claim to be. After all, properly greedy people presumably spend all their time out there making money (and/or having sex), not pricking other people's bubbles in /. comments ;-) I'm guessing you've learnt to accomodate the status quo in order to survive, which is fine (after all, survival is prerequisite for doing anything interesting), but I reckon it's worth keeping an eye on possible futures - you never know when an opportunity might arise to nudge things in a saner direction when nobody's looking!
That's presumably in a 'traditional' business.
Open-source development tends to be done by people who care much more about what they do, and who can judge quality.
Also, this will presumably mostly be done over the internet. It's hard to suck up to people by buying them beer in that situation ;-)
ideas on organization are always in competition. what is the yardstick we use to measure them? simple monetary success or monetary failure.
But maybe that won't be the criterion that people involved actually use. IME, the more people really enjoy what they do, the happier they are just to be able to cover basic living costs. If the company were to tick over for a decade or so generating enough income for the people involved to live on without screwing anybody over or trashing the environment, I think that might meet quite few people's ideas of "success."
I like to believe that I can see a distinct cultural change happening these days: people want to remain child-like for longer, and are increasingly resistant to anything that forces them to grow up. This has its downsides, of course, as anybody with conservative tendencies will have noticed (and I have a few myself): failure to take responsibility, solipsism / narcissism, selfishness. But the flip-side is that people don't want to live with the sort of constant low-grade background anxiety that the current socio-economic system generates, and want to be able to play, i.e. do creative stuff they like. We may be able to transcend that Darwinian struggle, and if the opportunity's there, it's worth making the attempt ..
Trumped! ;-)
Sure, but by the model they've outlined, you won't earn anything for it unless other contributors find it valuable.
And they might. Back in the late 90s, I spent "far too much time" reading and browsing when I should have been coding, but the flip side was that I knew just enough about all sorts of emerging technologies to judge whether it was worth us investing them, and to recommend them to my colleagues. (The running joke became that I knew everything, but actually I knew just enough about a lot of things to know where to go for more information.)
It sounds like a fairly reasonable pragmatic approach to enable bootstrapping of the system. Hopefully in the short-term the prospect of $$$ will override people's moral objections to the closed-source core, and in the long-term it would prove itself unnecessary, or at the very least the closed core would be accessible to enough users/developers that everybody would know somebody who they trusted who could access that core ..
In the short- to medium- term: the company can decide to contract that stuff out, presumably.
Long-term: you might be surprised how many people would happy doing something relatively menial if they're doing it for people they like and in the aid of cause that seems worthwhile. The biggest problem I can see is getting people to notice the small stuff enough to allow the guy who cleans the loos to get some money ..
if I upmod some stranger, he gets a bigger piece of the pie - every upmod I do makes my take smaller.
Only if the pot stays the same size. If your upmod encourages someone to make the product / company more competitive, and the revenue grows, you both win.
I reckon a lot of people object to socialism, and in particular communism as practiced in the last century, because of a sense that it's being forced on them.
If it comes about naturally and organically, managing to grow from within the existing economic situation, that's a whole other thing, and much more interesting.
It's possible to do things like marketing and sales well and ethically. If you actually believe in a product and have a genuine interest in helping your customers, so you're basically acting as a liaison between the customer and the company, rather than an employee of the latter.
I think most "open" programmers would respect that sort of marketing. There'd probably even be significant overlap between the two jobs..
Nobody's mentioned the Cluetrain Manifesto yet. Have we got a generation of slashdotters who weren't around at the time who need to be pointed at it?
I've always figured women are just more sensible and are quietly mulling over the details while the men are concocting grand plans to conquer the world / explain the origins of the universe / wipe the floor with the competition / eradicate terrorism. I presume the biological or cultural origins of the latter are in the need to have men around to supply essential protein (by killing it - requiring a certain amount hubris!) and protect the tribe from other men, with the former is something to do with child-rearing: caring for a young child basically means paying close attention to it.
Whatever it is, it's obviously overridable, but there is a definite trend..
So long as the OS scheduler is smart enough to keep each process on the same core to avoid cache thrashing, all the while num_procs < num_cores .. This was a problem at one point - I presume it's been fixed by now.
My great-uncle was A. S. Neill - sadly he died before I was born.
I think these ideas are finally catching on, but it remains to be seen whether they'll manage to set the world alight or just get blown out. There seems to be a developing kernel of kids in the 1/2 generation or so below me (Gen Y — they're not all narcissistic solipsists, thankfully!) who "get it" and haven't (yet) been broken by the realities of adult life. Maybe they'll make it through, either with the assistance of their elders or through their own strength ..
Incidentally, learning may not survive starvation, but I think wisdom does. As it's pretty much all I've been left with, I'm hoping it will one day turn out to be useful .. :/
The "workaround" is understanding how the platform you're targeting actually works rather than making guesses. fsync() and even fdatasync() have been around for ages and are documented. *NIX directories have always just been more or less lists of (name,inode_no) tuples, which is why hard links are part of the platform. There isn't really any magical connection between an inode and the directories it happens to be listed in.
Ted knows this stuff inside and out and is almost ridiculously reasonable compared to many people I've met with his level of expertise. The patches to enable the actual workaround were available pretty much at the same time the awareness of this bug hit the mainstream. Given the flak he was taking, the fact that he expressed his opinions about the way some of the userspace software may or may not have been behaving doesn't seem unreasonable.
The answer here is (1) roll out the workaround so nobody is horribly surprised when the latest distros ship with ext4, and (2) for developers to _listen_ to the guy who knows what he's talking about and fix their apps, ideally by providing some standard functions in the GNOME / KDE / etc. libs to handle the common situation, thus allowing the full performance advantages to be extracted from all the hard work that's been put into ext4 (and other file systems.)
There are a relatively small number of people in the world who are worth listening to when they say something. Take a lesson from a guy with a 3 digit UID (sorry to pull rank, but sometimes it has to be done!), and let me tell you that Ted Ts'o is one of them.
I don't see how teaching people to play team sports is anywhere near as important as teaching citizenship. Society doesn't fall apart just because 5% of the kids don't want to play football, but it just might if 5% grow up to be narcissistic, sociopathic solipsists in charge of the banking system :/
I agree with you that streaming done as you describe sucks. It should be done per subject, because most people are good something, and few are good at everything. And it should focus more on (sorry, buzz-word coming up) "joined up thinking" and not just storing information and performing exercises faster.
[..] If you are unwilling to change your circumstances, stop whining.'
I've heard this quite a lot over the years, and the sort of people it comes from are usually people who have started out with some sort of an edge, either their own talents and drive, or family support / money, or just luck (IME, being born into one of the right generations is a big part of that!) Then they like to pull up the drawbridge behind them, either because they've made themselves comfortable and don't like to think about anybody else, or because they're actually still insecure about their position and don't want the competition.
Yes, maybe people who end up broken are fragile, but that doesn't mean they couldn't have contributed to society at a pretty sophisticated level if they'd been allowed to quietly specialize rather being repeatedly (metaphorically) beaten. I've been "reforged" (nice analogy BTW), and the process has only made me more convinced that the only way modern civilization has a future is if we can treat the next generation substantially differently. Individualism has its limits: money only has value when there's a stable financial system to spend it in, and pretty sea-side holiday homes will disappear under rising sea levels in just the same way that the slums in Bangladesh do..
I guess it depends on your ego. I was pretty smart at math and hard sciences (back in the day - have forgotten most of it now!), got pretty frustrated when I was younger, and really enjoyed it when I got older and was in a class with people of similar ability.
The flip side, though, is that there was plenty of stuff I wasn't particularly good at: languages and PE in particular. I would much rather have been in a group without all the little polyglots for languages, where we could have taken things slower and been treated a bit more with kid gloves (I went to quite a high-achieving private school and some of teachers could be a bit brutal, in a purely verbal sense of course.) And I wouldn't have minded doing exercise so much if it hadn't been competitive, and I wasn't constantly being verbally abused by some meathead on the sidelines who fancied that he was being "encouraging."
The real problem is a broad social one of course, and it's a bit of a vicious circle. If the smart, hot-housed kids weren't put under such intense parental / teacher pressure to perform (but were still given opportunities to develop), and weren't picked on by the others, they might not become such narcissists. If the goal of the talented kids was not to earn $$$ and climb to the top of the greasy pole, but rather to contribute back to society, then the less talented might not resent them, and might actually be able to engage to a greater extent in the more sophisticated parts of our culture. Plus the talented kids might feel more like coming back into education as teachers, and contribute to the levelling out of all of the differences in the non-genetic aspects of "talent", which I suspect are at least as important as the genetic ones ..
It rather depends where you draw the boundaries of "job." Producing genius code is good, but being able to maintain a product long-term is what actually earns the $$$ for the company (in a sane economy.)
On the subject of House: do you think in real life that the hospital wouldn't simply have been bankrupted by lawsuits years ago?
Of course, one of the other ideas House conveys is that is possible to manage the mavericks. I would like to think that there are people out there who admire talent and are prepared to put up with (a certain level of) insanity in order be that talent's "interface" to the outside world..
There's a fine line, I think. All kids should certainly be taught respect for others and society, regardless of their talents.
On the other hand, subjecting smart kids to excruciatingly slow tuition along with everybody else because streaming is seen as un-egalitarian is a pretty effective form of torture, as is forcing them to endure bullying while trying to play team sports that they don't understand and are no good at, for example.
I'm willing to buy into the idea that all people are equal, but not that they are identical, and our culture increasingly cannot cope with people who are not exactly the same as everyone else. People with talent can serve society by developing that talent and using it to help society, if they're given the opportunity: otherwise they just end up broken and resentful.
It sounds like you're thinking about assigning bigger addresses only to clients, i.e. the ones initiating the connections. That's fine, but at some point we're going to need to assign the new, bigger addresses to servers, and that's a bit of a different issue (and of course with P2P, everybody's a server.) For servers listed in DNS you could I suppose do the reverse of what something like totd does, and return a fake IPv4 address to the old IPv4-only client, but .. yuck.
At some point new code will have to be deployed, and we've done the work on IPv6 now, it's ready to go. I'll concede that if something simpler had been proposed originally, it might have seemed less scary and so been deployed quicker ..
It seemed to be fashionable when I was at school. Drove me nuts, mainly because I couldn't do it convincingly ;-)
The core of X was never really designed for writing apps with directly. At the very least it was expected that people use Xt. The question in my mind has always been whether separating widget drawing and window management from basic region handling was efficient enough, and whether it made things too complicated. Here's a thought: given that GTK+ now uses Cairo most places, and Cairo can target DirectFB, how hard would it be to run GNOME or Xfce without X?
I seem to recall having to delete some files from somewhere after disabling session saving in Xfce (~/.cache/sessions maybe?) Either that or closing everything and quitting to save an empty session first, and then disabling it ;-)
Sadly with IPv6 it's the only way to do it. There's no way to extend the address space in a compatible manner, because there's no way for an old node to indicate a new node as a destination address. So it's not a question of IPv6 being badly designed, it's a question of whether to transition at all, or stick with an ever-growing stack of increasingly rickety hacks that may eventually fall over (how many layers of NAT does it take before P2P apps like VOIP can't punch their way through? Excuse me if I don't want to find out the hard way.)
I'd rather have ext4 than XFS!
It was just one of those nasty intersections between real-world usage patterns and and unexpected consequences of an intended feature (isn't the whole point of extent-based filesystems that we can do stuff like delayed allocation?) Sadly, I guess Canonical can't yet afford to pay to have hundreds of users sitting in labs typing randomly at PCs like MS can.. but OTOH, isn't a beta release a good substitute?
And let's not forget, Ted produced patches PDQ. He had a bit of moan at the same time, but he did produce patches. That ranks pretty low on the prima-donna scale in my book :-)
Where does this stupid *cough* gag come from? It's really lame.
Oh, I dunno, I find it less irritating on screen than when it's done IRL ;-)
I agree that the Windows API sucks. But let's be fair: the X Window System API sucks even more and has been around almost as long. The big difference is that there are some decent APIs running on top of X that impose some sanity, whereas Microsoft keeps bungling every new GUI platform it creates.
I don't know that X sucks, per-se, it's just become quite a large pile of layers over the years, the same as Windows. The difference is that the layers in the Windows stack "feel" thicker. Still, I had high hopes for Berlin / Fresco at one point, but that seems to be a dead project now. At least some people are still concerned with tidying up X..
Back On Track: I'd rather have the tech-savvy bar set lower: that's what's going to drive the adoption. It's simple, really: people want computers that work. Their definition of work is "I can igure out how to make the computer do what I want". The easier that is perceved to be (let's try and make that match reality), the better looking the (Linux) offer is.
Yup, me too. But the openness of the market should make that more plausible, regardless of the occasional dotty upstream decision. The GNOME guys may have messed up here, and Ubuntu copied them, but there's no reason why a downstream netbook vendor, say, had to follow them. Anyone who has to field tech support calls presumably has an incentive to do some usability testing before shipping stuff, and could easily have decided to stick on 8.04 and backport if necessary. Likewise a university or large company with its own IT department..
IOW, people can engage at the level that's appropriate. If you want it to "just work", and someone to kick when it doesn't, buy a box with a support contract. If you want it to work pretty well but also want to have the choice to try the cool new stuff every now and then, and give feedback directly to the developers regarding bugs and future features, something like Ubuntu's going to be more appropriate.