If there are better themes out there and no Gnome developer I know actually uses the default *why* is it the default still? Everyone hates it and it looks ugly. Even the Gnome developers agree by there changing to something else.
-Benjamin Meyer
This reminds me of little tidbit from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Because "in the future" all the common people got high targeted newspapers containing stories that they would like and it was a sign of status to actually read the normal full New York Times rather then to only get the articles it knows you are interested in. Kinda like/. already. Those who read only/. eventually think that everyone reads/. and cares about issues that are on/.
This is one area where Live cd's really shine. As a user I am able to download, burn and try out new major pieces of software and help out by reporting bugs v.s. before where most people would just wait for the 1.0 release and then report problems they spotted. Spend ten minute checking out the cool stuff in KDE 3.4 and make sure to report any bugs you find (In the help menu of every kde app there is a report bug action).
Along the lines of bugs, KDE's bug tracking system just reached it 100000 *reported* bug (not open) On the kde news site ther is a story about it include tips on how you can help report bugs/problems that you find in KDE to help make it better.
So why don't you raise your prices for customers like that? They are begging to pay more for better performance and think something is wrong when it doesn't happen.
ONe thing that I recently discovered was just how hard it was to find a quiet cpu fan. The reviews are very quickly out of date. Lukily I found that on newegg.com you can search the cpu fans on noise level.
Actually KDE doesn't rely on the X-Server that much. I ported KDE to native OS-X last Christmas and that was mostly cleaning up the few X-Server calls (i.e. the work is all done from the X-Server side of things).
Pure and simply laziness. Yes there computer is slower, but they can still kinda check e-mail. And when it is really slow they can go out and fork over another $1000 for a new DELL. Also you know the saying "Back in my day..." What that really means is: "I am old and lazy and don't care to learn any new tricks". People are lazy asses who just like to sit around and will easily pay $1000 to make their problems go away without having to "learn" the complicated Apple computer. People are LAZY. They are so lazy that if they thought about it for a minute they would realize that the five minutes it takes to learn OSX (and two days to move files) far outweights the two months of lost time on windows. It really ticks me off how lazy people are.
As an open source developer I colaberate with many other developers on text files using... cvs. The nicest part being that I have full revision and can back out and we all don't have to be awake at the same time. And when we are all awake together we have been known to use irc for that instant communication. Anyway, nice to see a tool try to put all these ideas into one.
-Benjamin Meyer
Granted I guess I couldn't really validate buying an Apple system when I already have several very nice x86 Linux boxes and I am going to be using the Linux boxes more anyway, but.... I can validate getting an Apple PowerBook. I had one last year and loved having it. The wifi just worked and bla cool bla shiny bla. Anyway so I probably wont be buying a mini (no real need at this time), but I was really hoping for some price change on the PowerBook. Waited the past four months, but alas no change this week. So I was going to pick one up next week, but now more credulant (than just dihard mac wishes) of the G5 in the PowerBooks? Should I wait 6 months or....
-Benjamin Meyer
P.S. Along the same lines started about two years ago I noticed that more and more Linux developers have PowerBooks even if they don't have Apple desktop box's.
How about updating the *$^&%$& document on how to make rpm's? Is that so much to ask?
It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years.
Look for yourself here
If you want people to help out you should update the doc! There are so many edge cases and hidden options it is insane and any new developers will pull there hair out. Not only that, but put the documentation in the cvs so everyone can help update it.
For something as critical as RPM Red Hat should be ashamed that their developer documentation is so bad.
Hold on there, Loki closing had *nothing* to do with game for Linux and everything to do with bad management, financing. Go back and re-read the old slashdot stories on it or Google and I bet you will find logs of good information.
What you need to do is make a game where either the rules constantly change or the more experienced you are the weaker you are (thus newbies are killers).
I recently picked up "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold amazon link. It was a very enjoyable read that tells the history of computers came to be. Not the last 20 years history, but most of the book is from 1600-1960's with a little bit out the modern computer. Very enjoyable read. Inspired me to make my own relays out of wire and a two bit adder.:)
So this is why users in the real world need admin! Until internally they force their developers to only use user account there will always be problems. As a developer I can bet you that if I always have admin I will take the shortcut and not bother making sure it works 100% if I run it as a user that has no admin right. I always wondered why so many of their apps (MS Word needs write access to win32/ ???) require that you let them touch (not just read) files outside of your home directory. Know I know.
Well I am happy. With this knowledge I know that Longhorn wont force users to only write to home directories like in Unix/Linux and virus's/bugs/spyware will continue to exists and they will only cause their Microsoft own downfall. This was the only feature that I figured would save Microsoft.
Simply get four hitachi 400GB drives ~$350 acording to pricewatch and at half the cost $1400 you can easily afford just about any basic computer to put them in with the left over money.
Or
Get 300GB drives for about ~$200 and for $2000 you can have 5 live drives and 5 backup, combine for 3TB or use your favorite raid setup and you still have $1000 left over for a box to hold the drives.
Best of all with either of these options you can put in the system a real uplink. Skip the firewire/usb and go straight for gigabit or optical.
Where is the networking setup standard? Please, please please! Why does every single distro have a different way (sometime only slightly!) of setting up networking? This causes so much pain. From porting script, helping get a friends box working, and getting the latest liveCD working with your laptop. Unlike other aspects of Linux because this is so fragmented even Google might not have the answer for your perticular distro. On top of that most everyday network setup gui tools are ONLY for one distro and you are lucky if it suports more then that one. It is a real problem for linux. Linux has fantastic networking support, but you have to re-learn how to setup your networking every time you go to a new distro. Whats up with that?
This looks like your classic, need to make some noise and reshuffle the company while not actually doing anything with the company. A way for CEO's to justify their jobs. Just from the summery you can see massive crossover of the different units that will be the downfall of this massive re-org.
"In the days ahead, when our transition to a new structure has been completed, we will have a streamlined organization with clear roles and responsibilities"
In other words... "Well try this for a while to see if it works or now, I don't actually have a clue if it will or not". And in reality it is nothing more then a cover for...
"especially at a time like this when we have announced plans for layoffs."
In other words: "CEO bonus here I come!" And I can't leave out this jewel:
"giving each [unit] responsibility for its own operations and financial performance."
So you have developer x in group 1 and group 2 needs developers x skills, but they have to first put in a REQ and get financiall approval or even worse hiring a new person and meanwhile developer x sits around idly. I predict project slowdowns stock dropping and in 12 months a "New Plan".
So that is how they are going to get people to come to that dead town! Seriously, I visted there on my school tour. The campus is all on a hill and looked like half of it was under construction and the town was the last place I would care to live.
They say they are pulling it now? I call WTF on them. Everyone on the team but the *manager* was let go one and half years ago! I should know, I was there.
Hehe, but some groupwise servers have pop3 enabled so before I just pulled my mail through it and they never got those messages (as they were left unopened). Then one day I went through and deleted them all in the actual application. A whole year worth of notifications went out to people.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, at only 12W for the entire system? It is pretty hard to get a x86 box that low for that
cheap.
-Benjamin Meyer
If there are better themes out there and no Gnome developer I know actually uses the default *why* is it the default still? Everyone hates it and it looks ugly. Even the Gnome developers agree by there changing to something else. -Benjamin Meyer
This reminds me of little tidbit from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Because "in the future" all the common people got high targeted newspapers containing stories that they would like and it was a sign of status to actually read the normal full New York Times rather then to only get the articles it knows you are interested in. Kinda like /. already. Those who read only /. eventually think that everyone reads /. and cares about issues that are on /.
-Benjamin Meyer
Along the lines of bugs, KDE's bug tracking system just reached it 100000 *reported* bug (not open) On the kde news site ther is a story about it include tips on how you can help report bugs/problems that you find in KDE to help make it better.
-Benjamin Meyer
So why don't you raise your prices for customers like that? They are begging to pay more for better performance and think something is wrong when it doesn't happen.
ONe thing that I recently discovered was just how hard it was to find a quiet cpu fan. The reviews are very quickly out of date. Lukily I found that on newegg.com you can search the cpu fans on noise level.
-Benjamin Meyer
Actually KDE doesn't rely on the X-Server that much. I ported KDE to native OS-X last Christmas and that was mostly cleaning up the few X-Server calls (i.e. the work is all done from the X-Server side of things).
-Benjamin Meyer
Pure and simply laziness. Yes there computer is slower, but they can still kinda check e-mail. And when it is really slow they can go out and fork over another $1000 for a new DELL. Also you know the saying "Back in my day..." What that really means is: "I am old and lazy and don't care to learn any new tricks". People are lazy asses who just like to sit around and will easily pay $1000 to make their problems go away without having to "learn" the complicated Apple computer. People are LAZY. They are so lazy that if they thought about it for a minute they would realize that the five minutes it takes to learn OSX (and two days to move files) far outweights the two months of lost time on windows. It really ticks me off how lazy people are.
-Benjamin Meyer
The article touches on recruitment and how in open source developers come and go. So might as well ask /.
If you are working on an open source project, what has caused you to join an open source project?
-Benjamin Meyer
As an open source developer I colaberate with many other developers on text files using ... cvs. The nicest part being that I have full revision and can back out and we all don't have to be awake at the same time. And when we are all awake together we have been known to use irc for that instant communication. Anyway, nice to see a tool try to put all these ideas into one.
-Benjamin Meyer
Granted I guess I couldn't really validate buying an Apple system when I already have several very nice x86 Linux boxes and I am going to be using the Linux boxes more anyway, but.... I can validate getting an Apple PowerBook. I had one last year and loved having it. The wifi just worked and bla cool bla shiny bla. Anyway so I probably wont be buying a mini (no real need at this time), but I was really hoping for some price change on the PowerBook. Waited the past four months, but alas no change this week. So I was going to pick one up next week, but now more credulant (than just dihard mac wishes) of the G5 in the PowerBooks? Should I wait 6 months or ....
-Benjamin Meyer
P.S. Along the same lines started about two years ago I noticed that more and more Linux developers have PowerBooks even if they don't have Apple desktop box's.
It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years. Look for yourself here
If you want people to help out you should update the doc! There are so many edge cases and hidden options it is insane and any new developers will pull there hair out. Not only that, but put the documentation in the cvs so everyone can help update it.
For something as critical as RPM Red Hat should be ashamed that their developer documentation is so bad.
-Benjamin Meyer
Can you give more details? Was the book initially authorized using the admin account? Did it happen with more then one book?
Hold on there, Loki closing had *nothing* to do with game for Linux and everything to do with bad management, financing. Go back and re-read the old slashdot stories on it or Google and I bet you will find logs of good information.
-Benjamin Meyer
You expect people to click on adds when they are in flash? Are you stupid?
What you need to do is make a game where either the rules constantly change or the more experienced you are the weaker you are (thus newbies are killers).
-Benjamin Meyer
Not to bust your dream, but I know of systems from the early 90's that only used flase hd's. And no these were not embedded systems, but servers.
If you want flash for you hard drive you can do it *today*.
-Benjamin Meyer
-Benjamin Meyer
It all make sense!
So this is why users in the real world need admin! Until internally they force their developers to only use user account there will always be problems. As a developer I can bet you that if I always have admin I will take the shortcut and not bother making sure it works 100% if I run it as a user that has no admin right. I always wondered why so many of their apps (MS Word needs write access to win32/ ???) require that you let them touch (not just read) files outside of your home directory. Know I know.
Well I am happy. With this knowledge I know that Longhorn wont force users to only write to home directories like in Unix/Linux and virus's/bugs/spyware will continue to exists and they will only cause their Microsoft own downfall. This was the only feature that I figured would save Microsoft.
-Benjamin Meyer
Simply get four hitachi 400GB drives ~$350 acording to pricewatch and at half the cost $1400 you can easily afford just about any basic computer to put them in with the left over money.
Or
Get 300GB drives for about ~$200 and for $2000 you can have 5 live drives and 5 backup, combine for 3TB or use your favorite raid setup and you still have $1000 left over for a box to hold the drives.
Best of all with either of these options you can put in the system a real uplink. Skip the firewire/usb and go straight for gigabit or optical.
-Benjamin Meyer
Where is the networking setup standard? Please, please please! Why does every single distro have a different way (sometime only slightly!) of setting up networking? This causes so much pain. From porting script, helping get a friends box working, and getting the latest liveCD working with your laptop. Unlike other aspects of Linux because this is so fragmented even Google might not have the answer for your perticular distro. On top of that most everyday network setup gui tools are ONLY for one distro and you are lucky if it suports more then that one. It is a real problem for linux. Linux has fantastic networking support, but you have to re-learn how to setup your networking every time you go to a new distro. Whats up with that?
-Benjamin Meyer
"In the days ahead, when our transition to a new structure has been completed, we will have a streamlined organization with clear roles and responsibilities"
In other words... "Well try this for a while to see if it works or now, I don't actually have a clue if it will or not". And in reality it is nothing more then a cover for...
"especially at a time like this when we have announced plans for layoffs."
In other words: "CEO bonus here I come!" And I can't leave out this jewel:
"giving each [unit] responsibility for its own operations and financial performance."
So you have developer x in group 1 and group 2 needs developers x skills, but they have to first put in a REQ and get financiall approval or even worse hiring a new person and meanwhile developer x sits around idly. I predict project slowdowns stock dropping and in 12 months a "New Plan".
-Benjamin Meyer
So that is how they are going to get people to come to that dead town! Seriously, I visted there on my school tour. The campus is all on a hill and looked like half of it was under construction and the town was the last place I would care to live.
Hehe, but some groupwise servers have pop3 enabled so before I just pulled my mail through it and they never got those messages (as they were left unopened). Then one day I went through and deleted them all in the actual application. A whole year worth of notifications went out to people. :)