(2) Check out MS' media-player thing on the 'dock'? Can we say "appicon"?
Really, where is all this innovation MS is talking about?
That spider-web like file-system navigation? Nothing new. There were 3D versions of stuff like that back in 1994 with Jurassic Park.
The problem MS and Apple face is that there really isn't anything much more to do. WindowManagers are already pretty much ok. Maybe a few tweaks here and there would fix minor flaws. However, nothing particularly major need be done. It's sort of like the design for the trashcan (real-life). When was the last innovation in trash-cans?
As opposed to how mature MS is when they generate anti-Linux FUD? Or what about when they say GNU/Linux is "unamerican" or "anti-capitalistic" or "communism" or whatever their latest hyperbolized nonsense is?
The issue with MS isn't that they're making money. All companies have to do that, as do all individuls (indeed, it's a rather pointless zero-sum game, working hard for little pieces of paper which could be worthless at any point in the future, in my opinion).
The issue is that MS is a monopoly. Monopolies in and of themselves are bad things. But, worse yet, they have used their power in anti-competitive ways, signing deals with OEMs preventing them from selling other OS' or selling computers without OS' on them (the result being the "MS-tax"). On MS' side, this is illegal and an abuse of their power, along with the many other things they've done.
However, a law against hardware-deals is ill-thought-out. There's no logic to it. Would every hardware company have to support every obscure OS? It would be illegal not to support Amiga or QNX? If we have an issue with hardware companies that don't support GNU/Linux, the solution is not to buy their products, and to use every legal means available to harm that company for not doing such. Furthermore, we should try to explain to them why they should support it. (Indeed, the best strategy is to get one hardware company to support you, which creates a pressure on the others to do so as well, otherwise they'd lose an entire market).
The only metaphor that holds is red, you dolt. How does green imply 'maximize'? Maybe for go, but that's a streth. And how does yellow imply minimize? Come on. That's fucking bullshit.
I can see it as a good thing in parallel to the symbols, but simply not having the symbols and just having red, yellow, and green makes no sense.
X is a good metaphor for close. X, as in EXIT. X, as in what you put on things you no longer want. What do you do when you have a large diagram that you want to get rid of? You put an X through it.
WindowMaker's triangle for minimize is also a good metaphor. Triangle, implying change in size -- diminuendo. It even is oriented inthe right direction (larger on the left, smaller on the right) to imply going from large to small. Unfortunately, a tweak is required to get this. Also, unfortunately, the default in wmaker implies window-shading more than minimization.
The most logical way to do it would be as follows:
Close: X
Maximize: Crescendo triangle (smaller on left, larger on right...this, reading left to right, implies getting larger).
Minimize: Diminuendo triangle (larger on left, smaller on right...thus, reading left to right, implied getting smaller).
Shade: none needed. Double-click on title-bar.
Ah, yes, if you wanted to be really smart, you'd put close on the far right side (compliance with MSS is to some degree a good thing), and the maximize and minimize buttons on the far left side, facing eachother, so as to produce an up-down hill, with maximize on the far left and minimize directly to the left of it. The effect would be as follows:/\. Gee, kind of implies "up down" as in, "make large, make small".
Now, if you want to talk about color-coding, the only color that makes logical sense would be red for close. You can color-code the rest, and it would be useful -- people learn color-coded things better -- but not logical, nor would it provide any immediate help.
Mac's intuitive? don't make me laugh
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Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: -1, Troll
MacOSX is only 'intuitive' to those who've used MacOS' before. My sister comes and sits down in front of MacOSX, and she's like, "wtf do these colored butons -- green, yellow, red -- mean?" Oh, they only reveal what they do once you put your mouse over them. That's real nice for a user who doesn't know what button features are going to be offered in the first place.
And let's not even get started on Apple's insistence on continuing to live in the 1980s with their "one mouse button" model. Oh yea, did I mention that Apple's new black keyboards are all scrunged together and difficult to type on?
Apple does not specialize in making things easier to use. They specialize in making things look pretty at the expense of functionality. Same thing with MS.
(1) Though I'm sure MS will fuck it up, just because you have 3D acceleration on the desktop doesn't mean you need to have 2D acceleration.
(2) 3D acceleration would be useful because it would allow you to offlay some things from the CPU to the GPU that are normally put on the CPU when you just use 2D acceleration to accelerate a desktop.
(3) Xfree86 should work on this. It would be a useful feature to have for any WM that takes advantage of it.
(4) This is not an excuse to make an eye-candy laden desktop like MacOSX. We do not need genie-effects or rotating windows, or any animations. They are all useless and serve no purpose, other than for impressive press-conferences. At best, these animations are useful for a very novice user who does not know what happens to windows when you minimize them, or shade them. They are of no use to anyone who's used to OS for more than a few minutes.
I'm still trying to find a way to eliminate the quick animation in WindowMaker's pop-up menus (if you stick a menu so that it's title-bar is just at the bottom of the screen, it becomes like an Apple universal menu, and u can get the rest of it by moving hte mouse to the screen's extremity. Unfortunately, when it pops up, that is animated. Blah.
I posted this elsewhere, but it is worth posting again. There are at least 6 reasons why shared libraries are still better than every app having it's own library:
Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.
Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.
RAM.Loading two copies of the same library wastes RAM.
Load-time.Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.
Consistency.Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if app X uses Qt 2.0 and app Y uses Qt 3.0.
The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed.Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library. That means doing it many times separately.
The solution to dependency-hell is to design better dependency management. Reverse-dependency management -- so as to remove useless libraries when no-longern needed and avoid bloat -- would also be good. Gentoo is doing pretty well in these categories.
On making install process' simple. I think that a graphical installation does not necessarily make things any easier. Anyone here played Descent 2? That installed by a good old-fashioned DOS-installation. And it was not particularly hard to install, even though it was not a GUI-install.
It is also not necessarily a good idea to abstract into oblivion the technical details behind an install. Part of the philosophy behind Gentoo, for example, is to take newbies and turn them into advanced users. I think that a clear well thought-out install guide is a useful thing. Gentoo's install guide is thorough and has virtually no noise. Compare that to the install-guides for Debian, which are affirmative nightmares, filled with irrelevant stuff. Furthermore, a helpful and friendly user-community is always a good way to help new users orient themselves. New users are going to ask questions on forums that advanced users find obvious. That should not be an invitation to say, "RTFM bitch" at the top of your lungs. All of us were newbies at one point, and just because we may have had to learn things the hard way doesn't mean that others should too.
Re:why do you stupidly assume it's "us"
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 1
The point it, it is an invalid and completely unverifiable assumption to assume that the person who did this was a Linux-supporter. So don't make that assumption.
So what, naming everyone involved is a lengthy process? Some recent papers based on genome-wide microarray methods have 40 or more authors (see Science and Nature). That doesn't mean they shouldn't all be credited. Everyone involved in the project should be credited in the about section. This is simply academic honesty. We need to establish some strong ethical guidelines on how to attribute proper credit.
Re:Distributed lawsuit? Re:SCO is acting unpr...
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 1
Yea, the idea is specifically *not* to file joint lawsuites, which make it easier for the defendant to defend himself. True, they also make it easier for everyone else to win (as they can pool their resources), but the important point is to drown them in legal hogwash. Bwuhahhaahahah.
why do you stupidly assume it's "us"
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There is no evidence to suggest that the individuals who did this have anything to do with the FS/OSS GNU/Linux community, or were even fans of GNU/Linux.
There are many possibilities as to who did this, only one of which is a Linux-fan.
Could have been an angered ex-employee at SCO.
Could have been a renegade at IBM.
Could have been someone who doesn't like SCO for some other reason.
So, stop defaming the Linux community.
SCO is acting unprofessionally...
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
by implying that GNU/Linux fans did this. I say we should all file separate (not joint) lawsuites against them for defamation (this would really fuck up their legal department with paperwork, because they'd be sued by about a thousand people at once).
Look, people should get credit for their work. That's really a pretty simple basic moral. I don't agree with Reiser's method of achieving such (the advertisements displayed whenever using his utils), but we need to properly attribute credit.
I'm also not sure I agree with the FSF' new documentation license that's coming out, having "invariable sections".
It's very simple. What RedHat's doing is plaguarism. They have replaced the KDE symbol with one of their own; this implied to end-users that RedHat made it. They are effectively taking credit for someone else' work. This is wrong.
We as a community should shun those who try to take credit for that which is not their own. I believe that Debian's current issue is that they think that the new GPL documentation license is not free, and I think they have a good argument. However, that does not make it ok to plaguarize other people's work. We should refuse to buy software by distributers like RedHat who plaguarize other people's work. Period. This is as immoral as me posting something written by Dickens and claiming it's mine. So, we should put pressure on RedHat to make more effort to attribute others for their work. We should also make a stronger effort to do that ourselves, and thank others for their contributions. And there are ways to do such that don't involve obnoxious messages (e.g., About).
Yes, the decision as to which files / folders get protection is arbitrary. It's called freedom of choice. You don't like the decision that a distro uses, then you can choose your own. You don't want any at all, then you can get rid of them all.
Yes, libtrash does offer much more effective coverage. However, there's nothing wrong with alsoo having this method.
In short, there is no harm that can come from having this functionality. If you don't like it, you can get rid of it, delete the protect.conf file, and it won't affect you at all. So, I don't see a good argument against it.
Do you have a way to make these decisions without having to result to personal and arbitrary preferences?
Well, the idea is that each distribution decides which folders / files go into protect.conf. I suggest having prompt and can't-delete options in the protect.conf file. I'm not proposing it should be anything fixed in stone by rm. It should be up to each GNU/Linux distribution to decide what to protect and how much, and -- ultimately -- up to the user (as anyone with administrative/root priviledges would be able to alter the contents of protect.conf).
This is only effective when you only protect a few critical directories. Maybe 10 to 20. Otherwise, it approaches rm -i, and the user just learns to ignore it. The idea is to make it like a fire-alarm. Fire-alarm's don't (or shouldn't) go off when you light a cigaratte. They should, however, go off when you've started a grease fire and you try to put it out by moronically spraying water on it (;-). So, distros and ultimately end-users should only protect the really critical things.
I believe you miss the point. I think that rm -i us useless. What would be more useful is having a file -- '/etc/protect.conf' -- that lists directories and files that the user should be prompted (y/n) before deleting. Maybe even in that file specify a reason why that directory is protected.
It was an entire GUI, yes. And it was more responsive.
Firstly, Windows 3.1 was the most unstable piece of shit OS I've ever used. PWM or Ratpoison + a file-manager (in X) is also an entire GUI, and it will be just as responsive. Oh yea, it also won't crash. Next.
It's okay to admit you were wrong. My Windows 3.11 argument has never been countered by anyone yet.
That's because it isn't an argument. It's bullshit, like everything else you've said.
I dismissed them because they were vague claims with no examples to back them up. People have been using Windows XP for close to two years now with no problems--no more DLL hell, unlike the Linux equivalent.
If by "no problems", you mean the mirage of security concerns, then maybe yes. Sorry, I'm not for wasting my hard-drive space and wasting my RAM -- not to mention wasting my download bandwidth -- to download, save, and load the same libraries over and over again. One copy of Gtk is more than enough for me. They will also consume more RAM than necessary if you load multiple progs that use the same library. Let's not forget, some of us don't want to spend more time downloading libraries than programs every time we want a new program. And let's not forget the huge potential for security and stability problems, as every different vender of software will be shipping their OS with *their own* version of every library, which contains who knows how many security/stability/etc bugs, and was compiled with who knows what crappy compile options.
After all, kilobytes and even mere megatbytes are at a premium these days.
You are, of course, *ass*uming that users want to buy upgrades to run your bloated crappy OS.
a Gentoo elitist...As if I want to spend all day building my distribution over the network when I've got work to do.
Am I claiming Gentoo is for everyone? No. RTFA next time. Gentoo is the best OS for me, I make no claims for anyone else. I simply said it has no package management problems. Likewise with Debian's apt-get. There are problems with package management in the more user-friendly distros (like RedHat), but those can easily be resolved by following Gentoo's and Debian's example. I believe Lindows is already doing that (they use.debs).
The right way to solve this problem is not to needlessly replicate the same library a hundred times within every application folder. That is the easy way to solve this problem. It is also wrong. The right way to solve this problem is to solve it at the package management level, and utilize better package (dependency) management. That is not an easy solution. But it is the right solution. There is this guy. He works for the President. His name is Donald Rumsfeld, and he's the Secretary of Defense. I think that a particular quote by him is most relevant in this situation:
"For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." [actually, this is a Mencken quote, but it is one of Rumsfeld's rules]
This is obviously a little bit of wisdom that has completely escaped you, as well as those at MS and Apple. Every distribution could implement your "solution" at the drop of a dime. It would require very minimal effort. So, obviously there is a reason why they haven't done that: because it is an inferior solution.
P.S.: I'm on a 1.1GHz, 60GB 7200rpm ATA-100, 256MB, GF2 GTS 64MB computer; and I still don't want to waste my resources duplicating the same libraries for every application.
Also, if this were such a no-brainer obviously right solution, then why didn't everyone do it the minute it was possible? MS could have done this a long time ago. They didn't, because they probably realized the flaw in it. This is not something that's hard to do -- this is something that would be incredibly easy to do. Every GNU/Linux distribution could have do this in a matter of a few days. None of them have. Because they recognize that there are flaws with this "solution". This is a simple-minded solution for dolts.
And then a long beat-around-the-bush argument side-stepping the fact that Apple and MS ignored the underlying problem as to why the GUI was becoming unresponsive, and just put on a bandaid. See the threat between Linus and that Xfree86 guy for details on why just renicing things alone is a problematic solution.
inux has yet to spawn forth a desktop environment as responsive as Windows 3.11, which was a mere shell on top of DOS and not an entire kernel. So much for that argument.
Your propensity for bullshit is remarkable. What was windows 3.11? Basically it was a file-manager plus a primitive windowmanager. Ratpoison or pwm (pluse a file-manager, like DFM) would provide all of that functionality on GNU/Linux, except faster and with greater stability. Thank you for demonstrating you don't know wtf you're talking about, as usual.
Windows XP solved DLL hell.
And introduced 6 additional problems, which I mentioned. I won't mention them again, since you'd obviously sooner ignore them than admit that you were wrong. The real solution -- the best way to solve the problem, the way which doesn't introduce at least 6 additional problems when you implement it -- is to create better package/dependency management. I've been using Gentoo for a while: no dependency problems. Period. They're also working on reverse-dependencies, so I can remove libraries that are no longer needed: not perfect yet, but on it's way. Btw, the reason for removing no-longer use dependencies (libraries) is that they're wasteful and grab disk-space. Since your "solution" wastes tons of disk-space, you can't complain at all on the grounds of "unnecessary libraries being there".
There are no consistency problems.
When applicaitons start coming with their own libraries built in, there are going to be consistency problems. Different libraries do not function exactly the same. There will also be security problems.
There's also the fact that MS' "solution" wastes gobs of hard-drive space and also wastes RAM.
I was running Windows XP acceptably on a 266mhz with 128MB of RAM
Yes, and how much of your RAM does XP waste on its own selfish needs, which are completely irrelevant to you getting work done? Try loading several more programs, or even one program that requires lots of RAM per the nature of what it does (e.g., MrBayes), and see how things slow down to a crawl.
Try that with Red Hat 9 or even the latest Slackware.
Can't speak for RedHat or Slack because I don't use them. However, Gentoo works very well on all systems, and can be taylored specifically to your needs.
You have yet to refute any of my points. That is, of course, because all of my 6 points were right.
Doesn't anyone bother to RTFA? They are not talking about mandating FS/OSS. They are talking about mandating that government officials consider it as an option, and justify not using it if they don't. The idea is to level the playing field, and give FS/OSS a chance to compete on it's merits. Quite frankly, also, there are many things -- like voting software -- which simply should be FS/OSS as a matter of principle (transparency).
OpenBSD = ppl who are very good at what they do
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OpenBSD 3.3 Released
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Which is producing the most secure server OS out of the box (of course, the fact that it's very very minimal out of the box helps).
Yep, you and anyone else who's arguing that the increased bloat and reduced performance, stability, and security which would occur if we got rid of shared libraries would be a good thing.
My idea is not "crap" because you disagree with it.
No, your idea is crap because of the reasons I mentioned above. TherNo, your idee were 6 of them. Or do you selectively ignore that which you don't like? Just for summary, they are: (1) Bandwidth; (2) HD-space; (3) RAM-usage; (4) Load-time; (5) Consistency; (6) Security, stability, and speed.
In your rush to claim how "superior" Windows is, you ignored all of the reasons why eliminating shared libraries is a very bad idea. You brush aside (1)-(4) by saying that it's not an issue since users are getting better and better hardware. Of course, you're full of shit there. Users are not going to upgrade their computers just to use your crappy OS, and they certainly don't want to have hundreds of slightly different versions of the same library floating around. You can not however brush aside the 5th and 6th problems with eliminating shared libraries. Indeed, there is no way to deal with those problems.
MS and Apple decided to take the easy -- as in, wrong -- way to deal with this problem. Just like they've taken the easy -- as in wrong -- way to deal with all their other problems (e.g., always running the UI at maximum priority). This is not a "feature" which any distribution should aim to emulate. It is crap. It is a "solution" to dependency-hell which creates a whole slew of additional problems, which are just as bad as dependency hell.
Windows XP removed DLL hell by copying different versions of conflicting system libraries. And yet the computing world has not fallen apart
Hahahah. You can forget about real consistent behavior between apps. You can forget about security -- as if it was ever there in the first place for Windows. Forget about stability as well. Finally, you can forget about using WinXP on your current system: plan on shelling out $1,000 just to get WinXP to run acceptably. That is fucking bullshit. You want to emulate that bullcrap, fine.
The right thing to do is usually the hardest thing to do. That holds true in this case, where the right thing to do is create a good dependency-management system (portage) and to create a good reverse-dependency maintenance system, which would remove completely unused libraries (undone?).
timeliness of delivery, ease of maintenance, and production cost are all at least as important as functionality
All of these things have to do with maintaining the software. None of them are helped by having larger, bulkier, more bloated code; in fact, they are all hurt by that. Thus, small code size -- which almost inherently means less RAM use and better performance -- is good for all of them.
Ultimately, there is only one factor to consider when deciding "which software is the best" from a purely functional point of view: which software allows the user to get his or her job done faster. All of the extra features added in MS Word after version 95 haven't really helped the vast majority of users get their tasks done any faster; but they have made the code much more bloated, slow, and memory-consuming. Thus, on a pound for pound basis, it is worse.
You're just mad that it's not the 80s anymore and shared libraries have been proven time and time again to be utterly pointless.
The stupidity at/. never ceases to amaze me. There are at least 6 reasons why shared libraries are still much better than every app having it's own library:
1. Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.
2. Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.
3. RAM. Loading two copies of the same library wastes gobs of RAM.
4. Load-time. Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.
5. Consistency. Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if every app uses its own version of glibc.
6. The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed. Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library.
The way to solve dependency-hell is to write better package management systems. Gentoo is part way there, though they need better reverse-package management (removing no-longer needed packages).
If only for security, convenience, and inconsistent behavior alone, your idea -- and that of anyone else who wants to do away with shared libraries -- is crap.
This guys dream is bullshit. You aren't going to win over any Win9x/MacOS users by making an OS just as crappy as Win9x/MacOS. Why should anyone bother to go through the trouble of uninstalling their current OS and installing a new one if that new OS is going to be just as slow and bloated as their old OS?
Yes, MS makes money, despite requiring users to upgrade. That's because most of their sales come from OEM-shops. Very few people are going out and buying WinXP then buying a new system (or upgrading their current one) to run it on.
Slashdot Mirror
try vogg
(1) This UI is crap. Flashy and distracting.
(2) Check out MS' media-player thing on the 'dock'? Can we say "appicon"?
Really, where is all this innovation MS is talking about?
That spider-web like file-system navigation? Nothing new. There were 3D versions of stuff like that back in 1994 with Jurassic Park.
The problem MS and Apple face is that there really isn't anything much more to do. WindowManagers are already pretty much ok. Maybe a few tweaks here and there would fix minor flaws. However, nothing particularly major need be done. It's sort of like the design for the trashcan (real-life). When was the last innovation in trash-cans?
As opposed to how mature MS is when they generate anti-Linux FUD? Or what about when they say GNU/Linux is "unamerican" or "anti-capitalistic" or "communism" or whatever their latest hyperbolized nonsense is?
The issue with MS isn't that they're making money. All companies have to do that, as do all individuls (indeed, it's a rather pointless zero-sum game, working hard for little pieces of paper which could be worthless at any point in the future, in my opinion).
The issue is that MS is a monopoly. Monopolies in and of themselves are bad things. But, worse yet, they have used their power in anti-competitive ways, signing deals with OEMs preventing them from selling other OS' or selling computers without OS' on them (the result being the "MS-tax"). On MS' side, this is illegal and an abuse of their power, along with the many other things they've done.
However, a law against hardware-deals is ill-thought-out. There's no logic to it. Would every hardware company have to support every obscure OS? It would be illegal not to support Amiga or QNX? If we have an issue with hardware companies that don't support GNU/Linux, the solution is not to buy their products, and to use every legal means available to harm that company for not doing such. Furthermore, we should try to explain to them why they should support it. (Indeed, the best strategy is to get one hardware company to support you, which creates a pressure on the others to do so as well, otherwise they'd lose an entire market).
The only metaphor that holds is red, you dolt. How does green imply 'maximize'? Maybe for go, but that's a streth. And how does yellow imply minimize? Come on. That's fucking bullshit.
/\. Gee, kind of implies "up down" as in, "make large, make small".
I can see it as a good thing in parallel to the symbols, but simply not having the symbols and just having red, yellow, and green makes no sense.
X is a good metaphor for close. X, as in EXIT. X, as in what you put on things you no longer want. What do you do when you have a large diagram that you want to get rid of? You put an X through it.
WindowMaker's triangle for minimize is also a good metaphor. Triangle, implying change in size -- diminuendo. It even is oriented inthe right direction (larger on the left, smaller on the right) to imply going from large to small. Unfortunately, a tweak is required to get this. Also, unfortunately, the default in wmaker implies window-shading more than minimization.
The most logical way to do it would be as follows:
Close: X
Maximize: Crescendo triangle (smaller on left, larger on right...this, reading left to right, implies getting larger).
Minimize: Diminuendo triangle (larger on left, smaller on right...thus, reading left to right, implied getting smaller).
Shade: none needed. Double-click on title-bar.
Ah, yes, if you wanted to be really smart, you'd put close on the far right side (compliance with MSS is to some degree a good thing), and the maximize and minimize buttons on the far left side, facing eachother, so as to produce an up-down hill, with maximize on the far left and minimize directly to the left of it. The effect would be as follows:
Now, if you want to talk about color-coding, the only color that makes logical sense would be red for close. You can color-code the rest, and it would be useful -- people learn color-coded things better -- but not logical, nor would it provide any immediate help.
MacOSX is only 'intuitive' to those who've used MacOS' before. My sister comes and sits down in front of MacOSX, and she's like, "wtf do these colored butons -- green, yellow, red -- mean?" Oh, they only reveal what they do once you put your mouse over them. That's real nice for a user who doesn't know what button features are going to be offered in the first place.
And let's not even get started on Apple's insistence on continuing to live in the 1980s with their "one mouse button" model. Oh yea, did I mention that Apple's new black keyboards are all scrunged together and difficult to type on?
Apple does not specialize in making things easier to use. They specialize in making things look pretty at the expense of functionality. Same thing with MS.
A few points:
(1) Though I'm sure MS will fuck it up, just because you have 3D acceleration on the desktop doesn't mean you need to have 2D acceleration.
(2) 3D acceleration would be useful because it would allow you to offlay some things from the CPU to the GPU that are normally put on the CPU when you just use 2D acceleration to accelerate a desktop.
(3) Xfree86 should work on this. It would be a useful feature to have for any WM that takes advantage of it.
(4) This is not an excuse to make an eye-candy laden desktop like MacOSX. We do not need genie-effects or rotating windows, or any animations. They are all useless and serve no purpose, other than for impressive press-conferences. At best, these animations are useful for a very novice user who does not know what happens to windows when you minimize them, or shade them. They are of no use to anyone who's used to OS for more than a few minutes.
I'm still trying to find a way to eliminate the quick animation in WindowMaker's pop-up menus (if you stick a menu so that it's title-bar is just at the bottom of the screen, it becomes like an Apple universal menu, and u can get the rest of it by moving hte mouse to the screen's extremity. Unfortunately, when it pops up, that is animated. Blah.
- Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.
- Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.
- RAM.Loading two copies of the same library wastes RAM.
- Load-time.Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.
- Consistency.Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if app X uses Qt 2.0 and app Y uses Qt 3.0.
- The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed.Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library. That means doing it many times separately.
The solution to dependency-hell is to design better dependency management. Reverse-dependency management -- so as to remove useless libraries when no-longern needed and avoid bloat -- would also be good. Gentoo is doing pretty well in these categories.On making install process' simple. I think that a graphical installation does not necessarily make things any easier. Anyone here played Descent 2? That installed by a good old-fashioned DOS-installation. And it was not particularly hard to install, even though it was not a GUI-install.
It is also not necessarily a good idea to abstract into oblivion the technical details behind an install. Part of the philosophy behind Gentoo, for example, is to take newbies and turn them into advanced users. I think that a clear well thought-out install guide is a useful thing. Gentoo's install guide is thorough and has virtually no noise. Compare that to the install-guides for Debian, which are affirmative nightmares, filled with irrelevant stuff. Furthermore, a helpful and friendly user-community is always a good way to help new users orient themselves. New users are going to ask questions on forums that advanced users find obvious. That should not be an invitation to say, "RTFM bitch" at the top of your lungs. All of us were newbies at one point, and just because we may have had to learn things the hard way doesn't mean that others should too.
The point it, it is an invalid and completely unverifiable assumption to assume that the person who did this was a Linux-supporter. So don't make that assumption.
Stop defaming the community.
So what, naming everyone involved is a lengthy process? Some recent papers based on genome-wide microarray methods have 40 or more authors (see Science and Nature). That doesn't mean they shouldn't all be credited. Everyone involved in the project should be credited in the about section. This is simply academic honesty. We need to establish some strong ethical guidelines on how to attribute proper credit.
Yea, the idea is specifically *not* to file joint lawsuites, which make it easier for the defendant to defend himself. True, they also make it easier for everyone else to win (as they can pool their resources), but the important point is to drown them in legal hogwash. Bwuhahhaahahah.
There is no evidence to suggest that the individuals who did this have anything to do with the FS/OSS GNU/Linux community, or were even fans of GNU/Linux.
There are many possibilities as to who did this, only one of which is a Linux-fan.
Could have been an angered ex-employee at SCO.
Could have been a renegade at IBM.
Could have been someone who doesn't like SCO for some other reason.
So, stop defaming the Linux community.
by implying that GNU/Linux fans did this. I say we should all file separate (not joint) lawsuites against them for defamation (this would really fuck up their legal department with paperwork, because they'd be sued by about a thousand people at once).
Look, people should get credit for their work. That's really a pretty simple basic moral. I don't agree with Reiser's method of achieving such (the advertisements displayed whenever using his utils), but we need to properly attribute credit.
I'm also not sure I agree with the FSF' new documentation license that's coming out, having "invariable sections".
It's very simple. What RedHat's doing is plaguarism. They have replaced the KDE symbol with one of their own; this implied to end-users that RedHat made it. They are effectively taking credit for someone else' work. This is wrong.
We as a community should shun those who try to take credit for that which is not their own. I believe that Debian's current issue is that they think that the new GPL documentation license is not free, and I think they have a good argument. However, that does not make it ok to plaguarize other people's work. We should refuse to buy software by distributers like RedHat who plaguarize other people's work. Period. This is as immoral as me posting something written by Dickens and claiming it's mine. So, we should put pressure on RedHat to make more effort to attribute others for their work. We should also make a stronger effort to do that ourselves, and thank others for their contributions. And there are ways to do such that don't involve obnoxious messages (e.g., About).
Yes, the decision as to which files / folders get protection is arbitrary. It's called freedom of choice. You don't like the decision that a distro uses, then you can choose your own. You don't want any at all, then you can get rid of them all.
Yes, libtrash does offer much more effective coverage. However, there's nothing wrong with alsoo having this method.
In short, there is no harm that can come from having this functionality. If you don't like it, you can get rid of it, delete the protect.conf file, and it won't affect you at all. So, I don't see a good argument against it.
Do you have a way to make these decisions without having to result to personal and arbitrary preferences?
Well, the idea is that each distribution decides which folders / files go into protect.conf. I suggest having prompt and can't-delete options in the protect.conf file. I'm not proposing it should be anything fixed in stone by rm. It should be up to each GNU/Linux distribution to decide what to protect and how much, and -- ultimately -- up to the user (as anyone with administrative/root priviledges would be able to alter the contents of protect.conf).
This is only effective when you only protect a few critical directories. Maybe 10 to 20. Otherwise, it approaches rm -i, and the user just learns to ignore it. The idea is to make it like a fire-alarm. Fire-alarm's don't (or shouldn't) go off when you light a cigaratte. They should, however, go off when you've started a grease fire and you try to put it out by moronically spraying water on it (;-). So, distros and ultimately end-users should only protect the really critical things.
I believe you miss the point. I think that rm -i us useless. What would be more useful is having a file -- '/etc/protect.conf' -- that lists directories and files that the user should be prompted (y/n) before deleting. Maybe even in that file specify a reason why that directory is protected.
It was an entire GUI, yes. And it was more responsive.
.debs).
Firstly, Windows 3.1 was the most unstable piece of shit OS I've ever used. PWM or Ratpoison + a file-manager (in X) is also an entire GUI, and it will be just as responsive. Oh yea, it also won't crash. Next.
It's okay to admit you were wrong. My Windows 3.11 argument has never been countered by anyone yet.
That's because it isn't an argument. It's bullshit, like everything else you've said.
I dismissed them because they were vague claims with no examples to back them up. People have been using Windows XP for close to two years now with no problems--no more DLL hell, unlike the Linux equivalent.
If by "no problems", you mean the mirage of security concerns, then maybe yes. Sorry, I'm not for wasting my hard-drive space and wasting my RAM -- not to mention wasting my download bandwidth -- to download, save, and load the same libraries over and over again. One copy of Gtk is more than enough for me. They will also consume more RAM than necessary if you load multiple progs that use the same library. Let's not forget, some of us don't want to spend more time downloading libraries than programs every time we want a new program. And let's not forget the huge potential for security and stability problems, as every different vender of software will be shipping their OS with *their own* version of every library, which contains who knows how many security/stability/etc bugs, and was compiled with who knows what crappy compile options.
After all, kilobytes and even mere megatbytes are at a premium these days.
You are, of course, *ass*uming that users want to buy upgrades to run your bloated crappy OS.
a Gentoo elitist...As if I want to spend all day building my distribution over the network when I've got work to do.
Am I claiming Gentoo is for everyone? No. RTFA next time. Gentoo is the best OS for me, I make no claims for anyone else. I simply said it has no package management problems. Likewise with Debian's apt-get. There are problems with package management in the more user-friendly distros (like RedHat), but those can easily be resolved by following Gentoo's and Debian's example. I believe Lindows is already doing that (they use
The right way to solve this problem is not to needlessly replicate the same library a hundred times within every application folder. That is the easy way to solve this problem. It is also wrong. The right way to solve this problem is to solve it at the package management level, and utilize better package (dependency) management. That is not an easy solution. But it is the right solution. There is this guy. He works for the President. His name is Donald Rumsfeld, and he's the Secretary of Defense. I think that a particular quote by him is most relevant in this situation:
"For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." [actually, this is a Mencken quote, but it is one of Rumsfeld's rules]
This is obviously a little bit of wisdom that has completely escaped you, as well as those at MS and Apple. Every distribution could implement your "solution" at the drop of a dime. It would require very minimal effort. So, obviously there is a reason why they haven't done that: because it is an inferior solution.
P.S.: I'm on a 1.1GHz, 60GB 7200rpm ATA-100, 256MB, GF2 GTS 64MB computer; and I still don't want to waste my resources duplicating the same libraries for every application.
Also, if this were such a no-brainer obviously right solution, then why didn't everyone do it the minute it was possible? MS could have done this a long time ago. They didn't, because they probably realized the flaw in it. This is not something that's hard to do -- this is something that would be incredibly easy to do. Every GNU/Linux distribution could have do this in a matter of a few days. None of them have. Because they recognize that there are flaws with this "solution". This is a simple-minded solution for dolts.
The UI should definitely be high-priority.
And then a long beat-around-the-bush argument side-stepping the fact that Apple and MS ignored the underlying problem as to why the GUI was becoming unresponsive, and just put on a bandaid. See the threat between Linus and that Xfree86 guy for details on why just renicing things alone is a problematic solution.
inux has yet to spawn forth a desktop environment as responsive as Windows 3.11, which was a mere shell on top of DOS and not an entire kernel. So much for that argument.
Your propensity for bullshit is remarkable. What was windows 3.11? Basically it was a file-manager plus a primitive windowmanager. Ratpoison or pwm (pluse a file-manager, like DFM) would provide all of that functionality on GNU/Linux, except faster and with greater stability. Thank you for demonstrating you don't know wtf you're talking about, as usual.
Windows XP solved DLL hell.
And introduced 6 additional problems, which I mentioned. I won't mention them again, since you'd obviously sooner ignore them than admit that you were wrong. The real solution -- the best way to solve the problem, the way which doesn't introduce at least 6 additional problems when you implement it -- is to create better package/dependency management. I've been using Gentoo for a while: no dependency problems. Period. They're also working on reverse-dependencies, so I can remove libraries that are no longer needed: not perfect yet, but on it's way. Btw, the reason for removing no-longer use dependencies (libraries) is that they're wasteful and grab disk-space. Since your "solution" wastes tons of disk-space, you can't complain at all on the grounds of "unnecessary libraries being there".
There are no consistency problems.
When applicaitons start coming with their own libraries built in, there are going to be consistency problems. Different libraries do not function exactly the same. There will also be security problems.
There's also the fact that MS' "solution" wastes gobs of hard-drive space and also wastes RAM.
I was running Windows XP acceptably on a 266mhz with 128MB of RAM
Yes, and how much of your RAM does XP waste on its own selfish needs, which are completely irrelevant to you getting work done? Try loading several more programs, or even one program that requires lots of RAM per the nature of what it does (e.g., MrBayes), and see how things slow down to a crawl.
Try that with Red Hat 9 or even the latest Slackware.
Can't speak for RedHat or Slack because I don't use them. However, Gentoo works very well on all systems, and can be taylored specifically to your needs.
You have yet to refute any of my points. That is, of course, because all of my 6 points were right.
But mandating open source is just a *bad* thing.
Doesn't anyone bother to RTFA? They are not talking about mandating FS/OSS. They are talking about mandating that government officials consider it as an option, and justify not using it if they don't. The idea is to level the playing field, and give FS/OSS a chance to compete on it's merits. Quite frankly, also, there are many things -- like voting software -- which simply should be FS/OSS as a matter of principle (transparency).
Which is producing the most secure server OS out of the box (of course, the fact that it's very very minimal out of the box helps).
Do you know what a troll is?
Yep, you and anyone else who's arguing that the increased bloat and reduced performance, stability, and security which would occur if we got rid of shared libraries would be a good thing.
My idea is not "crap" because you disagree with it.
No, your idea is crap because of the reasons I mentioned above. TherNo, your idee were 6 of them. Or do you selectively ignore that which you don't like? Just for summary, they are: (1) Bandwidth; (2) HD-space; (3) RAM-usage; (4) Load-time; (5) Consistency; (6) Security, stability, and speed.
In your rush to claim how "superior" Windows is, you ignored all of the reasons why eliminating shared libraries is a very bad idea. You brush aside (1)-(4) by saying that it's not an issue since users are getting better and better hardware. Of course, you're full of shit there. Users are not going to upgrade their computers just to use your crappy OS, and they certainly don't want to have hundreds of slightly different versions of the same library floating around. You can not however brush aside the 5th and 6th problems with eliminating shared libraries. Indeed, there is no way to deal with those problems.
MS and Apple decided to take the easy -- as in, wrong -- way to deal with this problem. Just like they've taken the easy -- as in wrong -- way to deal with all their other problems (e.g., always running the UI at maximum priority). This is not a "feature" which any distribution should aim to emulate. It is crap. It is a "solution" to dependency-hell which creates a whole slew of additional problems, which are just as bad as dependency hell.
Windows XP removed DLL hell by copying different versions of conflicting system libraries. And yet the computing world has not fallen apart
Hahahah. You can forget about real consistent behavior between apps. You can forget about security -- as if it was ever there in the first place for Windows. Forget about stability as well. Finally, you can forget about using WinXP on your current system: plan on shelling out $1,000 just to get WinXP to run acceptably. That is fucking bullshit. You want to emulate that bullcrap, fine.
The right thing to do is usually the hardest thing to do. That holds true in this case, where the right thing to do is create a good dependency-management system (portage) and to create a good reverse-dependency maintenance system, which would remove completely unused libraries (undone?).
timeliness of delivery, ease of maintenance, and production cost are all at least as important as functionality
All of these things have to do with maintaining the software. None of them are helped by having larger, bulkier, more bloated code; in fact, they are all hurt by that. Thus, small code size -- which almost inherently means less RAM use and better performance -- is good for all of them.
Ultimately, there is only one factor to consider when deciding "which software is the best" from a purely functional point of view: which software allows the user to get his or her job done faster. All of the extra features added in MS Word after version 95 haven't really helped the vast majority of users get their tasks done any faster; but they have made the code much more bloated, slow, and memory-consuming. Thus, on a pound for pound basis, it is worse.
You're just mad that it's not the 80s anymore and shared libraries have been proven time and time again to be utterly pointless.
/. never ceases to amaze me. There are at least 6 reasons why shared libraries are still much better than every app having it's own library:
The stupidity at
1. Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.
2. Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.
3. RAM. Loading two copies of the same library wastes gobs of RAM.
4. Load-time. Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.
5. Consistency. Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if every app uses its own version of glibc.
6. The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed. Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library.
The way to solve dependency-hell is to write better package management systems. Gentoo is part way there, though they need better reverse-package management (removing no-longer needed packages).
If only for security, convenience, and inconsistent behavior alone, your idea -- and that of anyone else who wants to do away with shared libraries -- is crap.
This guys dream is bullshit. You aren't going to win over any Win9x/MacOS users by making an OS just as crappy as Win9x/MacOS. Why should anyone bother to go through the trouble of uninstalling their current OS and installing a new one if that new OS is going to be just as slow and bloated as their old OS?
Yes, MS makes money, despite requiring users to upgrade. That's because most of their sales come from OEM-shops. Very few people are going out and buying WinXP then buying a new system (or upgrading their current one) to run it on.