I don't get it. Microsoft donates code to the community, licensed under the GPL. Anyone is free to do whatever they like with this code (well, within the constraints of the license), and people are actually bitching about this? I've released quite a few pieces of software under various OSI licenses, and I don't actively maintain the code. If somebody else wants to, fine. Would everyone be happier if Microsoft weren't releasing anything at all?
In the minds of the neurological cripples who are bitching about this, Microsoft are the Great Satan, no matter what.
It doesn't matter what they do; it's always part of an Evil Plot. At this point, Steve Ballmer could donate the entirety of Microsoft's net worth to World Vision if he wanted to, and the FSF would still try and portray him laughing maniacally in the background.
Microsoft are still doing their greatest amount of harm in another way, which nobody mentions or thinks about.
Microsoft's pattern of "interoperability," and integration, which users got used to with Office, (being able to embed OLE applets pretty much anywhere) is appallingly bad engineering practice, and is utterly anathema to the earlier UNIX design philosophy.
The problem, however, is that Microsoft have now got end users thoroughly accustomed and addicted to such functionality, to a degree where they scream loudly and relentlessly for it to be implemented within Linux, even though it is the source of nearly all of Windows' technical problems. (Security, stability etc) Eric Raymond has written at length about why excessive reliance on IPC is a bad thing; especially when that IPC is predominantly binary in nature.
So even though Linux developers initially started out knowing better development practice, they now face such vocal, incessant pressure from an end-user base that are thoroughly acclimatised to Microsoft's practices, that they cannot use said better practice, and create more stable software.
Thus, even if Microsoft ultimately die, they have more or less ensured that the demands of their own customer base, will eventually completely destroy the initial technical integrity of Linux.
Internet Explorer is the developers' browser, despite being closed source. Microsoft destroyed Java in the minds of anyone who matters, and successfully, entirely replaced it with ActiveX, at least as far as the Web is concerned.
Scream at me and call me a shill all you want, Linux users; but it's the plain truth. If all you want to do is passively surf, Firefox is great. For corporate types wanting to customise things (and even more, want to be able to embed their spreadsheets directly into a web page, via OLE) IE is the only way to fly.
Linux still doesn't have anything that can touch that, and the sad irony is that you should be light years ahead of anything Microsoft can produce where integration is concerned. UNIX used to be all about integration, and it was because the universal interface between all applications was pure text. You could use OpenOffice to render a spreadsheet in textual CSV format, and then write an AWK script to filter it directly into an HTML table from there.
The contemporary Linux (GUI, at least) programmer is not a truly technically inclined person, or a UNIX native. They're a Windows refugee who has drunk Stallman's Kool-Aid, and as such, simply want GNU/Windows.
As a result, we get programs which use things like XML-RPC for interprocess communication. The people coding Linux's desktop environments are either too young to know about the earlier UNIX concept of pure textual IPC, or are Windows refugees who erroneously think that they know better.
A contemporary 19 year old (university age, or close to) programmer will have been born in 1990. In other words, he's someone who has absolutely no genuine concept of the earlier UNIX design philosophy, and is probably sufficiently arrogant that he can't see any point in learning; especially with the number of brainless Windows refugees constantly screaming at him to make Linux identical to Windows in every possible respect.
As long as Linux developers think they can only win by blindly imitating Windows at every possible opportunity, Windows will keep beating Linux. The only way Linux developers can turn that trend around, is to embrace and actually start using the strengths of old school UNIX, rather than viewing Linux's UNIX heritage as an embarassment.
The Lord of the Rings books, to me and to many others, consolidated our mythology of elves and orcs, swords and dragons.
Yes, but...
Blizzard's (Metzen's) Orcs >>>>>>> Tolkien's.
I'm sorry, but it had to be said.;) Granted, I agree where Tolkien's Elves are concerned. Dragonlance's Elves were basically a bunch of genocidal snobs, and Blizzard's are more or less the same. The only thing Metzen's Night Elves are really good for is pet food.;)
Nah. We were only going to abort the insecure, easily frightened babies - they're the ones who grow up to be Republicans.
I'm proud of myself right now. I currently have mod points, but I displayed sufficient integrity that I was able to restrain myself from modding the parent +1, Insightful.
It wasn't easy, because yes, like a lot of people, I consider the Republican Party to essentially be the Satanic priesthood...but I managed it.;)
The more sane among us have realised that being a threat to Linux was no longer in Microsoft's best interests, for a while now.
I'm hoping, however, that as Microsoft continue to engage in more of these types of actions, that eventually the FSF and its' supporters will get the memo as well, and the culture of fear, hatred, and general toxicity which the FSF encourages among Linux users, will be allowed to die.
I've said it before, and I will keep saying it; at this point, Microsoft are no longer a viable threat to anyone but themselves.
Making a package manager that can handle configure/make/install for any app isn't trivial, but it has been done
Automating the autotools three-step in and of itself, is something I can do almost with my eyes closed. That isn't what's hard.
The hard part is how often compilation for individual packages, actually has more to it than that. A lot of things need patches; some things need in-place patching with sed, depending on how slack upstream is.
Then there's other annoying things like individual developers refusing to follow the tarball naming conventions exactly, so I have to write edge cases because the tcl developers label their files with tcl8.2.tar.bz2 instead of tcl-8.2.tar.bz2. It's a small change, but when you've got about 5 different variants of such a deviation, and a heap of different files doing it, it scales up and causes a serious pain in the ass.
Computers can't tolerate novelty, and the only reason why you have to try and write novelty handling into package management, is purely in order to compensate for human stupidity and lack of discipline.
That's also why you see snarled up, overcomplex messes like Debian's infrastructure. I used to hate them for doing it, but I've slowly begun to understand. They have to write a huge amount of plumbing just to take in what is otherwise a chaotic, randomised mess of data, and normalise it with their own system. It's literally, exactly what the Borg did in order to create universal compatibility among wildly disparate, divergent systems; bring order to chaos.
If our species could just stop being so brainlessly fucking stupid, superficial, and wilfully lazy and ignorant for even 5 seconds, we might be able to get something genuinely useful done; but we don't, and you have wastes of life like the average Windows user, (and even the GP of this post, if I'm honest) just wanting it all done for them, and done right now, and in such a way that they don't have to be even mildly proactive or responsible for any of it.
I'm seriously having trouble understanding how a species that thinks like that, really deserves to continue to survive at all.
Anyone born after 1990 isn't really anything much other than a corporate milch cow, as far as I'm concerned.
The system has raised them to be exactly that. They buy what they're told, think what they're told, say what they're told, and do what they're told. Political freedom, or any desire for it among them, is completely dead. They have no concept whatsoever of civic responsibility, and even if they did, it might take time away from watching Survivor.
The occasional news report you hear about a school shooting or new serial killer, basically represents the occasional exception to that rule; someone who didn't simply want to be a good little corporate drone, and who ended up going postal from the frustration of not having a viable alternative.
So yeah. We'll read news reports every so often which will stun us about the degree to which these kids mindlessly consume, (texting toddlers etc) but eventually, it will get to the point where none of the older generation(s) are left, and mindless, servile consumerism in a society straight out of The Running Man will be entirely the norm. I try not to go into my local city too often these days; I used to enjoy it, but the constant reminders of how close we are to finishing the transition to total fascism, is something I find depressing.
So congratulations, kids. Welcome to your global inheritance. If you happen to want an undisguised picture of what the future is going to look like, free of corporate spin, there's this little book called 1984 which you might want to pick up sometime; assuming it's still for sale, that is, and of course that you can actually read more conventional English than lolspeak.
Has any research with useful, practical applications actually come out of the ISS yet?
Not saying there hasn't been, necessarily, but if there has, I haven't heard about it.
There was a joke which went around about the Mars Rover, which I think really personified the problem of the genuine usefulness of space exploration, for me.
"Scientists today were stunned by the revelation, received from the Mars Rover, that the Martian landscape consists primarily of rocks, apparently similar to those commonly found in the Nevada Desert.
The scientists have said that they will not rest until every one of these Martian rocks have been thoroughly analysed and catalogued."
There was more going on than was posted on lkml. Alan has always called Linus "pinhead" and gotten away with it.
Well yes, that would start to annoy me too pretty quickly, I'm guessing.
If that makes me a Linus fan boy, whatever. I'm amazed at what he's managed to accomplish.
No, it doesn't necessarily; or I'm not going to call you one, anywayz. Truthfully I tend to think that he is probably under a lot of stress most of the time myself, as well.
I possibly wasn't meaning to attack him quite as strongly as it initially appeared, and I apologise if so. I just worry that, if he is sometimes a little irate with someone because he's having a bad day or whatever, the kernel could suffer from potentially missing out on something beneficial, is all.
Why is it, that all the GUI desktops abandoned Unix's philosophies completely and instead went the Windows way (which of course actually is the MacOS/Xerox/$otherProductItGotTakenFrom way)?
Because the Windows users are determined to see us become extinct. They scream, and scream, and scream, and scream endlessly for monoliths that are simple on the interface side, but hide complexity on the implementation side, where they don't have to look at it.
If any of us try and utter even a single word of protest, we are told that we should not rightfully exist.
...is how many other scenarios there, have been, where someone had code for the kernel which was better than the default, but which got arbitrarily rejected by Linus out of hand. This might be a high profile case, but I'll be money that it's probably nowhere close to having been the only one.
The benevolent dictator model, when it works, is a good thing. However, Linus, like all of us, is human, and he's also been working on the kernel for a long time now.
There would have to have been times when he has made the wrong decisions, and something tells me that Con Kolivas represents one of them.
Still some grudge towards Torvalds and Molnar? From the FAQ:
Apparently Linus genuinely is growing a little more prickly in his old age. While he's still got a fair way to go to equal Theo, he apparently does have a tendency to snap and snarl at people, on occasion. You might want to look up how he treated Alan Cox in relation to the tty code in the kernel, as well.
Yeah, I can work around it and make it work, but I don't think I should have to. I do that kind of shit at work, I don't want to do it at home too when all I'm trying to do is use my wireless internet, or listen to music and open a video up at the same time, or play around with some voice recognition software.
Install FreeBSD. You will have to do that sort of screwing around *once*, yes, for initial setup; but after that you won't have to do it again. I've been using my system for around 6 months now, and it's fine.
Nope, you are thinking like a geek. Microsoft is a business, follow the money like I did. It doesn't really matter if they have a roadmap, neither does it matter if their products suck or not.
It matters if it goes on long enough.
Even the idiot Windows refugees who are responsible for fouling Linux up, know what I'm talking about here; the whole reason why they're moving to Linux is because they can smell blood in the water. If Joe Sixpack knows something is sufficiently wrong to move to Linux, Microsoft are in truly deep shit; there's no coming back from that.
Meanwhile if I'm right gross revenue will be dropping hard as revenue per unit drops much faster than any kilely increase in units could make up for.
There has been a paradigm shift, yes; I won't argue with you at all about that. However, paradigm shifts by themselves don't have to kill a company. Microsoft survived the introduction of the Internet, even if Windows 95 was their peak. (And it was; you can't deny that. The sort of hoopla surrounding 95's release here in Australia, at least, has never been seen again, before or since. I can only assume that such was even MORE intense in the US)
My point is, you're only going to survive a paradigm shift, if you've actually got something to do it with. Your argument has basically proven my point with Apple; 9 was a dead end, but Steve pulled a rabbit out of his hat at the last minute and produced OSX. Microsoft can't do that; that was my point.
Nope. You must be too young to remember.
I'm old enough. I just never gave a crap.;)
Apple have always seriously annoyed me. My uncle had a machine with OS9, and not only did I hate using it, compared with first Commodore machines and then my 486, but additionally they were twice as expensive as everything else.
OSX might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a pirated, jerry rigged ISO for commodity hardware is the only way I'll ever see it. I can go into Melbourne and get an old refurbished 3 Ghz commodity box for less than $300, now; and put Linux From Scratch on it for the cost my bandwidth. An entry level Mac is close to $2K.
I'm not a suit in terms of my own thinking at all, and truthfully I hate them; but a certain amount of basic business sense is something I wish I could see, from Steve or whoever else runs Apple now. All them selling their own hardware means to me, is that I can't afford to buy it.
Apple can be as smug about their price point only being for rich, artsy New York metrosexuals as much as they want, (and they are; I remember their advertising, and that just alienated me from them even more) but the bottom line is that until Steve completely gets the memo about commodity hardware, he's going to sell a lot less units, and correspondingly still make less money (despite being at least twice as expensive per unit) than he would be otherwise.
Of course, as ESR wrote last year, Apple probably don't care much about world domination in desktop terms now, anywayz. They need a flagship desktop system, yes; but everyone I read keeps talking about how they're a media and mobile gadget shop, these days.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. All I know is fifteen years ago any pundit worth printing in the finest ZD rags just knew Windows was the future. Predicting the future more than year or two out is a sucker's game.
UNIX is at least going to be the future until someone comes up with something else, (which admittedly they could) which hasn't happened yet.
As for the Stallmanite morons and the proverbial latte sipping, yuppie CS graduate crowd working on GNOME, don't worry about them. Stallman is getting increasingly long in the tooth, and there isn't a lot of historical precedent for cults outliving their founder. OSX having its' own, fully SUS certified toolchain gives us just the counterweight we need to him, as well.
And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
Some of us have better things to do than be computer dorks, we grew up, have families and other priorities and likely a higher quality of life than those of you glued to your crappy hard to use editors.
Yes, because having a wife, kids, a mortgage, and probably a 16 hour a day job is definitely going to be less stressful and better for your health than living alone, without all that extra weight.
There is no better or worse, my friend. The grass is always greener...
Our Solaris guy had to show me how it worked. He, like you, seemed to assume I'd love it once I learned about it because of its power. I challenged him to show me something it could do that UltraEdit couldn't. He wasn't able to come up with anything.
You're correct. Vi(m)'s modal interface is a major design flaw, and it presumably does present a major stumbling block for the number of new users. Is Emacs possibly available for Solaris? It is not modal, and although I haven't delved deeply into it, seemed quite easy to use. There is also GNU Nano, if you want an open source editor. It is quite basic, but can still serve.
The way I see it, for some of us, Vi(m) does have a few good points, however.
- Nvi (that is, BSD vi) has an executable size of 300 kilobytes. I'm sure UltraEdit very possibly does exceed the functionality of vi, but I doubt it manages to do so while still having a smaller executable. There are some applications (embedded, handhelds, etc) where space still matters, and a 300kb editor (especially with the amount of functionality that you get for that 300kb) is an editor which can be put on a very large number of potential devices.
- Vi was originally designed for a vt102 terminal. This again has positive implications for mobile or embedded use, since it allows for a keyboard of much less than the modern standard size.
- Vi was originally designed to allow remote text editing over a 1200 baud serial line connection. While it is to be hoped that our network connections these days are always going to be faster than 1200 baud, for certain applications, an editor which is that conservative in its' networking usage, over remote connections, can again be a very valuable thing. Connections over wifi are not, I believe, always completely flawless.
- Vim (probably not Vi) has certain features (macros, etc) which synergise extremely well with vi's original command set, and allow for very rapid combination and automation of commands in a unique way. I'm not saying that in order to still try and convert you to it, but some of us do find it useful.
I sincerely hope that you will find an editor which meets your needs, and allows you to be comfortable. If you are a programmer, your choice of editor will probably be the single most important decision you make.
I'm sick and tired of this new fad that Slashdot seems is goes through, which is mostly a mentality that everyone here thinks Linux is perfect. No, they don't. Nobody does.
Here's the problem. You quite possibly are one of the few sane, rational, non-autistic Linux users who exist; I will concede the possibility, however unlikely it might be.
However, whenever the rest of us try and accept that idea that maybe, possibly, some Linux users are normal, Stallman's drones have a disturbing tendency to immediately start clawing their way up through the ground in large numbers.
Other than when we visit Slashdot, reminding ourselves to ensure that we always pack a mallet, possibly some holy water, and a wooden stake, how exactly do you suggest that we deal with that problem?
If by "run a few scripts" you mean "exactly the same scripts for every single package", fine. I mean, it's going to be./configure && make && make install.
The GP is an end user. The autotools triple is too difficult for end users. You're asking him to put his bottle in the microwave, set the timer for it, and take it out all by himself. You're supposed to do that, and then jam it in his mouth, and then burp him when he's finished.
Oh and by the way, unless you do that, Linux won't universally supplant Windows, which for some inexplicable reason, the Linux community is desperate to make happen.
No security.
The GP is an end user. End users don't care about security. At all. They especially don't care about security, if security in any way compromises their ability to gain the kind of effortless, instant gratification described above.
The absolute worst any modern desktop user has to do is run some commands -- that is, copy and paste something from a website into a commandline.
The GP is an end user... You already know how that's going to go, don't you?;)
Frankly, some kind of unified one-step scripted install structure, preferably all in a single container, that actually worked as intended would catapult linux on the desktop by leaps and bounds. It would make so many things easier. Developers would have to use it, though, or it would have to be dead simple to convert current asinine scripted installs to it, else there won't be packages for it and the whole thing would be dead before it started.
I agree with you. I've actually been trying to figure out a solution for this problem myself for the last couple of years, but it's slow going. The thing with package management is that it has two particularly nasty problems.
a) The dependency problem. Figuring out what is a prerequisite/dependency of what, and what you need in order to be able to have or build something else, and then putting a system for that in place which works, and cleanly removes all the dependencies as well, in the right order, despite human attempts to screw it up. The problem there is that it isn't only end users who are stupid, unfortunately; it's very often developers too; so developers tell the system that certain things are dependencies when they aren't.
b) The fakeroot problem. This is a problem where a package needs to be installed as root, yet people generally do compilation or installation of programs as a normal user; and they also tend to install/unpack packages in/tmp; not the root filesystem where you have to trick the install into thinking it's going to go.
So I agree that the problem should have been solved by now, but part of the reason why it hasn't been is because it's so hard, and the rest of it is that there are a lot of people who think that the problem has already been solved, when it hasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get it. Microsoft donates code to the community, licensed under the GPL. Anyone is free to do whatever they like with this code (well, within the constraints of the license), and people are actually bitching about this? I've released quite a few pieces of software under various OSI licenses, and I don't actively maintain the code. If somebody else wants to, fine. Would everyone be happier if Microsoft weren't releasing anything at all?
In the minds of the neurological cripples who are bitching about this, Microsoft are the Great Satan, no matter what.
It doesn't matter what they do; it's always part of an Evil Plot. At this point, Steve Ballmer could donate the entirety of Microsoft's net worth to World Vision if he wanted to, and the FSF would still try and portray him laughing maniacally in the background.
Microsoft are still doing their greatest amount of harm in another way, which nobody mentions or thinks about.
Microsoft's pattern of "interoperability," and integration, which users got used to with Office, (being able to embed OLE applets pretty much anywhere) is appallingly bad engineering practice, and is utterly anathema to the earlier UNIX design philosophy.
The problem, however, is that Microsoft have now got end users thoroughly accustomed and addicted to such functionality, to a degree where they scream loudly and relentlessly for it to be implemented within Linux, even though it is the source of nearly all of Windows' technical problems. (Security, stability etc) Eric Raymond has written at length about why excessive reliance on IPC is a bad thing; especially when that IPC is predominantly binary in nature.
So even though Linux developers initially started out knowing better development practice, they now face such vocal, incessant pressure from an end-user base that are thoroughly acclimatised to Microsoft's practices, that they cannot use said better practice, and create more stable software.
Thus, even if Microsoft ultimately die, they have more or less ensured that the demands of their own customer base, will eventually completely destroy the initial technical integrity of Linux.
Internet Explorer is the developers' browser, despite being closed source. Microsoft destroyed Java in the minds of anyone who matters, and successfully, entirely replaced it with ActiveX, at least as far as the Web is concerned.
Scream at me and call me a shill all you want, Linux users; but it's the plain truth. If all you want to do is passively surf, Firefox is great. For corporate types wanting to customise things (and even more, want to be able to embed their spreadsheets directly into a web page, via OLE) IE is the only way to fly.
Linux still doesn't have anything that can touch that, and the sad irony is that you should be light years ahead of anything Microsoft can produce where integration is concerned. UNIX used to be all about integration, and it was because the universal interface between all applications was pure text. You could use OpenOffice to render a spreadsheet in textual CSV format, and then write an AWK script to filter it directly into an HTML table from there.
The contemporary Linux (GUI, at least) programmer is not a truly technically inclined person, or a UNIX native. They're a Windows refugee who has drunk Stallman's Kool-Aid, and as such, simply want GNU/Windows.
As a result, we get programs which use things like XML-RPC for interprocess communication. The people coding Linux's desktop environments are either too young to know about the earlier UNIX concept of pure textual IPC, or are Windows refugees who erroneously think that they know better.
A contemporary 19 year old (university age, or close to) programmer will have been born in 1990. In other words, he's someone who has absolutely no genuine concept of the earlier UNIX design philosophy, and is probably sufficiently arrogant that he can't see any point in learning; especially with the number of brainless Windows refugees constantly screaming at him to make Linux identical to Windows in every possible respect.
As long as Linux developers think they can only win by blindly imitating Windows at every possible opportunity, Windows will keep beating Linux. The only way Linux developers can turn that trend around, is to embrace and actually start using the strengths of old school UNIX, rather than viewing Linux's UNIX heritage as an embarassment.
The Lord of the Rings books, to me and to many others, consolidated our mythology of elves and orcs, swords and dragons.
Yes, but...
Blizzard's (Metzen's) Orcs >>>>>>> Tolkien's.
I'm sorry, but it had to be said. ;) Granted, I agree where Tolkien's Elves are concerned. Dragonlance's Elves were basically a bunch of genocidal snobs, and Blizzard's are more or less the same. The only thing Metzen's Night Elves are really good for is pet food. ;)
Nah. We were only going to abort the insecure, easily frightened babies - they're the ones who grow up to be Republicans.
I'm proud of myself right now. I currently have mod points, but I displayed sufficient integrity that I was able to restrain myself from modding the parent +1, Insightful.
It wasn't easy, because yes, like a lot of people, I consider the Republican Party to essentially be the Satanic priesthood...but I managed it. ;)
The more sane among us have realised that being a threat to Linux was no longer in Microsoft's best interests, for a while now.
I'm hoping, however, that as Microsoft continue to engage in more of these types of actions, that eventually the FSF and its' supporters will get the memo as well, and the culture of fear, hatred, and general toxicity which the FSF encourages among Linux users, will be allowed to die.
I've said it before, and I will keep saying it; at this point, Microsoft are no longer a viable threat to anyone but themselves.
Making a package manager that can handle configure/make/install for any app isn't trivial, but it has been done
Automating the autotools three-step in and of itself, is something I can do almost with my eyes closed. That isn't what's hard.
The hard part is how often compilation for individual packages, actually has more to it than that. A lot of things need patches; some things need in-place patching with sed, depending on how slack upstream is.
Then there's other annoying things like individual developers refusing to follow the tarball naming conventions exactly, so I have to write edge cases because the tcl developers label their files with tcl8.2.tar.bz2 instead of tcl-8.2.tar.bz2. It's a small change, but when you've got about 5 different variants of such a deviation, and a heap of different files doing it, it scales up and causes a serious pain in the ass.
Computers can't tolerate novelty, and the only reason why you have to try and write novelty handling into package management, is purely in order to compensate for human stupidity and lack of discipline.
That's also why you see snarled up, overcomplex messes like Debian's infrastructure. I used to hate them for doing it, but I've slowly begun to understand. They have to write a huge amount of plumbing just to take in what is otherwise a chaotic, randomised mess of data, and normalise it with their own system. It's literally, exactly what the Borg did in order to create universal compatibility among wildly disparate, divergent systems; bring order to chaos.
If our species could just stop being so brainlessly fucking stupid, superficial, and wilfully lazy and ignorant for even 5 seconds, we might be able to get something genuinely useful done; but we don't, and you have wastes of life like the average Windows user, (and even the GP of this post, if I'm honest) just wanting it all done for them, and done right now, and in such a way that they don't have to be even mildly proactive or responsible for any of it.
I'm seriously having trouble understanding how a species that thinks like that, really deserves to continue to survive at all.
Anyone born after 1990 isn't really anything much other than a corporate milch cow, as far as I'm concerned.
The system has raised them to be exactly that. They buy what they're told, think what they're told, say what they're told, and do what they're told. Political freedom, or any desire for it among them, is completely dead. They have no concept whatsoever of civic responsibility, and even if they did, it might take time away from watching Survivor.
The occasional news report you hear about a school shooting or new serial killer, basically represents the occasional exception to that rule; someone who didn't simply want to be a good little corporate drone, and who ended up going postal from the frustration of not having a viable alternative.
So yeah. We'll read news reports every so often which will stun us about the degree to which these kids mindlessly consume, (texting toddlers etc) but eventually, it will get to the point where none of the older generation(s) are left, and mindless, servile consumerism in a society straight out of The Running Man will be entirely the norm. I try not to go into my local city too often these days; I used to enjoy it, but the constant reminders of how close we are to finishing the transition to total fascism, is something I find depressing.
So congratulations, kids. Welcome to your global inheritance. If you happen to want an undisguised picture of what the future is going to look like, free of corporate spin, there's this little book called 1984 which you might want to pick up sometime; assuming it's still for sale, that is, and of course that you can actually read more conventional English than lolspeak.
Has any research with useful, practical applications actually come out of the ISS yet?
Not saying there hasn't been, necessarily, but if there has, I haven't heard about it.
There was a joke which went around about the Mars Rover, which I think really personified the problem of the genuine usefulness of space exploration, for me.
"Scientists today were stunned by the revelation, received from the Mars Rover, that the Martian landscape consists primarily of rocks, apparently similar to those commonly found in the Nevada Desert.
The scientists have said that they will not rest until every one of these Martian rocks have been thoroughly analysed and catalogued."
There was more going on than was posted on lkml. Alan has always called Linus "pinhead" and gotten away with it.
Well yes, that would start to annoy me too pretty quickly, I'm guessing.
If that makes me a Linus fan boy, whatever. I'm amazed at what he's managed to accomplish.
No, it doesn't necessarily; or I'm not going to call you one, anywayz. Truthfully I tend to think that he is probably under a lot of stress most of the time myself, as well.
I possibly wasn't meaning to attack him quite as strongly as it initially appeared, and I apologise if so. I just worry that, if he is sometimes a little irate with someone because he's having a bad day or whatever, the kernel could suffer from potentially missing out on something beneficial, is all.
Why is it, that all the GUI desktops abandoned Unix's philosophies completely and instead went the Windows way (which of course actually is the MacOS/Xerox/$otherProductItGotTakenFrom way)?
Because the Windows users are determined to see us become extinct. They scream, and scream, and scream, and scream endlessly for monoliths that are simple on the interface side, but hide complexity on the implementation side, where they don't have to look at it.
If any of us try and utter even a single word of protest, we are told that we should not rightfully exist.
...is how many other scenarios there, have been, where someone had code for the kernel which was better than the default, but which got arbitrarily rejected by Linus out of hand. This might be a high profile case, but I'll be money that it's probably nowhere close to having been the only one.
The benevolent dictator model, when it works, is a good thing. However, Linus, like all of us, is human, and he's also been working on the kernel for a long time now.
There would have to have been times when he has made the wrong decisions, and something tells me that Con Kolivas represents one of them.
Still some grudge towards Torvalds and Molnar? From the FAQ:
Apparently Linus genuinely is growing a little more prickly in his old age. While he's still got a fair way to go to equal Theo, he apparently does have a tendency to snap and snarl at people, on occasion. You might want to look up how he treated Alan Cox in relation to the tty code in the kernel, as well.
Yeah, I can work around it and make it work, but I don't think I should have to. I do that kind of shit at work, I don't want to do it at home too when all I'm trying to do is use my wireless internet, or listen to music and open a video up at the same time, or play around with some voice recognition software.
Install FreeBSD. You will have to do that sort of screwing around *once*, yes, for initial setup; but after that you won't have to do it again. I've been using my system for around 6 months now, and it's fine.
Comments like that lead me to believe that you're one of those people that are the reason why people still prefer to use Windows.
http://slashdot.org/~petrus4/journal/230083
This is a journal entry I wrote in response to statements like this; you might find it interesting.
Nope, you are thinking like a geek. Microsoft is a business, follow the money like I did. It doesn't really matter if they have a roadmap, neither does it matter if their products suck or not.
It matters if it goes on long enough.
Even the idiot Windows refugees who are responsible for fouling Linux up, know what I'm talking about here; the whole reason why they're moving to Linux is because they can smell blood in the water. If Joe Sixpack knows something is sufficiently wrong to move to Linux, Microsoft are in truly deep shit; there's no coming back from that.
Meanwhile if I'm right gross revenue will be dropping hard as revenue per unit drops much faster than any kilely increase in units could make up for.
There has been a paradigm shift, yes; I won't argue with you at all about that. However, paradigm shifts by themselves don't have to kill a company. Microsoft survived the introduction of the Internet, even if Windows 95 was their peak. (And it was; you can't deny that. The sort of hoopla surrounding 95's release here in Australia, at least, has never been seen again, before or since. I can only assume that such was even MORE intense in the US)
My point is, you're only going to survive a paradigm shift, if you've actually got something to do it with. Your argument has basically proven my point with Apple; 9 was a dead end, but Steve pulled a rabbit out of his hat at the last minute and produced OSX. Microsoft can't do that; that was my point.
Nope. You must be too young to remember.
I'm old enough. I just never gave a crap. ;)
Apple have always seriously annoyed me. My uncle had a machine with OS9, and not only did I hate using it, compared with first Commodore machines and then my 486, but additionally they were twice as expensive as everything else.
OSX might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a pirated, jerry rigged ISO for commodity hardware is the only way I'll ever see it. I can go into Melbourne and get an old refurbished 3 Ghz commodity box for less than $300, now; and put Linux From Scratch on it for the cost my bandwidth. An entry level Mac is close to $2K.
I'm not a suit in terms of my own thinking at all, and truthfully I hate them; but a certain amount of basic business sense is something I wish I could see, from Steve or whoever else runs Apple now. All them selling their own hardware means to me, is that I can't afford to buy it.
Apple can be as smug about their price point only being for rich, artsy New York metrosexuals as much as they want, (and they are; I remember their advertising, and that just alienated me from them even more) but the bottom line is that until Steve completely gets the memo about commodity hardware, he's going to sell a lot less units, and correspondingly still make less money (despite being at least twice as expensive per unit) than he would be otherwise.
Of course, as ESR wrote last year, Apple probably don't care much about world domination in desktop terms now, anywayz. They need a flagship desktop system, yes; but everyone I read keeps talking about how they're a media and mobile gadget shop, these days.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. All I know is fifteen years ago any pundit worth printing in the finest ZD rags just knew Windows was the future. Predicting the future more than year or two out is a sucker's game.
UNIX is at least going to be the future until someone comes up with something else, (which admittedly they could) which hasn't happened yet.
As for the Stallmanite morons and the proverbial latte sipping, yuppie CS graduate crowd working on GNOME, don't worry about them. Stallman is getting increasingly long in the tooth, and there isn't a lot of historical precedent for cults outliving their founder. OSX having its' own, fully SUS certified toolchain gives us just the counterweight we need to him, as well.
GNOME/
And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
I thought that was Debian's. *rimshot*
Some of us have better things to do than be computer dorks, we grew up, have families and other priorities and likely a higher quality of life than those of you glued to your crappy hard to use editors.
Yes, because having a wife, kids, a mortgage, and probably a 16 hour a day job is definitely going to be less stressful and better for your health than living alone, without all that extra weight.
There is no better or worse, my friend. The grass is always greener...
vim is more orthagonal than any random also-ran programmer's editor like UltraEdit.
Is this sort of attitude really necessary?
Our Solaris guy had to show me how it worked. He, like you, seemed to assume I'd love it once I learned about it because of its power. I challenged him to show me something it could do that UltraEdit couldn't. He wasn't able to come up with anything.
You're correct. Vi(m)'s modal interface is a major design flaw, and it presumably does present a major stumbling block for the number of new users. Is Emacs possibly available for Solaris? It is not modal, and although I haven't delved deeply into it, seemed quite easy to use. There is also GNU Nano, if you want an open source editor. It is quite basic, but can still serve.
The way I see it, for some of us, Vi(m) does have a few good points, however.
- Nvi (that is, BSD vi) has an executable size of 300 kilobytes. I'm sure UltraEdit very possibly does exceed the functionality of vi, but I doubt it manages to do so while still having a smaller executable. There are some applications (embedded, handhelds, etc) where space still matters, and a 300kb editor (especially with the amount of functionality that you get for that 300kb) is an editor which can be put on a very large number of potential devices.
- Vi was originally designed for a vt102 terminal. This again has positive implications for mobile or embedded use, since it allows for a keyboard of much less than the modern standard size.
- Vi was originally designed to allow remote text editing over a 1200 baud serial line connection. While it is to be hoped that our network connections these days are always going to be faster than 1200 baud, for certain applications, an editor which is that conservative in its' networking usage, over remote connections, can again be a very valuable thing. Connections over wifi are not, I believe, always completely flawless.
- Vim (probably not Vi) has certain features (macros, etc) which synergise extremely well with vi's original command set, and allow for very rapid combination and automation of commands in a unique way. I'm not saying that in order to still try and convert you to it, but some of us do find it useful.
I sincerely hope that you will find an editor which meets your needs, and allows you to be comfortable. If you are a programmer, your choice of editor will probably be the single most important decision you make.
I'm sick and tired of this new fad that Slashdot seems is goes through, which is mostly a mentality that everyone here thinks Linux is perfect. No, they don't. Nobody does.
Here's the problem. You quite possibly are one of the few sane, rational, non-autistic Linux users who exist; I will concede the possibility, however unlikely it might be.
However, whenever the rest of us try and accept that idea that maybe, possibly, some Linux users are normal, Stallman's drones have a disturbing tendency to immediately start clawing their way up through the ground in large numbers.
Other than when we visit Slashdot, reminding ourselves to ensure that we always pack a mallet, possibly some holy water, and a wooden stake, how exactly do you suggest that we deal with that problem?
If by "run a few scripts" you mean "exactly the same scripts for every single package", fine. I mean, it's going to be ./configure && make && make install.
The GP is an end user. The autotools triple is too difficult for end users. You're asking him to put his bottle in the microwave, set the timer for it, and take it out all by himself. You're supposed to do that, and then jam it in his mouth, and then burp him when he's finished.
Oh and by the way, unless you do that, Linux won't universally supplant Windows, which for some inexplicable reason, the Linux community is desperate to make happen.
No security.
The GP is an end user. End users don't care about security. At all. They especially don't care about security, if security in any way compromises their ability to gain the kind of effortless, instant gratification described above.
The absolute worst any modern desktop user has to do is run some commands -- that is, copy and paste something from a website into a commandline.
The GP is an end user... You already know how that's going to go, don't you? ;)
Meh. Your asserted tradeoff has little basis in fact.
There's this particular operating system, where said tradeoff can be observed very clearly.
You might have heard of it. It's called Microsoft Windows.
Frankly, some kind of unified one-step scripted install structure, preferably all in a single container, that actually worked as intended would catapult linux on the desktop by leaps and bounds. It would make so many things easier. Developers would have to use it, though, or it would have to be dead simple to convert current asinine scripted installs to it, else there won't be packages for it and the whole thing would be dead before it started.
I agree with you. I've actually been trying to figure out a solution for this problem myself for the last couple of years, but it's slow going. The thing with package management is that it has two particularly nasty problems.
a) The dependency problem. Figuring out what is a prerequisite/dependency of what, and what you need in order to be able to have or build something else, and then putting a system for that in place which works, and cleanly removes all the dependencies as well, in the right order, despite human attempts to screw it up. The problem there is that it isn't only end users who are stupid, unfortunately; it's very often developers too; so developers tell the system that certain things are dependencies when they aren't.
b) The fakeroot problem. This is a problem where a package needs to be installed as root, yet people generally do compilation or installation of programs as a normal user; and they also tend to install/unpack packages in /tmp; not the root filesystem where you have to trick the install into thinking it's going to go.
So I agree that the problem should have been solved by now, but part of the reason why it hasn't been is because it's so hard, and the rest of it is that there are a lot of people who think that the problem has already been solved, when it hasn't.
They tried that.
First they ignored Linux. Kept saying it wasn't a threat.
Then they ridiculed it.
Now they are fighting it.
People really do make themselves look like mindless sheep, by continuing to regurgitate the Gandhi quote. Seriously, come up with something else.