Here here!
Rio 500's are great. I've got one as well.
64MB onboard memory, and it'll accept a 64MB smartmedia card, giving you 128MB of total space. Playback is quite good, and from what I've seen, it only glitches in the same places where winamp glitches. (I encode all my stuff to 192Kb/s, and glitches don't happen very often.) Plus, it was cheap! $150 at the time of purchase.
Everyone seems to be complaining about the headphones, but mine seem fine to me. Good bass, good treble, mids seem fine as well. Granted, their not anything like my studio quality Sony headphones, but they are light and fold-up for smaller size during transport. Great for my work out needs.
My appologies. I should have been more clear in my intent. Yes, simply masking credit card numbers in pages would allow people to simply search for the mask and follow the same link google did in order to see the unmasked result.
However, my intention was simply to remove Google's legal implication of storing credit card numbers that were not willingly given by the cardholder. They could also autonomously send an email to webmaster@offendingsite.com notifying them of the potentially vulnerable link, entirely from the kindness of their hearts. But, legal issues in the past have shown that this would result in a cease-and-desist and a lawsuit against Google claiming that the crawler/spider has been hacking their website.
Judging from the past, from a legal standpoint, the best thing they can do is simply filter their cached content. If you are worried that people are going to search for ################, then disallow searching for something so erroneous. Or simply change the mask from all # to random special characters.
It's really not that difficult of a solution. Yes, it's a little disturbing that some websites are this easily hacked, but are we really all that surprised? Get into the low-end ecommerce business sometime. You'll be surprised (frightened even) with what some people have been using for their online stores.
Your crawler is caching credit card numbers you say? Simple, check the content you cache for 16 digit numbers. Any that you find, you check with a simple LUHN (mod 10) algorithm. If it passes, you replace the number with "################" or a similar masking.
There, all credit card numbers will now filtered from your cache.
I understand the severity of the issue, and it's good to know this is happening, but the solution is simple.
His quest to destroy comercial software by creating free alternatives is admirable, but the goal is unattainable through his rigid guidelines.
Realistically, you can't expect users to drop everything they already know and move to a completely free solution. The functionality of the application in question isn't the issue. The look and feel of the application in question isn't the issue. The issue is the simple fact that people, by nature, resist change.
You could have an office suite that was a 100% clone of MS Office. Right down to the bugs and easter eggs. The functionality and look & feel would be exactly the same, yet people would resist using it simply because it isn't MS Office.
Granted, not everyone holds such an aversion to change. You probably would see a slightly larger acceptance than the current Linux userbase, but all-in-all it would still be fairly insignificant. Most of the people that haven't already tried Linux will still be afraid to try it, simply because it's too much change too fast. It makes them uncomfortable.
Now people can be cooed into change. In order to do this you need to take something dear to them, and mix it with something that is new, yet similar to something they already know. Like putting together a GUI that's similar to explorer.exe, and getting all of their Windows applications to run on Linux. Now they have all of their applications accessible to them, so their dear software is right there with them, yet they have to experience this strange new OS. "Good thing the user interface is mostly the same, or I wouldn't know what I'd do!", is what they'll think. At least at first.
After a while, they'll get used to it. And during this transition time, they'll probably try a few of these 'new fangled open source thingies'. They'll get lost in the application (it always happens to Joe User), and they'll get scared that they'll break something, and they'll revert back to the lowest ideology that they know. Namely: click the X in the corner to quit. This will repeat a few times, and will probably take a year or so of time, but eventually they will learn to cope with the funny GNOME and KDE applications ("whatever that means"), and will begin to feel at home in their new surroundings. Hopefully they will even start to rely on some of these new found applications for their daily computing lives.
Once they become reliant on a few pieces of OSS software, we can change the rules just a little bit more. Maybe move to a more Unix-like GUI, maybe introduce them to the command line. Utilities like cat, sed, grep, awk, and sort may not seem too useful to them at first, but they'll probably notice that copying and moving files is a hell of a lot faster in a CLI than it is in a GUI.
But, none of this is possible without baby steps. No Joe User off the street is going to just throw away all of their data and start fresh, and they're too busy to learn a bunch of new interfaces. Remember that not everyone is a computer geek. Most of these people are barely literate enough to install applications on their own. A good number of people buy a computer from a store, and only use the software that it's bundled with. If there's a new app they want, they might buy it, so long as their 8yr old nephew says he'll install it for them.
People in general are indeed becoming more literate, but we are over-estimating their competence. Baby steps are the key...
I've bitched about this for years.
I've even put an entry in my slashdot journal about the problems that are keeping Linux out of the real spotlight.
Shitty package management/lack of app-installers (RPM and apt-get aren't quite InstallShield replacements), bad filesystem design (/usr/bin/all-my-execs), no lossless HD repartitioning utilities (none that I've found anyways), lack of good journaling filesystem (ext3 seems to have fixed this), shitty printer-driver model (text files describing my printer's abilities are hardly flexible enough to remove the need to recompile lpd), bad video model (Xservers & Xclients streamlining all of my gfx operations? come on!), nearly everything you get has to be compiled (GPL is great, but just because you need to make the source available doesn't mean you need to make the source the way you distribute it. GCC should not be a required option), no windows compatability (Wine seems to be getting this under control).
I've kicked this fucking horse right into the ground. Everyone bitches about it, but everyone also agrees that starting their own distrobution isn't going to solve the problem. Linux is a great server, but an ultimately shitty desktop. Believe me when I say that I know from experience. It's been my ONLY desktop for over 2 years.
I switched to Linux to avoid having to reinstall the OS every few months, yet I still find myself doing so simply because there's been a huge kernel change, or my RPM dependancies are completely fucked from trying to install a non-RedHat created RPM. Or maybe I've "configure; make; make install;"ed my way into a full hard-drive, with no idea of what files belong to what application. There's a reason that I always configure apache to install into/opt/apache, it's because I don't want my applications to get their fingers all into each other! Not because I'm a neat freak, but because I can't fucking uninstall half of them without doing so!
If it's an OS upgrade, then make it an RPM, or make it an apt-get package. If it's an application, then it needs to have it's own installer bundled with it, and it needs to put itself into it's own fucking dir tree, so when the installer DB pukes, I can still tell what files belong to what app.
I'm putting together a new linux distro from LinuxFromScratch.com, and developing an application installer, and hopefully a new paradigm of how Linux applications are distributed. What wagon are you on?
At least there's a consolation prize...
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 2
At a bare minimum, this means that we're closer to Halo will shipping for the PC & Mac. I expect they'll start porting it within the next month, if they haven't already started. Of course, they won't release it for at least half a year to a year from now, but it's a start.
It's pretty sad when I have no interest in the system itself, but find more significance in the software that will become available for other platforms shortly after it's release.
Penny per page on your whole site is just asking for trouble. People will simply go to your competition that hasn't implemented the penny-per-page model.
And what about eCommerce sites? Why the hell should I be paying them just to browse through their selection. Will I get a 6 cent discount on my item because of the cost of simply ordering the item. Especially since I could place my order by calling their 800 number for free.
This whole model is cooked up so that "content provider" sites will finally have a business model. Places like cnn.com, anandtech.com, tomshardware.com, linux.com, slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, and sourceforge.net (just to name a few) all have a similar problem. They don't make any direct revenue from the people that browse their sites. This is simply a business model failure similar to the 2-out-of-3-step open source company problem.
1. Put up a content providing site.
3. Profit!
It just doesn't work. These places are struggling with bills, trying to make it work by selling advertising space. Some sites are backed by a company that already has a real stream of revenue from a non-internet source.
The solution is to start to charge people for using their service. The current model is like giving newspapers away for free. You can't expect to make a profit by throwing money into a product that people obviously want, but not charging for it.
The biggest difficulty is finding a model that people won't instantly shun. I don't think it's a matter of monthly/yearly subscription fee vs. pay-per-page. It's more likely the fact that by cutting off non-subscribers at all, you're preventing new people from seeing what your site can really do. Not to mention the fact that people don't like taking the time to fill out forms if they don't have to. (Like the subscription form.) Single login could take care of this problem, since you could simply be told that proceding will automatically charge you x dollars per unit of measure (page, month, year, hour, etc). You click yes or no, and you're done.
Single login has security issues though. I'd never trust any single entity to maintain the single login system for the entire internet. MS or not, putting the power into a single entity would really make things difficult. We'd be better served by a DNS-like setup. This would distribute the task amongst several entities. Plus it would need an authority to make sure everyone plays nice (an ICANN, if you will). The authority could set certain rules in place (like the necessity to support a common format so users can easily and securely transfer their single login between providers, and rules about always giving consumers the option to switch providers at any time).
I guess the real point is that free web services will never generate a real profit. Advertising will help, but you can't base an internet company off of it. The solution is to obviously charge for using the services you provide, but you have to make a reasonable model that customers won't shun. And finally, to make it all work efficiently, we absolutely need a single login facility. (It'll run without, but each site would have to put together it's own system, making it costly.) And for single login to work (and be accepted by the public), we need choice. Multiple providers, providing a standard protocol to businesses that wish to use it.
I used to work in the Cable Modem industry, back when it was "New Technology(tm)". The biggest selling point that I noticed for the tech savvy was the speed. (Obviously.) However, the tech savvy market is smaller than you think. So the real highest selling point was the cost vs benefit. For example:
_Dialup Model_
56k ISP: $20+/mo
2nd Phone line: $20+/mo
waiting 10 minutes/MB: pain in the ass
_Cable Modem Model_
Modem Rental: $10/mo or less
Connection Fees: $30-$40/mo
waiting 30 seconds/MB: less pain in the ass
The point is, for the same price, or even $10 more, people could have the same non-voice-line-interrupting service, and even get some extra speed out of the deal. People that had the more expensive ISPs (AOL comes to mind) were even more prone to make the switch, since they would actually be saving money by switching. (We provided @Home at the time, which provided content so people used to AOL wouldn't feel too out of place.)
Small applications are the only areas that Linux will ever beat Solaris on Sun hardware. I'd like to see a Linux cluster beat SunFire15k or even an older E10k in a performance vs. total cost of ownership chart.
Let's see, so we hire 10 people at 80k a piece to manage our 500 machine cluster, which will need to be replaced every 4 years at a minimum, just so that we can utilize a free OS?
Or, do we shell out some bucks up front, and get fault tolerant hardware, running an OS in a 5th generation VM environment, that will only require 2 people to manage, and will not need to be replaced for at least 10-15 years. (Upgrades not being considered replacements)
I'll stick with Sun, thanks. I'd much rather deal with a single machine, using extremely fault-tolerant tech than having to deal with 500 commodity pc's that are going to go through the usual 4 year replacement cycle.
Linux and Sun both have their place. Linux is a nice server, and a moderate desktop OS for the tech-savvy (at least I use it as a desktop). It's good for ftp servers, web servers, even small to mid database servers. Sun, on the other hand, is great for extremely high availability situations, where the 0.001% of down time in a 99.999% uptime plan could cost the company a few million in revenue.
Linux is saturating the low end market. Good! The low end market could use some low-cost & stable server software that runs on inexpensive hardware. But Sun caters more to the high end market where uptime is critical and data-sets are unbelievably large.
And no, Intel is no where near doing what Sun can already do. Go shoot your precious linux server with a.44, and see if it's still up. I'd guess the answer is no. Doing the same with a properly configured SunFire 15k would result in a high replacement cost, but an up and running system nonetheless. Processing power? Single cpu vs single cpu is getting closer. But for fault tolerance, full hotswap upgrades (as in lets pop a few more cpus into this machine...while it's running), high end SMP (way more than 8-way, try 72-way), and high end memory size (as in my server as 200GB of ram, what do you have under the hood?), Intel isn't even close. Sun, OTOH, has been doing it for a few years now.
I used to work for a cable company, and I was a cable modem tech support rep. (We all have part-time jobs while in college.) We didn't support Windows 2000 when it first came out either. In fact, I don't think they still don't support Windows 2000.
Cable carriers are relatively new to the idea of computer support. It will be a while before they realize that they actually have to train their staff when new OSes come out. The carrier I worked for provided absolutely no technical training at all. What you walked in the door with, is what you got. So they obviously tried to hire only people who could already perform the job, and then gave them basic training on the customer database and trouble-ticket software. Oh, I almost forgot, they gave us a piece of paper that outlined the steps required to identify a modem that needed a truck roll. It was pretty basic. Unplug modem, wait 30 seconds, plug back in, wait 1 minute, check light patterns, etc.
The point is they haven't had to train staff on supporting new OSes yet. They've been lucky thus far, as Windows 2000 can be brushed off as a 'business OS that residential service providers shouldn't have to support', but XP is a different animal. It is a home user OS. They're going to have to train their personel. I'm just curious to see how long they try to get by with what they have before they cave and fund the training.
In konqueror:
Settings->Configure Konqueror->User Agent
Simply add a new "Site/domain specific identification".
For example, I added ".msn.com" as the domain, and used "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)" as the user agent.
Voila! I can see msn.com again! Not that it is anything spectacular to look at, but if you MUST check the site out, this works well.:)
The main problem with using VMWare is that it can't do hardware 3d. So gaming in VMWare sucks quite hard.
I use Linux as my desktop OS both at home and at work, and at both locations I have VMWare installed. Now at work, I use VMWare because sometimes I need to write code for IIS apps. Everything else (word processors, spreadsheets, email) I do natively from Linux.
At home, I still use Linux for all of my email, wordprocessing, and etc, but I rarely ever start up VMWare. Simply because the only reason I could ever want to run Windows at home is to play a game, and frankly VMWare just can't hack it when it comes to DirectDraw. It's very slow. Don't even bother considering Direct3D or OpenGL, as it is completely unusable.
So, until vmware gets a better 'host OS video driver' that will better support hardware accelerated video operations, I will continue to only use it only for novelties that I can't easily duplicate in Linux.
Where the hell do I sign up to help!
Seriously! I've been pushing for the death of X for a long time now. DirectFB is a very promising replacement from the sounds of it.
As for the network transparency layer, nothing says that you have to lose that. If done correctly, you won't even need to recompile your apps for each different use. Quite simply, assume that every app on a system uses DirectFB instead of X. Now you want to remotely use a gui on that system. DirectFB simply needs to present the ability to run in a detached hardware mode. A client system can attach it's DirectFB to a DirectFB layer on the server.
The rest would run a lot like X: the application writes it's video output to DirectFB, which saves it in a memory buffer. That memory buffer is output to the client system as quickly as possible, but moderate loss is acceptable. All hardware blits are performed in software instead (since you really aren't using the system's video card at that point).
Yes, it sounds a lot like X, but without a few major X problems. Video updates are not required. So your windows won't hang on slow networks. Bonus #2 is that a lost connection doesn't have to kill an app. Just reconnect to the server when you get a chance and pick up where you left off.
I hope I managed to get across the major difference. I have a feeling that I haven't. I have a better explanation in my journal for those who really want to understand my major bitch points for Unix these days. (Even though I'm still a huge Unix advocate these days.)
I can't get into the site since it's been slashdotted, but from the sounds of it, the system in place is based on the honor system. You could very easily falsely register yourself as a Linux user, or simply not register at all. What might work a little better is an opensource project to write a piece of software that occasionally contacts a registration server to 'touch' it's record. When you register the machine, you might even want to specify it's use (personal desktop, business desktop, business server, etc). Records that go 'untouched' for over 6 months are considered extinct and are removed.
This would obviously only work for machines that have internet access, but it's still better then having to manually update your entry...
Note to web programmers, MySQL doesn't like it when it runs out of connections. Try increasing the connection pool size. Also, instead of having the page try to open the connection just once, and fall all over itself if the connection fails, try putting the connection request in a timed loop with a timeout of around 5 minutes, and a sleep(5) in the middle to help throttle a little. Your MySQL server will thank you, and your web page viewers will thank you.
Finally, UWB promises to be highly secure. It's very difficult to filter a pulse signal out of the flood of background electronic noise, and vendors such as Time Domain are encrypting the zeros and ones being transmitted by the pulses.
Okay, here's my question then. If it is so difficult to distinguish the pulse signal from ambient noise, how would one device be able to hear the other device? The whole security problem with 802.11 was the fact that the card could be put into a packet dumping mode that allowed users to view the raw packets, which would then allow them to brute force crack the encryption within meer hours. No other special equipment is needed. So as long as the cards allow promiscuous mode, filtering out the signal from ambient noise is not a problem. All you really need to concentrate on is breaking the encryption scheme. Hopefully they come up with a better method than 802.11 has.
of why radio stations buy broadcast licenses of music rather than going down to Sam Goody and buying the $15 comsumer version.
They have no reason to fear prosecution from the DMCA unless their current broadcast licenses specifically state the broadcast medium that the license is good for.
Essentially, radio stations couldn't park a Van mini-station at public events and play music to all to hear unless their broadcast license allowed it.
Basically, this tells me that a lot of radio stations need to either hire better lawyers that aren't afraid to exercise their license rights, or they need to negotiate new licenses that include streaming audio as a valid broadcasting medium.
Bingo! Couldn't have said that any better myself. On a side note about the reason for removing the Mhz from their products, take this into consideration.
AMD's Athlon has always been notorious for smoking identically clocked Intel processors. PII, PIII, P4, it doesn't matter. The Athlon always outperforms in both integer math and floating point. So, has anyone ever considered that AMD's processors just do the same instructions in less clock cycles? I remember seeing old intel specs that stated integer adds took 4 clock cycles to complete. (I'm sure it's outdated by now, but the concept is still there.) These aren't RISC cpu's where a single clock means a single operation has been completed, these processors end up waiting between 1-50 clock cycles for every instruction they perform. Obviously the higher delayed instructions are the more complex (like MMX and SIMD), but by simply making common operations take less time, you'll get better performance.
I've heard that AMD is going to seriously start concentrating on this aspect by making instructions take less clock cycles, rather than playing the die size wars with Intel. If this is the case, I can understand how the marketing guys would want to do something to disassociate their chip's performance from the fancy number that the competition is going to be steadily raising in the meantime.
So before you cry about AMD selling out, think about the differences between their CPUs and Intel's CPUs, and what they have to lose if they don't drop the Mhz listings.
I'm confident that this marketing strategy will only be in affect for a year or so at the most. Just long enough for people to realize that Mhz isn't everything. Once Intel raises the bar a few more Ghz, and AMD is still right there keeping up if not beating them, they'll release their current CPU speeds and you'll all be awestruck how a 2Ghz cpu could possible put a 5Ghz cpu to shame.
I've seen and used both Ultra-IIi 400Mhz, and my spiffy Sparc-Station 10, which I believe is a SuperSparc. The Ultra-IIi 400 was very fast and responsive. Made my PII at the time look like a snail when it came to heavy workloads. But, I guess that's to be expected when the architecture is designed for that.:)
I've used Linux on x86 for quite a long time, and it's great. I've also used Solaris and SPARCLinux on SPARC cpus for a while as well, and those both perform quite well. So my question is, do PPC's perform anywhere near the speed of SPARC processors? They are both RISC processors, so the general principles are the same. I've got a possible source for a PPC machine, and was planning on using it solely for PPC Linux. I just wanted to know what I should expect. Which processor is the slowest you'd want to use a GUI with, things like that. I just don't want to waste my time putting PPC Linux on a Mac that's the equivalent of a 286, since that wouldn't be usable to me.
Think about it this way. If pharmecuticals are no longer profitable to research and develop, guess where all of that mad-cow, cancer, and other live threatening disease research is going to go. If you answered 'right down the fscking tubes!', you were correct!
If brazil wants to really help themselves, start giving away clean needles and condoms to the public. You can educate the people all you want, but if they are too poor to buy a needle (cuz all their money goes to drugs), or are horny as hell and don't have a rubber on them, people will ignore their knowledge and do whatever they want at the moment. Thus, aids is spread.
Life is full of choices, and if large groups of people are too stupid to use their brains and protect themselves, then I guess we didn't need them in the gene pool anyways.
Re:Good! Now the next steps...
on
Linux Win In Schools
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· Score: 3, Informative
Apparently a few people disagree with what I've stated. (Which is the reason for the 'probably going to get modded down'-like phrases.)
Let's address these one by one, shall we?
Statically linking applications:
I've mainly only gotten "are you nuts" and "no thank you"'s on this one. Windows applications have C library functions at their disposal, yet the maintainer doesn't need to worry about updating their version of libc, or even worry about what version their application needs! It's just there. The required functions are compiled into the application. End of story. You're not looking at duplicating your libs all over the place. Just the functions that are used (and dependants), and only in the applications they are used in. Most of the griping I'm getting is about graphics libraries. Which is another reason why X needs to die. Applications are becoming too dependant on those various libs. End users just want it to run out of the box. End of story! There is no arguing about what is efficient and what is 'leet' or 'proper'. What matters is what works, and what work OUT OF THE BOX! Remember the general user's mentality. Put the cdrom in the drive, click 3 buttons, and the program is ready to use.
Also, people are complaining about the $PATH variables. I agree 100%. If you like having these applications in your path, FINE! Do it! By all means! Just don't force it upon other users! Remember, a desktop aimed distro is going to be VERY dumbed down. Keep it SIMPLE! CLI is fine, use it if you like it. But keep user installed applications out of the path by default. CLI should only be available for pre-installed system applications. (like grep, less, more, awk, sed, lpr, ls, echo, init, list goes on...)
An finally, my changing of the install model. This stretches across my previous two explanations quite a bit. The system install, should include system applications only, PERIOD. If I want KOffice, I'll go get it, or (better yet for Open Source projects out there) I'll buy it. I don't need some fancy OS installer app to decide what applications I may want on my computer. If I want it, I'll install it AFTER I put in the OS. Leave the pre-installed software to OEMs like Dell and Gateway. MS doesn't put Office in when you install Windows, why should Linux??? So this means what again?...That applications are NOT part of the OS!! So keep them out of the $PATH! If they want it in the $PATH, let them put it there. That's fine. But keep it out of there by default.
Plus, I forgot to mention this one earlier. Applications need to pick a directory, and stick to it, and stay out of each other's way! So unless your app is a CLI only app, and is a really big help with CLI-type operations, DON'T put it in/bin or/usr/bin. For god sakes, put it in/opt! That's what that directory is for! Put your application in/opt under it's own subdirectory, and don't put anything ANYWHERE else! (Okay, maybe you can put some configs in/etc, but PLEASE put them in their own subdir in there as well!)
Explaination: I haven't seen an automatic installer yet that doesn't die at some point or another. Putting apps in their own dirs makes it easier to remove an application after your installer database dies. Especially when the app doesn't put little bits of itself all over your harddrive. "I don't want abiword anymore. (rm -r/opt/abiword) There. What else did I want to do today...."
I used to work for an @Home MSO. (I forget the meaning of the acronym, basically they resell @Home internet connectivity over their own cable lines.) Well anyways, after the initial year of the 5 year service contract with @Home, a lot of them employees stopped liking them so much. In fact, a lot of the IT guys that were really happy with @Home's network layout, were getting kind of upset with their technical contacts within @Home. Stuff like poor response time, terrible email/news server uptimes. Generally, customers would bitch and bitch about miscellaneous problems with their service, and @Home would take weeks to fix them. Even minor issues would take days. (How hard is it to kill an email account and create a new one with the same name?!)
So what is the solution? Simple. You have a customer base, you have people pratically breaking your doors down to get your service, but you can't stand the ISP you're going through. Let's see...cable company with lots of money...needs high speed internet backbones...money...backbones...hey, doesn't MCI, the Bells, Sprint, Qwest, and about 100 other telco/data service companies sell internet connections??? Hey, lets get our own OC-192!
And thus, @Home doesn't get the contract renewal when the current one runs out. Not only that, but these contracts are specified in terms of geographical area, not just in terms of the companies that signed it. So, if the cable company expands (which they always are), nothing says that the new customers have to be @Home customers. The cable company can use their revunues from existing @home customers to build an independant infrastructure, and use that to independantly serve all new customers outside of the original area.
Result? @Home doesn't make enough money to cover their startup costs. And they file chapter 7 within years of initial creation.
Linux is making an impression upon school kids now. Great! Now all we need to do is fix the biggest problem with Linux distros these days. They are all designed to be servers!
In order for Linux to really make a good desktop OS, a distro must be designed with that goal in mind. Namely, get userspace programs out of the RPMs!! Nothing ticks me off more than having to search through a list of installed system RPMs just so that I can uninstall an old copy of mozilla. We really need to get a separate installer for applications, and get it distro immune. This way, people can start making professional looking install packages for their apps so non-geeks will take them seriously. (Sorry, but I don't know any grandmas out there who believe that source code is the best way to distribute applications. We need to start statically linking apps, and using a generic installer/uninstaller sort of like the Add/Remove programs in Windows.)
Secondly, I haven't seen a gui application yet that I religiously envoke from the command prompt. Get gui applications out of the $PATH! If I wanted to run xcdroast from the command line every time, I would put a symbolic link in/usr/local/bin myself!
There are other issues that I'm SURE will get me modded down (like X11 no longer being an efficient display method), but the two biggest problems that I see are the two I listed. There are other obvious issues (like the need for autoruns), but most of these have been taken care of. We really just need a desktop inclined distro, and a way to keep system packages separate from user installed packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Here here!
Rio 500's are great. I've got one as well.
64MB onboard memory, and it'll accept a 64MB smartmedia card, giving you 128MB of total space. Playback is quite good, and from what I've seen, it only glitches in the same places where winamp glitches. (I encode all my stuff to 192Kb/s, and glitches don't happen very often.) Plus, it was cheap! $150 at the time of purchase.
Everyone seems to be complaining about the headphones, but mine seem fine to me. Good bass, good treble, mids seem fine as well. Granted, their not anything like my studio quality Sony headphones, but they are light and fold-up for smaller size during transport. Great for my work out needs.
My appologies. I should have been more clear in my intent. Yes, simply masking credit card numbers in pages would allow people to simply search for the mask and follow the same link google did in order to see the unmasked result.
However, my intention was simply to remove Google's legal implication of storing credit card numbers that were not willingly given by the cardholder. They could also autonomously send an email to webmaster@offendingsite.com notifying them of the potentially vulnerable link, entirely from the kindness of their hearts. But, legal issues in the past have shown that this would result in a cease-and-desist and a lawsuit against Google claiming that the crawler/spider has been hacking their website.
Judging from the past, from a legal standpoint, the best thing they can do is simply filter their cached content. If you are worried that people are going to search for ################, then disallow searching for something so erroneous. Or simply change the mask from all # to random special characters.
It's really not that difficult of a solution. Yes, it's a little disturbing that some websites are this easily hacked, but are we really all that surprised? Get into the low-end ecommerce business sometime. You'll be surprised (frightened even) with what some people have been using for their online stores.
Your crawler is caching credit card numbers you say? Simple, check the content you cache for 16 digit numbers. Any that you find, you check with a simple LUHN (mod 10) algorithm. If it passes, you replace the number with "################" or a similar masking.
There, all credit card numbers will now filtered from your cache.
I understand the severity of the issue, and it's good to know this is happening, but the solution is simple.
His quest to destroy comercial software by creating free alternatives is admirable, but the goal is unattainable through his rigid guidelines.
Realistically, you can't expect users to drop everything they already know and move to a completely free solution. The functionality of the application in question isn't the issue. The look and feel of the application in question isn't the issue. The issue is the simple fact that people, by nature, resist change.
You could have an office suite that was a 100% clone of MS Office. Right down to the bugs and easter eggs. The functionality and look & feel would be exactly the same, yet people would resist using it simply because it isn't MS Office.
Granted, not everyone holds such an aversion to change. You probably would see a slightly larger acceptance than the current Linux userbase, but all-in-all it would still be fairly insignificant. Most of the people that haven't already tried Linux will still be afraid to try it, simply because it's too much change too fast. It makes them uncomfortable.
Now people can be cooed into change. In order to do this you need to take something dear to them, and mix it with something that is new, yet similar to something they already know. Like putting together a GUI that's similar to explorer.exe, and getting all of their Windows applications to run on Linux. Now they have all of their applications accessible to them, so their dear software is right there with them, yet they have to experience this strange new OS. "Good thing the user interface is mostly the same, or I wouldn't know what I'd do!", is what they'll think. At least at first.
After a while, they'll get used to it. And during this transition time, they'll probably try a few of these 'new fangled open source thingies'. They'll get lost in the application (it always happens to Joe User), and they'll get scared that they'll break something, and they'll revert back to the lowest ideology that they know. Namely: click the X in the corner to quit. This will repeat a few times, and will probably take a year or so of time, but eventually they will learn to cope with the funny GNOME and KDE applications ("whatever that means"), and will begin to feel at home in their new surroundings. Hopefully they will even start to rely on some of these new found applications for their daily computing lives.
Once they become reliant on a few pieces of OSS software, we can change the rules just a little bit more. Maybe move to a more Unix-like GUI, maybe introduce them to the command line. Utilities like cat, sed, grep, awk, and sort may not seem too useful to them at first, but they'll probably notice that copying and moving files is a hell of a lot faster in a CLI than it is in a GUI.
But, none of this is possible without baby steps. No Joe User off the street is going to just throw away all of their data and start fresh, and they're too busy to learn a bunch of new interfaces. Remember that not everyone is a computer geek. Most of these people are barely literate enough to install applications on their own. A good number of people buy a computer from a store, and only use the software that it's bundled with. If there's a new app they want, they might buy it, so long as their 8yr old nephew says he'll install it for them.
People in general are indeed becoming more literate, but we are over-estimating their competence. Baby steps are the key...
LMAO! ;)
Someone obviously uses Solaris...
I've bitched about this for years.
/opt/apache, it's because I don't want my applications to get their fingers all into each other! Not because I'm a neat freak, but because I can't fucking uninstall half of them without doing so!
I've even put an entry in my slashdot journal about the problems that are keeping Linux out of the real spotlight.
Shitty package management/lack of app-installers (RPM and apt-get aren't quite InstallShield replacements), bad filesystem design (/usr/bin/all-my-execs), no lossless HD repartitioning utilities (none that I've found anyways), lack of good journaling filesystem (ext3 seems to have fixed this), shitty printer-driver model (text files describing my printer's abilities are hardly flexible enough to remove the need to recompile lpd), bad video model (Xservers & Xclients streamlining all of my gfx operations? come on!), nearly everything you get has to be compiled (GPL is great, but just because you need to make the source available doesn't mean you need to make the source the way you distribute it. GCC should not be a required option), no windows compatability (Wine seems to be getting this under control).
I've kicked this fucking horse right into the ground. Everyone bitches about it, but everyone also agrees that starting their own distrobution isn't going to solve the problem. Linux is a great server, but an ultimately shitty desktop. Believe me when I say that I know from experience. It's been my ONLY desktop for over 2 years.
I switched to Linux to avoid having to reinstall the OS every few months, yet I still find myself doing so simply because there's been a huge kernel change, or my RPM dependancies are completely fucked from trying to install a non-RedHat created RPM. Or maybe I've "configure; make; make install;"ed my way into a full hard-drive, with no idea of what files belong to what application. There's a reason that I always configure apache to install into
If it's an OS upgrade, then make it an RPM, or make it an apt-get package. If it's an application, then it needs to have it's own installer bundled with it, and it needs to put itself into it's own fucking dir tree, so when the installer DB pukes, I can still tell what files belong to what app.
I'm putting together a new linux distro from LinuxFromScratch.com, and developing an application installer, and hopefully a new paradigm of how Linux applications are distributed. What wagon are you on?
At a bare minimum, this means that we're closer to Halo will shipping for the PC & Mac. I expect they'll start porting it within the next month, if they haven't already started. Of course, they won't release it for at least half a year to a year from now, but it's a start.
It's pretty sad when I have no interest in the system itself, but find more significance in the software that will become available for other platforms shortly after it's release.
Penny per page on your whole site is just asking for trouble. People will simply go to your competition that hasn't implemented the penny-per-page model.
And what about eCommerce sites? Why the hell should I be paying them just to browse through their selection. Will I get a 6 cent discount on my item because of the cost of simply ordering the item. Especially since I could place my order by calling their 800 number for free.
This whole model is cooked up so that "content provider" sites will finally have a business model. Places like cnn.com, anandtech.com, tomshardware.com, linux.com, slashdot.org, freshmeat.net, and sourceforge.net (just to name a few) all have a similar problem. They don't make any direct revenue from the people that browse their sites. This is simply a business model failure similar to the 2-out-of-3-step open source company problem.
1. Put up a content providing site.
3. Profit!
It just doesn't work. These places are struggling with bills, trying to make it work by selling advertising space. Some sites are backed by a company that already has a real stream of revenue from a non-internet source.
The solution is to start to charge people for using their service. The current model is like giving newspapers away for free. You can't expect to make a profit by throwing money into a product that people obviously want, but not charging for it.
The biggest difficulty is finding a model that people won't instantly shun. I don't think it's a matter of monthly/yearly subscription fee vs. pay-per-page. It's more likely the fact that by cutting off non-subscribers at all, you're preventing new people from seeing what your site can really do. Not to mention the fact that people don't like taking the time to fill out forms if they don't have to. (Like the subscription form.) Single login could take care of this problem, since you could simply be told that proceding will automatically charge you x dollars per unit of measure (page, month, year, hour, etc). You click yes or no, and you're done.
Single login has security issues though. I'd never trust any single entity to maintain the single login system for the entire internet. MS or not, putting the power into a single entity would really make things difficult. We'd be better served by a DNS-like setup. This would distribute the task amongst several entities. Plus it would need an authority to make sure everyone plays nice (an ICANN, if you will). The authority could set certain rules in place (like the necessity to support a common format so users can easily and securely transfer their single login between providers, and rules about always giving consumers the option to switch providers at any time).
I guess the real point is that free web services will never generate a real profit. Advertising will help, but you can't base an internet company off of it. The solution is to obviously charge for using the services you provide, but you have to make a reasonable model that customers won't shun. And finally, to make it all work efficiently, we absolutely need a single login facility. (It'll run without, but each site would have to put together it's own system, making it costly.) And for single login to work (and be accepted by the public), we need choice. Multiple providers, providing a standard protocol to businesses that wish to use it.
I used to work in the Cable Modem industry, back when it was "New Technology(tm)". The biggest selling point that I noticed for the tech savvy was the speed. (Obviously.) However, the tech savvy market is smaller than you think. So the real highest selling point was the cost vs benefit. For example:
_Dialup Model_
56k ISP: $20+/mo
2nd Phone line: $20+/mo
waiting 10 minutes/MB: pain in the ass
_Cable Modem Model_
Modem Rental: $10/mo or less
Connection Fees: $30-$40/mo
waiting 30 seconds/MB: less pain in the ass
The point is, for the same price, or even $10 more, people could have the same non-voice-line-interrupting service, and even get some extra speed out of the deal. People that had the more expensive ISPs (AOL comes to mind) were even more prone to make the switch, since they would actually be saving money by switching. (We provided @Home at the time, which provided content so people used to AOL wouldn't feel too out of place.)
Small applications are the only areas that Linux will ever beat Solaris on Sun hardware. I'd like to see a Linux cluster beat SunFire15k or even an older E10k in a performance vs. total cost of ownership chart.
.44, and see if it's still up. I'd guess the answer is no. Doing the same with a properly configured SunFire 15k would result in a high replacement cost, but an up and running system nonetheless. Processing power? Single cpu vs single cpu is getting closer. But for fault tolerance, full hotswap upgrades (as in lets pop a few more cpus into this machine...while it's running), high end SMP (way more than 8-way, try 72-way), and high end memory size (as in my server as 200GB of ram, what do you have under the hood?), Intel isn't even close. Sun, OTOH, has been doing it for a few years now.
Let's see, so we hire 10 people at 80k a piece to manage our 500 machine cluster, which will need to be replaced every 4 years at a minimum, just so that we can utilize a free OS?
Or, do we shell out some bucks up front, and get fault tolerant hardware, running an OS in a 5th generation VM environment, that will only require 2 people to manage, and will not need to be replaced for at least 10-15 years. (Upgrades not being considered replacements)
I'll stick with Sun, thanks. I'd much rather deal with a single machine, using extremely fault-tolerant tech than having to deal with 500 commodity pc's that are going to go through the usual 4 year replacement cycle.
Linux and Sun both have their place. Linux is a nice server, and a moderate desktop OS for the tech-savvy (at least I use it as a desktop). It's good for ftp servers, web servers, even small to mid database servers. Sun, on the other hand, is great for extremely high availability situations, where the 0.001% of down time in a 99.999% uptime plan could cost the company a few million in revenue.
Linux is saturating the low end market. Good! The low end market could use some low-cost & stable server software that runs on inexpensive hardware. But Sun caters more to the high end market where uptime is critical and data-sets are unbelievably large.
And no, Intel is no where near doing what Sun can already do. Go shoot your precious linux server with a
So...how was linux going to kill Sun again?
I used to work for a cable company, and I was a cable modem tech support rep. (We all have part-time jobs while in college.) We didn't support Windows 2000 when it first came out either. In fact, I don't think they still don't support Windows 2000.
Cable carriers are relatively new to the idea of computer support. It will be a while before they realize that they actually have to train their staff when new OSes come out. The carrier I worked for provided absolutely no technical training at all. What you walked in the door with, is what you got. So they obviously tried to hire only people who could already perform the job, and then gave them basic training on the customer database and trouble-ticket software. Oh, I almost forgot, they gave us a piece of paper that outlined the steps required to identify a modem that needed a truck roll. It was pretty basic. Unplug modem, wait 30 seconds, plug back in, wait 1 minute, check light patterns, etc.
The point is they haven't had to train staff on supporting new OSes yet. They've been lucky thus far, as Windows 2000 can be brushed off as a 'business OS that residential service providers shouldn't have to support', but XP is a different animal. It is a home user OS. They're going to have to train their personel. I'm just curious to see how long they try to get by with what they have before they cave and fund the training.
In konqueror:
:)
Settings->Configure Konqueror->User Agent
Simply add a new "Site/domain specific identification".
For example, I added ".msn.com" as the domain, and used "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)" as the user agent.
Voila! I can see msn.com again! Not that it is anything spectacular to look at, but if you MUST check the site out, this works well.
The main problem with using VMWare is that it can't do hardware 3d. So gaming in VMWare sucks quite hard.
I use Linux as my desktop OS both at home and at work, and at both locations I have VMWare installed. Now at work, I use VMWare because sometimes I need to write code for IIS apps. Everything else (word processors, spreadsheets, email) I do natively from Linux.
At home, I still use Linux for all of my email, wordprocessing, and etc, but I rarely ever start up VMWare. Simply because the only reason I could ever want to run Windows at home is to play a game, and frankly VMWare just can't hack it when it comes to DirectDraw. It's very slow. Don't even bother considering Direct3D or OpenGL, as it is completely unusable.
So, until vmware gets a better 'host OS video driver' that will better support hardware accelerated video operations, I will continue to only use it only for novelties that I can't easily duplicate in Linux.
Where the hell do I sign up to help!
Seriously! I've been pushing for the death of X for a long time now. DirectFB is a very promising replacement from the sounds of it.
As for the network transparency layer, nothing says that you have to lose that. If done correctly, you won't even need to recompile your apps for each different use. Quite simply, assume that every app on a system uses DirectFB instead of X. Now you want to remotely use a gui on that system. DirectFB simply needs to present the ability to run in a detached hardware mode. A client system can attach it's DirectFB to a DirectFB layer on the server.
The rest would run a lot like X: the application writes it's video output to DirectFB, which saves it in a memory buffer. That memory buffer is output to the client system as quickly as possible, but moderate loss is acceptable. All hardware blits are performed in software instead (since you really aren't using the system's video card at that point).
Yes, it sounds a lot like X, but without a few major X problems. Video updates are not required. So your windows won't hang on slow networks. Bonus #2 is that a lost connection doesn't have to kill an app. Just reconnect to the server when you get a chance and pick up where you left off.
I hope I managed to get across the major difference. I have a feeling that I haven't. I have a better explanation in my journal for those who really want to understand my major bitch points for Unix these days. (Even though I'm still a huge Unix advocate these days.)
I can't get into the site since it's been slashdotted, but from the sounds of it, the system in place is based on the honor system. You could very easily falsely register yourself as a Linux user, or simply not register at all. What might work a little better is an opensource project to write a piece of software that occasionally contacts a registration server to 'touch' it's record. When you register the machine, you might even want to specify it's use (personal desktop, business desktop, business server, etc). Records that go 'untouched' for over 6 months are considered extinct and are removed.
This would obviously only work for machines that have internet access, but it's still better then having to manually update your entry...
Note to web programmers, MySQL doesn't like it when it runs out of connections. Try increasing the connection pool size. Also, instead of having the page try to open the connection just once, and fall all over itself if the connection fails, try putting the connection request in a timed loop with a timeout of around 5 minutes, and a sleep(5) in the middle to help throttle a little. Your MySQL server will thank you, and your web page viewers will thank you.
Finally, UWB promises to be highly secure. It's very difficult to filter a pulse signal out of the flood of background electronic noise, and vendors such as Time Domain are encrypting the zeros and ones being transmitted by the pulses.
Okay, here's my question then. If it is so difficult to distinguish the pulse signal from ambient noise, how would one device be able to hear the other device? The whole security problem with 802.11 was the fact that the card could be put into a packet dumping mode that allowed users to view the raw packets, which would then allow them to brute force crack the encryption within meer hours. No other special equipment is needed. So as long as the cards allow promiscuous mode, filtering out the signal from ambient noise is not a problem. All you really need to concentrate on is breaking the encryption scheme. Hopefully they come up with a better method than 802.11 has.
of why radio stations buy broadcast licenses of music rather than going down to Sam Goody and buying the $15 comsumer version.
They have no reason to fear prosecution from the DMCA unless their current broadcast licenses specifically state the broadcast medium that the license is good for.
Essentially, radio stations couldn't park a Van mini-station at public events and play music to all to hear unless their broadcast license allowed it.
Basically, this tells me that a lot of radio stations need to either hire better lawyers that aren't afraid to exercise their license rights, or they need to negotiate new licenses that include streaming audio as a valid broadcasting medium.
Bingo! Couldn't have said that any better myself. On a side note about the reason for removing the Mhz from their products, take this into consideration.
AMD's Athlon has always been notorious for smoking identically clocked Intel processors. PII, PIII, P4, it doesn't matter. The Athlon always outperforms in both integer math and floating point. So, has anyone ever considered that AMD's processors just do the same instructions in less clock cycles? I remember seeing old intel specs that stated integer adds took 4 clock cycles to complete. (I'm sure it's outdated by now, but the concept is still there.) These aren't RISC cpu's where a single clock means a single operation has been completed, these processors end up waiting between 1-50 clock cycles for every instruction they perform. Obviously the higher delayed instructions are the more complex (like MMX and SIMD), but by simply making common operations take less time, you'll get better performance.
I've heard that AMD is going to seriously start concentrating on this aspect by making instructions take less clock cycles, rather than playing the die size wars with Intel. If this is the case, I can understand how the marketing guys would want to do something to disassociate their chip's performance from the fancy number that the competition is going to be steadily raising in the meantime.
So before you cry about AMD selling out, think about the differences between their CPUs and Intel's CPUs, and what they have to lose if they don't drop the Mhz listings.
I'm confident that this marketing strategy will only be in affect for a year or so at the most. Just long enough for people to realize that Mhz isn't everything. Once Intel raises the bar a few more Ghz, and AMD is still right there keeping up if not beating them, they'll release their current CPU speeds and you'll all be awestruck how a 2Ghz cpu could possible put a 5Ghz cpu to shame.
I've seen and used both Ultra-IIi 400Mhz, and my spiffy Sparc-Station 10, which I believe is a SuperSparc. The Ultra-IIi 400 was very fast and responsive. Made my PII at the time look like a snail when it came to heavy workloads. But, I guess that's to be expected when the architecture is designed for that. :)
I've used Linux on x86 for quite a long time, and it's great. I've also used Solaris and SPARCLinux on SPARC cpus for a while as well, and those both perform quite well. So my question is, do PPC's perform anywhere near the speed of SPARC processors? They are both RISC processors, so the general principles are the same. I've got a possible source for a PPC machine, and was planning on using it solely for PPC Linux. I just wanted to know what I should expect. Which processor is the slowest you'd want to use a GUI with, things like that. I just don't want to waste my time putting PPC Linux on a Mac that's the equivalent of a 286, since that wouldn't be usable to me.
Think about it this way. If pharmecuticals are no longer profitable to research and develop, guess where all of that mad-cow, cancer, and other live threatening disease research is going to go. If you answered 'right down the fscking tubes!', you were correct!
If brazil wants to really help themselves, start giving away clean needles and condoms to the public. You can educate the people all you want, but if they are too poor to buy a needle (cuz all their money goes to drugs), or are horny as hell and don't have a rubber on them, people will ignore their knowledge and do whatever they want at the moment. Thus, aids is spread.
Life is full of choices, and if large groups of people are too stupid to use their brains and protect themselves, then I guess we didn't need them in the gene pool anyways.
Apparently a few people disagree with what I've stated. (Which is the reason for the 'probably going to get modded down'-like phrases.)
...That applications are NOT part of the OS!! So keep them out of the $PATH! If they want it in the $PATH, let them put it there. That's fine. But keep it out of there by default.
/bin or /usr/bin. For god sakes, put it in /opt! That's what that directory is for! Put your application in /opt under it's own subdirectory, and don't put anything ANYWHERE else! (Okay, maybe you can put some configs in /etc, but PLEASE put them in their own subdir in there as well!)
/opt/abiword) There. What else did I want to do today...."
Let's address these one by one, shall we?
Statically linking applications:
I've mainly only gotten "are you nuts" and "no thank you"'s on this one. Windows applications have C library functions at their disposal, yet the maintainer doesn't need to worry about updating their version of libc, or even worry about what version their application needs! It's just there. The required functions are compiled into the application. End of story. You're not looking at duplicating your libs all over the place. Just the functions that are used (and dependants), and only in the applications they are used in. Most of the griping I'm getting is about graphics libraries. Which is another reason why X needs to die. Applications are becoming too dependant on those various libs. End users just want it to run out of the box. End of story! There is no arguing about what is efficient and what is 'leet' or 'proper'. What matters is what works, and what work OUT OF THE BOX! Remember the general user's mentality. Put the cdrom in the drive, click 3 buttons, and the program is ready to use.
Also, people are complaining about the $PATH variables. I agree 100%. If you like having these applications in your path, FINE! Do it! By all means! Just don't force it upon other users! Remember, a desktop aimed distro is going to be VERY dumbed down. Keep it SIMPLE! CLI is fine, use it if you like it. But keep user installed applications out of the path by default. CLI should only be available for pre-installed system applications. (like grep, less, more, awk, sed, lpr, ls, echo, init, list goes on...)
An finally, my changing of the install model. This stretches across my previous two explanations quite a bit. The system install, should include system applications only, PERIOD. If I want KOffice, I'll go get it, or (better yet for Open Source projects out there) I'll buy it. I don't need some fancy OS installer app to decide what applications I may want on my computer. If I want it, I'll install it AFTER I put in the OS. Leave the pre-installed software to OEMs like Dell and Gateway. MS doesn't put Office in when you install Windows, why should Linux??? So this means what again?
Plus, I forgot to mention this one earlier. Applications need to pick a directory, and stick to it, and stay out of each other's way! So unless your app is a CLI only app, and is a really big help with CLI-type operations, DON'T put it in
Explaination: I haven't seen an automatic installer yet that doesn't die at some point or another. Putting apps in their own dirs makes it easier to remove an application after your installer database dies. Especially when the app doesn't put little bits of itself all over your harddrive. "I don't want abiword anymore. (rm -r
I used to work for an @Home MSO. (I forget the meaning of the acronym, basically they resell @Home internet connectivity over their own cable lines.) Well anyways, after the initial year of the 5 year service contract with @Home, a lot of them employees stopped liking them so much. In fact, a lot of the IT guys that were really happy with @Home's network layout, were getting kind of upset with their technical contacts within @Home. Stuff like poor response time, terrible email/news server uptimes. Generally, customers would bitch and bitch about miscellaneous problems with their service, and @Home would take weeks to fix them. Even minor issues would take days. (How hard is it to kill an email account and create a new one with the same name?!)
So what is the solution? Simple. You have a customer base, you have people pratically breaking your doors down to get your service, but you can't stand the ISP you're going through. Let's see...cable company with lots of money...needs high speed internet backbones...money...backbones...hey, doesn't MCI, the Bells, Sprint, Qwest, and about 100 other telco/data service companies sell internet connections??? Hey, lets get our own OC-192!
And thus, @Home doesn't get the contract renewal when the current one runs out. Not only that, but these contracts are specified in terms of geographical area, not just in terms of the companies that signed it. So, if the cable company expands (which they always are), nothing says that the new customers have to be @Home customers. The cable company can use their revunues from existing @home customers to build an independant infrastructure, and use that to independantly serve all new customers outside of the original area.
Result? @Home doesn't make enough money to cover their startup costs. And they file chapter 7 within years of initial creation.
Linux is making an impression upon school kids now. Great! Now all we need to do is fix the biggest problem with Linux distros these days. They are all designed to be servers!
/usr/local/bin myself!
In order for Linux to really make a good desktop OS, a distro must be designed with that goal in mind. Namely, get userspace programs out of the RPMs!! Nothing ticks me off more than having to search through a list of installed system RPMs just so that I can uninstall an old copy of mozilla. We really need to get a separate installer for applications, and get it distro immune. This way, people can start making professional looking install packages for their apps so non-geeks will take them seriously. (Sorry, but I don't know any grandmas out there who believe that source code is the best way to distribute applications. We need to start statically linking apps, and using a generic installer/uninstaller sort of like the Add/Remove programs in Windows.)
Secondly, I haven't seen a gui application yet that I religiously envoke from the command prompt. Get gui applications out of the $PATH! If I wanted to run xcdroast from the command line every time, I would put a symbolic link in
There are other issues that I'm SURE will get me modded down (like X11 no longer being an efficient display method), but the two biggest problems that I see are the two I listed. There are other obvious issues (like the need for autoruns), but most of these have been taken care of. We really just need a desktop inclined distro, and a way to keep system packages separate from user installed packages.
Okay moderators, down we go.....