Is television really so powerful that a well-crafted science fiction series can increase the gullibility of millions of Americans?
I remember that, when I was younger (I'm only 17 now, so this is not that long ago), Fox came out with some series that involved aliens coming to Earth (I believe they were attempting to escape another, evil species of aliens). I was convinced throughout most of its run that they were actual aliens, and that Fox had somehow obtained footage of them.
Perhaps younger children have a harder time differentiating reality and television than I thought.
It does, although IIRC building dependencies for the source isn't really a stable feature yet. From the man page for apt-get:
source causes apt-get to fetch source packages. APT
will examine the available packages to decide which
source package to fetch. It will then find and
download into the current directory the newest
available version of that source package. Source
packages are tracked separately from binary packages via deb-src type lines in the sources.list(5)
file. This probably will mean that you will not get
the same source as the package you have installed
or as you could install. If the --compile options
is specified then the package will be compiled to a
binary.deb using dpkg-buildpackage, if --download-
only is specified then the source package will not
be unpacked.
A specific source version can be retrieved by postfixing the source name with an equals and then the
version to fetch, similar to the mechanism used for
the package files. This enables exact matching of
the source package name and version, implicitly
enabling the APT::Get::Only-Source option.
Note that source packages are not tracked like
binary packages, they exist only in the current
directory and are similar to downloading source tar
balls.
However, that will only download/build/install the one source package. If one wants to install the packages required to satisfy the build dependencies for a given source package, the build-dep option should be used with apt-get.
It would be stupid not to take good ideas from your competitors and integrate them into your own system. Where would we be if every interface had to be reinvented? Sure, there would be a lot of innovation, but also a lot of terrible, terrible software.
In my opinion, KDE looks more like Windows than GNOME does by default, but this depends of course on how your distribution or package maintainer set up the package.
But would you really expect de Icaza to look at a cool system that Microsoft has worked on or developed and say, "Hey, that's really great and useful, so let's do something different!" Would he be a good developer if he did that? I don't think so.
Bonobo makes sense and is useful, no matter what its inspiration. SOUP, I hope, is going to be the same way.
Why don't they just limit the sound quality of the MP3s?
Because I'm not going to rip my CD collection at 24Kbps or really anything else than the settings I use now (using LAME with VBR). If I don't rip my CDs at 24Kbps, they won't be shared. Say goodbye to Napster's "customer" base once the only people who have files available for download are people who are willing to maintain a copy of their MP3 collection at a lower bitrate specifically for trading with Napster users.
Humankind has only been around on the order of 10,000 years
This is a common culture-centric idea, albeit a false one.
Homo erectus is currently thought to have arisen about 1.8 million years ago, and existed until about 400,000 years ago. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, though possibly not a direct ancestor of "modern man," is very similar to our species and probably lived from about 300,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. You and I, homo sapiens sapiens, which I assume to be your "humankind," are thought to have appeared about 120,000 years ago.
The next advance in human-computer interface has already been described in cheezy SciFi tv shows. Holographic displays which can expand to many times the size of their transmitter (which you could wear or carry in your pocket), and respond to physical interaction.
I was talking to someone recently who works with a lot of the technology start-up companies, and he mentioned to me that this company he's involved with has found a way to create a holographic 3D keyboard that responds to a user touching it. He said you could stick your PDA upright, turn the keyboard on, and type away.
Pretty neat!
Re:What good is it to have different distributions
on
An RPM Port Of APT
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· Score: 1
What good is it to have different distributions if the distributions are all alike?
Please read the rant a bit more carefully. I did not say that I wanted all distributions to be alike. In fact, I mention this issue specifically:
But, you may say, this argues for the end of distributions! What good is a Mandrake to a Red Hat if I can just take the
Mandrake packages and install them on Red Hat? To this, I say that perhaps distributions will have to do more to stand
out. How is Red Hat presented? What does it include out of the box?
All I'm saying is that there is no advantage to having incompatable packaging systems. A unified packaging specification would allow developers of programs to create one package and have it install across distributions; it wouldn't force those distributions to change anything (except to conform to a standard filesystem layout).
I (a while back, admittedly) posted an article that gets involved with the implications of a unified packaging format/specification. Since that discussion is rather dead, and this one is alive and kicking, I'll repost it here for your enjoyment;-)
(Special note: I'm using Debian now, and kernel 2.4 works fine. Before you flame me, check my (edibiase's) replies to concerns brought up on K5!)
I'm about to scream. This is about the third time this has happened: I've gotten sick of Linux. I know what follows. I'll "try" Windows 2000, decide that I hate it even more than Linux, and move on to BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, NetBSD, and then, to top it all off, QNX. At the end of that OS run, I'd think to myself, "Hmm. It appears that I do like Linux the best of all the operating systems I've tried," and I'll go back to Red Hat. But, after a while, I'll think to myself, "Red Hat sucks! It's too unstable, too bleeding-edge, and things don't always work the way they're supposed to. I need something that will work right all the time, like Debian. Debian all the way! One-hundred-percent free software, baby!" So I'll enjoy Debian for a while. Then, "Debian sucks! It's too out of date! Nobody releases DEB files for packaging, anyway! I won't be able to use Linux 2.4.x with Debian until the Sun dies, and that's optimistic!" Perhaps after this I'll move on to SuSE, and then to Slackware, and eventually I'll end up at Caldera. Once I get there, I'll be thinking, "Well, Windows 'Whistler' looks pretty neat. I'll give it a shot." In truth, though, I love Linux, but find it incredibly hard to use. I'll admit it, I'm rather a perfectionist in this regard.
Can we develop a more usable Linux?
To answer these questions, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm sixteen years old, and have been using Linux for a little while now; I'd estimate about four or five years. I want to go in to computer science when I "grow up." My real interests are in AI and user interface design, though.
My UI interest should come as no surprise, though, because I spend so much time looking at every single interface known to man in my quest for the optimal system. GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, Enlightenment, bash, DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, BeOS. Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head; I don't know how many others I can't even remember!
think I've come to the conclusion that I like Linux. It's fast. It's free. It's stable. It lets me mess around with
programming, administration, and web development stuff, and it's starting to support all of my hardware (Quake III, the
Matrox G400 MAX AGP, and XFree86 4.0.1 make a sweet combination). So what's the problem? I've identified several,
and possibly you can add some more.
First off, there is nowhere near a useful level of consistency among distributions. Red Hat puts things in different places
than Mandrake and SuSE, and doesn't even use the same package management system as Debian, Storm Linux, and Corel
Linux. That's not to mention Slackware, or the other (millions?) of distributions that are around.
Not only is there no level of consistency in where distributions put things, but they use different package management
programs, and there's no easy way to convert between them! Sure, there are tools like alien, but how much use are they
when packages converted from one format to the other will probably only stick things in the wrong places and not interface
with any kind of dependency system? The obvious problem is that I, J. Random Software Developer/Company, can't just
release the J. Random Development Environment "for Linux." I have the joy of making a version for "Debian GNU/Linux,"
"Red Hat Linux 5.x," "Red Hat Linux 6.x," "Red Hat Linux 7.x," "Corel Linux," "Storm Linux," and "Slackware Linux." Yeah,
I'm really going to want to create seven packages and manage them all. It's easier just to do it for Windows, or, as some
companies have been doing of late, to release it for a particular Linux distribution only, and pretty much saying that any
other platform is unsupported.
If we can get the consistency problem licked, it shouldn't be much of a jump to move to a unified packaging system, or at
flock of compatable ones. Can't we come up with some kind of unified Linux packaging standard, with rules for creating,
installing, and configuring packages, and work from there?
My last major point is that all the GUIs I've seen for Linux I'd classify in the "not very useful for Evan" category. I'm not
saying that KDE, GNOME, and all the other Graphical User Interfaces out there for Linux are horrible (they're not), but
rather that they're not what I feel comfortable using, and they're not something I feel many others would feel comfortable
using. Neither GNOME nor KDE give me any real configurability as far as how I want my data to be organized, and they
don't seem to have been designed to follow any sort of goal as far as user interface goes. I don't want to give the
impression that I'm an expert on this, because I do not follow development of these projects at the mailing-list level, but
this is what I know as an end user: it is really, really hard to justify using "mature" Free Software products like GNOME or
KDE when they do not provide an intuitively designed interface nor a consistent way of working with the machine. Here's an
example: I use GNOME most of the time, and it really irks me that things are so haphazard in it. Using a GUI should be
easy, fast, and intuitive. We're moving toward fast (and, in many cases, are already there), but what about easy and
intuitive? Let's cause a paradigm shift here: interfaces by, for, and of the users, as opposed to by, for, and of the whimsies
of the arbitrary developer. Can we make an interface that nobody's ever seen before; an interface that will make Linux
stand out more than it already does as a shining example of an excellent operating system?
Those are my ideas for a good Linux system. In a nutshell: consistency, good package management, and amazingly good
GUIs.
But, you may say, this argues for the end of distributions! What good is a Mandrake to a Red Hat if I can just take the
Mandrake packages and install them on Red Hat? To this, I say that perhaps distributions will have to do more to stand
out. How is Red Hat presented? What does it include out of the box?
I know that the driving force behind any kind of evolution, be it biological or technical, is diversity. But how can we continue
to justify diversification to the extent of exclusion? I don't think we can any longer. Yeah, you can go and hack your own
system from the source, and only install the source. That's your choice. But let's agree that there are certain things that
simply need to be standardized. I'm sick and tired of fighting Linux to get it to do what I want it to do, and I'm sure that
many of you agree.
So, what do you make of my little rant? Is it too late for Linux? How much standardization is really necessary? I want to
see this turn into something amazingly productive; I believe that the open source/free software concept, when harnessed
properly, is the most powerful software development force yet known. Can we harness it to do something about this
problem? Do we need to start a SourceForge project? Work with the Linux Standards Base and the distributions to try and
standardize the important things? What are those important things? Do we need to standardize interfaces (I don't think
so)? What about creating a package management format that works better than RPM and dpkg, and that will let software
developers release one package for use with everyone? I look forward to hearing what people think, because we truly have
the opportunity here to release Linux from something that, in my opinion, has been holding it back.
Yeah, it's a bit long, but it generated some good discussion on Kuro5hin, so I figured it might generate a similar level of discussion here.
what I got from the article was that the 4 major
commercial distros were looking to standardizing on the base install issues (e.g. following the linux standard directory structure, making sure new packages go into the right places, having certain services and security features on/off by default), such that 1) the base for all 4 distros is common and strongly documented and 2) the 4 distros would no longer be competing at the OSS level, but at the service and support and additional features level.
Hmm. This is kind of what I was suggesting in this Kuro5hin rant. Basically, I suggested that distributions adopt a common filesystem layout and packaging specification. Glad to see that things are moving towards this end.
And... if you want to know why I'm glad, perhaps you should read the rant. I'm not going to repeat myself:)
Is this kind of commercial deal common in the US? Can your children opt out of these "mandatory" ads and newscasts (who selects stories and editorializes them?). Soviet-style "The five year plan again yields record crops for happy farmworkers" news is rightly derided by all - how is this corporate brainwashing any better?
I'm a junior in such a "Channel One School" (as they call them on the "newscasts"). (Just in case you're wondering, my school is the great, wonderful, incredibly stupid North Allegheny (http://www.northallegheny.org/).) Basically, Channel One is broadcast every morning, but the stories they run are stupid (how much content can one have in 10 minutes) and are padded with 3 minute ad segments... I think there are about three of these ad segments per newscast, making the news time and ad time about equal. The advertising is pretty much the same every day, and will slowly shift as the year progresses.
Sadly, this kind of deal is common, at least in our schools. If I remember correctly, the school that houses our 9th and 10th grades has a scoreboard with the Coke logo right in the middle of it, and Coke vending machines in the lunch area.
As far as I know, there's no way to opt out of this stuff... it's broadcast to every TV in the school every morning. It's pretty bad, but at least our school doesn't make us pay rapt attention to the screen like I'd imagine they're supposed to.
I can't wait until the TVs are turned into telescreens and my school is renamed "The Ministry of Knowledge."
Gnome doesn't need The App That Does Everything (neither does KDE, for that matter). All that does is lead to bloat, redundant apps on a system, and confusion for new users.
Luckily, though, Nautilus is not "The App That Does Everything." It is "The App That Can Use Components That Do Various Things." So, the web-browsing "feature" of Nautilus is really a Mozilla component embeded into Nautilus. If there was a spreadsheet "feature" in Nautilus, it would more likely be a Gnumeric component. Much better that way, in my opinion -- code reuse and consistent interfaces (looks the same/similar in Gnumeric the application and in Gnumeric the component) help the overall user experience.
Question: has anyone heard of Wild tangent? My router the other day started connecting to a website "update.wildtangent.com" out of the blue when I launched win98.
It looks like your copy of Windows 98 had the WildTangent "3D Streaming Technology" plugin installed. My guess is that the plugin checks for updates of itself whenever IE is launched (or, in this case, IE is launched because it is tied to the OS which was starting...).
Not saying that the fact that WildTangent was installed without you knowing was a good thing, or that it contacting update.wildtangent.com without your permission was a good thing, either. Just an explanation.
...and MacOS X Server. When I ran that script someone else posted to do 100 queries on a server, a few of the headers from Apple looked like this:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 15:43:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.9 (Mac OS X Server)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Of course, most of them were Netscape Enterprise, which I believe Apple does run on Solaris.
What? HelixCode and Eazel are enemies?
on
KDE Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Mr. Powell states:
Now comes word that, as it was put to me, "Miguel and the Helixes" are in a running battle with Red Hat and Eazel, an organization with the temerity to actually develop for Gnome without sufficient and constant genuflecting to Miguel.
Now, if I may politely ask: where the fuck did that come from? Eazel, as they clearly state on their web page, is also in the GNOME Foundation along with Red Hat and HelixCode. Obviously, HelixCode, Red Hat, and Eazel are not "in a running battle" but actuall all working together to develop GNOME together. If Miguel was so intent on fighting with these two other companies, why is he letting Nautilus be the default file manager for GNOME 1.4? If there was such bitter hatred between Eazel and GNOME why would Eazel put the following on http://www.eazel.com/about.html? "Eazel is developing software that will be an integral part of the GNOME environment and we are collaborating closely with the GNOME community and our friends at Helix Code to develop GNOME into the finest desktop environment available on any platform." (italics mine.)
In other words, this Dennis Powell guy is full of shit. He's just trying to be inflammatory, for whatever reason. My best advice: ignore him. Having established that he can't resist flaming the GNOME project (although, granted, he pointed out some "issues" with GNOME), just chalk this guy up on the moron chart. Put him in your killfile. Whatever. He's not worth anyone's time.
I think the similarity you see is because they are both using the same X widget set (GTK+).
Possibly. However, there are a few things about AOL's client that make me suspicious besides the fact that GTK+ was used.::shrugs:: Maybe I'm just paranoid;)
hmm, it looks to me like the Linux86 RPM (what the heck, i'll start using it) version from AOL is an exact (as possible) copy of the windows AIM client interface. it looks a whole lot (read almost perfect) copy of that, compared to GAIM looking sort of like it
Granted; I'm not saying that AOL is just re-releasing GAIM. However, AOL's client does have quite a similarity to GAIM (think: GAIM with different icons and a few more buttons). The fact that it magically ended up at version 1.1.14 makes me even more suspicious that this is something that needs to have source released (because it is derived from something under the GPL).
Is it me, or do these screenshots look very much like GAIM? Take, for example, this picture. Why does it look so similar to, say, this? I find it a bit surprising that GAIM and this Linux AIM Beta client look so much alike; either GAIM did an exceptionally good job of duplicating the (unreleased) Linux AIM client or AOL just grabbed GAIM and branded it. In addition, has AOL really gotten up to the 1.1.14 stable release of this thing, or is it just GAIM 0.9.14?
Did I miss the link on AOL's page to the Linux AIM Client's source, considering GAIM is under the GPL?
How do you do versioning? Miguel speaks fondly of objects embedding themselves in each other, this is a disaster if one component doesn't do what it's supposed to. As evidince, look at M$ Word, Excel, etc. You can embed them in each other, but you have to have the right versions or everything goes to hell.
True. Perhaps (and maybe it is already this way, I don't really know) the system could be designed in such a way that Mozilla says to the component-dispensing program, "Hey, this looks like a word processor document, so can I please have a word processor? I'd like AbiWord if you have it, because this is an AbiWord document, but something that has an AbiWord translator would also work." Then, the giver of components looks around, sees what's registered, and says, "Looks like we've got the AbiWork Bonobo component installed, and here it is!"
With versioning, perhaps, we could do it so that the program works around the features of whatever component is available. For example, my program really wants to perform the open_wireless_connection() function with the Mozilla component. However, said function is only available with Mozilla M21 or greater, and the user only has M20 installed. Perhaps my program, instead of crashing, just tells the user, "Sorry, but I need Mozilla M21 to open this wireless connection. Would you like me to install the required components for you that would allow you to view Slashdot headlines in your GNOME panel wirelessly? This will upgrade your version of Mozilla to M21." Another option would be to make my program know that the way to open wireless connections in Mozilla
I'm partial to the "general" model that I listed first, because it just seems a bit more useful, even if it's not as direct (because it involves the intermediary component selector). The advantages I see in this model are
Not as specific; useful for tasks that require "a web browser" or "a word processor"
Allows for updates to the underlying structure of any item in the process (program, selector, component) without changing every other part. For example, AbiWord's word processor component could change the function is uses to open a file from open_file(string path) to open_local_file(string path). Instead of re-writing every program to deal with the new function (or giving each program a function set for each version), AbiWord just informs the selector that it requires open_local_file instead of open_file from now on.
Permits same level of strictness as other model while providing some extra safeguards. My program could still call on the selector to "Open/home/evand/slashdot_rant.abw with AbiWord using the function AbiWord::open_file("/home/evand/slashdot_rant.abw" )", but the extra layer of protection (and code reuse) is there because the selector can say, "Sorry, AbiWord::open_file doesn't work, but if you want to open a local file AbiWord::open_local_file will do the trick." Then it's up to the program to decide only that one thing, as opposed to making the call to the AbiWord component, finding out that it doesn't work, handling the error, and using an alternate call (assuming it even knows about the new call).
It's interesting stuff, to be sure, but I'm not much of a programmer (or else I'd be working on it). Hopefully my ideas make sense and can be useful to GNOME in a programming context, but if not please let me know why they wouldn't work. I like to know where my ideas are faulty.
Do you really want to embed an editable spreadsheet in a document, and deal with the bloat and crashes that will occur? Or is there a Better Way?
Like I said, I think that an editable spreadsheet in a document can be a good idea under certain circumstances. It's certainly easier to edit the budget spreadsheet in the budget report document, especially if they really are part of the same "document" and will be presented together. It makes it more cohesive, and much more like "real life," where spreadsheets end up on documents all the time.
I think the best way of figuring out if something is going to work well for people is by putting it through the "real life" test. If an interface does things like people do it in real life, and it makes sense in the context, it's probably a good idea.
For example, if I design an interface linking web sites together that have to do with different countries, and I decide to make the interface such that to see information on Canada you have to fly to Canada (virtually), that's a bad way to do it. Why? It's cute, and it is the way you'd learn about Toronto in real life, but it doesn't make things easier for the user. A much better method might be to have a clickable, zoomable map, or perhaps an alphabetically sorted list of places to visit. On the other hand, sticking an editable spreadsheet right in the middle of a document makes sense, because it's related to the document, and it needs to be in the middle of that document for layout reasons. In addition, it passes the "real life" test because sticking spreadsheets in the middle of documents is what happens in real life, and it's an intuitive, efficient way to do it on the computer.
I'd normally say, "That's just my two cents," after a rant like that, but I think this one is more like a dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that, when I was younger (I'm only 17 now, so this is not that long ago), Fox came out with some series that involved aliens coming to Earth (I believe they were attempting to escape another, evil species of aliens). I was convinced throughout most of its run that they were actual aliens, and that Fox had somehow obtained footage of them.
Perhaps younger children have a harder time differentiating reality and television than I thought.
It does, although IIRC building dependencies for the source isn't really a stable feature yet. From the man page for apt-get:
However, that will only download/build/install the one source package. If one wants to install the packages required to satisfy the build dependencies for a given source package, the build-dep option should be used with apt-get.
http://www.netapp.com/ftp/postmark-1_5.c
Yeah, it sounds like someone is forging their agent headers.
No, but my house doesn't have only one thing in every room, either ;-)
It would be stupid not to take good ideas from your competitors and integrate them into your own system. Where would we be if every interface had to be reinvented? Sure, there would be a lot of innovation, but also a lot of terrible, terrible software.
In my opinion, KDE looks more like Windows than GNOME does by default, but this depends of course on how your distribution or package maintainer set up the package.
But would you really expect de Icaza to look at a cool system that Microsoft has worked on or developed and say, "Hey, that's really great and useful, so let's do something different!" Would he be a good developer if he did that? I don't think so.
Bonobo makes sense and is useful, no matter what its inspiration. SOUP, I hope, is going to be the same way.
Because I'm not going to rip my CD collection at 24Kbps or really anything else than the settings I use now (using LAME with VBR). If I don't rip my CDs at 24Kbps, they won't be shared. Say goodbye to Napster's "customer" base once the only people who have files available for download are people who are willing to maintain a copy of their MP3 collection at a lower bitrate specifically for trading with Napster users.
This is a common culture-centric idea, albeit a false one.
Homo erectus is currently thought to have arisen about 1.8 million years ago, and existed until about 400,000 years ago. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, though possibly not a direct ancestor of "modern man," is very similar to our species and probably lived from about 300,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. You and I, homo sapiens sapiens, which I assume to be your "humankind," are thought to have appeared about 120,000 years ago.
Uh, no. GNOME 1.2 has been/is the version of GNOME in woody/sid. Helix GNOME is based on GNOME 1.2, hence your confusion.
KDE is currently only in "unstable"; you'd need to add a line similar to
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
in your sources.list to make KDE available.
I was talking to someone recently who works with a lot of the technology start-up companies, and he mentioned to me that this company he's involved with has found a way to create a holographic 3D keyboard that responds to a user touching it. He said you could stick your PDA upright, turn the keyboard on, and type away.
Pretty neat!
Please read the rant a bit more carefully. I did not say that I wanted all distributions to be alike. In fact, I mention this issue specifically:
All I'm saying is that there is no advantage to having incompatable packaging systems. A unified packaging specification would allow developers of programs to create one package and have it install across distributions; it wouldn't force those distributions to change anything (except to conform to a standard filesystem layout).
I (a while back, admittedly) posted an article that gets involved with the implications of a unified packaging format/specification. Since that discussion is rather dead, and this one is alive and kicking, I'll repost it here for your enjoyment ;-)
(Special note: I'm using Debian now, and kernel 2.4 works fine. Before you flame me, check my (edibiase's) replies to concerns brought up on K5!)
I'm about to scream. This is about the third time this has happened: I've gotten sick of Linux. I know what follows. I'll "try" Windows 2000, decide that I hate it even more than Linux, and move on to BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, NetBSD, and then, to top it all off, QNX. At the end of that OS run, I'd think to myself, "Hmm. It appears that I do like Linux the best of all the operating systems I've tried," and I'll go back to Red Hat. But, after a while, I'll think to myself, "Red Hat sucks! It's too unstable, too bleeding-edge, and things don't always work the way they're supposed to. I need something that will work right all the time, like Debian. Debian all the way! One-hundred-percent free software, baby!" So I'll enjoy Debian for a while. Then, "Debian sucks! It's too out of date! Nobody releases DEB files for packaging, anyway! I won't be able to use Linux 2.4.x with Debian until the Sun dies, and that's optimistic!" Perhaps after this I'll move on to SuSE, and then to Slackware, and eventually I'll end up at Caldera. Once I get there, I'll be thinking, "Well, Windows 'Whistler' looks pretty neat. I'll give it a shot." In truth, though, I love Linux, but find it incredibly hard to use. I'll admit it, I'm rather a perfectionist in this regard.
Can we develop a more usable Linux?
To answer these questions, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm sixteen years old, and have been using Linux for a little while now; I'd estimate about four or five years. I want to go in to computer science when I "grow up." My real interests are in AI and user interface design, though.
My UI interest should come as no surprise, though, because I spend so much time looking at every single interface known to man in my quest for the optimal system. GNOME, KDE, Window Maker, Enlightenment, bash, DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, BeOS. Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head; I don't know how many others I can't even remember!
think I've come to the conclusion that I like Linux. It's fast. It's free. It's stable. It lets me mess around with programming, administration, and web development stuff, and it's starting to support all of my hardware (Quake III, the Matrox G400 MAX AGP, and XFree86 4.0.1 make a sweet combination). So what's the problem? I've identified several, and possibly you can add some more.
First off, there is nowhere near a useful level of consistency among distributions. Red Hat puts things in different places than Mandrake and SuSE, and doesn't even use the same package management system as Debian, Storm Linux, and Corel Linux. That's not to mention Slackware, or the other (millions?) of distributions that are around.
Not only is there no level of consistency in where distributions put things, but they use different package management programs, and there's no easy way to convert between them! Sure, there are tools like alien, but how much use are they when packages converted from one format to the other will probably only stick things in the wrong places and not interface with any kind of dependency system? The obvious problem is that I, J. Random Software Developer/Company, can't just release the J. Random Development Environment "for Linux." I have the joy of making a version for "Debian GNU/Linux," "Red Hat Linux 5.x," "Red Hat Linux 6.x," "Red Hat Linux 7.x," "Corel Linux," "Storm Linux," and "Slackware Linux." Yeah, I'm really going to want to create seven packages and manage them all. It's easier just to do it for Windows, or, as some companies have been doing of late, to release it for a particular Linux distribution only, and pretty much saying that any other platform is unsupported.
If we can get the consistency problem licked, it shouldn't be much of a jump to move to a unified packaging system, or at flock of compatable ones. Can't we come up with some kind of unified Linux packaging standard, with rules for creating, installing, and configuring packages, and work from there?
My last major point is that all the GUIs I've seen for Linux I'd classify in the "not very useful for Evan" category. I'm not saying that KDE, GNOME, and all the other Graphical User Interfaces out there for Linux are horrible (they're not), but rather that they're not what I feel comfortable using, and they're not something I feel many others would feel comfortable using. Neither GNOME nor KDE give me any real configurability as far as how I want my data to be organized, and they don't seem to have been designed to follow any sort of goal as far as user interface goes. I don't want to give the impression that I'm an expert on this, because I do not follow development of these projects at the mailing-list level, but this is what I know as an end user: it is really, really hard to justify using "mature" Free Software products like GNOME or KDE when they do not provide an intuitively designed interface nor a consistent way of working with the machine. Here's an example: I use GNOME most of the time, and it really irks me that things are so haphazard in it. Using a GUI should be easy, fast, and intuitive. We're moving toward fast (and, in many cases, are already there), but what about easy and intuitive? Let's cause a paradigm shift here: interfaces by, for, and of the users, as opposed to by, for, and of the whimsies of the arbitrary developer. Can we make an interface that nobody's ever seen before; an interface that will make Linux stand out more than it already does as a shining example of an excellent operating system?
Those are my ideas for a good Linux system. In a nutshell: consistency, good package management, and amazingly good GUIs.
But, you may say, this argues for the end of distributions! What good is a Mandrake to a Red Hat if I can just take the Mandrake packages and install them on Red Hat? To this, I say that perhaps distributions will have to do more to stand out. How is Red Hat presented? What does it include out of the box?
I know that the driving force behind any kind of evolution, be it biological or technical, is diversity. But how can we continue to justify diversification to the extent of exclusion? I don't think we can any longer. Yeah, you can go and hack your own system from the source, and only install the source. That's your choice. But let's agree that there are certain things that simply need to be standardized. I'm sick and tired of fighting Linux to get it to do what I want it to do, and I'm sure that many of you agree.
So, what do you make of my little rant? Is it too late for Linux? How much standardization is really necessary? I want to see this turn into something amazingly productive; I believe that the open source/free software concept, when harnessed properly, is the most powerful software development force yet known. Can we harness it to do something about this problem? Do we need to start a SourceForge project? Work with the Linux Standards Base and the distributions to try and standardize the important things? What are those important things? Do we need to standardize interfaces (I don't think so)? What about creating a package management format that works better than RPM and dpkg, and that will let software developers release one package for use with everyone? I look forward to hearing what people think, because we truly have the opportunity here to release Linux from something that, in my opinion, has been holding it back.
Yeah, it's a bit long, but it generated some good discussion on Kuro5hin, so I figured it might generate a similar level of discussion here.
You're missing something. GNOME runs fine on other operating systems as well. FreeBSD is an example of one such operating system.
Hmm. This is kind of what I was suggesting in this Kuro5hin rant. Basically, I suggested that distributions adopt a common filesystem layout and packaging specification. Glad to see that things are moving towards this end.
And... if you want to know why I'm glad, perhaps you should read the rant. I'm not going to repeat myself :)
Sadly, this kind of deal is common, at least in our schools. If I remember correctly, the school that houses our 9th and 10th grades has a scoreboard with the Coke logo right in the middle of it, and Coke vending machines in the lunch area.
As far as I know, there's no way to opt out of this stuff... it's broadcast to every TV in the school every morning. It's pretty bad, but at least our school doesn't make us pay rapt attention to the screen like I'd imagine they're supposed to.
I can't wait until the TVs are turned into telescreens and my school is renamed "The Ministry of Knowledge."
Not saying that the fact that WildTangent was installed without you knowing was a good thing, or that it contacting update.wildtangent.com without your permission was a good thing, either. Just an explanation.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 15:43:07 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.9 (Mac OS X Server)
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Of course, most of them were Netscape Enterprise, which I believe Apple does run on Solaris.
Now, if I may politely ask: where the fuck did that come from? Eazel, as they clearly state on their web page, is also in the GNOME Foundation along with Red Hat and HelixCode. Obviously, HelixCode, Red Hat, and Eazel are not "in a running battle" but actuall all working together to develop GNOME together. If Miguel was so intent on fighting with these two other companies, why is he letting Nautilus be the default file manager for GNOME 1.4? If there was such bitter hatred between Eazel and GNOME why would Eazel put the following on http://www.eazel.com/about.html? "Eazel is developing software that will be an integral part of the GNOME environment and we are collaborating closely with the GNOME community and our friends at Helix Code to develop GNOME into the finest desktop environment available on any platform." (italics mine.)
In other words, this Dennis Powell guy is full of shit. He's just trying to be inflammatory, for whatever reason. My best advice: ignore him. Having established that he can't resist flaming the GNOME project (although, granted, he pointed out some "issues" with GNOME), just chalk this guy up on the moron chart. Put him in your killfile. Whatever. He's not worth anyone's time.
I think the similarity you see is because they are both using the same X widget set (GTK+).
::shrugs:: Maybe I'm just paranoid ;)
Possibly. However, there are a few things about AOL's client that make me suspicious besides the fact that GTK+ was used.
hmm, it looks to me like the Linux86 RPM (what the heck, i'll start using it) version from AOL is an exact (as possible) copy of the windows AIM client interface. it looks a whole lot (read almost perfect) copy of that, compared to GAIM looking sort of like it
Granted; I'm not saying that AOL is just re-releasing GAIM. However, AOL's client does have quite a similarity to GAIM (think: GAIM with different icons and a few more buttons). The fact that it magically ended up at version 1.1.14 makes me even more suspicious that this is something that needs to have source released (because it is derived from something under the GPL).
Is it me, or do these screenshots look very much like GAIM? Take, for example, this picture. Why does it look so similar to, say, this? I find it a bit surprising that GAIM and this Linux AIM Beta client look so much alike; either GAIM did an exceptionally good job of duplicating the (unreleased) Linux AIM client or AOL just grabbed GAIM and branded it. In addition, has AOL really gotten up to the 1.1.14 stable release of this thing, or is it just GAIM 0.9.14?
Did I miss the link on AOL's page to the Linux AIM Client's source, considering GAIM is under the GPL?
True. Perhaps (and maybe it is already this way, I don't really know) the system could be designed in such a way that Mozilla says to the component-dispensing program, "Hey, this looks like a word processor document, so can I please have a word processor? I'd like AbiWord if you have it, because this is an AbiWord document, but something that has an AbiWord translator would also work." Then, the giver of components looks around, sees what's registered, and says, "Looks like we've got the AbiWork Bonobo component installed, and here it is!"
With versioning, perhaps, we could do it so that the program works around the features of whatever component is available. For example, my program really wants to perform the open_wireless_connection() function with the Mozilla component. However, said function is only available with Mozilla M21 or greater, and the user only has M20 installed. Perhaps my program, instead of crashing, just tells the user, "Sorry, but I need Mozilla M21 to open this wireless connection. Would you like me to install the required components for you that would allow you to view Slashdot headlines in your GNOME panel wirelessly? This will upgrade your version of Mozilla to M21." Another option would be to make my program know that the way to open wireless connections in Mozilla
I'm partial to the "general" model that I listed first, because it just seems a bit more useful, even if it's not as direct (because it involves the intermediary component selector). The advantages I see in this model are
- Not as specific; useful for tasks that require "a web browser" or "a word processor"
- Allows for updates to the underlying structure of any item in the process (program, selector, component) without changing every other part. For example, AbiWord's word processor component could change the function is uses to open a file from open_file(string path) to open_local_file(string path). Instead of re-writing every program to deal with the new function (or giving each program a function set for each version), AbiWord just informs the selector that it requires open_local_file instead of open_file from now on.
- Permits same level of strictness as other model while providing some extra safeguards. My program could still call on the selector to "Open
/home/evand/slashdot_rant.abw with AbiWord using the function AbiWord::open_file("/home/evand/slashdot_rant.abw" )", but the extra layer of protection (and code reuse) is there because the selector can say, "Sorry, AbiWord::open_file doesn't work, but if you want to open a local file AbiWord::open_local_file will do the trick." Then it's up to the program to decide only that one thing, as opposed to making the call to the AbiWord component, finding out that it doesn't work, handling the error, and using an alternate call (assuming it even knows about the new call).
It's interesting stuff, to be sure, but I'm not much of a programmer (or else I'd be working on it). Hopefully my ideas make sense and can be useful to GNOME in a programming context, but if not please let me know why they wouldn't work. I like to know where my ideas are faulty. Do you really want to embed an editable spreadsheet in a document, and deal with the bloat and crashes that will occur? Or is there a Better Way?Like I said, I think that an editable spreadsheet in a document can be a good idea under certain circumstances. It's certainly easier to edit the budget spreadsheet in the budget report document, especially if they really are part of the same "document" and will be presented together. It makes it more cohesive, and much more like "real life," where spreadsheets end up on documents all the time.
I think the best way of figuring out if something is going to work well for people is by putting it through the "real life" test. If an interface does things like people do it in real life, and it makes sense in the context, it's probably a good idea.
For example, if I design an interface linking web sites together that have to do with different countries, and I decide to make the interface such that to see information on Canada you have to fly to Canada (virtually), that's a bad way to do it. Why? It's cute, and it is the way you'd learn about Toronto in real life, but it doesn't make things easier for the user. A much better method might be to have a clickable, zoomable map, or perhaps an alphabetically sorted list of places to visit. On the other hand, sticking an editable spreadsheet right in the middle of a document makes sense, because it's related to the document, and it needs to be in the middle of that document for layout reasons. In addition, it passes the "real life" test because sticking spreadsheets in the middle of documents is what happens in real life, and it's an intuitive, efficient way to do it on the computer.
I'd normally say, "That's just my two cents," after a rant like that, but I think this one is more like a dollar.