In other not-news, the only sane answer to this alleged "problem" is societal, not technological. When you look after your employees happily, including but not limited to giving them a decent salary, they feel sufficient loyalty that you don't *need* draconian security measures.
Works for me - both the last and current job have simple iptables firewalls, and no restrictions on what flows at censorship level. And do we see major info leak? No. We employee sensible honourable clueful folks, and look after them OK. No problem.
How anyone can claim to support their product on "linux" when what they really mean is "if you're not running RH5.2 or 6.0 with a Gnome desktop environment, we don't want to know", I dunno. I guess it's because manglement think "this will mean we can program a monkey to do Support", when what they should really do is train their internal staff in the product set and have folks knowlegeable about the OS as well; thereafter, a good escalation process back into Development where they can research these things at source level.
At the first job, we had a puppet micro-manager, whose sole line seemed to be to get crib-sheets that you could "just press a button" and send to the customer... those of us running support for both the US and UK offices single-handedly for a week were less than impressed...
"The criticisms are relatively minor, and his commentary appear to be wild overreactions from here."
Yeah, well I never expected FreeSoftware-friendliness from the slashdot crowd.
OTOH unlike you I read through the license for myself, and found the point about "why include the US export restrictions in the license itself?" truly obnoxious as well. In fact, I also refuse to regard it open-source (as it's discriminatory against specific countries), let alone Free, until there's a non-US version with a sensible license (gpl/bsd/apache/whatever, but not the current crock).
Find your favourite distribution's source archive, and grab 'em from there. (Debian would be my first port of call, seeing as I *know* they've packaged VNC before now.)
I'm thinking, in this day & age of open-source, it's slightly weird that projects can be "removed" from public distribution - cf ?Blender?, the Net::DNS CPAN module, and/or that nice movie editor thing - when so many distributions have used the sources in the past, it can very rapidly become quite hard to find something once it *is* removed; reason being, freshmeat refers people only to the project's listed homepage, it doesn't copy stuff locally.
Seems to me that within the "bazaar" that is open-source development, there's quite a lot of "one package, one home site" going on.
"Over here in Europe where I live I can buy any phone from anywhere. It'll work with any operator"
IME most phones in Europe are locked into one particular operator's network. Example: I got one of the earlier Motorola Timeport P7389(?) things, which was available only on BT Cellnet at the time. I guess I could - and did - have it unlocked to work with Orange, but that was hellish expensive - definitely not the default state.
On the other hand, both my recent Nokia purchases have been unlocked, despite buying on Cellnet...
Personally I think something that slams HTML mailing is sensible too.
I use fetchmail, procmail, spamassassin and razor at ork with a frontend of Gnus, amongst a company of M$loth-lusers, and I have no problems at all. In fact, compared to all the M$loth+telnet+vim+/usr/bin/cvs "people", I have a particularly easy life of it - mail comes in, diff gets saved out, edited, sanity-checked, applied with Ediff mode and then committed to CVS all from within Emacs.
"The simpler the transition, the more will come across."
No. The more prepared people are to get out and learn the new thing, the more welcome they'll be. Otherwise, it you go around "simplifying the transition", you'll end up with Windoze all over again, won't you?
1. Open up a shell, type `lspci -v'. This is not hard. (You do *get* that in the regular installer, don't you? It's not as though `more/proc/pci' is impossible either, though.)
2. OK, suggest that to the debian-installer guys that a mapping between versions and kernel-modules would be a good thing.
Or, if point 2 sounds like hard work, then bear in mind we have Hardware-Compatibility-HOWTOs floating around as well.
Pretty much agree. The odd bug-fix, and hardware detection (but then again, if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?), oh and maybe avoid dselect like the plague...
Took me under a day to get a reasonable Unstable tracking system up and running from fresh on the new orkstation. As with anything, try it twice and then tell me what the pick-up curve was, don't say "oh it's not the windoze installer, what do I do?!!" and wail and whine.
No. This debian user thinks that if someone isn't prepared to investigate a simple installer (what? read things? that'd never do) then they'll *NEVER* *bother* reading dpkg(8) and apt(8) - ie their on-going use will be crap too so no harm in "dissuading" the ignorant *and* lazy arses at install-time. But ultimately "dissuading" is the wrong way of looking at it anyway. It works, it *is* simple - dead simple, just cursor-keys tab and enter - and there's no need to go around sticking pretty buttons on it that make people think "what does this circle with a triangle underneath it mean?".
Hmmmm. OK, so you have half a way of becoming root in the GUI, which is looking more interesting. I still think `sudo vi/e[TAB]/X[TAB]/XF[TAB]' and C-A-BS to restart the current login session would be pretty darn' quick, mind.
"If you don't believe the magic why don't you just try it for yourself?"
I have philosophical objections to supporting something whose only distinctive feature is non-Free. I'm not particularly interested in supporting non-Free software on linux.
How do you add a new video-mode eg 1600x1200 when the install only detected up to 1280x1024? You need to be root for that, and by FAR the quickest way is to hack on/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 yourself, IMO. Unless it's got a magic way of becoming root, editing the file and restarting X all in the space of one click plus drag, of course... ??
"people want to see features they know from windows, and don't care about other useful ones"
Couldn't agree more.
And it's not as though there isn't a way to get anti-aliassing in X, 'cos I thought it was possible (mentioned recently?).
Poeple even take this across with negative things as well - "there must be one GUI" is the obvious one - how many times do people say "linux sux" because they don't like whichever of Gnome or KDE they installed?
Can't say that's my favourite kind of user.
And it gets really bad when this is the sort of ignoramus who's tasked with the job of setting up the corporate firewall, web-presence, DB-server and intranet box....... !!!!
"The only way to make sure your input is correct is by manually checking everything, consulting with the manpage on every step."
Actually, no, the answer is to learn to *read*. I go for whole years at a stretch without seeing any obscure error messages, things to which the answer is either "don't do that then" or "oops, quick tweak, goodie". You just have to understand getting your kicks in text-mode.
" Someone who's used neither before but has a working knowledge of computer technology in general, can be up and running much faster with a control panel system than with text files."
You're only a newbie once, or on a slow day, maybe twice. Thereafter you're a serious user, and you're getting well bummed-out at having to click through reams of cruddy windows to find the one option you lost.
"But if the Linux developer community has no interest in making life easier for the mythical `luser', then their presence on the desktop deserves to remain marginal."
You don't get it. There is no `deserve' about it, and there's no negative stigma about `marginal' at all.
This boils down to educating the user-base, and in particular, those who don't want to be educated are the ones to whom businesses are pandering, and it makes me sick.
"But I guess your reply will be "but that kind of questions are precisely the ones I would answer"."
I'm not so (un)fortunate as to know enough be the next AC, but such as I know I'll gladly share by pointing folks in the right direction, if they look interested enough and don't always seek a "just click here" answer. I come from days when the Armadillo book (Essential Unix Sysadmin) was good reading - but it talked about Solaris. I suspect I'm very server-orientated in approach - the old unix province of Clueful Folks is something I see as on its demise when I was getting out of uni into the job market.
"Hmm, maybe I'm agreeing more with you then I first thought:) "
"Well, isn't the fact that they post a message on usenet a first sign of wanting to learn something?"
Sometimes. Sometimes it's also done cluelessly.
"Those kind of users are really the rotten apples in the community."
Quite probably so. Maybe in their case it's because they *don't* know the answers either and just have lousy egos.
"You are right about that quantity is not a measure for quality,"
Sure. It's one of those things I've always said, I'm not interested in count(bums_on_seats) or "linux" having a bigger user-base than M$loth; I'm interested in there being a louder quality signal from the user-base. Yesterday, I read an article on uk.comp.os.linux quoting a cable-modem installing company telling its field-rep "if it's a linux user, they'll know what they're doing, just get the MAC address and let them work out DHCP". That's what I'm proud to see.
The key here is the "sometimes", I think. It's not lack of knowlege of how your OS works, it's the clue to look locally and then remotely for documentation, *READ* the blighters, and try things out. It's not the fact that someone knowing only a little appears on one of "my" newsgroups, it's whether they want to learn or not. And of course it's possible for me to exhibit a lousy attitude on usenet (or here;) but it generally doesn't happen.
"When you started using Linux, weren't you pleased with the help you could get on the Internet (usenet, www, whatever)?"
Not an awful lot, no. I'd been using linux myself reading TFM (and, dammit, info pages as well) and occasionally bouncing ideas off one or two friends for a few years before I first subscribed to my local newsgroup. The only times I've used the HOWTOs collection recently is when I need a hardware-compatibility check.
And now I'm on a few, on such occasions as I answer apparent newbies, I make sure it's those who exude *clue* not just "I'm a newbie please be nice to me" apologetics - listen and learn, don't whine.
"I am sorry to say so, but Windows beats the crap out of Linux for easy configuring."
You think? Find me someone who's used neither before, and get them to give you an impartial view of the "control panel" systen. Sure I know much of that inside-out on everything from win3 to 2k and back, but then I also know my way around/etc on more than one distro, and I know which I *prefer*.
And you don't address the idea of folks who don't *know* stuff becoming less ignorant - because the real crime here is cluelessness and not *wanting* to learn to use what's in front of you. I say let M$loth keep those cretins to themselves; these are not the droids I'm looking for.
"Maybe this elite attitude is precisely what holds Linux from breaking through on major scale."
When you see that bums on seats is no measure of quality (except perhaps to say "we glossed over all the interesting bits to make life easier for the mythical `luser'"), you'll see why I have no problem with this idea at all.
Slashdot Mirror
In other not-news, the only sane answer to this alleged "problem" is societal, not technological.
When you look after your employees happily, including but not limited to giving them a decent salary, they feel sufficient loyalty that you don't *need* draconian security measures.
Works for me - both the last and current job have simple iptables firewalls, and no restrictions on what flows at censorship level. And do we see major info leak? No. We employee sensible honourable clueful folks, and look after them OK. No problem.
Blame management, I do.
How anyone can claim to support their product on "linux" when what they really mean is "if you're not running RH5.2 or 6.0 with a Gnome desktop environment, we don't want to know", I dunno. I guess it's because manglement think "this will mean we can program a monkey to do Support", when what they should really do is train their internal staff in the product set and have folks knowlegeable about the OS as well; thereafter, a good escalation process back into Development where they can research these things at source level.
At the first job, we had a puppet micro-manager, whose sole line seemed to be to get crib-sheets that you could "just press a button" and send to the customer... those of us running support for both the US and UK offices single-handedly for a week were less than impressed...
"The criticisms are relatively minor, and his commentary appear to be wild overreactions from here."
Yeah, well I never expected FreeSoftware-friendliness from the slashdot crowd.
OTOH unlike you I read through the license for myself, and found the point about "why include the US export restrictions in the license itself?" truly obnoxious as well. In fact, I also refuse to regard it open-source (as it's discriminatory against specific countries), let alone Free, until there's a non-US version with a sensible license (gpl/bsd/apache/whatever, but not the current crock).
Think of it this way. If they'd actually sold ONE of these things, they'd've been able to afford a web-designer with a clue.
Hint: I don't buy from Flash sites.
Hint2: I don't see what some ugly bitch's boobs have to do with a watch.
I'm glad to see other folks have come up with alternatives.
...the article probably doesn't validate as clean HTML either, when the rest of the world is way on with XHTML1.0 and XSL and stuff, does it?
Find your favourite distribution's source archive, and grab 'em from there. (Debian would be my first port of call, seeing as I *know* they've packaged VNC before now.)
I'm thinking, in this day & age of open-source, it's slightly weird that projects can be "removed" from public distribution - cf ?Blender?, the Net::DNS CPAN module, and/or that nice movie editor thing - when so many distributions have used the sources in the past, it can very rapidly become quite hard to find something once it *is* removed; reason being, freshmeat refers people only to the project's listed homepage, it doesn't copy stuff locally.
Seems to me that within the "bazaar" that is open-source development, there's quite a lot of "one package, one home site" going on.
"Over here in Europe where I live I can buy any phone from anywhere. It'll work with any operator"
IME most phones in Europe are locked into one particular operator's network. Example: I got one of the earlier Motorola Timeport P7389(?) things, which was available only on BT Cellnet at the time.
I guess I could - and did - have it unlocked to work with Orange, but that was hellish expensive - definitely not the default state.
On the other hand, both my recent Nokia purchases have been unlocked, despite buying on Cellnet...
Who cares about a *private* network? Are these ISPs not *I*SPs??
Show us the T&Cs as well; I'll bet they don't say anything about p2p usage.
Agreed. Email != IM != PIM, FFS.
Personally I think something that slams HTML mailing is sensible too.
I use fetchmail, procmail, spamassassin and razor at ork with a frontend of Gnus, amongst a company of M$loth-lusers, and I have no problems at all.
In fact, compared to all the M$loth+telnet+vim+/usr/bin/cvs "people", I have a particularly easy life of it - mail comes in, diff gets saved out, edited, sanity-checked, applied with Ediff mode and then committed to CVS all from within Emacs.
That's an even better consequence. :8))
I'm thinking the answer is, "so the poor girl shouldn't sell herself at all, or at least shouldn't under-sell herself" in the first place...
"The clone now has no rights, since she was purchased, created and programmed (raised) by the company."
How exactly does this differ from Britney Spears?
zsh/scr # crontab -l | grep apt /var/lib/apt/lists ) > /dev/null
13 2 * * * (export http_proxy=http://localhost:8080/; apt-get update; apt-get -dy dist-upgrade; apt-get update; apt-get -dy dist-upgrade; chmod -R og+rX
No more problem.
"The simpler the transition, the more will come across."
No. The more prepared people are to get out and learn the new thing, the more welcome they'll be. Otherwise, it you go around "simplifying the transition", you'll end up with Windoze all over again, won't you?
D'oh. That's why the installer should provide you with an `lspci'. Or if it didn't supply you with cat at least, I'd be rather surprised.
1. Open up a shell, type `lspci -v'. This is not hard. /proc/pci' is impossible either, though.)
(You do *get* that in the regular installer, don't you? It's not as though `more
2. OK, suggest that to the debian-installer guys that a mapping between versions and kernel-modules would be a good thing.
Or, if point 2 sounds like hard work, then bear in mind we have Hardware-Compatibility-HOWTOs floating around as well.
Pretty much agree. The odd bug-fix, and hardware detection (but then again, if you don't KNOW what's in your box, why are you installing on it?), oh and maybe avoid dselect like the plague...
Took me under a day to get a reasonable Unstable tracking system up and running from fresh on the new orkstation. As with anything, try it twice and then tell me what the pick-up curve was, don't say "oh it's not the windoze installer, what do I do?!!" and wail and whine.
No. This debian user thinks that if someone isn't prepared to investigate a simple installer (what? read things? that'd never do) then they'll *NEVER* *bother* reading dpkg(8) and apt(8) - ie their on-going use will be crap too so no harm in "dissuading" the ignorant *and* lazy arses at install-time.
But ultimately "dissuading" is the wrong way of looking at it anyway. It works, it *is* simple - dead simple, just cursor-keys tab and enter - and there's no need to go around sticking pretty buttons on it that make people think "what does this circle with a triangle underneath it mean?".
GUI installers: Pfui.
Hmmmm. OK, so you have half a way of becoming root in the GUI, which is looking more interesting. I still think `sudo vi /e[TAB]/X[TAB]/XF[TAB]' and C-A-BS to restart the current login session would be pretty darn' quick, mind.
"If you don't believe the magic why don't you just try it for yourself?"
I have philosophical objections to supporting something whose only distinctive feature is non-Free. I'm not particularly interested in supporting non-Free software on linux.
How do you add a new video-mode eg 1600x1200 when the install only detected up to 1280x1024? You need to be root for that, and by FAR the quickest way is to hack on /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 yourself, IMO.
Unless it's got a magic way of becoming root, editing the file and restarting X all in the space of one click plus drag, of course... ??
"people want to see features they know from windows, and don't care about other useful ones"
Couldn't agree more.
And it's not as though there isn't a way to get anti-aliassing in X, 'cos I thought it was possible (mentioned recently?).
Poeple even take this across with negative things as well - "there must be one GUI" is the obvious one - how many times do people say "linux sux" because they don't like whichever of Gnome or KDE they installed?
Can't say that's my favourite kind of user.
And it gets really bad when this is the sort of ignoramus who's tasked with the job of setting up the corporate firewall, web-presence, DB-server and intranet box....... !!!!
"The only way to make sure your input is correct is by manually checking everything, consulting with the manpage on every step."
Actually, no, the answer is to learn to *read*. I go for whole years at a stretch without seeing any obscure error messages, things to which the answer is either "don't do that then" or "oops, quick tweak, goodie". You just have to understand getting your kicks in text-mode.
" Someone who's used neither before but has a working knowledge of computer technology in general, can be up and running much faster with a control panel system than with text files."
You're only a newbie once, or on a slow day, maybe twice.
Thereafter you're a serious user, and you're getting well bummed-out at having to click through reams of cruddy windows to find the one option you lost.
"But if the Linux developer community has no interest in making life easier for the mythical `luser', then their presence on the desktop deserves to remain marginal."
You don't get it. There is no `deserve' about it, and there's no negative stigma about `marginal' at all.
This boils down to educating the user-base, and in particular, those who don't want to be educated are the ones to whom businesses are pandering, and it makes me sick.
"But I guess your reply will be "but that kind of questions are precisely the ones I would answer"."
:) "
;8)
I'm not so (un)fortunate as to know enough be the next AC, but such as I know I'll gladly share by pointing folks in the right direction, if they look interested enough and don't always seek a "just click here" answer.
I come from days when the Armadillo book (Essential Unix Sysadmin) was good reading - but it talked about Solaris. I suspect I'm very server-orientated in approach - the old unix province of Clueful Folks is something I see as on its demise when I was getting out of uni into the job market.
"Hmm, maybe I'm agreeing more with you then I first thought
It's allowed
"Well, isn't the fact that they post a message on usenet a first sign of wanting to learn something?"
;) but it generally doesn't happen.
Sometimes. Sometimes it's also done cluelessly.
"Those kind of users are really the rotten apples in the community."
Quite probably so. Maybe in their case it's because they *don't* know the answers either and just have lousy egos.
"You are right about that quantity is not a measure for quality,"
Sure. It's one of those things I've always said, I'm not interested in count(bums_on_seats) or "linux" having a bigger user-base than M$loth; I'm interested in there being a louder quality signal from the user-base. Yesterday, I read an article on uk.comp.os.linux quoting a cable-modem installing company telling its field-rep "if it's a linux user, they'll know what they're doing, just get the MAC address and let them work out DHCP". That's what I'm proud to see.
The key here is the "sometimes", I think. It's not lack of knowlege of how your OS works, it's the clue to look locally and then remotely for documentation, *READ* the blighters, and try things out. It's not the fact that someone knowing only a little appears on one of "my" newsgroups, it's whether they want to learn or not. And of course it's possible for me to exhibit a lousy attitude on usenet (or here
I forgot one thing to reply to:
"When you started using Linux, weren't you pleased with the help you could get on the Internet (usenet, www, whatever)?"
Not an awful lot, no. I'd been using linux myself reading TFM (and, dammit, info pages as well) and occasionally bouncing ideas off one or two friends for a few years before I first subscribed to my local newsgroup. The only times I've used the HOWTOs collection recently is when I need a hardware-compatibility check.
And now I'm on a few, on such occasions as I answer apparent newbies, I make sure it's those who exude *clue* not just "I'm a newbie please be nice to me" apologetics - listen and learn, don't whine.
"I am sorry to say so, but Windows beats the crap out of Linux for easy configuring."
/etc on more than one distro, and I know which I *prefer*.
You think? Find me someone who's used neither before, and get them to give you an impartial view of the "control panel" systen. Sure I know much of that inside-out on everything from win3 to 2k and back, but then I also know my way around
And you don't address the idea of folks who don't *know* stuff becoming less ignorant - because the real crime here is cluelessness and not *wanting* to learn to use what's in front of you. I say let M$loth keep those cretins to themselves; these are not the droids I'm looking for.
"Maybe this elite attitude is precisely what holds Linux from breaking through on major scale."
When you see that bums on seats is no measure of quality (except perhaps to say "we glossed over all the interesting bits to make life easier for the mythical `luser'"), you'll see why I have no problem with this idea at all.