I was horrified by the original Corel Linux - broken installer in extremum.
Increasing the user base is not a good thing unless they're at least happy and competent users of it, and preferably are prepared to go out and fix things and write new toys for everyone. "Business respect" is not something in which I'm interested at all. It's viable for the desktop when it's viable for the desktop, not when Microsoft say it is.
> If I am a good driver, why can't I go 80 miles per hour on an interstate?
Because there are other bungling idiots who can't cope, who don't know about the concept of "left lane" (or right, for the americans reading and anyone else who gets it wrong), or whatever.
Although quite why that has to be *my* fault I don't know either. As for making people drive at the limit - what's wrong with that? If I say it's possible to do a given corner at 33mph on my tyres[1] in a certain conditions, then the chances are I know what I'm talking about. I certainly don't need arbitrary restrictions within the realms of safety for cars of 30 years ago.
I guess I agree entirely with everything else said there though.
[1] I know of one such corner, which I found out about the hard way after it'd been raining... technically a 60 limit there too, FWIW.
Why does this give me the same kind of feeling as the state restrictions in Total Recall gave me?
I'm beginning to think that it's a fundamental part of the definition of "government" to be "bungling, incompetent, frustrating, imposing and to violate your rights".
And does it actually work? Does it result in a happier, quicker and safer journey from A to B by everyone (not just the taxis)?
Me, I refuse to have anything that even risks cutting off the fuel supply. If you've ever so much as stalled on a motorway, let alone had a blowout or engine failure, you'll know it's not fun.
All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
So maybe with a few more years' exposure to the horrible people you get out there on the 'Net (ick), he'll have mastered grammar as well as being able to answer the phone.
What really cheeses me off is the intrusion of politics and governments and the whole legal system into affairs of the 'Net - it should be plain and simple, "this is your top-level domain, this is where you belong. If a search engine doesn't pick you up in the top dozen, your site is crap", end of argument.
ISTM most of the comments here have been to do with the standard ICQ client for windoze available from ICQ/Mirabilis directly. To make a suggestion, GnomeICU is the best client I've seen - it spends most of its time being about 1cm square in the Gnome panel, with a light to show your status. If someone messages you, you get a flashing yellow post-it symbol. Does chat, does file xfer, does everything else you require in a proper chat client. Doesn't do birthdays. Doesn't sing (unless you enable sounds), doesn't dance. The contact list itself has an optional 'auto hide' feature, which is cool, too.
Eek. The Dilbert in me is getting worried... [E-speak]allows e-services to dynamically interact to discover, negotiate, broker and compose themselves to solve a business to business or business to consumer service request.
Congratulations, that tells me nothing at all about it.
But whatever it is, I guess HP supporting Open Source is a jolly good idea. Good on 'em!
One thought though: if Amazon win the case for some strange and perverse reason, won't it just alienate us open-source type hackers as a bunch of weirdos, from the rest of the commercial world?
Let's hope the judge isn't that easily bribable...
Oh, six of one and half-a-dozen of t'other, innit? I mean, Awel's right in some ways, the demand works against any technical excellence whatsoever (rough large-scale paraphrase), or "the morons have all the money". Days were when I approached Usenet knowing there were gurus out there who would delete articles with MIME and upside-down responses. Now I know a thing or two more than then (I hope) and definitely do the same to others, I'm all for it staying that you learn what you approach, and you correct the obvious bad bits in it thereafter.
Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, it is a crime against one's privacy that this information, however "insignificant" it might be of itself, has been stolen (ie without consent).
Me, I've seen these "comet cursors" on the Dilbert page, and thought they were bad enough there. As a gimmic they don't interest me one way or another, and if they destroy my Dinosaurs cursor theme, even for just a few mouse-over events, then they're blydi annoying.
I think the limit should be the regular web server logging, no more. It's fair enough that an httpd should know where you're coming from and with what agent, as there are folks out here who need to maintain stats on the above; but asking the browser to give up any more information than that is immoral, and writing a browser that allows more to be sent is in league with those who want such info. Web server logs, no more.
With your 'working environment' I encompass both mouse and keyboard together. I disagree about the arrow keys (if he means cursor keys) as they're a god-send, but I do hate the arrows on the numeric keypad. Something else not to forget: the arrow keys *do* scale into words and paragraphs (if not sentences) with WinWord (and no doubt others), using ctrl+cursor up/down. (And on the subject of WinWord, did you know that F12 does file/open, print, save and SaveAs ever since Word 2?!)
You're right that author and editor adapt to each other. ObHistory: I used to be into emacs in a relatively big way, but I didn't really know my way around it - I let others' opinions of vi keep me with emacs. Then I decided to branch out and do the Other Thing, and hey presto, I'm still *with* vim, because vim and I get on better together. However, for webpage editing, I do sometimes prefer something like screem, because I hate having to mess around with word-delimiters to manipulate tags.
When I'm working, I don't mind having one hand on the mouse for about a quarter of the time - I optimise where it is so no time is lost in the focus change, and of course it's way faster than alt+tab between 10 windows or whatever.
Caps lock can go, and CTRL can reappear where caps was, by all means.
But I also disagree about chording keyboard - there's nothing wrong with having, say, alt+shift+N mapped to '/usr/local/netscape/netscape' if that's what turns you on. And on ergonomic grounds, that sort of keypress can be pretty quick to come by.
Ever tried playing quake under X on a notebook? The only problem with restricting oneself to the keyboard is that the turn-angle delta is way too huge, and in my case, I have a Fn key on the left of Ctrl so I don't get a chance to shoot anyone!
Other major distributions have their derivative distros - eg RedHat and Mandrake etc. There are also some good jobs done of porting RedHat-written code to Debian (eg Linuxconf). Given the problems experienced with Corel Linux, which is known to be "based on Debian", what are your feelings on having other distributions derived from Debian - in particular, how 'far' away from the original should they go and is there any preference in direction that they take?
First, I agree entirely. Second, I wonder how GPL would appear in court - who would plead in favour of it, and how?
Third, a comment from Roblimo's article: But when Bruce advocates a lawsuit against Corel for violating the GPL, even if he rapidly recants, he's effectively putting any investment Corel has in Linux at risk.
The thing is, that's only half of the story - to be nice and rebellious, if Corel cock things up so badly twice on the trot, and make a distribution that brings the name of Debian into disrepute (as this most surely has, because it's aw ful and broken, then something needs done to sort them out. We *can't* have them going round bungling up the licensing in such a way as to offend the linux community, let alone twice. The only concern I have with that is whether Corel has invested anything of use in Linux - given that I don't want more lame newbies coming to linux (those who are uninterested in it for its own sake, that is), and throwing money at it doesn't get anywhere... what is there to show, certainly that appeals to me?
Re:Yes, with some modifications.
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
Why exactly does what you suggest require a "license" of any description, why would imposing such a license be anything other than a restriction of rights of freedom, and how would you go about working it out for the whole world, not just america?
Just asking... not that I think the idea's a steaming pile of turd, or anything...
"Certain countries" is also a matter of performance and possibly even of legality if american crappy crytpo-export regulations apply, btw.
And there *is* no reason for the 18yr-old limit, or "a minor" as it says. It's just as bad a way of eliminating the hand that fed them as the original license complaint was.
Yes, thanks for the pointer in the direction of normality!
But.. it's not by sitting on one's communal derriere that we've got to the state of play where we can challenge corporations like that. Something needs saying, sensibly / rationally / presentably / pointedly, to Corel, with the weight of the community's backing behind it - then there's no excuse for them not to change it. They *will* *have* to change it. Not everything is got right the first time round, but I expect things to right themselves in time too.
Some thoughts from me: I downloaded and tried this last week, and was frankly disgusted. It took too long to boot into the GUI. The package selection was foul - clicking 2 levels of trees to find only one package where I *know* the real debian has masses. Then the worst insult of all - repartitioning. No, you can't assign a mountpoint to an existing partition, you have to delete and recreate it. No, when you recreate it you specify a size in megs and it uses that as the cylinder difference instead. Then it complains that there's not enough space to install your selected packages. Having gone through this rigmarole twice, at about 15mins apiece, the CD hit the opposite wall with a satisfying thud, although it still works (worse luck) - oh, and I posted to my favourite local Linux newsgroup with a flame of a review and forwarded a copy to the Corel feedback email address.
It says it all that I've not even had an acknowlegement of the email I sent them, let alone the time I wasted one evening setting it all up.
I *have* gone back to the real Debian, and intend to stay with it for a while - on both desktops (the home one has just been reinstalled) and my notebook.
So as for these petty licensing derangements - Corel can indeed go to hell. I'm totally in favour of boycotting them, especially given what it says for the real debian.
Over here we've had the Demon Usenet-hosting debacle to cope with and I'm not happy that an ISP should be liable for anything other than equipment and service provision. As soon as you get governments, courts and corporations involved in the 'Net, you've got problems - all the innocence of one's student days is over.
If you want an example of the sort of depth of argument that does the rounds nowadays, check here.
Yup, agreed on that one. "Spod" I've always taken as someone who hangs out a lot on EW-* talkers or MUDs etc; to me a 'nerd' is a wannabee geek, too - lacking in social interaction or something like that, gets over-excited at every nerd toy to drop from Bill's gracious hand, rather than Linus';)
I think Roblimo is absolutely right to say, There is commercial success, and there is satisfaction. The two are not always the same.
Also I've been worrying a bit about the 'negative spiral' which results only in the goods bits of the "ivory-tower" nature of software becoming commercialised and lusers getting their hands on it, etc. To see the "upwards spiral" instead is much more enlightening - "by treating users as adoring fans - not as annoyances - they can earn even more applause, there will be more users. And more applause. And more developers."
Well, your religion of choice might disagree that *nobody* has got it right yet, of course... But I agree entirely that this "sit them round in a circle and have them chant something over and over" approach isn't prayer, it's nothing other than shallow (thanks for the word) mysticism.
For real ingenuity, the shape to arrange them around would be a chalk outline of Bill...
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I was horrified by the original Corel Linux - broken installer in extremum.
Increasing the user base is not a good thing unless they're at least happy and competent users of it, and preferably are prepared to go out and fix things and write new toys for everyone.
"Business respect" is not something in which I'm interested at all.
It's viable for the desktop when it's viable for the desktop, not when Microsoft say it is.
I'm already on Debian - what do I go to next?
> If I am a good driver, why can't I go 80 miles per hour on an interstate?
Because there are other bungling idiots who can't cope, who don't know about the concept of "left lane" (or right, for the americans reading and anyone else who gets it wrong), or whatever.
Although quite why that has to be *my* fault I don't know either. As for making people drive at the limit - what's wrong with that? If I say it's possible to do a given corner at 33mph on my tyres[1] in a certain conditions, then the chances are I know what I'm talking about. I certainly don't need arbitrary restrictions within the realms of safety for cars of 30 years ago.
I guess I agree entirely with everything else said there though.
[1] I know of one such corner, which I found out about the hard way after it'd been raining... technically a 60 limit there too, FWIW.
Why does this give me the same kind of feeling as the state restrictions in Total Recall gave me?
I'm beginning to think that it's a fundamental part of the definition of "government" to be "bungling, incompetent, frustrating, imposing and to violate your rights".
And does it actually work? Does it result in a happier, quicker and safer journey from A to B by everyone (not just the taxis)?
Me, I refuse to have anything that even risks cutting off the fuel supply. If you've ever so much as stalled on a motorway, let alone had a blowout or engine failure, you'll know it's not fun.
All you need a good solid 2 or 3 weeks of training and you can answer the phones too.
So maybe with a few more years' exposure to the horrible people you get out there on the 'Net (ick), he'll have mastered grammar as well as being able to answer the phone.
Otherwise, what an anal-retentive arsehole...
Agree entirely...
What really cheeses me off is the intrusion of politics and governments and the whole legal system into affairs of the 'Net - it should be plain and simple, "this is your top-level domain, this is where you belong. If a search engine doesn't pick you up in the top dozen, your site is crap", end of argument.
ISTM most of the comments here have been to do with the standard ICQ client for windoze available from ICQ/Mirabilis directly.
To make a suggestion, GnomeICU is the best client I've seen - it spends most of its time being about 1cm square in the Gnome panel, with a light to show your status. If someone messages you, you get a flashing yellow post-it symbol. Does chat, does file xfer, does everything else you require in a proper chat client. Doesn't do birthdays. Doesn't sing (unless you enable sounds), doesn't dance. The contact list itself has an optional 'auto hide' feature, which is cool, too.
Eek. The Dilbert in me is getting worried...
[E-speak]allows e-services to dynamically interact to discover, negotiate, broker and compose themselves to solve a business to business or business to consumer service request.
Congratulations, that tells me nothing at all about it.
But whatever it is, I guess HP supporting Open Source is a jolly good idea. Good on 'em!
Jolly good - perhaps I ought to do likewise.
One thought though: if Amazon win the case for some strange and perverse reason, won't it just alienate us open-source type hackers as a bunch of weirdos, from the rest of the commercial world?
Let's hope the judge isn't that easily bribable...
Does anyone know how much effort it takes to port the JDK 2 to yet another free Unix flavor on yet another system?
Surely FreeBSD shouldn't be that hard to do - how far would linux binary emulation go?
Oh, six of one and half-a-dozen of t'other, innit?
I mean, Awel's right in some ways, the demand works against any technical excellence whatsoever (rough large-scale paraphrase), or "the morons have all the money".
Days were when I approached Usenet knowing there were gurus out there who would delete articles with MIME and upside-down responses. Now I know a thing or two more than then (I hope) and definitely do the same to others, I'm all for it staying that you learn what you approach, and you correct the obvious bad bits in it thereafter.
Where would we be without vi?!
Would we be able to sue them under the Trade Descriptions Act for not living up to the name?
(This is a UK thing, where we have a sensible law...)
Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, it is a crime against one's privacy that this information, however "insignificant" it might be of itself, has been stolen (ie without consent).
Me, I've seen these "comet cursors" on the Dilbert page, and thought they were bad enough there. As a gimmic they don't interest me one way or another, and if they destroy my Dinosaurs cursor theme, even for just a few mouse-over events, then they're blydi annoying.
I think the limit should be the regular web server logging, no more. It's fair enough that an httpd should know where you're coming from and with what agent, as there are folks out here who need to maintain stats on the above; but asking the browser to give up any more information than that is immoral, and writing a browser that allows more to be sent is in league with those who want such info.
Web server logs, no more.
With your 'working environment' I encompass both mouse and keyboard together.
I disagree about the arrow keys (if he means cursor keys) as they're a god-send, but I do hate the arrows on the numeric keypad.
Something else not to forget: the arrow keys *do* scale into words and paragraphs (if not sentences) with WinWord (and no doubt others), using ctrl+cursor up/down. (And on the subject of WinWord, did you know that F12 does file/open, print, save and SaveAs ever since Word 2?!)
You're right that author and editor adapt to each other. ObHistory: I used to be into emacs in a relatively big way, but I didn't really know my way around it - I let others' opinions of vi keep me with emacs. Then I decided to branch out and do the Other Thing, and hey presto, I'm still *with* vim, because vim and I get on better together.
However, for webpage editing, I do sometimes prefer something like screem, because I hate having to mess around with word-delimiters to manipulate tags.
When I'm working, I don't mind having one hand on the mouse for about a quarter of the time - I optimise where it is so no time is lost in the focus change, and of course it's way faster than alt+tab between 10 windows or whatever.
Caps lock can go, and CTRL can reappear where caps was, by all means.
But I also disagree about chording keyboard - there's nothing wrong with having, say, alt+shift+N mapped to '/usr/local/netscape/netscape' if that's what turns you on. And on ergonomic grounds, that sort of keypress can be pretty quick to come by.
Ever tried playing quake under X on a notebook? The only problem with restricting oneself to the keyboard is that the turn-angle delta is way too huge, and in my case, I have a Fn key on the left of Ctrl so I don't get a chance to shoot anyone!
Other major distributions have their derivative distros - eg RedHat and Mandrake etc. There are also some good jobs done of porting RedHat-written code to Debian (eg Linuxconf).
Given the problems experienced with Corel Linux, which is known to be "based on Debian", what are your feelings on having other distributions derived from Debian - in particular, how 'far' away from the original should they go and is there any preference in direction that they take?
First, I agree entirely.
Second, I wonder how GPL would appear in court - who would plead in favour of it, and how?
Third, a comment from Roblimo's article:
But when Bruce advocates a lawsuit against Corel for violating the GPL, even if he rapidly recants, he's effectively putting any investment Corel has in Linux at risk.
The thing is, that's only half of the story - to be nice and rebellious, if Corel cock things up so badly twice on the trot, and make a distribution that brings the name of Debian into disrepute (as this most surely has, because it's aw ful and broken, then something needs done to sort them out. We *can't* have them going round bungling up the licensing in such a way as to offend the linux community, let alone twice.
The only concern I have with that is whether Corel has invested anything of use in Linux - given that I don't want more lame newbies coming to linux (those who are uninterested in it for its own sake, that is), and throwing money at it doesn't get anywhere... what is there to show, certainly that appeals to me?
Why exactly does what you suggest require a "license" of any description, why would imposing such a license be anything other than a restriction of rights of freedom, and how would you go about working it out for the whole world, not just america?
Just asking... not that I think the idea's a steaming pile of turd, or anything...
"Certain countries" is also a matter of performance and possibly even of legality if american crappy crytpo-export regulations apply, btw.
And there *is* no reason for the 18yr-old limit, or "a minor" as it says. It's just as bad a way of eliminating the hand that fed them as the original license complaint was.
Yes, thanks for the pointer in the direction of normality!
But.. it's not by sitting on one's communal derriere that we've got to the state of play where we can challenge corporations like that. Something needs saying, sensibly / rationally / presentably / pointedly, to Corel, with the weight of the community's backing behind it - then there's no excuse for them not to change it.
They *will* *have* to change it. Not everything is got right the first time round, but I expect things to right themselves in time too.
Hmmm.
Good on you, I guess...
Some thoughts from me: I downloaded and tried this last week, and was frankly disgusted. It took too long to boot into the GUI. The package selection was foul - clicking 2 levels of trees to find only one package where I *know* the real debian has masses. Then the worst insult of all - repartitioning. No, you can't assign a mountpoint to an existing partition, you have to delete and recreate it. No, when you recreate it you specify a size in megs and it uses that as the cylinder difference instead. Then it complains that there's not enough space to install your selected packages. Having gone through this rigmarole twice, at about 15mins apiece, the CD hit the opposite wall with a satisfying thud, although it still works (worse luck) - oh, and I posted to my favourite local Linux newsgroup with a flame of a review and forwarded a copy to the Corel feedback email address.
It says it all that I've not even had an acknowlegement of the email I sent them, let alone the time I wasted one evening setting it all up.
I *have* gone back to the real Debian, and intend to stay with it for a while - on both desktops (the home one has just been reinstalled) and my notebook.
So as for these petty licensing derangements - Corel can indeed go to hell. I'm totally in favour of boycotting them, especially given what it says for the real debian.
Thanks for the warm fuzzies.
Over here we've had the Demon Usenet-hosting debacle to cope with and I'm not happy that an ISP should be liable for anything other than equipment and service provision. As soon as you get governments, courts and corporations involved in the 'Net, you've got problems - all the innocence of one's student days is over.
If you want an example of the sort of depth of argument that does the rounds nowadays, check here.
Yup, agreed on that one. "Spod" I've always taken as someone who hangs out a lot on EW-* talkers or MUDs etc; to me a 'nerd' is a wannabee geek, too - lacking in social interaction or something like that, gets over-excited at every nerd toy to drop from Bill's gracious hand, rather than Linus' ;)
I think Roblimo is absolutely right to say,
There is commercial success, and there is satisfaction. The two are not always the same.
Also I've been worrying a bit about the 'negative spiral' which results only in the goods bits of the "ivory-tower" nature of software becoming commercialised and lusers getting their hands on it, etc. To see the "upwards spiral" instead is much more enlightening - "by treating users as adoring fans - not as annoyances - they can earn even more applause, there will be more users. And more applause. And more developers."
Now where was I with my book on ML...?
Well, your religion of choice might disagree that *nobody* has got it right yet, of course...
But I agree entirely that this "sit them round in a circle and have them chant something over and over" approach isn't prayer, it's nothing other than shallow (thanks for the word) mysticism.
For real ingenuity, the shape to arrange them around would be a chalk outline of Bill...
Cool.
:)
;)
Thanks folks, I'm in the middle of downloading it now and will see what I think of it
(I wonder if I really have turned into a Debian freak in recent months...