I confess I haven't tried MONO but I hope that the web pages it's used to generate are valid XHTML/CSS. Those that are generated by ASP.NET tend not to be.
Thanks I needed that, it's been a long difficult day and a good laugh was very relaxing.
As to the title of the article - I guess the anonymous coward was trying to discover just how far Redmond had actually gotten to him. The news is not good - proof positive sniffing the ink used on MS licence agreements is hazardous to the health.
The International Webmaster's Association http://www.iwanet.org
The also offer training courses and a certification program if that is what you are looking for. They and the HTML Writer's Guild have recently merged into one organization.
I have a Thinkpad A20 I bought last December. It has a Lucent modem instead of the earlier MWave device. The integrated ethernet is an Intel EtherExpress Pro 100.
Should be easier to support. I haven't put Linux on it yet, but I have heard that the Lucent driver works fine for the modem and the EEPro100 is already supported.
This is slightly off topic but I felt a need to comment given Dr. Reid's quoted credentials.
While the SoAJ has done a good job with the site, and the administration of a domain is not a trivial task, they have as yet not opened this non-profit organization, supposedly for the benefit of the Church and its followers, to membership beyond the founders.
The page says that they will do so as soon as the Charter etc. is formalized. Well they have been in existance for 4 years and are a registered non-profit. That means they had to have a formal charter before they could be registered.
Maybe it is my own cynicism and I do them an injustice, but I would think that they should have all such considerations well formalized long before now, as well as offering membership to those interested in the goals of the organization. Regardless of the forum it provides the Church and its followers, as it stands it looks more like a private club than an organization for providing a charitable service.
As with most such things it comes with some baggage.
The signaling rates of such technologies are moving higher and higher into the RF spectrum and as such have a very real potential (especially when not used in properly shielded environments) to both cause RFI and become more susceptible to it.
This is going to be especially true if deployed on the rather mediocre twin wire telephone lines that feed most of our homes and businesses.
Sympatico in Nova Scotia (Maritime Telephone & Telegraph) has a different ADSL setup than Sympatico in ON/QC (BEll). Here rather than HSE they call it empowered and it is a higher speed connection (downstream is 3mbps average, 7 mbps max).
However they will not install unless you are running a minumum of a Pentium 100/64M RAM and Win95 or 98. If you have NT, OS/2, Mac, Linux, etc. you are out of luck unless you switch to Win9x and then switch after they install.
I have no idea if this works as I don't know anyone who has tried it. I hope to have MPowered the end of the month (I have a multiboot system) and will experiment then.
Part of Micro$oft's monopoly is driven by the #@!$%& companies who don't think anyone uses anything else.
The sites referenced are acessible from here at least. Mail into Yugoslavia is also coming back from the British and Canadian post offices too.
Problem is that the Balkan countries have been a seething cauldron for hundreds of years. The only thing that kept them in check in this century was Tito and WW II and even that was an uneasy alliance. Now everyone else is getting drawn into it.
I read a book many years ago that theorized that if global or semiglobal conflict was to hapen again it would probably start in either the Balkans or the Middle East. I hope they weren't being prophetic.
HP may be reputable but in many ways their tech support leaves something to be desired.
I have been having problems with one of their CD-R drives. When I called tech support my support consisted of the person reading (you could tell from the way they were listing things) a list of possible causes. After listing everything from the power supply in the system to the cable, SCSI card, drivers, software they added "well it could also be the drive". They then informed me that I could send it back and, for almost the price of a new one, exchange it for a refurbished unit as they did no testing on returned drives but simply swapped them.
I can figure out the list of what might be the problem all by myself. What I need when I call tech support is some in depth informed help, not someone reading a list of possibilites off a screen.
I sure hope they do Linux tech support better than that or there will be a lot of unhappy computer users which can only hurt the acceptance of Linux.
It seems to me that there is a fallacy in this essay that negates much of its reasoning.
The author contends that "software pricing follows that of other commodities". In fact it doesn't. Software pricing remains relatively inflexible regardless of demand. Although niche products are more expensive than mainstream products, prices of popular packages do not drop as more are sold, nor do niche products.
This negates the very basis of the commodity arguments, IMO.
This "Letter to Debian about Friendliness" has a number of points that need addressing. The author is not completely off base, and serveral of his points are universally true of all OSes, and indeed most technical or semi-technical endeavors.
His basic premises are that stupid users are bad and should therefore be ignored. The problem with this approach is fine if one is in a position that one has no concern as to whether someone uses your product or not, nor whether it moves outside its niche. A case in point (no flames please) is Apple. They have targeted their systems for years at those who wish a simple to startup and use computer without the learning curve of "other systems". This approach does indeed work - and while there are a great many Apple users who have deep knowledge of computer related subjects and their machines, the majority just want to use it without worrying about HOW it works.
The problem is that many of the people he considers "stupid" are not such. They are often those with a need for a flexible, powerful system but due to the many constraints on their time - do not have the leisure to become a system guru - they need their machines to work, and work now - not after a couple of weeks of tweaking.
This time intensive learning curve is one of the reasons that older versions of UNIX have not found popularity on most desks. It isn't because people are too stupid or too lazy; they do not have the time to learn the myriad tasks (some of them tedious) to maintain a UNIX system, not indeed the inclination - they are COMPUTER USERS... the people these things were designed for in the first place.
To ignore their concerns because they are too busy to learn what is sometimes a whole new vocation, is damaging to any company.
The friendlier a system is the more people with basic skill sets, or the time to learn them,will utilize a system. That is so obvious that it shouldn't neet to be emphasized. It is what keeps Apple selling Mac's, it is why Windows became so popular. One of the (but not the only) reasons that people are now starting to search for alternatives is that the simple friendly Windows is starting to not be so simple and friendly anymore.
The author presupposes that the earlier era of "hackers and geeks" as he refers to them would have scoffed at him for his skills. I don't think so, since by his discussions of tape and punch cards puts me in at the end of that era. The first computer I worked on was an old IBM System/3 with a typewriter console and a punch card reader the size of a dumpster.
Those of us who knew a bit had patience with what he considers "stupid" questions even if the answer was in the documentation. This was becasue then, as now, much of the documentation was as obscure as the smile on the Sphinx and buried a lot deeper. Who wrote all those GUI's in the first place? Hackers and geeks who wanted an easier interface for themselves because there are times when searching for little used switches is as frustrating for the most jaded user as it is for the newbie.
(Exercise: write down all the switches for the ls command and what they are for without looking them up. Then check the docs and see how many you missed or got wrong.)
He is correct in that it was a different time. It was not as rushed in the sense that time was not such a precious commodity and while things still had to be done yesterday, these days that means lask week.
I'm sure that I am glad he does not work for me or in a tech department I have to rely on. Assistance for those with time constraints, or problems finding some thing in an obscure documentation is as necessary sometimes as being polite to your boss when they are being a pain.:-)
I agree with him, that many jump in without reading any documentation at all but that is not their fault entirely but that of a social and work culture that has taught us to expect something to work as we wish, or think it should from teh very start. That isn't being lazy in most cases, just culturaly conditioned.
"I tell them that I will not answer any question that I feel could have been researched and answered in less than 30 minutes. Why should I do all the work for them. -I- already know how to disable ftpd, they're supposed to be learning."
This is where he fails to see a larger picture that I have already adressed. The majority of those he considers stupid or lazy are not interested in learning how an OS is built or in administration. They want to USE an operating system with minimal fuss and installation. So long as it is hard to install, operate maintain it will never enjoy widespread use among the general computer using populace. How many users on a mainframe can install, tweak, administer the system? Damn few, but they don't have to to take advantage of its power.
His outlook on GUI's is also skewed although I find myseelf sympathizing somewhat. GUI's have been around a lot longer tha 10 years. The first was done by Xerox before Apple ever saw the light of day. And they were developed for areason - to make complex systems easier to use for those who did not have the time to learn the intricacies of their underlying design. I often prefer a command line interface myself - but I grew up with one as it were and can oftern do things in it as fast as others in a GUI. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the complexity that a GUI sheilds a user from having to deal with on occasion.
His premise that some of the most powerful tools available to the advanced/power user are complicated and not user friendly is probably correct. His premise I believe is not - namely that the programmer didn't work in a GUI. It is more likely the case that it was written initially for personal use to solve a problem, like all software, and the programmer wasn't really concerned about making it pretty so long as it was efficient. After all computers are not an end in themselves but a tool to facilitate a solution. As a confirmed command line user, he goes on to admire and use the graphical interfaced BeOS. As I said - a tool to a job.
His complaint that only a very UNIX knowledgeable user can consider thenselves safe from bugs and exploits as the uninformed couldn't fix it or even be aware of it until it was "too late". This is an obvious fallacy as every day bugs and holes are found in UNIX systems managed by professionals. Not everyone wants to be or needs to be or has the time if they wanted to be a system administrator.
I agree with the author that Debian does seem to fill a niche between the attempted "turnkey" solution of RedHat and teh starkness of Slackware. But the expansion of the number of people in this niche can only be for teh better. Those who decide to use it and stay will gradually learn more and more about their systems over time and that will be only to the good of the Unix community. The greatest strenght of UNIX is its flexibility - that in can be that obscure powerful command line OS to one and the arguablly easier to navigate GUI "frontended" OS to another. If it ever looses this I think it will really spell the end of UNIX.
One last word on documentation. I guess I'm old fashioned. I like printed docs. Its nice to have open on the desk for reference. Studies have shown that people read slower off a computer screen than from the printed page. As UNIX doc's have never been the most succinct and straightforward it can be time consuming and frustrating sometimes to search for the answer to a problem... and sometimes the answer isn't there.
A comment on the footnotes:
"2. If you average 6 keystrokes per second and it takes 3 seconds to move your hand to the mouse, move it to the desired location, and place the hand back on the keyboard, you have lost 18 keystrokes."
At 6 ks/sec you are typing at 72 wpm - higher than most computer users can type. With the loss your speed is 69 wpm.
This turned into a longer post than I intended but I felt that there needed to be some answer. If Linux, and other UNIXes, are to become wodely accepted, they not only musy offer facility to new users, but cannot be burdened with an "eliteist" attitude on the part of the current user body.
(BTW, I do not meant elite in the current prevailing meaning amongst the "hacker" community but in its original sense.)
Yes, thats a perception problem that indeed exists. Many people new to Open Source, or even commercial variants of basic core products, see what we call distributions as different OSes entirely. I had an admitted newcomer who was contemplating trying Linux ask me if he could run Red Hat and Debian in multi-boot on the same machine as both had been recommended to him and he wanted to compare and see which Operating System was best for him.
Besides touting just the benefits of the Linux (and other Open Source OSes) we also need to educate as to just what an OS is and what different distributions have to offer.
I know some people that are otherwise comfortable with computers and use them daily would be horrified if faced with having to compile their software before they could use it to say nothing of patch it as needed. It's going to be a long time before that sort of thing is easily accepted by the greater number of users out there.
Slashdot Mirror
I confess I haven't tried MONO but I hope that the web pages it's used to generate are valid XHTML/CSS. Those that are generated by ASP.NET tend not to be.
ROFLMAO!
Thanks I needed that, it's been a long difficult day and a good laugh was very relaxing.
As to the title of the article - I guess the anonymous coward was trying to discover just how far Redmond had actually gotten to him. The news is not good - proof positive sniffing the ink used on MS licence agreements is hazardous to the health.
The International Webmaster's Association http://www.iwanet.org
The also offer training courses and a certification program if that is what you are looking for. They and the HTML Writer's Guild have recently merged into one organization.
Should be easier to support. I haven't put Linux on it yet, but I have heard that the Lucent driver works fine for the modem and the EEPro100 is already supported.
While the SoAJ has done a good job with the site, and the administration of a domain is not a trivial task, they have as yet not opened this non-profit organization, supposedly for the benefit of the Church and its followers, to membership beyond the founders.
The page says that they will do so as soon as the Charter etc. is formalized. Well they have been in existance for 4 years and are a registered non-profit. That means they had to have a formal charter before they could be registered.
Maybe it is my own cynicism and I do them an injustice, but I would think that they should have all such considerations well formalized long before now, as well as offering membership to those interested in the goals of the organization. Regardless of the forum it provides the Church and its followers, as it stands it looks more like a private club than an organization for providing a charitable service.
The signaling rates of such technologies are moving higher and higher into the RF spectrum and as such have a very real potential (especially when not used in properly shielded environments) to both cause RFI and become more susceptible to it.
This is going to be especially true if deployed on the rather mediocre twin wire telephone lines that feed most of our homes and businesses.
However they will not install unless you are running a minumum of a Pentium 100/64M RAM and Win95 or 98. If you have NT, OS/2, Mac, Linux, etc. you are out of luck unless you switch to Win9x and then switch after they install.
I have no idea if this works as I don't know anyone who has tried it. I hope to have MPowered the end of the month (I have a multiboot system) and will experiment then.
Part of Micro$oft's monopoly is driven by the #@!$%& companies who don't think anyone uses anything else.
Problem is that the Balkan countries have been a seething cauldron for hundreds of years. The only thing that kept them in check in this century was Tito and WW II and even that was an uneasy alliance. Now everyone else is getting drawn into it.
I read a book many years ago that theorized that if global or semiglobal conflict was to hapen again it would probably start in either the Balkans or the Middle East. I hope they weren't being prophetic.
HP may be reputable but in many ways their tech support leaves something to be desired.
I have been having problems with one of their CD-R drives. When I called tech support my support consisted of the person reading (you could tell from the way they were listing things) a list of possible causes. After listing everything from the power supply in the system to the cable, SCSI card, drivers, software they added "well it could also be the drive". They then informed me that I could send it back and, for almost the price of a new one, exchange it for a refurbished unit as they did no testing on returned drives but simply swapped them.
I can figure out the list of what might be the problem all by myself. What I need when I call tech support is some in depth informed help, not someone reading a list of possibilites off a screen.
I sure hope they do Linux tech support better than that or there will be a lot of unhappy computer users which can only hurt the acceptance of Linux.
It seems to me that there is a fallacy in this essay that negates much of its reasoning.
The author contends that "software pricing follows that of other commodities". In fact it doesn't. Software pricing remains relatively inflexible regardless of demand. Although niche products are more expensive than mainstream products, prices of popular packages do not drop as more are sold, nor do niche products.
This negates the very basis of the commodity arguments, IMO.
If I missed somthing feel free to point it out.
This "Letter to Debian about Friendliness" has a number of points that need addressing. The author is not completely off base, and serveral of his points are universally true of all OSes, and indeed most technical or semi-technical endeavors.
His basic premises are that stupid users are bad and should therefore be ignored. The problem with this approach is fine if one is in a position that one has no concern as to whether someone uses your product or not, nor whether it moves outside its niche. A case in point (no flames please) is Apple. They have targeted their systems for years at those who wish a simple to startup and use computer without the learning curve of "other systems". This approach does indeed work - and while there are a great many Apple users who have deep knowledge of computer related subjects and their machines, the majority just want to use it without worrying about HOW it works.
The problem is that many of the people he considers "stupid" are not such. They are often those with a need for a flexible, powerful system but due to the many constraints on their time - do not have the leisure to become a system guru - they need their machines to work, and work now - not after a couple of weeks of tweaking.
This time intensive learning curve is one of the reasons that older versions of UNIX have not found popularity on most desks. It isn't because people are too stupid or too lazy; they do not have the time to learn the myriad tasks (some of them tedious) to maintain a UNIX system, not indeed the inclination - they are COMPUTER USERS ... the people these things were designed for in the first place.
To ignore their concerns because they are too busy to learn what is sometimes a whole new vocation, is damaging to any company.
The friendlier a system is the more people with basic skill sets, or the time to learn them,will utilize a system. That is so obvious that it shouldn't neet to be emphasized. It is what keeps Apple selling Mac's, it is why Windows became so popular. One of the (but not the only) reasons that people are now starting to search for alternatives is that the simple friendly Windows is starting to not be so simple and friendly anymore.
The author presupposes that the earlier era of "hackers and geeks" as he refers to them would have scoffed at him for his skills. I don't think so, since by his discussions of tape and punch cards puts me in at the end of that era. The first computer I worked on was an old IBM System/3 with a typewriter console and a punch card reader the size of a dumpster.
Those of us who knew a bit had patience with what he considers "stupid" questions even if the answer was in the documentation. This was becasue then, as now, much of the documentation was as obscure as the smile on the Sphinx and buried a lot deeper. Who wrote all those GUI's in the first place? Hackers and geeks who wanted an easier interface for themselves because there are times when searching for little used switches is as frustrating for the most jaded user as it is for the newbie.
(Exercise: write down all the switches for the ls command and what they are for without looking them up. Then check the docs and see how many you missed or got wrong.)
He is correct in that it was a different time. It was not as rushed in the sense that time was not such a precious commodity and while things still had to be done yesterday, these days that means lask week.
I'm sure that I am glad he does not work for me or in a tech department I have to rely on. Assistance for those with time constraints, or problems finding some thing in an obscure documentation is as necessary sometimes as being polite to your boss when they are being a pain. :-)
I agree with him, that many jump in without reading any documentation at all but that is not their fault entirely but that of a social and work culture that has taught us to expect something to work as we wish, or think it should from teh very start. That isn't being lazy in most cases, just culturaly conditioned.
"I tell them that I will not answer any question that I feel could have been researched and answered in less than 30 minutes. Why should I do all the work for them. -I- already know how to disable ftpd, they're supposed to be learning."
This is where he fails to see a larger picture that I have already adressed. The majority of those he considers stupid or lazy are not interested in learning how an OS is built or in administration. They want to USE an operating system with minimal fuss and installation. So long as it is hard to install, operate maintain it will never enjoy widespread use among the general computer using populace. How many users on a mainframe can install, tweak, administer the system? Damn few, but they don't have to to take advantage of its power.
His outlook on GUI's is also skewed although I find myseelf sympathizing somewhat. GUI's have been around a lot longer tha 10 years. The first was done by Xerox before Apple ever saw the light of day. And they were developed for areason - to make complex systems easier to use for those who did not have the time to learn the intricacies of their underlying design. I often prefer a command line interface myself - but I grew up with one as it were and can oftern do things in it as fast as others in a GUI. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the complexity that a GUI sheilds a user from having to deal with on occasion.
His premise that some of the most powerful tools available to the advanced/power user are complicated and not user friendly is probably correct. His premise I believe is not - namely that the programmer didn't work in a GUI. It is more likely the case that it was written initially for personal use to solve a problem, like all software, and the programmer wasn't really concerned about making it pretty so long as it was efficient. After all computers are not an end in themselves but a tool to facilitate a solution. As a confirmed command line user, he goes on to admire and use the graphical interfaced BeOS. As I said - a tool to a job.
His complaint that only a very UNIX knowledgeable user can consider thenselves safe from bugs and exploits as the uninformed couldn't fix it or even be aware of it until it was "too late". This is an obvious fallacy as every day bugs and holes are found in UNIX systems managed by professionals. Not everyone wants to be or needs to be or has the time if they wanted to be a system administrator.
I agree with the author that Debian does seem to fill a niche between the attempted "turnkey" solution of RedHat and teh starkness of Slackware. But the expansion of the number of people in this niche can only be for teh better. Those who decide to use it and stay will gradually learn more and more about their systems over time and that will be only to the good of the Unix community. The greatest strenght of UNIX is its flexibility - that in can be that obscure powerful command line OS to one and the arguablly easier to navigate GUI "frontended" OS to another. If it ever looses this I think it will really spell the end of UNIX.
One last word on documentation. I guess I'm old fashioned. I like printed docs. Its nice to have open on the desk for reference. Studies have shown that people read slower off a computer screen than from the printed page. As UNIX doc's have never been the most succinct and straightforward it can be time consuming and frustrating sometimes to search for the answer to a problem ... and sometimes the answer isn't there.
A comment on the footnotes:
"2. If you average 6 keystrokes per second and it takes 3 seconds to move your hand to the mouse, move it to the desired location, and place the hand back on the keyboard, you have lost 18 keystrokes."
At 6 ks/sec you are typing at 72 wpm - higher than most computer users can type. With the loss your speed is 69 wpm.
This turned into a longer post than I intended but I felt that there needed to be some answer. If Linux, and other UNIXes, are to become wodely accepted, they not only musy offer facility to new users, but cannot be burdened with an "eliteist" attitude on the part of the current user body.
(BTW, I do not meant elite in the current prevailing meaning amongst the "hacker" community but in its original sense.)
Cheers!
What it means is that Kipling's site is hosted on Planet Internet's servers, or at least through their site.
Yes, thats a perception problem that indeed exists. Many people new to Open Source, or even commercial variants of basic core products, see what we call distributions as different OSes entirely. I had an admitted newcomer who was contemplating trying Linux ask me if he could run Red Hat and Debian in multi-boot on the same machine as both had been recommended to him and he wanted to compare and see which Operating System was best for him.
Besides touting just the benefits of the Linux (and other Open Source OSes) we also need to educate as to just what an OS is and what different distributions have to offer.
I know some people that are otherwise comfortable with computers and use them daily would be horrified if faced with having to compile their software before they could use it to say nothing of patch it as needed. It's going to be a long time before that sort of thing is easily accepted by the greater number of users out there.