Ever look at a quality weld versus one on a Yugobike? Welds should not look like a kindergartener gluing cardboard houses together. I'm talking about mechanical damage. I'm talking the abuse of riding in city traffic on pockmarked downtown streets, which makes even a well built bike require more frequent maintenance.
Ever try finding replacement parts for a Huffy? Ever try getting a Huffy fixed? If you break a bearing, it's all over. Huffy, Magna and Murray use some really strange parts designed to be cheap and non-replaceable. You bust a bearing in the bottom bracket? Any bike from a manufacturer shooting for quality instead of quantity could get this fixed up for $30-$80 depending on if the bearing started to cut grooves in the shell or the kind of parts required. El-Cheapo uses a one-piece bottom bracket that they don't sell as an individual part. You're screwed.
Back before I could afford a decent bike when I was in high school, I was riding a 1994 Huffy Cedar Falls. Top of the Huffy line, and I still snapped the rear axle. When the bike shop took it out to replace it, it turned out that instead of threading a metal pin (the right way to make a strong axle), they drop-cast the damn thing, and it had a huge bubble right where it broke. It was paper thin, and shouldn't have lasted as long as it did.
By 100 miles of commuting daily 4 miles each way, the cheap parts they used for the rear sprokets and chain stretched to the point that the chain no longer fit the front sprokets or the rear sprokets, and when they put a new chain on, the rear sprokets had stretched enough that they had to be replaced. Paid for the bike again right there, for the third time.
And in high school, I weighed 120 pounds. It always creeped the hell out of me how the frame creaked every time I hit an expansion gap in the road or turned a corner.
"But Baloo! You had to be really riding that thing for it to wear out that fast!"
No. It never left the pavement. I was too scared the thing would break apart like Challenger on first contact with the dirt. The manufacturer seemed to agree with me, there was a warning painted on to the top tube that read "Not for off-road use." Thier lifetime frame warantee goes void the first time you jump a curb or take it off road, read the warantee sometime. You're not covered.
About the only thing they're good for is if you need something to get you to and from work for a couple days while your real bike's in the shop, and someone else already has the loaner.
Then you're probably not riding it daily then, or you're riding it strictly around a warehouse or other superprotected-from-the-elements-and-actual-road-o r-trail-use enviornment. 8:o)
I ride a 1999 Gary Fisher Wahoo. Yes, I'm aware this isn't a starter bike. Something along the lines of Trek's toughest built rigid frames (like the 800 series) will get the same job done far less expensively, but they're heavier and from what I've experianced, tend to get eaten alive on rough terrain (like some of the more high-traffic suburban bicycle thoroughfares through swamp that haven't been repaved in a decade or two, that have long since developed serious tire ruts in the middle of the travel lanes and potholes and trenches where gophers have undermined the ballast) fairly quickly.
I purchased a cargo trailer for my bike, and I can carry two weeks of groceries if I strap a milkcrate down to my luggage rack, pack the trailer strategically, put large items on top of the trailer and strap them down, and whatever doesn't fit goes in my messenger bag. With it loaded like this, I can haul the ~300 pounds of goodies up to 20 MPH (with lots of shifting gears while speeding up, and lots of time to stop it all again).
And I'm not talking about BMW Bicycles, those run in the thousands of dollars before accessories.
I'm saying that the Trek 800 is the human-powered equivilent to a Geo Metro, and Huffy, Murray, Magna, and other single-use bicycles won't last more than three rides before the TCO catches up with the retail price of a real bicycle. They're the bicycle equivilent of the Yugo. They're so poorly built, Portland Yellow Bike (the bicycles loaned to the public for free) won't even take them as a donation to become a village bicycle, and they've got some pretty scary bikes. Frequenlty bicycles from Magna, Murray and Huffy aren't even considered roadworthy in Oregon at time of sale, and Oregon's got some of the most lax laws regaurding bicycle roadworthiness anywhere in North America.
Walmart sells the single-use bicycles I describe. They're designed with shoddy, nonstandard parts and will only take you, tops, 50 miles before they start giving you serious problems that would require nearly the purchase price of the bicycle to fix. I take the bus or drive over longer distances and still, I put at least 50 miles on a bike a week.
Just what part of the world do bicycles cost $100? Cheapest I've ever found a new bicycle is $250. You might find a Huffy, Murray or Magna claiming to be a bicycle around that price range, but in reality, these are single-use units (ask your local bicycle commuter and he'll probably agree with this statement). For the short-distance, never out after dark, in the rain or carrying anything, expect to pay about $250.
If you ever have to ride at night, in the rain, or carry stuff, expect to pay extra for lights (as required by law), full-length fenders (unless you like the "dragged through the mud" look), and luggage racks, possibly panniers or a trailer for larger loads. If you go the Boy Scout method and have lights, speedometer (bikes have to follow the same rules of the road including speed limits (I learned the hard way in downtown)), luggage rack, fenders, airhorn, and a rear-view mirror, expect to pay closer to $850.
Either way, you're right, bicycles are far more practical and far less expensive than a Segway.
I got my own Megway for Christmas. It can do everything the Segway does, but better. The Megway is also theft resistant with the new Fist Antitheft Device (FAD). I've also discovered that you can take the Megway to parties and make it look like you aren't stuck working a graveyard every Friday and Saturday night. I'm quite happy with my Megway.
Not really. Umbrellas really are a nuisance in Portland. More than half the state's population lives within a 17 mile radius of the Burnside Bridge, there's no room for someone to be a dick carrying around a 3 to 6 foot wide umbrella around, especially in downtown. Fortunately, the natives realise this and get real raingear instead.
This year has been pretty good, though: I've only seen three umbrellas. One being the bronze tourist statue on Pioneer Courthouse Square, another was someone with a small umbrella and jabbed someone in the eye near Fifth and Yamhill with one of the points, and another was someone getting off the MAX at Pioneer Place, who opened a huge golf umbrella the moment he cleared the doors (never mind it's a covered, almost indoor platform) and hit two people in the face doing so.
So, out of three umbrellas this season, the only one not mishandling the damn thing was a bronze statue...
Damn californians!! stay out of washington!! no more room for you all!!:) (joking!!!!!)
Heh, fine by us in Oregon. We really are full. 8:o)
Seriously, if you want to to hear a 20 minute speech on every last bit of unilaterlally Californian politics that Oregon's taken splash-damage for, spend most of your time in the rain, get bitched at for driving instead of taking TriMet, and rust in traffic waiting for dozens of weekly protests and advocacy parties, and spend it unemployed, then move to Oregon.
For the rest of you, there's Seattle, though they'll bitch about yet another Californian moving there, too.
If you don't want to get bitched at for moving in from California, move to anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. California's not been a good neighbor to us, and it'll save yourself the trouble and the earful to go someplace else. Native northwesterners tend to get hiring priority anyway.
Don't move to Portland. Oregon is full. Unemployment is sky-high and for Californians, if the weather doesn't get you, the locals attitude towards you will. That being said, if you do move to Oregon, keep to yourself, claim you're from Arizona and never carry an umbrella (doing so marks you an outsider and people get pissed about the eye-level hazard. Get real raingear like a trenchcoat or poncho instead).
Returning from a week at Camp Baldwin with my Scout troop in August, 2001, I had about 40MB in my spool. I waited 5 minutes before I gave up and looked for something better.
Mutt took seconds. And it threaded it all for me.
Between the security holes, non-free licensing and somewhat goofball design, I'd call it Outlook Express for Unix, but at least Pine works most of the time, something I can't say about OE.
Installation:
He makes comments extensively on SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake, but shows
no real understanding or explain his issues with the Debian installer
other than that it "is the worst installer [he's] had to use." He
also implies the base install is too simplistic.
Not to be overly critical, but he seems to have no real grasp at the
concept of being bloatless. Installation requires the lowest common
denominator.
My beef with the Debian installer is that it won't make a best guess
on partitioning. Seperately but related, X doesn't attempt any
autodetection, even the minimal stuff in XF86Setup from XF86 3.3.6.
Setup:
He complains that the setup refers you to documentation that is not
yet installed. My understanding is you are expected to have a copy of
the installation manual handy and at least have some idea what it's
telling you. Yes, the menu options should be clearer, however, I
disagree with the idea that software should babysit the user and hold
them by the hand.
The writer clearly shows lack of clue and ability to RTFM with his
comment about module selections.
Package Selection:
I just have to plain wonder if this guy has taken a good, long look at
dpkg and apt-get.
I do agree with his beefs about the annoying help screens at every
turn in dselect. Worse yet, I've been hitting space to clear the damn
thing since bo, only to have them change it to enter this revision.
Why can't it be both?
I've never heard of, or experianced, the kind of funkitude with failed
packages cancelling the whole apt-get download like he claims.
The Installation Overall:
I'm with him right up until he suggested hiding things behind
"Advanced" buttons. Sorry, but I don't see how making the
installation less intuitive and more complex somehow magically makes
the installer droolproof. I also don't agree with the idea of using
branded names instead of driver names. Maybe have a help option that
explains the branded names to the drivers, and definately an
autodetect option. Don't sacrifice efficiency for those who know what
they're doing in favor of those who can't be bothered.
I agree with the idea that dselect needs to be redesigned, however,
making it more like a GUI will only confuse users expecting it to work
just like a GUI, and will actually make dselect more painful to deal
with than vi, instead of slightly less painful.
The Configured System:
I'm just going to summarily dismiss all
bitching about KDE. KDE sucks. Gnome sucks. CDE sucks. Cocoa
sucks. Microsoft Explorer sucks. All these systems are too baroque,
adding unneeded complexity for the user to wrap thier brain around
instead of presenting them with the actual system. Sorry, but mv, cp,
ls, find, and a newbie oriented text editor aren't that hard to learn
how to use. I mean, my compuphobic art-geek sister can figure it
out. Hell, my WinBigot(tm) roommate was even able to figure out that
much.
Debian has pretty complete documentation of configuration files in the
comments in those files. I haven't had to look in man section 5 in a
very long time, around the time I had to reinstall due to accidentally
deleting/usr back in early 1998 thanks to improved documentation in
comments. Control panels are thus very much dead-weight.
Conclusions:
I have to seriously question whether or not he knows what he's talking
about about RPM. I've used RPM recently. It's still painful to use
and terraparsecs behind apt-get *still*. Even with urpmi. apt-rpm
segfaults on machines with low RAM. Package names are *still* not
standardized. Versions still conflict badly, and upgrading the system
is still a "fsck me harder" experiance.
I strongly disagree with the idea that we should create yet another
method for configuration. No. Webmin works. Linuxconf works.
$EDITOR works better, and the config file comments usually have more
helpful information than webmin and linuxconf do, and it's usually
faster.
The Debian Desktop idea is almost a good one, but then again, that's
why themes.org exists. Why duplicate that effort here?
Granny proof: No. I'm all for accessiblity, but you should never
stop learning. Plus, trying to granny proof anything leads to bloat
and a shitload of bugs. Need proof? Look at Gnome. Look at KDE.
Look at Nautilus. Take a long look at Microsoft Explorer. Notice how
they all fail at that goal, and notice how buggy and bloated they
are. This is not an honorable or obtainable goal, time would be
better spent trying to find lost cities of gold.
It's not about whether or not the students take the course seriously. It's about whether or not they should be forced to, on thier own dollar, no less!
Looking at high schools and colleges, public and private, lately hasn't given me a lot of hope. Any more it seems the only difference between a college education and being overloaded with industry certs is that people with a clue don't pretend the certs mean anything...
I hope someone local to Waterloo puts in a nice letter to the editor, publicly criticising this flagrant display of greed on the part of Waterloo.
I think the real travesty here is that any corporation could get the university to run a mandatory course about thier product. Where's the academic integrity?
Due to being an outsource gaurd, they give me a computer and no login. If I can get on the network without using Windows and without anything installed on the machine itself, they don't care. If it werent for Floppix my job as a night guard in a children's hospital would be a *lot* more boring.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever look at a quality weld versus one on a Yugobike? Welds should not look like a kindergartener gluing cardboard houses together. I'm talking about mechanical damage. I'm talking the abuse of riding in city traffic on pockmarked downtown streets, which makes even a well built bike require more frequent maintenance.
Ever try finding replacement parts for a Huffy? Ever try getting a Huffy fixed? If you break a bearing, it's all over. Huffy, Magna and Murray use some really strange parts designed to be cheap and non-replaceable. You bust a bearing in the bottom bracket? Any bike from a manufacturer shooting for quality instead of quantity could get this fixed up for $30-$80 depending on if the bearing started to cut grooves in the shell or the kind of parts required. El-Cheapo uses a one-piece bottom bracket that they don't sell as an individual part. You're screwed.
Back before I could afford a decent bike when I was in high school, I was riding a 1994 Huffy Cedar Falls. Top of the Huffy line, and I still snapped the rear axle. When the bike shop took it out to replace it, it turned out that instead of threading a metal pin (the right way to make a strong axle), they drop-cast the damn thing, and it had a huge bubble right where it broke. It was paper thin, and shouldn't have lasted as long as it did.
By 100 miles of commuting daily 4 miles each way, the cheap parts they used for the rear sprokets and chain stretched to the point that the chain no longer fit the front sprokets or the rear sprokets, and when they put a new chain on, the rear sprokets had stretched enough that they had to be replaced. Paid for the bike again right there, for the third time.
And in high school, I weighed 120 pounds. It always creeped the hell out of me how the frame creaked every time I hit an expansion gap in the road or turned a corner.
"But Baloo! You had to be really riding that thing for it to wear out that fast!"
No. It never left the pavement. I was too scared the thing would break apart like Challenger on first contact with the dirt. The manufacturer seemed to agree with me, there was a warning painted on to the top tube that read "Not for off-road use." Thier lifetime frame warantee goes void the first time you jump a curb or take it off road, read the warantee sometime. You're not covered.
About the only thing they're good for is if you need something to get you to and from work for a couple days while your real bike's in the shop, and someone else already has the loaner.
OK, I cannot believe I have to say this. But someone modded me up and them posted in the thread. BEFORE YOU MODERATE, READ THE GUIDELINES
Then you're probably not riding it daily then, or you're riding it strictly around a warehouse or other superprotected-from-the-elements-and-actual-road-o r-trail-use enviornment. 8:o)
I ride a 1999 Gary Fisher Wahoo. Yes, I'm aware this isn't a starter bike. Something along the lines of Trek's toughest built rigid frames (like the 800 series) will get the same job done far less expensively, but they're heavier and from what I've experianced, tend to get eaten alive on rough terrain (like some of the more high-traffic suburban bicycle thoroughfares through swamp that haven't been repaved in a decade or two, that have long since developed serious tire ruts in the middle of the travel lanes and potholes and trenches where gophers have undermined the ballast) fairly quickly.
I purchased a cargo trailer for my bike, and I can carry two weeks of groceries if I strap a milkcrate down to my luggage rack, pack the trailer strategically, put large items on top of the trailer and strap them down, and whatever doesn't fit goes in my messenger bag. With it loaded like this, I can haul the ~300 pounds of goodies up to 20 MPH (with lots of shifting gears while speeding up, and lots of time to stop it all again).
And I'm not talking about BMW Bicycles, those run in the thousands of dollars before accessories.
I'm saying that the Trek 800 is the human-powered equivilent to a Geo Metro, and Huffy, Murray, Magna, and other single-use bicycles won't last more than three rides before the TCO catches up with the retail price of a real bicycle. They're the bicycle equivilent of the Yugo. They're so poorly built, Portland Yellow Bike (the bicycles loaned to the public for free) won't even take them as a donation to become a village bicycle, and they've got some pretty scary bikes. Frequenlty bicycles from Magna, Murray and Huffy aren't even considered roadworthy in Oregon at time of sale, and Oregon's got some of the most lax laws regaurding bicycle roadworthiness anywhere in North America.
Walmart sells the single-use bicycles I describe. They're designed with shoddy, nonstandard parts and will only take you, tops, 50 miles before they start giving you serious problems that would require nearly the purchase price of the bicycle to fix. I take the bus or drive over longer distances and still, I put at least 50 miles on a bike a week.
Damn! Your city was poorly planned. You need guys should vote your own Metro into existance. It's worked wonders for Portland.
If you ever have to ride at night, in the rain, or carry stuff, expect to pay extra for lights (as required by law), full-length fenders (unless you like the "dragged through the mud" look), and luggage racks, possibly panniers or a trailer for larger loads. If you go the Boy Scout method and have lights, speedometer (bikes have to follow the same rules of the road including speed limits (I learned the hard way in downtown)), luggage rack, fenders, airhorn, and a rear-view mirror, expect to pay closer to $850.
Either way, you're right, bicycles are far more practical and far less expensive than a Segway.
I got my own Megway for Christmas. It can do everything the Segway does, but better. The Megway is also theft resistant with the new Fist Antitheft Device (FAD). I've also discovered that you can take the Megway to parties and make it look like you aren't stuck working a graveyard every Friday and Saturday night. I'm quite happy with my Megway.
Please fully expand it as Business Software Association to keep people from confusing us with these idiots.
What, you forgot about Royal Crown Cola?
All you geek households need to go set up Squid and set it up to distribute the load. The Slashdot Effect can be eliminated within our lifetimes.
This year has been pretty good, though: I've only seen three umbrellas. One being the bronze tourist statue on Pioneer Courthouse Square, another was someone with a small umbrella and jabbed someone in the eye near Fifth and Yamhill with one of the points, and another was someone getting off the MAX at Pioneer Place, who opened a huge golf umbrella the moment he cleared the doors (never mind it's a covered, almost indoor platform) and hit two people in the face doing so.
So, out of three umbrellas this season, the only one not mishandling the damn thing was a bronze statue...
Heh, fine by us in Oregon. We really are full. 8:o)
Seriously, if you want to to hear a 20 minute speech on every last bit of unilaterlally Californian politics that Oregon's taken splash-damage for, spend most of your time in the rain, get bitched at for driving instead of taking TriMet, and rust in traffic waiting for dozens of weekly protests and advocacy parties, and spend it unemployed, then move to Oregon.
For the rest of you, there's Seattle, though they'll bitch about yet another Californian moving there, too.
If you don't want to get bitched at for moving in from California, move to anywhere but the Pacific Northwest. California's not been a good neighbor to us, and it'll save yourself the trouble and the earful to go someplace else. Native northwesterners tend to get hiring priority anyway.
Don't move to Portland. Oregon is full. Unemployment is sky-high and for Californians, if the weather doesn't get you, the locals attitude towards you will. That being said, if you do move to Oregon, keep to yourself, claim you're from Arizona and never carry an umbrella (doing so marks you an outsider and people get pissed about the eye-level hazard. Get real raingear like a trenchcoat or poncho instead).
Watch, it turns out Notepad's source is three times the size of the Linux kernel source...
Seriously. The United States is starting to get scary what with John Poindexter running the brand new Information Awareness Office at once-honorable DARPA.
I buy my comics close to exclusively at conventions. I tend to only like a few obscure titles, so I get by damn well at Conifur.
Returning from a week at Camp Baldwin with my Scout troop in August, 2001, I had about 40MB in my spool. I waited 5 minutes before I gave up and looked for something better.
Mutt took seconds. And it threaded it all for me.
Between the security holes, non-free licensing and somewhat goofball design, I'd call it Outlook Express for Unix, but at least Pine works most of the time, something I can't say about OE.
Your perception's skewed. The X server is serving out the user to programs, rather than the computer to users.
If you say programs are the servers and screens are the client, you're describing television, not an interactive display like X.
I'm 100% with you on that one. If anybody wants to take a peek at the optional web interface for it, I've got it here.
Installation:
He makes comments extensively on SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake, but shows no real understanding or explain his issues with the Debian installer other than that it "is the worst installer [he's] had to use." He also implies the base install is too simplistic.
Not to be overly critical, but he seems to have no real grasp at the concept of being bloatless. Installation requires the lowest common denominator.
My beef with the Debian installer is that it won't make a best guess on partitioning. Seperately but related, X doesn't attempt any autodetection, even the minimal stuff in XF86Setup from XF86 3.3.6.
Setup:
He complains that the setup refers you to documentation that is not yet installed. My understanding is you are expected to have a copy of the installation manual handy and at least have some idea what it's telling you. Yes, the menu options should be clearer, however, I disagree with the idea that software should babysit the user and hold them by the hand.
The writer clearly shows lack of clue and ability to RTFM with his comment about module selections.
Package Selection:
I just have to plain wonder if this guy has taken a good, long look at dpkg and apt-get.
I do agree with his beefs about the annoying help screens at every turn in dselect. Worse yet, I've been hitting space to clear the damn thing since bo, only to have them change it to enter this revision. Why can't it be both?
I've never heard of, or experianced, the kind of funkitude with failed packages cancelling the whole apt-get download like he claims.
The Installation Overall:
I'm with him right up until he suggested hiding things behind "Advanced" buttons. Sorry, but I don't see how making the installation less intuitive and more complex somehow magically makes the installer droolproof. I also don't agree with the idea of using branded names instead of driver names. Maybe have a help option that explains the branded names to the drivers, and definately an autodetect option. Don't sacrifice efficiency for those who know what they're doing in favor of those who can't be bothered.
I agree with the idea that dselect needs to be redesigned, however, making it more like a GUI will only confuse users expecting it to work just like a GUI, and will actually make dselect more painful to deal with than vi, instead of slightly less painful.
The Configured System:
I'm just going to summarily dismiss all bitching about KDE. KDE sucks. Gnome sucks. CDE sucks. Cocoa sucks. Microsoft Explorer sucks. All these systems are too baroque, adding unneeded complexity for the user to wrap thier brain around instead of presenting them with the actual system. Sorry, but mv, cp, ls, find, and a newbie oriented text editor aren't that hard to learn how to use. I mean, my compuphobic art-geek sister can figure it out. Hell, my WinBigot(tm) roommate was even able to figure out that much.
Debian has pretty complete documentation of configuration files in the comments in those files. I haven't had to look in man section 5 in a very long time, around the time I had to reinstall due to accidentally deleting /usr back in early 1998 thanks to improved documentation in
comments. Control panels are thus very much dead-weight.
Conclusions:
I have to seriously question whether or not he knows what he's talking about about RPM. I've used RPM recently. It's still painful to use and terraparsecs behind apt-get *still*. Even with urpmi. apt-rpm segfaults on machines with low RAM. Package names are *still* not standardized. Versions still conflict badly, and upgrading the system is still a "fsck me harder" experiance.
I strongly disagree with the idea that we should create yet another method for configuration. No. Webmin works. Linuxconf works. $EDITOR works better, and the config file comments usually have more helpful information than webmin and linuxconf do, and it's usually faster.
The Debian Desktop idea is almost a good one, but then again, that's why themes.org exists. Why duplicate that effort here?
Granny proof: No. I'm all for accessiblity, but you should never stop learning. Plus, trying to granny proof anything leads to bloat and a shitload of bugs. Need proof? Look at Gnome. Look at KDE. Look at Nautilus. Take a long look at Microsoft Explorer. Notice how they all fail at that goal, and notice how buggy and bloated they are. This is not an honorable or obtainable goal, time would be better spent trying to find lost cities of gold.
Everything including the movies is being mirroed here. Should have everything in a little bit.
It's not about whether or not the students take the course seriously. It's about whether or not they should be forced to, on thier own dollar, no less!
Looking at high schools and colleges, public and private, lately hasn't given me a lot of hope. Any more it seems the only difference between a college education and being overloaded with industry certs is that people with a clue don't pretend the certs mean anything...
I hope someone local to Waterloo puts in a nice letter to the editor, publicly criticising this flagrant display of greed on the part of Waterloo.
I think the real travesty here is that any corporation could get the university to run a mandatory course about thier product. Where's the academic integrity?
Due to being an outsource gaurd, they give me a computer and no login. If I can get on the network without using Windows and without anything installed on the machine itself, they don't care. If it werent for Floppix my job as a night guard in a children's hospital would be a *lot* more boring.