Try to file bug for the popup problem. Ask (nicely) for an option to disable all these reconnect popups. First they will bitch you of that it's not their problem. Then they will close the bug.
Sometimes I just don't get these people. Mind you I even know someone who maintained a patchset for this feature for a longtime. He can probably still be found around the Freenet / TOR projects.
Wine developers say that a program running under wine could easely detect that it's in reality running under Linux, and then call Linux syscalls instead of using the "Windows" system call traps.
.. "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes", so I would have taken out the bad parts of my post.
What I wanted to tell is that with knowledge and the will to contribute you can help with open source software. Even if you are not a software writer, even if you are not 'artsy' (KDE is attracting lots of these lately), and even if you are not a good documentation writer. As long as you know what 'usable' is, open source projects could use your thoughts.
With open source you can communicate directly with the developers, something that is rarely possible with the commercial software. Just contact a particular developer and ask if you can be his 'ordinary user'. Warn him/her that you _will_ be irritating.
Some of your ideas are maybe a bit too broad for this kind of direct interaction (you would need to communicate with lots of developers at the same time). But if you just pick one to start with, say the "easy transition" item, you could start flicking little improvement ideas into the heads of the developers.
For example, a mail to some Konqueror dev: "How difficult would it be to import Favorites from Internet Explorer if I would give the directory to read from?" "Could you check for changes in the IE Favorites every time Konqueror starts?" "Take a look at the Wine code to make an educated guess for where the Favorites are placed"
At the moment few applications can import data you could suggest someone to wrap it up in a migration wizard.
But I guess you get the picture. Go kick those shins;)
PS: I think the slight trolling tone as in your original post might even help a little, if used moderately. It pushes the person on the other end to think about the situation.
PS2: There's a new website for these kind of things at http://openusability.org/ . But I think it's more targeted at the professional usability experts. As a newby you might get bashed away (don't know if there are big ego's there, still haven't encountered them;).
PS3. You could also try to achieve some things by filing bugreports, but I think that won't be as effective as directly talking to the devs (bugzilla's are not for chatter).
You sound like you know quite a lot about this. I'm not sure if this means you're troll. But I'll bite;-)
Let's look at the parent post, and I'll show you what the average home user uses a computer for. For brevities sake I've skipped the obvious commercial uses.
Which should they use to do what? To:
1) Create a development workstation
Okay 'maybe' not this one.
2) Run a small home server
If you can get it into peoples mind that storing your data in one place is safer and easier to backup, everybody would use that. That, and getting Windows to do as this all other mainstream OSes do; Point to a thing that store files and say, put the data of the users on there (including a nice wizardy thing of course;-)). That nobody uses it is just because nobody knows, the society might eventually adapt.
I know this thing is accounted for under your "Will you be hauling sand or rocks?" line. But maybe you can get some 'warm fuzzy feelings' for these developers if you know they helped to make data storage on your local system safer and speedier.
Software for home servers already exists if you care to pay large sums of money or want to fiddle with the open source building blocks they used. But people who develop home server software don't care about any of the things you mentioned on your post. So we move on to the next point.
4) Use for children
You catched that one.
Problem is, those childrens and their parents are probably not going to make this software if they lack the skills. These 'skills' include the social skills of finding programmers that can help and then communicate with them what you expect. This includes not yelling if they say it's impossible, convice them, don't try to overpower, that won't work.
Open source works because the development is open. You can influence the developers. There are lots of bright programmers in open source. But they work and live in a 'developer world'. So they need a bit of input for things they just never encounter.
If you really want the things you pointed out above you can easely find the community sites. Pick out someone 'higher up' and bug him or her about a couple of things and ask if s/he directs you to someone who can help with that. Now is a good time.
If this 'doing small things to improve the software for yourself and others' is not for you, then please consider not using open source software. Seriously.
7) Use for an embedded system with no user interface at all
Embedded systems designers are using Linux more and more in recent years. It could be that you are not aware that "embedded systems" include things as your central heating system, tv, microwave, monitor's on-screen-display, radio, cd and dvd player, network routers, etc. etc. Maybe you don't care what it runs. But you do care that it runs correctly because you use it.
I hope you now know that the part you saw of Linux 'home use' is only a small part of the picture. Maybe your problem is that you didn't figure out that the underlying operating system can be "be all of those things" without breaking the rest.
Now it's up to you to help fix the things you see that are broken.
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
The innovations are in the tiny corners. Formatting options in the context menu. I really like that. Now they only should display the hotkeys next to the items so you can learn them 'by accident'.
Another smallish thing: Double click on the 'paste special' button (OOo2.x) and it will paste the formatting every time you select something untill you disable it again with a click on the same button. Put a background colour in it and select everything you want to be marked. Very nice if you are a student, or are reviewing a document.
Say you want to throttle a single IP address worldwide on the entier internet.
2^32 addresses in ten minutes (600s): 7158278 ICMP packets per second
I don't know how large ICMP packets are, but I do know they are relatively tiny, say 64 octets. That would mean you need 436Mo/s. Not an entierly trivial amount of bandwidth for an individual, but spread over a thousand botnet peers it should be doable.
Factor in that an attacker would probably want to block a couple of addresses. For example microsoft.com's or Akamai's DNS servers. Another neat trick would be to tell everybody to throttle bandwidth to some of the intercontinental routers or the 13 root DNS servers.
Hmm, I think the next Microsoft Windows worm might be 'interesting', due to the renewed attention on this flaw.
All appliances with digital circuits inside are already computers. They compute (calculate) things. what you probably meant is "a future where all appliances would use complex hardware or software".
Complexity is where the bugs come from. It increases the chance that people forget to check some corner case where a bug is lurking.
Fast User Switching doesn't help if the admin privs are needed to setup some per user settings. You can't really do that on the admin account without tracking what was changed and translating that to the other user, applying it there.
Of course needing admin rights for per user setup is an error in the particular software, but it's not exactly pushed by Microsoft to make software that behaves correct without admin rights.
Not to downplay your plans, but thousands of new apprentices are joining the Open Force movement every day. Not many of them are fully awoken, yet. Many of those will even never become a true master of the Force, still they help us in our fight against the empire by pointing the Way. Loosing a master may feel painful now, but the Force is already attracting replacement troops. Yes, troops, the power of the Force lies in it's multitude.
Besides this, we haven't had communications with Daniel Robbins recently so his plans might be cloaked. I feel this event as only a small disturbance in the Force. The Force is strong!
Could you name an example? Last year, several Open Source projects have reported that some of their servers were hacked into. I definitely remember Debian going though lists of MD5 hashes to find back older known-good versions of their files.
But maybe you can enlighten us? btw, I am not saying that Open Source is somehow 'better than Microsoft' in this case. It's just that you saying that people probably don't see something is rather hard to prove for the people you speak to ("Hey, I don't know any project that told me they were hacked, it must be true!").
I don't see the big rush for these Mini-machines. They are clearly aimed at a market where people want a very simple solution. The people that want email, internet access, and maybe Office.
Great, now tell us what percentage of the desktop PC market does just that? Did you say 90-95%? Hmmkay. I hope you can see it now.
Btw, the way to add storage is by means of a Firewire connected harddisk enclosure. And about the HD playback, it seems to do 720i/p just fine. Higher resolution is a problem. But then only higher end current PCs can play back 1080i/p HD streams in a reasonable fashion, depending on the codec you will need an even faster PC.
Intel also makes stuff other than x86. Several low power ARM CPUs, their knowledge about chipsets could also be retargeted to PowerPC, all kinds of 'accelerator' chips (decoding video, DRM,..), etc., etc.
I'd find it odd if Apple wouldn't use Intel chips if they were a good fit.
Together with a wireless backup connection you could move your servers while still operating;-)
Also escapes my why they haven't done that with external storage. Pull the plug, the OS get's a signal and syncs the data to disk wirelessly, unmounts when it's finished.
That's also why Open Source can work, software that everybody could put to use in a usefull way thrive on being open and generaly available.
btw, I'm not saying "OMG!!1 L0LLerz! Micr0$oft is d00med!". People have accused me far too many times of that. Microsoft has lots of money, lots of mindshare and lots of inertia behind it. For companies to do anything drastic in any direction away Microsoft is probably a bad idea and wouldn't work out that well. (I can only say, 'start slowly'.)
Though for individuals I'm not that sure. Linux is free and all. With Live CDs it's not really that difficult get up and running, just to try it. It won't hurt you. And in general, individuals don't have the money spend to do all the nice stuff you can do with your computer.
I mean, I've been doing some desktop publishing stuff with Open Source software that I simply couldn't have do with the same effort (both time and money wise, being a student and all) with existing commercial software.
On a side note, Microsoft is currently asking software vendors (at least in The Netherlands) that make domain specific software if they would like to re-licence their software under an Open Source licence. They then go to tell everyone that basicly all vendors told them a firm 'No!' (due to invested money, time it would take to clean the codebase, etc.).
Just interested, but where did you get that number from? An absolutely overwhelming number of applications are available for UNIX, and of course the same can be said for Microsoft Windows. So I'd like to know who made up that number.
It's not like when you have 100 times the people you can also sell them 100 times as much different software titles. General solutions will stick and will make specific software unnecessary to everyone but a tiny group.
That TweakUI option only enables/disables the boottime optimization process that is run every 3 days. The process will move programs used during boot into one area of the harddisk so that it can be read ahead in one sweep with minimal arm movement. ('arm' as in, the the arm that puts the read/write-head of the harddisk in place).
They should have written it like "Optimize boot- and program startup time when idle" in TweakUI for Windows XP.
You can start it by hand with "rundll32 advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks", for example from the "Run..." Start menu item.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to file bug for the popup problem. Ask (nicely) for an option to disable all these reconnect popups. First they will bitch you of that it's not their problem. Then they will close the bug.
Sometimes I just don't get these people. Mind you I even know someone who maintained a patchset for this feature for a longtime. He can probably still be found around the Freenet / TOR projects.
Wine developers say that a program running under wine could easely detect that it's in reality running under Linux, and then call Linux syscalls instead of using the "Windows" system call traps.
.. "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes", so I would have taken out the bad parts of my post.
;)
;).
What I wanted to tell is that with knowledge and the will to contribute you can help with open source software. Even if you are not a software writer, even if you are not 'artsy' (KDE is attracting lots of these lately), and even if you are not a good documentation writer. As long as you know what 'usable' is, open source projects could use your thoughts.
With open source you can communicate directly with the developers, something that is rarely possible with the commercial software. Just contact a particular developer and ask if you can be his 'ordinary user'. Warn him/her that you _will_ be irritating.
Some of your ideas are maybe a bit too broad for this kind of direct interaction (you would need to communicate with lots of developers at the same time). But if you just pick one to start with, say the "easy transition" item, you could start flicking little improvement ideas into the heads of the developers.
For example, a mail to some Konqueror dev: "How difficult would it be to import Favorites from Internet Explorer if I would give the directory to read from?"
"Could you check for changes in the IE Favorites every time Konqueror starts?"
"Take a look at the Wine code to make an educated guess for where the Favorites are placed"
At the moment few applications can import data you could suggest someone to wrap it up in a migration wizard.
But I guess you get the picture. Go kick those shins
PS: I think the slight trolling tone as in your original post might even help a little, if used moderately. It pushes the person on the other end to think about the situation.
PS2: There's a new website for these kind of things at http://openusability.org/ . But I think it's more targeted at the professional usability experts. As a newby you might get bashed away (don't know if there are big ego's there, still haven't encountered them
PS3. You could also try to achieve some things by filing bugreports, but I think that won't be as effective as directly talking to the devs (bugzilla's are not for chatter).
You sound like you know quite a lot about this. I'm not sure if this means you're troll. But I'll bite ;-)
;-)). That nobody uses it is just because nobody knows, the society might eventually adapt.
Let's look at the parent post, and I'll show you what the average home user uses a computer for. For brevities sake I've skipped the obvious commercial uses.
Which should they use to do what? To:
1) Create a development workstation
Okay 'maybe' not this one.
2) Run a small home server
If you can get it into peoples mind that storing your data in one place is safer and easier to backup, everybody would use that. That, and getting Windows to do as this all other mainstream OSes do; Point to a thing that store files and say, put the data of the users on there (including a nice wizardy thing of course
I know this thing is accounted for under your "Will you be hauling sand or rocks?" line. But maybe you can get some 'warm fuzzy feelings' for these developers if you know they helped to make data storage on your local system safer and speedier.
Software for home servers already exists if you care to pay large sums of money or want to fiddle with the open source building blocks they used. But people who develop home server software don't care about any of the things you mentioned on your post. So we move on to the next point.
4) Use for children
You catched that one.
Problem is, those childrens and their parents are probably not going to make this software if they lack the skills. These 'skills' include the social skills of finding programmers that can help and then communicate with them what you expect. This includes not yelling if they say it's impossible, convice them, don't try to overpower, that won't work.
Open source works because the development is open. You can influence the developers. There are lots of bright programmers in open source. But they work and live in a 'developer world'. So they need a bit of input for things they just never encounter.
If you really want the things you pointed out above you can easely find the community sites. Pick out someone 'higher up' and bug him or her about a couple of things and ask if s/he directs you to someone who can help with that. Now is a good time.
If this 'doing small things to improve the software for yourself and others' is not for you, then please consider not using open source software. Seriously.
7) Use for an embedded system with no user interface at all
Embedded systems designers are using Linux more and more in recent years. It could be that you are not aware that "embedded systems" include things as your central heating system, tv, microwave, monitor's on-screen-display, radio, cd and dvd player, network routers, etc. etc. Maybe you don't care what it runs. But you do care that it runs correctly because you use it.
I hope you now know that the part you saw of Linux 'home use' is only a small part of the picture. Maybe your problem is that you didn't figure out that the underlying operating system can be "be all of those things" without breaking the rest.
Now it's up to you to help fix the things you see that are broken.
How do you define 'end of the day' on a planet?
Look at Open Office. Great idea, lousy implementation. Apart from the cost, what benefit does it have over Microsoft Office? There's nothing new in it, nothing innovative.
The innovations are in the tiny corners. Formatting options in the context menu. I really like that. Now they only should display the hotkeys next to the items so you can learn them 'by accident'.
Another smallish thing: Double click on the 'paste special' button (OOo2.x) and it will paste the formatting every time you select something untill you disable it again with a click on the same button. Put a background colour in it and select everything you want to be marked. Very nice if you are a student, or are reviewing a document.
Say you want to throttle a single IP address worldwide on the entier internet.
2^32 addresses in ten minutes (600s): 7158278 ICMP packets per second
I don't know how large ICMP packets are, but I do know they are relatively tiny, say 64 octets. That would mean you need 436Mo/s. Not an entierly trivial amount of bandwidth for an individual, but spread over a thousand botnet peers it should be doable.
Factor in that an attacker would probably want to block a couple of addresses. For example microsoft.com's or Akamai's DNS servers. Another neat trick would be to tell everybody to throttle bandwidth to some of the intercontinental routers or the 13 root DNS servers.
Hmm, I think the next Microsoft Windows worm might be 'interesting', due to the renewed attention on this flaw.
All appliances with digital circuits inside are already computers. They compute (calculate) things. what you probably meant is "a future where all appliances would use complex hardware or software".
;-)
Complexity is where the bugs come from. It increases the chance that people forget to check some corner case where a bug is lurking.
Anyways, the future is now. Have a nice day
Fast User Switching doesn't help if the admin privs are needed to setup some per user settings. You can't really do that on the admin account without tracking what was changed and translating that to the other user, applying it there.
Of course needing admin rights for per user setup is an error in the particular software, but it's not exactly pushed by Microsoft to make software that behaves correct without admin rights.
Not to downplay your plans, but thousands of new apprentices are joining the Open Force movement every day. Not many of them are fully awoken, yet. Many of those will even never become a true master of the Force, still they help us in our fight against the empire by pointing the Way. Loosing a master may feel painful now, but the Force is already attracting replacement troops. Yes, troops, the power of the Force lies in it's multitude.
Besides this, we haven't had communications with Daniel Robbins recently so his plans might be cloaked. I feel this event as only a small disturbance in the Force. The Force is strong!
May the Counsel of the FSF guide your ways.
Could you name an example? Last year, several Open Source projects have reported that some of their servers were hacked into. I definitely remember Debian going though lists of MD5 hashes to find back older known-good versions of their files.
But maybe you can enlighten us? btw, I am not saying that Open Source is somehow 'better than Microsoft' in this case. It's just that you saying that people probably don't see something is rather hard to prove for the people you speak to ("Hey, I don't know any project that told me they were hacked, it must be true!").
See:
1. From the site: 'This is the sixth and final update of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (codename 'woody') [..]
And this:
2. [..] More good news: r6 is the final update of woody [..]
3. ???
4. Profit!
I have already replaced the CPU fan, and it has got marginally better. I'm still searching for a propper replacement of the PSU fan.
I don't see the big rush for these Mini-machines. They are clearly aimed at a market where people want a very simple solution. The people that want email, internet access, and maybe Office.
Great, now tell us what percentage of the desktop PC market does just that? Did you say 90-95%? Hmmkay. I hope you can see it now.
Btw, the way to add storage is by means of a Firewire connected harddisk enclosure. And about the HD playback, it seems to do 720i/p just fine. Higher resolution is a problem. But then only higher end current PCs can play back 1080i/p HD streams in a reasonable fashion, depending on the codec you will need an even faster PC.
I own both of them. And the Asus Pundit makes a heck of lot more noise, and more in the irritating spectrum (probably in human speech range).
Intel also makes stuff other than x86. Several low power ARM CPUs, their knowledge about chipsets could also be retargeted to PowerPC, all kinds of 'accelerator' chips (decoding video, DRM, ..), etc., etc.
I'd find it odd if Apple wouldn't use Intel chips if they were a good fit.
Together with a wireless backup connection you could move your servers while still operating ;-)
Also escapes my why they haven't done that with external storage. Pull the plug, the OS get's a signal and syncs the data to disk wirelessly, unmounts when it's finished.
A bit like the notebook layout view in Word:mac 2004, but then for full documents? (btw, MS OneNote has the same layout)
You mean like this?
"I! E! I'm Zippie!
O! E! I'm Zoe!"
Ah, always nice to know they are fighting supervilains off your computer when you are on the internet.
(And now I'd like to know who has these flash movies on his/her CV..)
That's also why Open Source can work, software that everybody could put to use in a usefull way thrive on being open and generaly available.
btw, I'm not saying "OMG!!1 L0LLerz! Micr0$oft is d00med!". People have accused me far too many times of that. Microsoft has lots of money, lots of mindshare and lots of inertia behind it. For companies to do anything drastic in any direction away Microsoft is probably a bad idea and wouldn't work out that well. (I can only say, 'start slowly'.)
Though for individuals I'm not that sure. Linux is free and all. With Live CDs it's not really that difficult get up and running, just to try it. It won't hurt you. And in general, individuals don't have the money spend to do all the nice stuff you can do with your computer.
I mean, I've been doing some desktop publishing stuff with Open Source software that I simply couldn't have do with the same effort (both time and money wise, being a student and all) with existing commercial software.
On a side note, Microsoft is currently asking software vendors (at least in The Netherlands) that make domain specific software if they would like to re-licence their software under an Open Source licence. They then go to tell everyone that basicly all vendors told them a firm 'No!' (due to invested money, time it would take to clean the codebase, etc.).
How odd..
95% of all programs run under XP
Just interested, but where did you get that number from? An absolutely overwhelming number of applications are available for UNIX, and of course the same can be said for Microsoft Windows. So I'd like to know who made up that number.
It's not like when you have 100 times the people you can also sell them 100 times as much different software titles. General solutions will stick and will make specific software unnecessary to everyone but a tiny group.
Never mind.. I should have read the page, code and the replies.
:-P
Now go mod me down
http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2005/Apr/ 0445.html
Then call it SVN, Subversions shorter name.
That TweakUI option only enables/disables the boottime optimization process that is run every 3 days. The process will move programs used during boot into one area of the harddisk so that it can be read ahead in one sweep with minimal arm movement. ('arm' as in, the the arm that puts the read/write-head of the harddisk in place).
They should have written it like "Optimize boot- and program startup time when idle" in TweakUI for Windows XP.
You can start it by hand with "rundll32 advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks", for example from the "Run..." Start menu item.
*hopes someone with modpoints read this*