Again, as others have said, this is a learnability test rather than a usability test. Why not add two more groups, given 30 minutes tuition in using XP/KDE first and compare their times too?
So don't. Apt-get install, urpmi, download binary packages
- Recompiling the kernel is NEVER OK for ANY reason - Installing drivers or software MUST NOT require accessing the shell
These kind of problems are solved well enough by many distributions (debian's module approach, Knoppix, mandrake et al autoprobing). there are exceptions, obviously, often caused by hardware manufacturers refusal to release linux drivers.
- There MUST NOT be different packages for different linux distributions - There MUST NOT be different packages for different kernels or different glibc/gnome versions. I can still run Internet Explorer 6 or Windows 98; I highly doubt that you could run most GNOME or KDE apps on GNOME/KDE 1.0
You can still run IE 6 on windows 98. However, I doubt it's completely the same package you download and install on different versions of windows - that funky installer thing just does dependency testing and downloads the correct install for you.
- Rebooting is NOT OK. Windows just got over this, Linux shouldn't have it.
Linux requires far fewer reboots than windows. Only installing a new kernel requires a reboot. Unlike my windows2000 install, which is currently spontaneously rebooting itself every so often.
- There MUST BE a way to detect unknown hardware and query for the driver. Perhaps even a central server. Asking the user to figure out what chipset their DFE-530TX+ (Hint: It's Realtek) uses is NOT OK. - There MUST BE driver support OUT OF THE BOX for any device which has a stable driver.
Again, many distros do autoprobing. Users that want this sort of hand-holding can use Knoppix or Lindows.
- Legacy crap must go. A modern distro SHOULD NOT include apps that are not GTK+ or QT based (at least not visibly).
Latex+xemacs? You'd take that away? Over my cold dead body.
- Config tools are a must. Editing the config file for Apache is not an option.
Editing config on apache: vi/etc/apache/httpd.conf ->/$(Term of interest) -> change value ->/etc/init.d/apache restart. Done. From anywhere in the world.
- Samba must be integrated flawlessly. You should be able to share a folder as a CIFS share flwawlessly. Likewise, you should be able to access a CIFS share just by typing in it's name in Nautilus/Konq (e.g. \\tux). This needs to apply to printers too.
LiSa does much of this. It makes me angry that the open-source community has to waste so much effort trying to interface with MS protocols when they put so much effort into obfuscating them (anti-GPL clauses. Very Reasonable and Non-Disciminatory)
- The directory tree must be hidden. The tree should be for programmers and sysadmins. For normal users, the filesystem should start at their home directory. There should be a special location for applications (applications:/// is a good start on GNOME).
Huh? Every program starts its file dialog in the user's home directory. Ah wait. Could it just be you're spouting crap. And as for the name thing - there are loads of editors. What if they all called themself Notepad? Every image editor was called Paint?
> Hmmm... that extra 200 mhz of FSB doesn't really do much, > does it? It's still limited by memory bandwidth. Moreover, that > bandwidth is shared between both processors in a DP system.
That extra 200Mhz means that when the memory bus is supplying the processor with data at maximum rate, the processor still has spare FSB bandwidth to talk to the hard discs, network card etc without slowing memory access. This happened with the early Athlons too.
RedHat6.2 (what's this whole linucks thing about?) Solaris 8 intel (yuck - slow, hard to use) SuSE 7.0 (ick) SuSE 7.3 (I think, still ick, crashed) Debian Woody (Outdated but good. Got fed up with old versions of everything eventually) FreeBSD 4.8 (Fast+nice, no sound, barfed on my USB mouse for some reason occasionally though. Gave up fiddling) SuSE 8.2 (Why do I go back to SuSE? Still sucks. What is this awful YAST thing doing?) Gentoo 1.4rc-whatever-they're-up-to-now (stable, fast up-to-date. Takes forever to install)
Personally, I'm sticking with Gentoo. It just works. type emerge xine and half-an-hour later I'm watching the Matrix2 trailer.
Speaking as someone who wasted far too much of his money as a teenager on bits of cardboard (building an evil red/blue direct-damage/jujitsu deck), you're right. However, the number of Magic:TG tournaments with real money prizes can make it worthwhile buying cards if you're good enough.
Exactly what I thought. I imagine things like inlining and other compiler optimisations might confuse things further.
From looking at the report generated on Trillian (in the whitepaper on the site), most of what it seems to do is check for bad function calls (sprintf etc). I'm not sure who their target market is - not developers, as they can use automatic auditing tools on the source which would tell them more useful information.
With no real threat of serious (ie costly) legal action for violating the GPL, what's to stop this happening again and again? How many other companies have stolen GPL code and are distributing it without our knowing about it?
Then again, if someone did sue for copyright infringement, what kind of damages could you claim?
Damn I hate the way the RIAA works. If they want to increase CD sales revenues, stop the pirate witch-hunt and use the money instead to:
1)Charge less per album
-> more people prepared to buy albums to see if they like it 2)Pay the artists more
-> more artists -> more choice -> better music
I frequently get pings around the 50ms mark playing Day of Defeat on my 512/256k ADSL setup. That is in central London though, so the exchange is pretty close.
Re:How about making more Distros comply first.
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Damn, Slashdot moderation is screwed up. Joke post gets -1, post by clueless person who doesn't get the joke gets 5. Next time I go to the zoo I'm going to check the monkey house for chimpanzees with mod access
> I'm really in support of bringing back radio plays and
> dramatizations,
Radio 4 (and 3 too IIRC) from the BBC do plays etc quite often, and you can listen online - here
That is one of the worst websites I've seen - wouldn't even let me in with Konqueror.
The license fee isn't all bad though. For example, watching each episode of "24" on BBC actually only lasts 40 odd minutes because there's no advert breaks like on US tv.
I'd guess that part of the reason for the speed is "because we could". But also, electric cars are generally seen as toy cars. Mention that this 'toy' car accelerates faster than a Porsche, and suddenly it seems much less toy like.
There's no mention in the article of how he managed to install the software on the system. I'd assume that any public terminal would be logged in as a user with virtually no priveleges beyond access to internet, word-processing etc and a small temporary storage partition that is wiped on log-out. Or does kinkos just run win98 boxes?
Yes, the screen size is the one annoying thing, but for the price it's pretty good still. And they look much better if you replace the case with a metallic-grey one.
In less than two minutes a woman in an apron put a tray with our food on the table, handed us our change, took the plastic number and left.
So it still required a human to bring him his food and sort out his change? This is complete automation how?
His assumptions are a little inaccurate - what about the jobs created in the robot servicing, production and design industry? What about the massive cost reductions caused by automation - if everything is produced much more cheaply, maybe nobody needs to work full time in order to afford a good quality of life, so we all share out the remaining work part-time.
The Docklands Light Railway in London is the largest completely-computerised transport system I know of (no drivers), and it's pretty damn fast and reliable. If that's a sign of the robotic future, bring it on.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, as others have said, this is a learnability test rather than a usability test. Why not add two more groups, given 30 minutes tuition in using XP/KDE first and compare their times too?
-Compiling from source is NOT ok
/etc/apache/httpd.conf -> /$(Term of interest) -> change value -> /etc/init.d/apache restart. Done. From anywhere in the world.
So don't. Apt-get install, urpmi, download binary packages
- Recompiling the kernel is NEVER OK for ANY reason
- Installing drivers or software MUST NOT require accessing the shell
These kind of problems are solved well enough by many distributions (debian's module approach, Knoppix, mandrake et al autoprobing). there are exceptions, obviously, often caused by hardware manufacturers refusal to release linux drivers.
- There MUST NOT be different packages for different linux distributions
- There MUST NOT be different packages for different kernels or different glibc/gnome versions. I can still run Internet Explorer 6 or Windows 98; I highly doubt that you could run most GNOME or KDE apps on GNOME/KDE 1.0
You can still run IE 6 on windows 98. However, I doubt it's completely the same package you download and install on different versions of windows - that funky installer thing just does dependency testing and downloads the correct install for you.
- Rebooting is NOT OK. Windows just got over this, Linux shouldn't have it.
Linux requires far fewer reboots than windows. Only installing a new kernel requires a reboot. Unlike my windows2000 install, which is currently spontaneously rebooting itself every so often.
- There MUST BE a way to detect unknown hardware and query for the driver. Perhaps even a central server. Asking the user to figure out what chipset their DFE-530TX+ (Hint: It's Realtek) uses is NOT OK.
- There MUST BE driver support OUT OF THE BOX for any device which has a stable driver.
Again, many distros do autoprobing. Users that want this sort of hand-holding can use Knoppix or Lindows.
- Legacy crap must go. A modern distro SHOULD NOT include apps that are not GTK+ or QT based (at least not visibly).
Latex+xemacs? You'd take that away? Over my cold dead body.
- Config tools are a must. Editing the config file for Apache is not an option.
Editing config on apache: vi
- Samba must be integrated flawlessly. You should be able to share a folder as a CIFS share flwawlessly. Likewise, you should be able to access a CIFS share just by typing in it's name in Nautilus/Konq (e.g. \\tux). This needs to apply to printers too.
LiSa does much of this. It makes me angry that the open-source community has to waste so much effort trying to interface with MS protocols when they put so much effort into obfuscating them (anti-GPL clauses. Very Reasonable and Non-Disciminatory)
- The directory tree must be hidden. The tree should be for programmers and sysadmins. For normal users, the filesystem should start at their home directory. There should be a special location for applications (applications:/// is a good start on GNOME).
Huh? Every program starts its file dialog in the user's home directory. Ah wait. Could it just be you're spouting crap. And as for the name thing - there are loads of editors. What if they all called themself Notepad? Every image editor was called Paint?
> Hmmm... that extra 200 mhz of FSB doesn't really do much,
> does it? It's still limited by memory bandwidth. Moreover, that
> bandwidth is shared between both processors in a DP system.
That extra 200Mhz means that when the memory bus is supplying the processor with data at maximum rate, the processor still has spare FSB bandwidth to talk to the hard discs, network card etc without slowing memory access. This happened with the early Athlons too.
I don't get this whole holy war thing.
In the last few years, I've tried:
RedHat6.2 (what's this whole linucks thing about?)
Solaris 8 intel (yuck - slow, hard to use)
SuSE 7.0 (ick)
SuSE 7.3 (I think, still ick, crashed)
Debian Woody (Outdated but good. Got fed up with old versions of everything eventually)
FreeBSD 4.8 (Fast+nice, no sound, barfed on my USB mouse for some reason occasionally though. Gave up fiddling)
SuSE 8.2 (Why do I go back to SuSE? Still sucks. What is this awful YAST thing doing?)
Gentoo 1.4rc-whatever-they're-up-to-now (stable, fast up-to-date. Takes forever to install)
Personally, I'm sticking with Gentoo. It just works. type emerge xine and half-an-hour later I'm watching the Matrix2 trailer.
Godwin's law. Now shut up.
Speaking as someone who wasted far too much of his money as a teenager on bits of cardboard (building an evil red/blue direct-damage/jujitsu deck), you're right. However, the number of Magic:TG tournaments with real money prizes can make it worthwhile buying cards if you're good enough.
Exactly what I thought. I imagine things like inlining and other compiler optimisations might confuse things further.
From looking at the report generated on Trillian (in the whitepaper on the site), most of what it seems to do is check for bad function calls (sprintf etc). I'm not sure who their target market is - not developers, as they can use automatic auditing tools on the source which would tell them more useful information.
Exactly what the RIAA did before they got hacked the last time
With no real threat of serious (ie costly) legal action for violating the GPL, what's to stop this happening again and again? How many other companies have stolen GPL code and are distributing it without our knowing about it?
Then again, if someone did sue for copyright infringement, what kind of damages could you claim?
Damn I hate the way the RIAA works. If they want to increase CD sales revenues, stop the pirate witch-hunt and use the money instead to:
1)Charge less per album
-> more people prepared to buy albums to see if they like it
2)Pay the artists more
-> more artists -> more choice -> better music
I frequently get pings around the 50ms mark playing Day of Defeat on my 512/256k ADSL setup. That is in central London though, so the exchange is pretty close.
There are a ton of items but be prepared, most prices start around $500 and go up to $40,000
And that's before the Slashdot effect hits the prices.
And others say "hey, who drank half my pint."
Damn, Slashdot moderation is screwed up. Joke post gets -1, post by clueless person who doesn't get the joke gets 5. Next time I go to the zoo I'm going to check the monkey house for chimpanzees with mod access
> I'm really in support of bringing back radio plays and
> dramatizations,
Radio 4 (and 3 too IIRC) from the BBC do plays etc quite often, and you can listen online - here
I know, it just makes me cross that I have to do that.
That is one of the worst websites I've seen - wouldn't even let me in with Konqueror.
The license fee isn't all bad though. For example, watching each episode of "24" on BBC actually only lasts 40 odd minutes because there's no advert breaks like on US tv.
>when it comes to Windows. Coexist and be happy !
Why should we try to coexist? Microsoft go out of their way to make their software hard to coexist with.
I'd guess that part of the reason for the speed is "because we could". But also, electric cars are generally seen as toy cars. Mention that this 'toy' car accelerates faster than a Porsche, and suddenly it seems much less toy like.
Read it yourself. From the article:
Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14 Kinko's copy shops, software that logs individual keystrokes.
There's no mention in the article of how he managed to install the software on the system. I'd assume that any public terminal would be logged in as a user with virtually no priveleges beyond access to internet, word-processing etc and a small temporary storage partition that is wiped on log-out. Or does kinkos just run win98 boxes?
Yes, the screen size is the one annoying thing, but for the price it's pretty good still. And they look much better if you replace the case with a metallic-grey one.
Yeah, cos everyone knows the best language for high perfomance gaming APIs is Perl.
In less than two minutes a woman in an apron put a tray with our food on the table, handed us our change, took the plastic number and left.
So it still required a human to bring him his food and sort out his change? This is complete automation how?
His assumptions are a little inaccurate - what about the jobs created in the robot servicing, production and design industry? What about the massive cost reductions caused by automation - if everything is produced much more cheaply, maybe nobody needs to work full time in order to afford a good quality of life, so we all share out the remaining work part-time.
The Docklands Light Railway in London is the largest completely-computerised transport system I know of (no drivers), and it's pretty damn fast and reliable. If that's a sign of the robotic future, bring it on.
There's always Palms like the m105 - $59 I think at the moment. 8meg memory, 20Mhz. Plenty fast enough for me.