Working at a computer manufacturer in Europe I get a lot of questions concerning Linux from Spain. So maybe Spain is the next country to get a Linux article on Slashdot.:-)
The table of equivalents lists a lot of open source solutions for almost every program that you can get for Windows. So if someone wants to switch to Open Source he should have a look at it.
And yes, Linux is ready for the desktop. I switched my own firm PC to Debian/testing last October and I use it for the daily work stuff without any problems. Even being a small island in a Windows-focussed infrastructure doesn't give much trouble.
The trick is not to try to be a 100% compatible to Windows. No, I rather prefer to be compatible to open standards and so I'm sharing my documents not in *.DOC files but in *.PDF and originally they are written with LaTeX. You can't convince a bean counter that switching makes sense if you just want to do the things the same way like before, because then nobody sees some "added value". If you do things different and even more successful then people start to think about the why...
The city of Treuchtlingen (also in Germany and not so far from Munich) with just around 13000 citizens moved their municipality to open source. They also have setup a webiste (unfortunatley in German only) where they give details about what and how they did and how the acceptance of the people that have to live with the solution is. Ok, I guess their project is very much smaller than the one of Munich, but at least it reads like a success story.
Fedora Core 2 has already a kernel update. See the announcement of the 2.6.6-1.435 kernel. So all you need is getting the RPM and install it.
The question is, when will this patch show up on other distributions. People are sometimes not able to compile a vanilla kernel or a vanilla kernel can cause headache, e.g. SuSE 9.1 formats your filesystem with reiserfs and ACLs, but a vanilla kernel might not support this backported ACL feature.
Seen the kernel release from this point of view means, that the sistributions should hurry up to provide fixed kernel packages for their users.
this is a patent on the idea of launching different functions depending on how and the length of time a user presses a button
PRIOR ARTS! I'm doing this since many years, even when Microsoft didn't exist. My setup is: The button: Its the button of my doorbell
The user: Somebody that wants something from me. The functions:
User presses button short results in function open_door_with_a_friendly_smile
User presses button multiple times launches function open_door_with_an_angry_look_on_the_face
User presses button for a long time launches function open_door_and_aim_fist_at_users_face
...that if McAffe can get a patent for anti-spam techniques then I should be able to get one as well for spam techniques. That would enable me to sue every spammer even if spamming in some countries
is not treated as illegal, but patent violation surely is.:-)
As an aside Paul Graham's "A Plan for Spam" was published August 2002."
IANAL, but isn't that a proof of "prior usage" and makes the patent invalid?
Another question: Can somebody explain me why the "logo" for this article on Slashdot is "fork, knife and spoon" (in German we call it "Besteck" but I know that the english language has no equivalent for it)? Just curious about that...:-)
Does Germany have a law that I'm not familiar with?
Could be.:-)
Email is free not a paid service, why is there some obligation to deliver?
Well, even if its for free it has to fulfill some requirements. For example also the air to breathe is for free and the government sets laws to prohibit the pollution of that "free good". One other reason could be that Email is becoming a way to have "legally relevant correspondence". In that context it is not a good idea to drop a mail. And AFAIK a big part of the problem are "undelivable message reports" that from one point of view really need to be delivered, because you never know if the reason is a fake address or just a typo in the address.
Snail mail is normally Govt. run and delivery is what you pay for with a stamp.
Here in Germany there are the first private firms that have a license to deliver mail. And they are competing with the now "private" post service.
No one has to or could guarantee anything for email.
But if you want to use email for real legally relevant communication then you need some guarantees.
So whatever the spammers pay to Microsoft, they won't make it up to my whitelist. And because of that they won't even get an answer by my vacation reply when I'm out of the office.:-)
The new smartphones will edge PDA:s out of the mainstream market (why have two devices?)
There are some simple reasons why I prefer to have two devices instead of one smartphone:
When boarding a plane or attending a meeting I'm usually told to turn my mobile phone off because of security reasons or even to avoid disturbing people by ringing phones. Can a smartphone be turned off in a way so that I still can use the "PDA" functions, but I'm not transmitting airwaves to the next cell station of my phone provider?
Even when trying hard my ears are not able to write or to press buttons. Imagine you have a call on your smartphone and then you have to use the smartphones calendar to look for an appointment or even worse you want to take quick notes about that call... That looks pretty difficult as long as I have the phone on my ear and if I remove it from the ear my audio-link is somewhat lost. In that case I really prefer to have my independent cell phone on the ear while writing on my Palm on the table in front of me.
Um, why do you want to fit it on a single sheet of paper? It's like saying "I tried to fit the book on a single sheet of paper and it's unreadable".
First of all because the "paperless office" is still an illusion. And I really prefer to go to a meeting with a piece of paper instead of relying on a laptop computer and then act like the other 10 fools in the meeting that play around with their laptop computers instead of focussing on the meeting.
Second because if someone uses a sort of database then he should be aware that one requrest that I have for a Database is that I can select the few records that I need and don't need the "noise" of 1000 other records. In my case that Excel-Sheet is a sort of database for PC hardware platforms and usually you want to focus on one mainboard without being disturbed by the other 50 mainboards, the 20 graphic cards and the 50 network controllers etc.
Of course I don't need to fit a book into one piece of paper (BTW: I once got a microfilm bible that was stamp size and was the whole bible, readable with a good microscope) because books are usually good organized. You have a table of contents and an index and even if I need 3 informations from the book I can put 3 bookmarks into it and good. On a "excel wallpaper" you just get lost when you can't limit the data to what is really of your interest.
The main problem with that thing was simple that in AB234 there was a deadline for a mainboard and from week "X" to week "X+1" the deadline changed and the Excel sheet was the medium to communicate this change. And then there was the "I don't know why you fuss around, the plans were there for 48 years on your local office at alpha centauri" (in memorian Douglas Adams) complaints when you didn't notice something.:-)
Excel is perfect for creating lists of things, and being used as a way of storing simple data...
Yes, I have a colleauge that thinks like this. The result is an Excel sheet that if you want to make it fit on one sheet of paper you'll need a microscope to read cells. And since he's updating this "information" every week you really would like a sort of diff week-1.xls week-2.xls to find out what changed. My time is too precious to search a thousand cells if they may contain information relevant for my job or not. So this document perfectly fulfills the ISO900x criteria but is not usuable for anyone else than the author.
then I automatically think of what in Germany is called "BeiBholz". That's a piece of wood that you want to bite when you get a BSOD while doing some important work. So Microsoft was inventing the market for wooden computer accessories.
It looks like a nice drive for putting in a big RAID
AFAIK the acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of InexpensiveDisks. And I guess at the moment such a drive is not what I would call "inexpensive". YMMV.
but a GUI probably easier to learn for anyone new to a given application
I doubt that. Just compare the manuals for a GUI based app and the manuals for a CLI app. The GUI based manual usually has a lot of pages, all filled with a big load of screenshots (that are maybe even not the same as the actual program version shows) and very little text.
A manual for a CLI based app is usually more straightforward: What does the user want to do? How does he achieve it? What unexpected situations can happen? And yes, its a lot of text to read but it is usually much more useful than a lot of screenshots.
And as already stated: As soon as the GUI looks slightly different from what the book explains (or a support guy tells you on the phone) a newcomer to an app is getting lost.
I think one big difference between GUI and CLI is that a CLI sets the focus on each step you have to do to complete your job. A GUI distracts you by offering too much "noise" in form of options that lead you somewhere else. Didn't it ever happen to you, that you were looking for a solution for X and found a function Y, wasted a lot of time there and totally forgot your initial problem. CLI environments keep you on the path.
Compare it with cooking. Sure you can see your kitchen environment as a "GUI" where you can point at any thing and use it to prepare a meal. But to make a good meal you usually follow a receipe that is just written down in simple words. And if you're lucky the cookbook has a picture of how it should look like when its done.:-)
Remove the 1.5 tons of water and you have 300 kg of other material. The average wheight of a PC is much
less than that. So the question is where does the matter go? Or in other words: I can't imagine that a PC manufacturer that is doing lets say 1 million PC per year is moving 300000 tons of material through its factory. That would be 1000 tons every day, just imagine the number of trucks you need to supply that mass.
I guess the world deserves to see the evidence of those claims. If they don't have one, they should go to hell and sue the devil for putting heat on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why shall I believe any of them?
Working at a computer manufacturer in Europe I get a lot of questions concerning Linux from Spain. So maybe Spain is the next country to get a Linux article on Slashdot. :-)
And yes, Linux is ready for the desktop. I switched my own firm PC to Debian/testing last October and I use it for the daily work stuff without any problems. Even being a small island in a Windows-focussed infrastructure doesn't give much trouble.
The trick is not to try to be a 100% compatible to Windows. No, I rather prefer to be compatible to open standards and so I'm sharing my documents not in *.DOC files but in *.PDF and originally they are written with LaTeX. You can't convince a bean counter that switching makes sense if you just want to do the things the same way like before, because then nobody sees some "added value". If you do things different and even more successful then people start to think about the why...
The city of Treuchtlingen (also in Germany and not so far from Munich) with just around 13000 citizens moved their municipality to open source. They also have setup a webiste (unfortunatley in German only) where they give details about what and how they did and how the acceptance of the people that have to live with the solution is. Ok, I guess their project is very much smaller than the one of Munich, but at least it reads like a success story.
The question is, when will this patch show up on other distributions. People are sometimes not able to compile a vanilla kernel or a vanilla kernel can cause headache, e.g. SuSE 9.1 formats your filesystem with reiserfs and ACLs, but a vanilla kernel might not support this backported ACL feature.
Seen the kernel release from this point of view means, that the sistributions should hurry up to provide fixed kernel packages for their users.
...that we can get SuSE-Linux CDs at McDonalds?
:-)
Or that every SuSE box contains a card for getting a free BigMac at McDonalds? Well, maybe the thing has to be renamed to BigTux.
PRIOR ARTS! I'm doing this since many years, even when Microsoft didn't exist. My setup is:
The button: Its the button of my doorbell The user: Somebody that wants something from me.
The functions:
Any questions? :-)
...that if McAffe can get a patent for anti-spam techniques then I should be able to get one as well for spam techniques. That would enable me to sue every spammer even if spamming in some countries is not treated as illegal, but patent violation surely is. :-)
IANAL, but isn't that a proof of "prior usage" and makes the patent invalid?
Another question: Can somebody explain me why the "logo" for this article on Slashdot is "fork, knife and spoon" (in German we call it "Besteck" but I know that the english language has no equivalent for it)? Just curious about that... :-)
...if you could get the answers for the exam by SMS during the exam. :-)
Could be. :-)
Email is free not a paid service, why is there some obligation to deliver?
Well, even if its for free it has to fulfill some requirements. For example also the air to breathe is for free and the government sets laws to prohibit the pollution of that "free good". One other reason could be that Email is becoming a way to have "legally relevant correspondence". In that context it is not a good idea to drop a mail. And AFAIK a big part of the problem are "undelivable message reports" that from one point of view really need to be delivered, because you never know if the reason is a fake address or just a typo in the address.
Snail mail is normally Govt. run and delivery is what you pay for with a stamp.
Here in Germany there are the first private firms that have a license to deliver mail. And they are competing with the now "private" post service.
No one has to or could guarantee anything for email.
But if you want to use email for real legally relevant communication then you need some guarantees.
http://www.daniken.com/
If its really compatible it should be able to run also all those nice programs that are installed over the net automagically. :-)
So whatever the spammers pay to Microsoft, they won't make it up to my whitelist. And because of that they won't even get an answer by my vacation reply when I'm out of the office. :-)
You forgot the very first program that is installed automagically: Win32Blaster. :-)
First of all because the "paperless office" is still an illusion. And I really prefer to go to a meeting with a piece of paper instead of relying on a laptop computer and then act like the other 10 fools in the meeting that play around with their laptop computers instead of focussing on the meeting.
Second because if someone uses a sort of database then he should be aware that one requrest that I have for a Database is that I can select the few records that I need and don't need the "noise" of 1000 other records. In my case that Excel-Sheet is a sort of database for PC hardware platforms and usually you want to focus on one mainboard without being disturbed by the other 50 mainboards, the 20 graphic cards and the 50 network controllers etc.
Of course I don't need to fit a book into one piece of paper (BTW: I once got a microfilm bible that was stamp size and was the whole bible, readable with a good microscope) because books are usually good organized. You have a table of contents and an index and even if I need 3 informations from the book I can put 3 bookmarks into it and good. On a "excel wallpaper" you just get lost when you can't limit the data to what is really of your interest.
The main problem with that thing was simple that in AB234 there was a deadline for a mainboard and from week "X" to week "X+1" the deadline changed and the Excel sheet was the medium to communicate this change. And then there was the "I don't know why you fuss around, the plans were there for 48 years on your local office at alpha centauri" (in memorian Douglas Adams) complaints when you didn't notice something. :-)
Yes, I have a colleauge that thinks like this. The result is an Excel sheet that if you want to make it fit on one sheet of paper you'll need a microscope to read cells. And since he's updating this "information" every week you really would like a sort of diff week-1.xls week-2.xls to find out what changed. My time is too precious to search a thousand cells if they may contain information relevant for my job or not. So this document perfectly fulfills the ISO900x criteria but is not usuable for anyone else than the author.
Waltzing with bears by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. And yes, they provide spreadsheets to calculate probabilities.
then I automatically think of what in Germany is called "BeiBholz". That's a piece of wood that you want to bite when you get a BSOD while doing some important work. So Microsoft was inventing the market for wooden computer accessories.
And there are also analog wooden computers.
AFAIK the acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. And I guess at the moment such a drive is not what I would call "inexpensive". YMMV.
I doubt that. Just compare the manuals for a GUI based app and the manuals for a CLI app. The GUI based manual usually has a lot of pages, all filled with a big load of screenshots (that are maybe even not the same as the actual program version shows) and very little text.
A manual for a CLI based app is usually more straightforward: What does the user want to do? How does he achieve it? What unexpected situations can happen? And yes, its a lot of text to read but it is usually much more useful than a lot of screenshots.
And as already stated: As soon as the GUI looks slightly different from what the book explains (or a support guy tells you on the phone) a newcomer to an app is getting lost.
I think one big difference between GUI and CLI is that a CLI sets the focus on each step you have to do to complete your job. A GUI distracts you by offering too much "noise" in form of options that lead you somewhere else. Didn't it ever happen to you, that you were looking for a solution for X and found a function Y, wasted a lot of time there and totally forgot your initial problem. CLI environments keep you on the path.
Compare it with cooking. Sure you can see your kitchen environment as a "GUI" where you can point at any thing and use it to prepare a meal. But to make a good meal you usually follow a receipe that is just written down in simple words. And if you're lucky the cookbook has a picture of how it should look like when its done. :-)
Remove the 1.5 tons of water and you have 300 kg of other material. The average wheight of a PC is much less than that. So the question is where does the matter go? Or in other words: I can't imagine that a PC manufacturer that is doing lets say 1 million PC per year is moving 300000 tons of material through its factory. That would be 1000 tons every day, just imagine the number of trucks you need to supply that mass.
I guess the world deserves to see the evidence of those claims. If they don't have one, they should go to hell and sue the devil for putting heat on them.