I've taken knoppix for a spin, and was actually more impressed with it than with Ubuntu. Very clean system that was designed to do one thing, and do it well - and it seems to be successful at doing so.
It is a common misconception that the most valuable thing a project can have is users. In fact it is developers with time
The most valuable thing a commercial project can have is users. The most valuable thing an opensource project can have is a good leader. And by that I mean someone who knows what the software should do, and who knows how to listen to users telling her how it should do it, and then say no to developers who fail to do what the users want (that is also in scope/line with the project).
Most developers suck at coding.
Most developers that don't suck at coding suck at UI (I claim to fall into this camp).
The developer that is good at both is a rare find. But you really just need someone at the top who can direct decent coders to do the right thing - and that person does NOT need to be a coder.
Ubuntu is the first large scale attempt to build a desktop Linux. I'm using it nearly as my main platform since the october 2004 release (first one) and improvments are remarkable.
OK, now you're just talking crap. Redhat wasn't/isn't an attempt to build desktop linux?
I'm not calling you a liar, but, really, your experience is atypical these days.
Thanks!:-)
Getting the graphics to work is just the first big hurdle. Then there's "everything else I want to do." While many things are easy, nothing is pleasant. My sister (who is sharp, but not a geek) can do just about anything she wants with a mac. Every once in a while I have to walk her through something, but it's 2-3 times a year. With Linux, I have to walk ME through doing all sorts of things that should just be easy.
In the vein of the graphics issue: I can change my resolution and bit depth on a mac in a few seconds. Neither could I find out how do to it (short of editing the X11 config file), nor could I find help on the system, or a reference online how to do it. Folks, that's just an example - don't tell me it's easy, and here's how; put the damn docs in the system and make it easy to find.
I installed ubuntu on a PC a couple of months ago. It took me about a day to get the graphics system to work on the machine (X11 - text was fine). And by work, I mean "display at all." I never got the res out of it that I wanted. And once I had some graphics up, I tried to do anything else, and was misserable.
I cut my teeth on linux back in the.8 and.9 days; I stuck with NeXTSTEP. I revisited back in the late 90's; I stuck with OpenStep. I revisited it around 2000, when MacOS was very much in transition; I stuck with OpenStep and/on Windows. (though my servers were FreeBSD during the 90's and early oughts') And now I've taken a look in '06; I'm still going to stick with OSX (which is now my server).
It's not there yet. Everything I do on *nix other than OSX feels like pulling teeth. I'll continue to use this expensive OS ($600 machines and $100 OS upgrades every 2 years) for some time, I guess. And while I do, I'll continue to submit bugs and toss a line or 2 of code at various Open Source code/systems I use.
I have stuff to do, and I don't care to muss with the kernel and video drivers. If you don't have stuff to do, or you DO want to muss with kernels/vid drivers - go for some flavor if linux.
Re:A New Core Class in College?
on
PGP & GPG
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
This is currently modded funny, but I'm not sure why.
So basically 99.9% of users online today.
You're missing at least one 9, I figure. If there are a billion folks [more or less] online... 1,000,000,000; 1 in 1000 would mean that 1,000,000 people online have more than a notion of how public-key cryptography works.
I guess I could believe that there are 10K or more, but I certainly think there are fewer than 100K.
I now think that the best solution is to get the regulating bodies out of the way so that competition can be employed. As soon as there's a competitive marketplace for last mile high speed connectivity, if the cableco restricts my access to vonage, there's lots of other choices. They'll lose market share and the benefits of network neutrality will be achieved without all of the heavy handed (and ineffective) government oversite.
I bet you don't live in a rural area, do ya?
Now I don't know what the regulations are on phone companies, but I can assure you: there is not enough profit to motivate these companies to lay fiber to every house in the country. There is problably plenty of profit to be had for say 50% of the homes - the ones in cities and large towns (I'm pulling all these numbers out of my ass, folks). But the folks in these less urban, small towns, and downright rural places need Water, Power, and Connectivity.
There is no way they're going to get a phone line unless it's required/regulated, because it just doesn't make financial sense to run water/power/phone line to some po-dunk town of 30 a hundred miles from anything. This is where capitalism falls down and regulation has to step in.
And that's probably a great arguement for non-neutrality. If that po-dunk town is on it's own subnet, make google and all the other big media providers pony up for the 2nd to last 100 miles these 30 folks need for their connectivity, thus distributing the cost to the big data providers. The only problem is that the network companies are also data providers, and can cut themselves a break.
If the bandwidth providers had never been allowed to also be content providers, I think this would be a non-issue.
I've been playing WoW on my BookPro for.. as long as I've had the pro. I've hit MC with a full 40man, and it ran just fine. I find it hard to believe that the iMac performs worse. Does it really?
[there is some crossover, but] All the people paying for office are businesses - they can't afford their office to be down (through network problems or google problems).
Dunno where you work, but when the 'net connection at my job is down, no work gets done. This is usually because our connection to the internet is only as good as our intranet (which is to say, if I don't have connection to the 'net, I can't hit the fileserver, either). But also because if the 'net connection is down, email has stopped.
The contents of your phone calls are your business.
So its not like this sort of question hasn't come up before. It has, and SCOTUS has ruled on it, and they ruled that our telephone calls are our own personal effects in light of the 4th ammendment, even if a third party is involved with making those calls.
That ruling seems to me to concern itself with the contents of the calls, not the calls themselves.
I think that this kind of thing (recording associations, after all) has more to do with the first amendment.
I do think it was wrong of the government to ask, but it was clearly wrong for the phone companies to roll over.
Not at all...look in your terms of service or customer agreement with your phone company. I guarantee you there are provisions in there for them turning over your records to law enforcement. The real question is when can they do that and under what conditions...
Which is what I meant by "wrong". QWEST seems to think it was illegal (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/washington/12cn d-phone.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=eb85158452eae 01a&hp&ex=1147492800&partner=homepage), but what I really meant by wrong was "lame of them to turn over the records without any kind of warrant, and I would seriously consider using QWEST if I had a choice because they seem less lame on this one."
I was going to say the same kinda thing, except I was going to ask which liberty we're giving up.
For those that say "search and siezure", your phone calls are already someone else's business (the phone companies). And most of them gave up your info willingly. I'm afraid in this one, it is the phone companies you should be mad at, not the government.
I do think it was wrong of the government to ask, but it was clearly wrong for the phone companies to roll over.
This is one of the things SPF (http://www.openspf.org/) is meant to end - false positives. One of the problems with SMTP is that you can't build up a reputation by domain because anyone can claim to be you.
If a verified sender is sending [lots of] unwanted email, they are a spammer and should be blacklisted. Otherwise, verified senders should probably be trusted.
Not to mention the problems that will continue to haunt wireless for some time.
"What problems?" you might ask. Well, let us start with security. While the methods and keys used to lock wireless networks continue to grow stronger, it is still easier to get onto a wireless network then it is to sneak into someone's apartment and plug into their network like you would have to do with a physical connection.
I call BS. I think you are overestimating the value of physical security, and underestimating the robustness of wireless security. I bet it would take a lot less time for any somewhat skilled cat burglar to break into someone's home and connect to their LAN than it would for a skilled hacker to connect to any reasonably secured wireless.
There is also the interference concern.
OK, I'll buy that.
I do not think we are going to see an end to wired networks just yet.
You may not, but I may. If I can get 100Mbs consistent throughput, I don't see any reason to server NFS over cable. I don't need to stream from my computer to my low-def TV, sooo... I'm thinking as of the next rev of Apple's airport systems, cables are gonna be history.
I find the attitude of the OSS community depressing about this subject. They are too close to the technology and can't see the flaws in it.
email is a very old and very entrenched system. The spec for it is really rather good. Your mail should always be delivered. If it isn't, you should always get get a bounce message.
But it is impossible to make everyone follow all the rules.
It's just like the regular mail system. Very very simple. Everyone agrees that mail should be sent, and should be delivered or returned - but that isn't how it always works out. The faults in the regular mail system are often similar to the faults in email: the local postmaster ignores/drops mail, the local postman discards the mail, there is a disaster that destroys mail in process, the destination address is scrambled/old/no longer valid - and so is the sender address. The list goes on and on.
I ran the same mail system on an 8086 running DOS, of all things, back in '88. And somewhere in the [3rd] world someone is still running it on similar hardware.
On the other hand, email is flexible enough to let you bolt any number of [partial] fixes onto it - and many have done so. But you can't expect all the bolted on stuff to work on that 8086, far away. Nor can you get everyone to adapt a new [revised] email system.
email isn't perfect, and there are a few things I would sure like to see it do much better (at all). But is really is quite good, and nearly impossible to change.
Why do you guys always rush to the defense of email. It's a crappy system.
Email is a great system with a few flaws. Gauranteed delivery is not one of them.
Virtually all email programs will let you request a recieved receipt, and that's about as good as you're going to get. You could probably also find an addon that will notify you by sending an image or other HTML element that tracks back to a server that will send you a reciept. I'm sure someone will sell you that solution, too (or give it to you free if you look for it).
But the recipient has no obligation to implement either of those, and in some cases can not.
The bottom line is that if you want guaranteed delivery, email probably will never be your solution.
I do wonder why you sound so bitter about it, though. Is there some specific problem you've been having? My email always does get delivered, and in the odd cases it does not, I get a bounce.
Wow. All Java is used for these days is web apps? I beg to differ.
Go ahead and differ. And that's the point: you do differ. The vast majority of computer users do not use java on a daily basis, except (possibly) through the web. The IDE *I* use is written in Java. As is the Code Editor. I program in Java for a living. Like I said: Java is an OK language.
But my girlfriend uses java virtually never. Nor do my parents. Nor does my sister. Except for maybe some webapps, here and there. My father, who is an EE, has been curious about Java off and on - but the projects he is working on are being writtne in C++ (or VC++? Whatever - some crap).
If some company that didn't suck (like SUN) at doing APIs had had control over Java, I imagine we'd all be using jOffice - or at least 3% of us would. And we'd browse using jWeb. Etc.
Sounds like you're working on some cool projects. I wrote an XMLRPC server with a swing client for a previous gig. It worked pretty well, though the client was clunky, hard to write, and slow. Almost all of that was my fault, I'm certain - I've been spoiled with OpenStep/Cocoa GUI tools since the late 80's, and Java GUI APIs blow chunks. But the person who took over the client side used some C++ library, not Java. That was not my fault - for that I blame SUN, and their generally crappy APIs.
Which is why I say that SUN failed Java, and that Java has mostly been a failure as a result.
I don't know what planet you are on, but on mine Java is one of the most successful and widely used development languages of all time.
My planet is the one where C is still the most successful and widely used. It is the one where Java failed utterly in the web client space, despite having a tremendous lead. It is the one where Java loses ground to PHP, python, and now Ruby, by the hour. It is the one where java has failed on the desktop nearly completely.
Java is an OK language; there's not much wrong with it. I code in it for a living. I use SUNs APIs nearly not at all, because they are so bad.
If that is 'failing', I would be interested in your definition of 'succeeding'.
Succeeding would be no need for javascript; no need for AJAX; applets everywhere. Succeeding would be [more than] one office suite in pure java. Succeeding would be web applications that were easy enough and powerful enough to write that there wouldn't be any/much need for php, python, and the like.
In short, success may have been someone at the helm that could develop good, usable OO APIs. And a decent UI interface/implementation. SUN failed Java.
Slashdot Mirror
I've taken knoppix for a spin, and was actually more impressed with it than with Ubuntu. Very clean system that was designed to do one thing, and do it well - and it seems to be successful at doing so.
It is a common misconception that the most valuable thing a project can have is users. In fact it is developers with time
The most valuable thing a commercial project can have is users. The most valuable thing an opensource project can have is a good leader. And by that I mean someone who knows what the software should do, and who knows how to listen to users telling her how it should do it, and then say no to developers who fail to do what the users want (that is also in scope/line with the project).
Most developers suck at coding.
Most developers that don't suck at coding suck at UI (I claim to fall into this camp).
The developer that is good at both is a rare find. But you really just need someone at the top who can direct decent coders to do the right thing - and that person does NOT need to be a coder.
Ubuntu is the first large scale attempt to build a desktop Linux. I'm using it nearly as my main platform since the october 2004 release (first one) and improvments are remarkable.
OK, now you're just talking crap. Redhat wasn't/isn't an attempt to build desktop linux?
I'm not calling you a liar, but, really, your experience is atypical these days.
:-)
Thanks!
Getting the graphics to work is just the first big hurdle. Then there's "everything else I want to do." While many things are easy, nothing is pleasant. My sister (who is sharp, but not a geek) can do just about anything she wants with a mac. Every once in a while I have to walk her through something, but it's 2-3 times a year. With Linux, I have to walk ME through doing all sorts of things that should just be easy.
In the vein of the graphics issue: I can change my resolution and bit depth on a mac in a few seconds. Neither could I find out how do to it (short of editing the X11 config file), nor could I find help on the system, or a reference online how to do it. Folks, that's just an example - don't tell me it's easy, and here's how; put the damn docs in the system and make it easy to find.
I installed ubuntu on a PC a couple of months ago. It took me about a day to get the graphics system to work on the machine (X11 - text was fine). And by work, I mean "display at all." I never got the res out of it that I wanted. And once I had some graphics up, I tried to do anything else, and was misserable.
.8 and .9 days; I stuck with NeXTSTEP. I revisited back in the late 90's; I stuck with OpenStep. I revisited it around 2000, when MacOS was very much in transition; I stuck with OpenStep and/on Windows. (though my servers were FreeBSD during the 90's and early oughts') And now I've taken a look in '06; I'm still going to stick with OSX (which is now my server).
I cut my teeth on linux back in the
It's not there yet. Everything I do on *nix other than OSX feels like pulling teeth. I'll continue to use this expensive OS ($600 machines and $100 OS upgrades every 2 years) for some time, I guess. And while I do, I'll continue to submit bugs and toss a line or 2 of code at various Open Source code/systems I use.
I have stuff to do, and I don't care to muss with the kernel and video drivers. If you don't have stuff to do, or you DO want to muss with kernels/vid drivers - go for some flavor if linux.
This is currently modded funny, but I'm not sure why.
So basically 99.9% of users online today.
You're missing at least one 9, I figure. If there are a billion folks [more or less] online...
1,000,000,000; 1 in 1000 would mean that 1,000,000 people online have more than a notion of how public-key cryptography works.
I guess I could believe that there are 10K or more, but I certainly think there are fewer than 100K.
I now think that the best solution is to get the regulating bodies out of the way so that competition can be employed. As soon as there's a competitive marketplace for last mile high speed connectivity, if the cableco restricts my access to vonage, there's lots of other choices. They'll lose market share and the benefits of network neutrality will be achieved without all of the heavy handed (and ineffective) government oversite.
I bet you don't live in a rural area, do ya?
Now I don't know what the regulations are on phone companies, but I can assure you: there is not enough profit to motivate these companies to lay fiber to every house in the country. There is problably plenty of profit to be had for say 50% of the homes - the ones in cities and large towns (I'm pulling all these numbers out of my ass, folks). But the folks in these less urban, small towns, and downright rural places need Water, Power, and Connectivity.
There is no way they're going to get a phone line unless it's required/regulated, because it just doesn't make financial sense to run water/power/phone line to some po-dunk town of 30 a hundred miles from anything. This is where capitalism falls down and regulation has to step in.
And that's probably a great arguement for non-neutrality. If that po-dunk town is on it's own subnet, make google and all the other big media providers pony up for the 2nd to last 100 miles these 30 folks need for their connectivity, thus distributing the cost to the big data providers. The only problem is that the network companies are also data providers, and can cut themselves a break.
If the bandwidth providers had never been allowed to also be content providers, I think this would be a non-issue.
Of course, Apple didn't have a monopoly to risk losing when it took this course of action...
No, they had a small and diminishing market share they risked alienating, in the face of free competitors and a monopoly.
And they still managed.
I've been playing WoW on my BookPro for .. as long as I've had the pro. I've hit MC with a full 40man, and it ran just fine. I find it hard to believe that the iMac performs worse. Does it really?
[there is some crossover, but] All the people paying for office are businesses - they can't afford their office to be down (through network problems or google problems).
Dunno where you work, but when the 'net connection at my job is down, no work gets done. This is usually because our connection to the internet is only as good as our intranet (which is to say, if I don't have connection to the 'net, I can't hit the fileserver, either). But also because if the 'net connection is down, email has stopped.
May as well go home.
It's true, and leaves me a little miffed, but I have a 15" machine. And if I had to choose now, it turns out I'd still buy the 15" machine.
The only thing that was a surprise is how fast the MacBooks are [compared with the Pros].
Still others seem to scream bloody murder when a new computer is released and it's faster than the one they [just] bought. Now there's a shocker...
I don't get it. Which is the monkey, and which is the prophet? What does either have to do with "the world we have now"?
Built on top of Ruby, which is itself a pretty thin simplification wrapper over C++
If you'd said Java, I'd have let it slide. If you'd said Objective-C, I'd have maybe even agreed, but C++? Naw.
Introspection. Non-polymorphic. Dynamic method forwarding.
The contents of your phone calls are your business.
So its not like this sort of question hasn't come up before. It has, and SCOTUS has ruled on it, and they ruled that our telephone calls are our own personal effects in light of the 4th ammendment, even if a third party is involved with making those calls.
That ruling seems to me to concern itself with the contents of the calls, not the calls themselves.
I think that this kind of thing (recording associations, after all) has more to do with the first amendment.
I do think it was wrong of the government to ask, but it was clearly wrong for the phone companies to roll over.
n d-phone.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=eb85158452eae 01a&hp&ex=1147492800&partner=homepage), but what I really meant by wrong was "lame of them to turn over the records without any kind of warrant, and I would seriously consider using QWEST if I had a choice because they seem less lame on this one."
Not at all...look in your terms of service or customer agreement with your phone company. I guarantee you there are provisions in there for them turning over your records to law enforcement. The real question is when can they do that and under what conditions...
Which is what I meant by "wrong". QWEST seems to think it was illegal (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/washington/12c
I was going to say the same kinda thing, except I was going to ask which liberty we're giving up.
For those that say "search and siezure", your phone calls are already someone else's business (the phone companies). And most of them gave up your info willingly. I'm afraid in this one, it is the phone companies you should be mad at, not the government.
I do think it was wrong of the government to ask, but it was clearly wrong for the phone companies to roll over.
This is one of the things SPF (http://www.openspf.org/) is meant to end - false positives. One of the problems with SMTP is that you can't build up a reputation by domain because anyone can claim to be you.
If a verified sender is sending [lots of] unwanted email, they are a spammer and should be blacklisted. Otherwise, verified senders should probably be trusted.
Not to mention the problems that will continue to haunt wireless for some time.
"What problems?" you might ask. Well, let us start with security. While the methods and keys used to lock wireless networks continue to grow stronger, it is still easier to get onto a wireless network then it is to sneak into someone's apartment and plug into their network like you would have to do with a physical connection.
I call BS. I think you are overestimating the value of physical security, and underestimating the robustness of wireless security. I bet it would take a lot less time for any somewhat skilled cat burglar to break into someone's home and connect to their LAN than it would for a skilled hacker to connect to any reasonably secured wireless.
There is also the interference concern.
OK, I'll buy that.
I do not think we are going to see an end to wired networks just yet.
You may not, but I may. If I can get 100Mbs consistent throughput, I don't see any reason to server NFS over cable. I don't need to stream from my computer to my low-def TV, sooo... I'm thinking as of the next rev of Apple's airport systems, cables are gonna be history.
I find the attitude of the OSS community depressing about this subject. They are too close to the technology and can't see the flaws in it.
email is a very old and very entrenched system. The spec for it is really rather good. Your mail should always be delivered. If it isn't, you should always get get a bounce message.
But it is impossible to make everyone follow all the rules.
It's just like the regular mail system. Very very simple. Everyone agrees that mail should be sent, and should be delivered or returned - but that isn't how it always works out. The faults in the regular mail system are often similar to the faults in email: the local postmaster ignores/drops mail, the local postman discards the mail, there is a disaster that destroys mail in process, the destination address is scrambled/old/no longer valid - and so is the sender address. The list goes on and on.
I ran the same mail system on an 8086 running DOS, of all things, back in '88. And somewhere in the [3rd] world someone is still running it on similar hardware.
On the other hand, email is flexible enough to let you bolt any number of [partial] fixes onto it - and many have done so. But you can't expect all the bolted on stuff to work on that 8086, far away. Nor can you get everyone to adapt a new [revised] email system.
email isn't perfect, and there are a few things I would sure like to see it do much better (at all). But is really is quite good, and nearly impossible to change.
Why do you guys always rush to the defense of email. It's a crappy system.
Email is a great system with a few flaws. Gauranteed delivery is not one of them.
Virtually all email programs will let you request a recieved receipt, and that's about as good as you're going to get. You could probably also find an addon that will notify you by sending an image or other HTML element that tracks back to a server that will send you a reciept. I'm sure someone will sell you that solution, too (or give it to you free if you look for it).
But the recipient has no obligation to implement either of those, and in some cases can not.
The bottom line is that if you want guaranteed delivery, email probably will never be your solution.
I do wonder why you sound so bitter about it, though. Is there some specific problem you've been having? My email always does get delivered, and in the odd cases it does not, I get a bounce.
Wow. All Java is used for these days is web apps? I beg to differ.
Go ahead and differ. And that's the point: you do differ. The vast majority of computer users do not use java on a daily basis, except (possibly) through the web. The IDE *I* use is written in Java. As is the Code Editor. I program in Java for a living. Like I said: Java is an OK language.
But my girlfriend uses java virtually never. Nor do my parents. Nor does my sister. Except for maybe some webapps, here and there. My father, who is an EE, has been curious about Java off and on - but the projects he is working on are being writtne in C++ (or VC++? Whatever - some crap).
If some company that didn't suck (like SUN) at doing APIs had had control over Java, I imagine we'd all be using jOffice - or at least 3% of us would. And we'd browse using jWeb. Etc.
Sounds like you're working on some cool projects. I wrote an XMLRPC server with a swing client for a previous gig. It worked pretty well, though the client was clunky, hard to write, and slow. Almost all of that was my fault, I'm certain - I've been spoiled with OpenStep/Cocoa GUI tools since the late 80's, and Java GUI APIs blow chunks. But the person who took over the client side used some C++ library, not Java. That was not my fault - for that I blame SUN, and their generally crappy APIs.
Which is why I say that SUN failed Java, and that Java has mostly been a failure as a result.
Java will never lose to Ruby / Python / PHP, at the least because Java is faster
I don't much believe in performance, and in the vanishingly small cases where it matters, any other language can dive into C callouts, anyway.
and allows fast multithreading programming on many processors/cores - which Python/Ruby don't allow
Ruby Threads - look familiar?
but PHP is too specialized, and I am doubt very much that it is substantial threat to Java.
Not sure what you mean "is too specialized" - virtually all java is used for these days are web apps. Which is php's bread and butter.
I don't know what planet you are on, but on mine Java is one of the most successful and widely used development languages of all time.
My planet is the one where C is still the most successful and widely used. It is the one where Java failed utterly in the web client space, despite having a tremendous lead. It is the one where Java loses ground to PHP, python, and now Ruby, by the hour. It is the one where java has failed on the desktop nearly completely.
Java is an OK language; there's not much wrong with it. I code in it for a living. I use SUNs APIs nearly not at all, because they are so bad.
If that is 'failing', I would be interested in your definition of 'succeeding'.
Succeeding would be no need for javascript; no need for AJAX; applets everywhere. Succeeding would be [more than] one office suite in pure java. Succeeding would be web applications that were easy enough and powerful enough to write that there wouldn't be any/much need for php, python, and the like.
In short, success may have been someone at the helm that could develop good, usable OO APIs. And a decent UI interface/implementation. SUN failed Java.