OpenOffice? StarOffice? Please. I'm not minimizing the great work the folks on these projects have done, but they are much more buggy products. When it comes to the simple stuff, they work just fine, but just like Office 2000, they crash and burn on the complex stuff.
Really? I couldn't tell by reading the first part of your comment.
And the idiots who enact these damned laws are the very same fools who claim to have so much "faith-in-god" they get upset when a court tells them they can't shove a religiously tainted pledge down my throat. Sounds to me like a bunch of unbelievers trying to save themselves from their own just rewards.
If it's your job (and it sounds like it is) to fix the computers in your workplace, then what are you complaining about? Do the payroll people complain when they have to print out checks *every single week*? No, because IT'S THEIR JOB.
A culture? A CULTURE?! It's software. It may even be a group of like-minded individuals, but it certainly isn't a *culture*.
In windows, when a user tries to connect to the internet for the first time, it notices that their network isn't set up and runs them through a wizard which explains what is going on as it is done. What is so bad with combining documentation with the program like that? Why do Linux folks hate wizards? They work!
One of the things that Windows is really *GOOD* at is providing drivers that work for all kinds of gaming hardware: joysticks, video cards, etc. And providing an interface to fix problems with said hardware to get games working. Unless you can come up with some kick-ass auto-detection for Linux drivers and an interface for upgrading drivers for joe-user's crazy-old-joystick, you're not going to beat the windows folks. Doing this in itself would take quite a bit of a development effort. Not something that is going to happen when game production budgets are as tight as they are.
What I want to know is why people continue to buy cars of different colors! A red paint job doesn't make your car any faster. I did a real-life test of this and found out that blue cars actually go faster.
And why do they call those stripes people put on their car, "racing stripes"? It's not like it makes your car a good racing car. Duh! People are so stupid to think that putting stripes on your car makes it go faster.
And while I'm on it, why do so-called "still-life" painters continue to try to create apples and pottery with paint on canvas? It doesn't work folks! I tried to eat an apple in a painting once at the museum and they tried to throw me out because I was exposing their lies!
Please note: At the moment all downloadable software and the source code is only available at the intranet site of IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH. As soon as it will be accessible on the internet for all, I will mention it at this site.
Except that you can't participate unless you're on their internal network.
Everytime I hear about streaming media again, I think back to the mbone. Why give a stream to every single user when you can intelligently stream media using the very thing that makes the internet what it is, it's ability to route packets to their destination? Why should I have to send out 1000 copies of the *same damn thing* over my wire when I could just send one copy and let the routers send copies to subnets that are going to use it?
I am tired of hearing about the digital divide as if it is something new that we need to deal with. Schools in poorer neighborhoods have *always* had less money than those in rich neighborhoods...duh. It's always going to be that way. Rich parents are going to spend more money on their schools, either through the system or outside of it via donations and such. The problem isn't just with computers. It's with funding in general. The fact that lack of funding keeps computers out of classroom is not a new problem, it's the same problem that we have always had; that schools don't have enough money to get the resources that they need, whether it be computers, new textbooks, or crayons.
I personally like to call this the Christian management style. Now don't flame me because I brought religion into this, I didn't. *One* of the things that Christ taught was that the master is the servant of the served. This is why he washed the feet of his apostles. A good leader is there to help the group to get their job done, not to "be in charge". That's called a power trip. While *occasionally* this requires kicking one of the team members in behind so that all do not suffer, most of the time this means that the leader of the group is there to serve the team.
But if our schools and communities are leaving major portions of our country's underpriviledged or underserved children unprepared for the work force and for college, then they are not performing the service for which they are intended, and need to work hard in developing new curriculum using computers.
Did you even read what this guy was trying to say? He was saying that even in those schools that have laptops for every student, they aren't learning anything even preparing for the job market. Just putting computers in the classroom doesn't do anything. You have to let the students use them and teach them to do things with them.
The problem is that most teachers don't have any idea of how to use a computer other than for making up tests and presentations. But it's not just a problem with teachers. They are hardly to blame. It's a problem with the population at large as well. There is only a small subset of the population that even understands the *concept* of programming. Why do think that most people never even try to even record macros in their word processor, let alone try to edit it? It isn't like it is inherently difficult. Programming, at least at a beginning level is quite straightforward and simple to understand. It should be taught at the beginning levels of education! Computers have gotten rid of the need for many of the repetitive tasks that we do in life, especially in schools. Why not take advantage of the opportunity and teach them a little programming?
While, as a software developer, I benefit if the "cult of the programmer" myth continues, but the truth is that even in my job, the people I work for still don't understand how a programmer can be useful. I always seem to be finding people spending hours doing repetetive tasks uselessly. I write a macro/script/program and have it done in half the time, and now we have a program that can do it from now on! The problem is that if people have has *some* education in programming, they will at least know when to go to a programmer to get some help.
First of all, how the hell am I supposed to back it up? Conduct a survey?
Anyway, perhaps you aren't aware of the numerous campaigns against different stores through the years (Circle-K, KMart, etc.) to get them to take offensive magazines off the shelf. Most of them are successful! Most stores don't want to bring on the wrath and bad publicity of millions of family-values-oriented americans. And why do you ask, is it such bad publicity? Because most people don't want offensive (however you define the term is unimportant, you know what I mean) magazines in the stores that they shop at. And how do I know that this is true for most or many people? Because if it wasn't true, and there weren't that many people who cared, then it wouldn't be bad publicity!
I think Walmart has come to a good comprimise. They don't outright ban those magazines, but they don't allow their publishers to put covers, which we are all forced to see, in the stores that a large group of people will be offended by.
What was implied however, was that somehow the group of walmart shoppers opposed to offensive magazine covers, were actually a small insignificant minority who were forcing their will upon the customers who find walmart "the only game in town". The problem is that most people who shop at walmart *do* want covers to not be offensive and don't mind if the power of walmart can do that for them. Many folks who feel as I do feel powerless against a corporate america intent on feeding popular culture instead of being responsible corporate citizens, and we welcome the chance for a group/company who represents our feelings/ideals large enough to make a difference.
Maybe the family-owned alternatives should have learned to compete in a free market. Seriously though, at what point does a small "good" store (that you would support) become a large "evil" store? When it puts another store out of business? Even small stores put other small stores out of business in the same way that Walmart destroyed the competition: location, price, convenience, etc. The reason that Walmart is so popular is because of its pentration into rural areas where your "family-owned alternatives" used to rule. These "family-owned alternatives" made the problem of rural poverty even worse because of their higher prices and lack of selection. Walmart offered people in rural areas lower prices and the selection of urban areas. Now people in Nowhere, Utah can buy a TV for the same price that people in the big city do. Why is that a bad thing?
Walmart seems to think that you are incapable of even "viewing" a potentially controversial cover and making a decision whether or not to buy it - they make the choice for you!
No they didn't. They may make the individual decisions on what covers to accept and reject now, but that decision was made and foisted upon Walmart by their customers, at least those customers vocal enough to demand that inappropriate magazine covers be changed or removed from the shelf. Either they did it directly to Walmart or it was just threatened by the leader of a family rights organization, but the threat of a boycott from that type of group was sufficient to make Walmart censor magazine covers. Apparantly, the threat of boycott from the other side wasn't enough to convince them. Basically, Walmart is listening to their customers, an IMPORTANT part of a free market. Are you saying that they shouldn't respond to the threat of a boycott?
And pardon me for wanting my sons to learn about sex from their *parents*, and not from the popular culture which has hugely warped view of the entire thing. When they are old enough to understand sex from an *educated* point of view, then I think they are old enough to understand that much of the popular view of it is backward and perverted.
You know, it's not really a difficult thing to understand. Most people who have ever used a computer will be able to tell you the difference between a Mac and PC. The Mac can't run regular software. You have to get *special* Mac software. It's the same deal with Linux, except a lot of the stuff is free.
See? Now how hard was that to explain? The problem with the slashdot community is that they think that their knowledge is so above and beyond the rest of the world that there is no way that they will ever understand it. Oh please, we're not that smart.
Well, apparantly, the contents of the cover isn't so important to the publisher that they can't at least stick an extra page on the front to cover up the offending cover for issues sent to Walmart. Walmart isn't censoring the content of the magazine, which is really what the magazine is about anyway. Walmart isn't the one "not buying" the offensive covers, it's the shoppers, the family-values crowd. They aren't as small a minority as you might think. They are the 15% who don't buy magazines (TIME, Rolling Stone, whatever) that offend them.
(Please, Rolling Stone? It may be mainstream but I wouldn't let my hormone-ridden sons have it.)
Except that you don't actually have to do that. At the top are a few folks who are trusted by the root. kernel, kde, xfree86, gnome, etc. Each entity gets a certificate that it uses only for it's "products". Now if other people, like the developers of gnometris want to get their stuff out on the network, then they ask for a cert from the gnome folks (they don't have to but it would make more sense to ask them than to ask the kde folks). Since the gnome folks know and trust the gnometris folks, they give them a cert, but it isn't a 1st level cert, it's a 2nd level cert, and when you try to download gnometris from the OCN, then before you approve the download, you take a look at the line of authority to see if you trust everyone on that list.
Computers crash all by themselves. It is possible to write software and not too difficult to write software that doesn't crash. In its most extreme state, it's called formal verification.
I guess my point is that in all Linux Distros, there are too many options up front. Asking the user, "Which of these 400000 packages do you want to install?". The average user just starting with Linux is going to say, "Can't I do this later? I just want to install Linux and play with it." These aren't users like your grandma, those user-types are harder to deal with. These are semi-knowledgeable users. They've probably only ever used windows, but aren't stupid. They know about things like partitions, formatting, etc. They know what Linux is generally but just want to try to get started with it.
I know, I was one of these users. I was told that Debian was the distro for those who knew UNIX (I was a Solaris admin many moons ago) somewhat but wanted to get into Linux full force.
I was overwhelmed and confused by the number of packages. I just wanted to hit the "default desktop system" button and get started. But no, I had to select which of 4 thousand packages I wanted to install. Most of which didn't really need to be installed at the time and could've easily be added later.
Well, I guess the reason that the debian folks don't include alternate installers isn't very obvious. I would not be currently considering moving to suse if they did. I assumed that most folks know that debian doesn't include these installers. That is what was obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a better solution?
OpenOffice? StarOffice? Please. I'm not minimizing the great work the folks on these projects have done, but they are much more buggy products. When it comes to the simple stuff, they work just fine, but just like Office 2000, they crash and burn on the complex stuff.
And I'm an atheist.
Really? I couldn't tell by reading the first part of your comment.
And the idiots who enact these damned laws are the very same fools who claim to have so much "faith-in-god" they get upset when a court tells them they can't shove a religiously tainted pledge down my throat. Sounds to me like a bunch of unbelievers trying to save themselves from their own just rewards.
If it's your job (and it sounds like it is) to fix the computers in your workplace, then what are you complaining about? Do the payroll people complain when they have to print out checks *every single week*? No, because IT'S THEIR JOB.
A culture? A CULTURE?! It's software. It may even be a group of like-minded individuals, but it certainly isn't a *culture*.
In windows, when a user tries to connect to the internet for the first time, it notices that their network isn't set up and runs them through a wizard which explains what is going on as it is done. What is so bad with combining documentation with the program like that? Why do Linux folks hate wizards? They work!
One of the things that Windows is really *GOOD* at is providing drivers that work for all kinds of gaming hardware: joysticks, video cards, etc. And providing an interface to fix problems with said hardware to get games working. Unless you can come up with some kick-ass auto-detection for Linux drivers and an interface for upgrading drivers for joe-user's crazy-old-joystick, you're not going to beat the windows folks. Doing this in itself would take quite a bit of a development effort. Not something that is going to happen when game production budgets are as tight as they are.
What I want to know is why people continue to buy cars of different colors! A red paint job doesn't make your car any faster. I did a real-life test of this and found out that blue cars actually go faster.
And why do they call those stripes people put on their car, "racing stripes"? It's not like it makes your car a good racing car. Duh! People are so stupid to think that putting stripes on your car makes it go faster.
And while I'm on it, why do so-called "still-life" painters continue to try to create apples and pottery with paint on canvas? It doesn't work folks! I tried to eat an apple in a painting once at the museum and they tried to throw me out because I was exposing their lies!
He wants to see one made out of LEGO, bonehead.
Please note: At the moment all downloadable software and the source code is only available at the intranet site of IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH. As soon as it will be accessible on the internet for all, I will mention it at this site.
Except that you can't participate unless you're on their internal network.
The overhead with multicast would be considerably prohibitave.
Why?
Everytime I hear about streaming media again, I think back to the mbone. Why give a stream to every single user when you can intelligently stream media using the very thing that makes the internet what it is, it's ability to route packets to their destination? Why should I have to send out 1000 copies of the *same damn thing* over my wire when I could just send one copy and let the routers send copies to subnets that are going to use it?
Whatever happened to the mbone!?!?!?!?
I am tired of hearing about the digital divide as if it is something new that we need to deal with. Schools in poorer neighborhoods have *always* had less money than those in rich neighborhoods...duh. It's always going to be that way. Rich parents are going to spend more money on their schools, either through the system or outside of it via donations and such. The problem isn't just with computers. It's with funding in general. The fact that lack of funding keeps computers out of classroom is not a new problem, it's the same problem that we have always had; that schools don't have enough money to get the resources that they need, whether it be computers, new textbooks, or crayons.
I personally like to call this the Christian management style. Now don't flame me because I brought religion into this, I didn't. *One* of the things that Christ taught was that the master is the servant of the served. This is why he washed the feet of his apostles. A good leader is there to help the group to get their job done, not to "be in charge". That's called a power trip. While *occasionally* this requires kicking one of the team members in behind so that all do not suffer, most of the time this means that the leader of the group is there to serve the team.
But if our schools and communities are leaving major portions of our country's underpriviledged or underserved children unprepared for the work force and for college, then they are not performing the service for which they are intended, and need to work hard in developing new curriculum using computers.
Did you even read what this guy was trying to say? He was saying that even in those schools that have laptops for every student, they aren't learning anything even preparing for the job market. Just putting computers in the classroom doesn't do anything. You have to let the students use them and teach them to do things with them.
The problem is that most teachers don't have any idea of how to use a computer other than for making up tests and presentations. But it's not just a problem with teachers. They are hardly to blame. It's a problem with the population at large as well. There is only a small subset of the population that even understands the *concept* of programming. Why do think that most people never even try to even record macros in their word processor, let alone try to edit it? It isn't like it is inherently difficult. Programming, at least at a beginning level is quite straightforward and simple to understand. It should be taught at the beginning levels of education! Computers have gotten rid of the need for many of the repetitive tasks that we do in life, especially in schools. Why not take advantage of the opportunity and teach them a little programming?
While, as a software developer, I benefit if the "cult of the programmer" myth continues, but the truth is that even in my job, the people I work for still don't understand how a programmer can be useful. I always seem to be finding people spending hours doing repetetive tasks uselessly. I write a macro/script/program and have it done in half the time, and now we have a program that can do it from now on! The problem is that if people have has *some* education in programming, they will at least know when to go to a programmer to get some help.
First of all, how the hell am I supposed to back it up? Conduct a survey?
Anyway, perhaps you aren't aware of the numerous campaigns against different stores through the years (Circle-K, KMart, etc.) to get them to take offensive magazines off the shelf. Most of them are successful! Most stores don't want to bring on the wrath and bad publicity of millions of family-values-oriented americans. And why do you ask, is it such bad publicity? Because most people don't want offensive (however you define the term is unimportant, you know what I mean) magazines in the stores that they shop at. And how do I know that this is true for most or many people? Because if it wasn't true, and there weren't that many people who cared, then it wouldn't be bad publicity!
I think Walmart has come to a good comprimise. They don't outright ban those magazines, but they don't allow their publishers to put covers, which we are all forced to see, in the stores that a large group of people will be offended by.
What was implied however, was that somehow the group of walmart shoppers opposed to offensive magazine covers, were actually a small insignificant minority who were forcing their will upon the customers who find walmart "the only game in town". The problem is that most people who shop at walmart *do* want covers to not be offensive and don't mind if the power of walmart can do that for them. Many folks who feel as I do feel powerless against a corporate america intent on feeding popular culture instead of being responsible corporate citizens, and we welcome the chance for a group/company who represents our feelings/ideals large enough to make a difference.
Maybe the family-owned alternatives should have learned to compete in a free market. Seriously though, at what point does a small "good" store (that you would support) become a large "evil" store? When it puts another store out of business? Even small stores put other small stores out of business in the same way that Walmart destroyed the competition: location, price, convenience, etc. The reason that Walmart is so popular is because of its pentration into rural areas where your "family-owned alternatives" used to rule. These "family-owned alternatives" made the problem of rural poverty even worse because of their higher prices and lack of selection. Walmart offered people in rural areas lower prices and the selection of urban areas. Now people in Nowhere, Utah can buy a TV for the same price that people in the big city do. Why is that a bad thing?
Walmart seems to think that you are incapable of even "viewing" a potentially controversial cover and making a decision whether or not to buy it - they make the choice for you!
No they didn't. They may make the individual decisions on what covers to accept and reject now, but that decision was made and foisted upon Walmart by their customers, at least those customers vocal enough to demand that inappropriate magazine covers be changed or removed from the shelf. Either they did it directly to Walmart or it was just threatened by the leader of a family rights organization, but the threat of a boycott from that type of group was sufficient to make Walmart censor magazine covers. Apparantly, the threat of boycott from the other side wasn't enough to convince them. Basically, Walmart is listening to their customers, an IMPORTANT part of a free market. Are you saying that they shouldn't respond to the threat of a boycott?
And pardon me for wanting my sons to learn about sex from their *parents*, and not from the popular culture which has hugely warped view of the entire thing. When they are old enough to understand sex from an *educated* point of view, then I think they are old enough to understand that much of the popular view of it is backward and perverted.
You know, it's not really a difficult thing to understand. Most people who have ever used a computer will be able to tell you the difference between a Mac and PC. The Mac can't run regular software. You have to get *special* Mac software. It's the same deal with Linux, except a lot of the stuff is free.
See? Now how hard was that to explain? The problem with the slashdot community is that they think that their knowledge is so above and beyond the rest of the world that there is no way that they will ever understand it. Oh please, we're not that smart.
Well, apparantly, the contents of the cover isn't so important to the publisher that they can't at least stick an extra page on the front to cover up the offending cover for issues sent to Walmart. Walmart isn't censoring the content of the magazine, which is really what the magazine is about anyway. Walmart isn't the one "not buying" the offensive covers, it's the shoppers, the family-values crowd. They aren't as small a minority as you might think. They are the 15% who don't buy magazines (TIME, Rolling Stone, whatever) that offend them.
(Please, Rolling Stone? It may be mainstream but I wouldn't let my hormone-ridden sons have it.)
Who the hell cares if the toolkit works in Linux? All I need is a compiler, which I'm sure will be released for Linux.
Except that you don't actually have to do that. At the top are a few folks who are trusted by the root. kernel, kde, xfree86, gnome, etc. Each entity gets a certificate that it uses only for it's "products". Now if other people, like the developers of gnometris want to get their stuff out on the network, then they ask for a cert from the gnome folks (they don't have to but it would make more sense to ask them than to ask the kde folks). Since the gnome folks know and trust the gnometris folks, they give them a cert, but it isn't a 1st level cert, it's a 2nd level cert, and when you try to download gnometris from the OCN, then before you approve the download, you take a look at the line of authority to see if you trust everyone on that list.
Maybe you should read the site. It has a way of getting around the "is my tv on or off problem"
Automobiles don't crash, people crash them.
Computers crash all by themselves. It is possible to write software and not too difficult to write software that doesn't crash. In its most extreme state, it's called formal verification.
I guess my point is that in all Linux Distros, there are too many options up front. Asking the user, "Which of these 400000 packages do you want to install?". The average user just starting with Linux is going to say, "Can't I do this later? I just want to install Linux and play with it." These aren't users like your grandma, those user-types are harder to deal with. These are semi-knowledgeable users. They've probably only ever used windows, but aren't stupid. They know about things like partitions, formatting, etc. They know what Linux is generally but just want to try to get started with it.
I know, I was one of these users. I was told that Debian was the distro for those who knew UNIX (I was a Solaris admin many moons ago) somewhat but wanted to get into Linux full force.
I was overwhelmed and confused by the number of packages. I just wanted to hit the "default desktop system" button and get started. But no, I had to select which of 4 thousand packages I wanted to install. Most of which didn't really need to be installed at the time and could've easily be added later.
Well, I guess the reason that the debian folks don't include alternate installers isn't very obvious. I would not be currently considering moving to suse if they did. I assumed that most folks know that debian doesn't include these installers. That is what was obvious.