Actually, you point out one major problem with RPM's. Hence why I'm looking at non-RPM distros
This is a common misconception - The problem does not lie inherantly with RPM, rather you just need a wrapper around it. You'd have the same problems if you tried to use debs directly (rather than using apt instead).
If you use, urpmi, apt-rpm, up2date or any of the other systems out there, rpms aren't any different from any other distros out there.
KDE has, or at least is gaining a Kiosk-mode, which allows you to lock down the ability, for example, to change the wallpaper background, or the icons on the panel, control panel and other "dangerous" areas when putting a computer in a public place.
I haven't checked on it's progress but that is probably the kind of area that you are looking for.
you might not use your 3d graphics card to capture video, but if you wanted to edit video, it means you can't use your matrox to hardware accelerate 3d wipes/transitions/color transformations. Which is a bit of a shame really. Equivalent to having one sitting in your machine but having to play Doom3 through a software renderer in the frustrating stakes.
Of course if your editing video on the cheap, you probably go for something slightly more dedicated like the Matrox RT2500 anyway, which is not that much more expensive.
Interesting, I take the exact opposite view. For me, computing is substantial, whilst the movie industry is not. Ok, if I write some software for a company, it might not make the headlines, and it might not be that noticable, but it is there, and working daily to make peoples lives just slightly more bearable. On the other hand, A movie gets made, and after a couple of years (it's lucky if it lasts that long) it wallows into obscurity, or ends up only being shown at christmas.
Just think about the positive impact compuer jobs hae the next time, on a friday night when the banks are shut and your low on money, you walk up to the hole-in-the-wall, check you balance and draw some money out to go and enjoy yourself with. How often have you done this? And how often have you watched Casablanca?
This isn't advocacy against the movie industry - entertainment needs a constant influx of new material for it to stay fresh, and it is true that there are some just-as-insubstantial jobs in the computer industry (such as the games market).
Unless you count letting crappy software crash the OS as an OS problem.
Well crappy software crashing the OS is an OS problem. If you mean crappy drivers crashing the OS, then that would be different.
However, I have easily crashed Windows 9x > 30 times a day. It's very easy - just try and debug an application with a particularly type of bad pointer reference in it which you accidentally create every so often. Your computer is almost guaranteed to crash in less than 10 minutes of running the debugger.
This is the one area with open source which I am suprised has not been exploited earlier, and it's a problem I'm not sure how can be avoided.
We see that the "many eyes" on open source seems to work pretty damn quickly : but the question is, how much damage could someone do in the time it takes for people to notice? Most software needs to be installed as root, and most people blindly install software without checking the make files to see what they do. Because it is run as root, you are leaving your machine wide open to anything the trojan wants to do.
yes | rm -r /
The trouble is, a normal virus checker wouldn't be any use against this kind of trojan as most damage is caused before the trojan is noticed.
Has anyone else thought about ways to solve this problem?
You clearly haven't understood what I've written. My argument is precisely that all developers should be able to beneift from my code if they want to.
GPL is designed to restrict who can benefit from what you're releasing. BSD doesn't.
The GPL does not actually restrict anyone benefitting from what you are releasing. Microsoft could use GPL'd code if they wanted to.
What the GPL does is to stop developers who like to take that code so nicely put there to help them do what they have to, and then decide that they do not want to let any other developers benefit from the code they wrote. The GPL is a way of saying "my house is your house, but only to people prepared to do the same for me (it doesn't matter if you live in a tent or a mansion)".
That's why some companies call the GPL a virus : because all they want to do is freeload off of the community. As a quick question : I'm sure Microsoft has said that they think the BSD license is great... so what products exactly have they released themselves licensed under it?
But if you are willing for absolutely anyone to use your code for any purpose and don't expect them to give you anything in return, go ahead and use the BSD license.
Thats for your post, but I still don't think that there any reason not to give a file a place in more than one location - a heirarchical tree and an alphabetic sort. I can't see it as being too expensive either - and you always exclude/var/tmp if you were worried about that kind of thing...
Heres a quick way to compare the functionality of the file system structures versus locates database.
let's say we want to search for documents on the computer.
File system:
find / | grep ".doc"
Locate database:
locate ".doc"
Compare the speed. Locate is incredibly quick, especially on large harddisks.
Now compare creating a new file in the file system:
echo "hello" > test
to updating the locate database so that it can find the file quickly:
updatedb
(I think you need to be root to perform this).
Here the filesystem wins easily.
Unfortunately, like most computer algorithms, there is no "perfect" solution to searching for and adding files : if you optimise for searching speed, then update speed suffers. If you optimise for access and updating, then searching suffers. You can optimise for both (by having both the file system and locate), but you have gained better performance at the penalty of storing the information twice and hence taking up more space and greater code complexity - you need the file system code and locate, rather than just one or the other.
Another way to look at it : why does your favourate computer textbook, or a world atlas contain an index? I mean, that's just duplication of information already on the map!
Of course, it's because it's easier to find the place you are looking for in the index, but the map is actually useful for figuring out how to get there...
Compare the act of defacing a web site with that of spray-painting a brick and mortar store front. Graffiti is basically the same, whether it's on a web site or in the real world. We don't need a new law that applies specifically to the former; instead, we should simply charge the kiddies with vandalism, just as we would if they did the latter.
This is actually a bad anaolgy. The correct analogy is to compare web site defacing with breaking into the store and then spray painting your name on all of the products. You would have a breaking and entering charge on top of the vandalism.
"Hey cool! We don't needs to bother compressing movies anymore, hey we don't even need to compress 'em to DVD quality! We can just send them at the full whopping 250mbps that they take up!"
"Oh, hang on, damn this 400mbps connections slow - hell I can only download one mega high-quality movie at a time ot it starts breaking up!"
I use konqueror with "open javascript popups" set to "ask me first". I haven't seen any popup ads in the last year, I don't see what people's problem are really.
Oh, until I use a machine with IE on it of course.
Question : Does windows XP install in 2.7 mouse clicks when installing on a P2 - 300mhz PC with 128 meg of ram, which has windows 98 on it taking up the entire disk (which I don't want to lose completely coz I still want to play all my old games on)?
And for the "expert/developer/server" installation (for us techies), does it also allow the installation of working webserver, C/C++ compiler, IDE development environment, office suite, website development apps, etc. in the same installation?
They will look at their tv and say "k, videogame network is channel 42, ill scope it out later." and change the channel.
2 days later.. "what happened to that videogame network.." *flips through channels* "here it is.. woah, coverage of that new ps2 release that everyone is drooling over!"
Ummm... either that or 2 days later.. "what happened to that videogame network.." *flips through channels* "here it is.. woah... still... pong... erm... ok... I... might... check... back... next... year...... maybe"
>No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that >functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list...
You obviously have no concept of Object Orientated coding, which is a shame because there is one important point to learn from it:
NEVER do something multiple times if you can do it once and forget about it.
Obviously, you have to do it once in the first place (you can't just "throw away the computer") but hey - the fact that your using a computer means you at least partly understand the concept - I mean, you don't use a seperate machine for email, web browsing text, web browsing flash, web browsing XML, web browsing pictures, web browsing hyperlinked sites, web browsing... (etc. etc. etc...) do you?
Put the functionality into flash ONCE, and forget about it. Rather than have EVERY SINGLE author who ever makes a flash movie have to WASTE HIS TIME putting it in.
Simple fact: The Gimp, like many other Open Source programs, has a poor user interface. Unlike Photoshop, which, despite its massive feature-set, is easy for an average user to pick up, the Gimp's functions are all buried in multiple levels of right-click menus. It also uses an annoying multi-window interface that clutters your taskbar horribly. The simple fact is that Photoshop is just a lot more pleasant and easy to use.
Once you realise that the right click menu in gimp is basically the same as the menu at the top of the screen in photoshop... you realise that having a menu that is instantly under the mouse when you want it is much better than a menu that you have to track from wherever you are on the screen to the menu, and then after selecting it, move the mouse all the way back to the menu. As far as menu selection is concerned, if the Gimp was a 5 mile fun run, photoshop is a marathon.
Incidentally, I am also highly annoyed that the last time I used photoshop, it _still_ had a half MDI/half gimp interface. It was hideous to use, for someone like me who first used the Gimp.
Likewise, MS Office is a much smoother experience than StarOffice (which, admittedly, has improved by leaps and bounds since its thrice-damned 5.0 incarnation).
I agree here, though I use KOffice out of preference at present.
Now, I'm behind Open Source 100%, but I don't get so caught up in my zealotry that I lose sight of ease of use issues. If an everyday user can't sit down and use an Open Source program just as easily as they could use a proprietary one, then they're not going to want to switch. It's as simple as that.
But do not get confused between "Which interface the user is used to" and "which interface is better". An everyday user could not sit down at photoshop and draw a straight line using the paint tool:-) (same goes for gimp) But once you get used to an interface, it all comes down to which is quickest. Having used both, IMO gimp is faster to use than photoshop, except for those areas where it lacks features (CMYK, etc.)
I've been running Windows for 12 years now. Never had a virus, trojan or registry problems that weren't caused by my own software. I wonder what you're doing wrong, or if you're just prone to exaggeration?
Perhaps you should stop running things like BritneySpearsNakedWithBoyfriendOnBeachHot!!!.exe - they really aren't what they say they are:-)
Wha??? EVERYONE cares about network transparency these days! (even if they don't realise that they do)
I hardly know any windows users nowadays that don't access their email through a web interface, so they can access it from any computer they happen to be on. Outlook Exchange is the next thing up, which true - is still a corporate thing at the moment.
But think - how long will it be before your wordprocessor is running on a remote machine and you just have a dumb terminal? What would be the advantage of this? Well it doesn't take much hardware to run a dumb terminal, compared to having to carry around a hard disk, cdrom, lots of memory, etc. etc. etc
And the extension to this is distributed computing - I mean true distributed computing, where your wordprocessor uses other peoples run time if it needs it, and theirs does likewise. Eventually you end up with the idea of one _massive_ computer, distributed around the world so that it never goes down in one go, which everyone connects to using dumb terminals.
Network transparency is the future, for these and for numerous other reasons (control your fridge from your computer! Yay!)
In the same way that "Only a geek sends text messages & emailswas 5/10 years ago, the same is happening now with network transparent computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you point out one major problem with RPM's. Hence why I'm looking at non-RPM distros
This is a common misconception - The problem does not lie inherantly with RPM, rather you just need a wrapper around it. You'd have the same problems if you tried to use debs directly (rather than using apt instead).
If you use, urpmi, apt-rpm, up2date or any of the other systems out there, rpms aren't any different from any other distros out there.
KDE has, or at least is gaining a Kiosk-mode, which allows you to lock down the ability, for example, to change the wallpaper background, or the icons on the panel, control panel and other "dangerous" areas when putting a computer in a public place.
I haven't checked on it's progress but that is probably the kind of area that you are looking for.
you might not use your 3d graphics card to capture video, but if you wanted to edit video, it means you can't use your matrox to hardware accelerate 3d wipes/transitions/color transformations. Which is a bit of a shame really. Equivalent to having one sitting in your machine but having to play Doom3 through a software renderer in the frustrating stakes.
Of course if your editing video on the cheap, you probably go for something slightly more dedicated like the Matrox RT2500 anyway, which is not that much more expensive.
The biggest problem would be for the poor sods stuck in space unable to get back down if the elevator snapped...
I assume that they will put some sort of emergency space ship at the top to pilot people back to safety?
It has to be said though, with those requirements you should really be using a Mac...
professionals will either use premier or a home grown system.
Actually, most professionals I know at that level use a Mac with Final Cut Pro.
Interesting, I take the exact opposite view. For me, computing is substantial, whilst the movie industry is not. Ok, if I write some software for a company, it might not make the headlines, and it might not be that noticable, but it is there, and working daily to make peoples lives just slightly more bearable. On the other hand, A movie gets made, and after a couple of years (it's lucky if it lasts that long) it wallows into obscurity, or ends up only being shown at christmas.
Just think about the positive impact compuer jobs hae the next time, on a friday night when the banks are shut and your low on money, you walk up to the hole-in-the-wall, check you balance and draw some money out to go and enjoy yourself with. How often have you done this? And how often have you watched Casablanca?
This isn't advocacy against the movie industry - entertainment needs a constant influx of new material for it to stay fresh, and it is true that there are some just-as-insubstantial jobs in the computer industry (such as the games market).
mod up! mod up!
Unless you count letting crappy software crash the OS as an OS problem.
Well crappy software crashing the OS is an OS problem. If you mean crappy drivers crashing the OS, then that would be different.
However, I have easily crashed Windows 9x > 30 times a day. It's very easy - just try and debug an application with a particularly type of bad pointer reference in it which you accidentally create every so often. Your computer is almost guaranteed to crash in less than 10 minutes of running the debugger.
This is the one area with open source which I am suprised has not been exploited earlier, and it's a problem I'm not sure how can be avoided.
We see that the "many eyes" on open source seems to work pretty damn quickly : but the question is, how much damage could someone do in the time it takes for people to notice? Most software needs to be installed as root, and most people blindly install software without checking the make files to see what they do. Because it is run as root, you are leaving your machine wide open to anything the trojan wants to do.
yes | rm -r /
The trouble is, a normal virus checker wouldn't be any use against this kind of trojan as most damage is caused before the trojan is noticed.
Has anyone else thought about ways to solve this problem?
You clearly haven't understood what I've written. My argument is precisely that all developers should be able to beneift from my code if they want to.
GPL is designed to restrict who can benefit from what you're releasing. BSD doesn't.
The GPL does not actually restrict anyone benefitting from what you are releasing. Microsoft could use GPL'd code if they wanted to.
What the GPL does is to stop developers who like to take that code so nicely put there to help them do what they have to, and then decide that they do not want to let any other developers benefit from the code they wrote. The GPL is a way of saying "my house is your house, but only to people prepared to do the same for me (it doesn't matter if you live in a tent or a mansion)".
That's why some companies call the GPL a virus : because all they want to do is freeload off of the community. As a quick question : I'm sure Microsoft has said that they think the BSD license is great... so what products exactly have they released themselves licensed under it?
But if you are willing for absolutely anyone to use your code for any purpose and don't expect them to give you anything in return, go ahead and use the BSD license.
Thats for your post, but I still don't think that there any reason not to give a file a place in more than one location - a heirarchical tree and an alphabetic sort. I can't see it as being too expensive either - and you always exclude /var/tmp if you were worried about that kind of thing...
:
:
:
:
Heres a quick way to compare the functionality of the file system structures versus locates database.
let's say we want to search for documents on the computer.
File system
find / | grep ".doc"
Locate database
locate ".doc"
Compare the speed. Locate is incredibly quick, especially on large harddisks.
Now compare creating a new file in the file system
echo "hello" > test
to updating the locate database so that it can find the file quickly
updatedb
(I think you need to be root to perform this).
Here the filesystem wins easily.
Unfortunately, like most computer algorithms, there is no "perfect" solution to searching for and adding files : if you optimise for searching speed, then update speed suffers. If you optimise for access and updating, then searching suffers. You can optimise for both (by having both the file system and locate), but you have gained better performance at the penalty of storing the information twice and hence taking up more space and greater code complexity - you need the file system code and locate, rather than just one or the other.
Another way to look at it : why does your favourate computer textbook, or a world atlas contain an index? I mean, that's just duplication of information already on the map!
Of course, it's because it's easier to find the place you are looking for in the index, but the map is actually useful for figuring out how to get there...
Compare the act of defacing a web site with that of spray-painting a brick and mortar store front. Graffiti is basically the same, whether it's on a web site or in the real world. We don't need a new law that applies specifically to the former; instead, we should simply charge the kiddies with vandalism, just as we would if they did the latter.
This is actually a bad anaolgy. The correct analogy is to compare web site defacing with breaking into the store and then spray painting your name on all of the products. You would have a breaking and entering charge on top of the vandalism.
I wouldn't.
And of course,we are all waiting for the story which says that people do need that much porn...
"Hey cool! We don't needs to bother compressing movies anymore, hey we don't even need to compress 'em to DVD quality! We can just send them at the full whopping 250mbps that they take up!"
"Oh, hang on, damn this 400mbps connections slow - hell I can only download one mega high-quality movie at a time ot it starts breaking up!"
or something.
I use konqueror with "open javascript popups" set to "ask me first". I haven't seen any popup ads in the last year, I don't see what people's problem are really.
Oh, until I use a machine with IE on it of course.
My only huge complaint about KDE (And GNOME) is how freaking ugly the font rendering is.
Just checking but make sure that your running the latest XFree86 (4.2) and have antialiasing turned on (in the control panel).
Things then look much sweeter.
Question : Does windows XP install in 2.7 mouse clicks when installing on a P2 - 300mhz PC with 128 meg of ram, which has windows 98 on it taking up the entire disk (which I don't want to lose completely coz I still want to play all my old games on)?
And for the "expert/developer/server" installation (for us techies), does it also allow the installation of working webserver, C/C++ compiler, IDE development environment, office suite, website development apps, etc. in the same installation?
They will look at their tv and say "k, videogame network is channel 42, ill scope it out later." and change the channel.
2 days later.. "what happened to that videogame network.." *flips through channels* "here it is.. woah, coverage of that new ps2 release that everyone is drooling over!"
Ummm... either that or 2 days later.. "what happened to that videogame network.." *flips through channels* "here it is.. woah... still... pong... erm... ok... I... might... check... back... next... year...... maybe"
Of course if you use a _proper_ lossless compression audio codec (several are reviewed on this page here
:-)
then you do get roughly 50% compression.
But that still would no be enough to get 5 albums on, unless the albums were really short
>No, blame the tool. When you author in HTML, you don't need to do anything to get that >functionality. In Flash, it's another item on the TODO list.
:
Riiight... Maybe I should throw out my computer too huh? Since it doesn't write the software for me, instead it's left it on the TODO list...
You obviously have no concept of Object Orientated coding, which is a shame because there is one important point to learn from it
NEVER do something multiple times if you can do it once and forget about it.
Obviously, you have to do it once in the first place (you can't just "throw away the computer") but hey - the fact that your using a computer means you at least partly understand the concept - I mean, you don't use a seperate machine for email, web browsing text, web browsing flash, web browsing XML, web browsing pictures, web browsing hyperlinked sites, web browsing... (etc. etc. etc...) do you?
Put the functionality into flash ONCE, and forget about it. Rather than have EVERY SINGLE author who ever makes a flash movie have to WASTE HIS TIME putting it in.
Simple fact: The Gimp, like many other Open Source programs, has a poor user interface. Unlike Photoshop, which, despite its massive feature-set, is easy for an average user to pick up, the Gimp's functions are all buried in multiple levels of right-click menus. It also uses an annoying multi-window interface that clutters your taskbar horribly. The simple fact is that Photoshop is just a lot more pleasant and easy to use.
:-) (same goes for gimp) But once you get used to an interface, it all comes down to which is quickest. Having used both, IMO gimp is faster to use than photoshop, except for those areas where it lacks features (CMYK, etc.)
Once you realise that the right click menu in gimp is basically the same as the menu at the top of the screen in photoshop... you realise that having a menu that is instantly under the mouse when you want it is much better than a menu that you have to track from wherever you are on the screen to the menu, and then after selecting it, move the mouse all the way back to the menu. As far as menu selection is concerned, if the Gimp was a 5 mile fun run, photoshop is a marathon.
Incidentally, I am also highly annoyed that the last time I used photoshop, it _still_ had a half MDI/half gimp interface. It was hideous to use, for someone like me who first used the Gimp.
Likewise, MS Office is a much smoother experience than StarOffice (which, admittedly, has improved by leaps and bounds since its thrice-damned 5.0 incarnation).
I agree here, though I use KOffice out of preference at present.
Now, I'm behind Open Source 100%, but I don't get so caught up in my zealotry that I lose sight of ease of use issues. If an everyday user can't sit down and use an Open Source program just as easily as they could use a proprietary one, then they're not going to want to switch. It's as simple as that.
But do not get confused between "Which interface the user is used to" and "which interface is better". An everyday user could not sit down at photoshop and draw a straight line using the paint tool
I've been running Windows for 12 years now. Never had a virus, trojan or registry problems that weren't caused by my own software. I wonder what you're doing wrong, or if you're just prone to exaggeration?
:-)
Perhaps you should stop running things like BritneySpearsNakedWithBoyfriendOnBeachHot!!!.exe - they really aren't what they say they are
Wha??? EVERYONE cares about network transparency these days! (even if they don't realise that they do)
;-)
I hardly know any windows users nowadays that don't access their email through a web interface, so they can access it from any computer they happen to be on. Outlook Exchange is the next thing up, which true - is still a corporate thing at the moment.
But think - how long will it be before your wordprocessor is running on a remote machine and you just have a dumb terminal? What would be the advantage of this? Well it doesn't take much hardware to run a dumb terminal, compared to having to carry around a hard disk, cdrom, lots of memory, etc. etc. etc
And the extension to this is distributed computing - I mean true distributed computing, where your wordprocessor uses other peoples run time if it needs it, and theirs does likewise. Eventually you end up with the idea of one _massive_ computer, distributed around the world so that it never goes down in one go, which everyone connects to using dumb terminals.
Network transparency is the future, for these and for numerous other reasons (control your fridge from your computer! Yay!)
In the same way that "Only a geek sends text messages & emailswas 5/10 years ago, the same is happening now with network transparent computing.
We can't help it if we are ahead of fashion