What it really missed was the fact that the editorial outright LIED about the FSF's stance. They even point to the article. The FSF does NOT think that the computing effort will be done only by people who do it for fun. They, in fact, are funded in a large part by selling software development services.
The entire original article is based on a complete fabrication of the opposing side. It's always easy to beat an opponent you make up.
Good point, but the fact remains that of all those hundreds of millions of Windows users nearly 100% could switch to Linux, but haven't. That does count for something.
********
No. It doesn't. It would count for something if
a) all those users knew what Linux was.
b) all those users knew the advantages and disadvantages of both systems
c) all those users knew how easy it is to switch
The fact is, 99% of those users don't know any of the above, and thus cannot make that choice. Add into that the amount of disinformation there is on Linux, and the possibility of this user knowing about this valid choice, and that it is valid, drops to near 0.
As for using Linux without editing config files, my wife and I do so every day. Installed and use regularly, and had to do a whole lot less configuration than with Windows. Even changing the video card was handled automatically, and the system detected and installed the appropriate 3D drivers for my new card automatically.
Your point 1 implies a deep misunderstanding of market economics. OEMs ship windows because thats what the users demand. The customers do prefer windows. Cold hard fact.
********
This is complete baloney. Most users have never tried anything else. Microsoft has taken control of the distribution channels, so there is no place for consumers to have a choice. If they go into best buy they get a choice between Windows and Windows. How would they manage to choose Linux in that scenario? Or Mac? They would have to have known about it before hand, AND know where to find it, AND know what it's capabilities are.
That's like saying the Chinese people prefer communism. The fact is the system doesn't give them a choice. Hopefully in the future the grassroots Linux movement will enable more choice and knowledge for users, but that takes time. Don't pretend like it's a choice today because it isn't.
As to your other point, preferences differ, but most people like KDE or GNOME as much or better than Windows, although less than Macintosh. GNOME, I know has gone through such usability testing as you mention. I don't know about KDE. What, specifically, do you find sucky about them?
Several Scheme ones take this approach. Scheme and the Art of Programming is excellent, and for more advanced students, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
If you want your students to learn more about how the computer works, you might try reading the book I'm in the middle of writing, Programming from the Ground Up. The current draft is available online at http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/computers/Progr ammi ngGroundUp/
This is quite true. The reason Microsoft should switch to open-source is that in the 10-year term, open-source is what will matter. They can currently milk their customers today, but they will lose them tomorrow. They make large profits today at the expense of profits tomorrow, or they can start down the path of open-source which will allow them on the playing field tomorrow.
Microsoft has always had a policy of being the first to destroy their own market-share, because it's better that they do so to themselves than another company do it. If they don't switch to open-source now, another company will destroy their market-share.
I think it depends on in what way it is better. I do not see the average user downloading a new Netscape, but Mozilla is possible. Why? Because it gets rid of popups, which are universally hated.
Mozilla has a lot of features that are better than this, but this one feature hits a such known problem area that it could get a large group of people to switch.
Of course, since Mozilla has no marketing budget, it is unknown whether anyone will ever know this besides us.
The problem is the interpretation of the PDF spec by GhostScript of blank pages. Acrobat 5 started being more strict about following the spec, but there are some vagaries, specifically with blank pages. GhostScript tries to make the Contents Key have an empty array, while the spec says that the Contents key should have an array of streams. Technically, an empty array could be considered to be an array of streams of length 0, but apparently Acrobat 5 disagrees.
See http://www.ghostscript.com/pipermail/bug-gs/2001-J uly/000535.html
Have you tried looking on penguinppc.org? Or maybe one of the PPC distributions? Or even typing in Tetris PPC into the google search? You can find most Linux programs ported to PA-Risc at http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/. Pretty much, if there is an architecture, someone has a site full of ports. The point is not that each project owns the ports, but usually there is a single clearing house of ports to a particular platform, like the FreeBSD ports collection.
.NET on ARM was a bad example. However, what about.NET on other architectures? Which has more ports, Linux or.NET?
As for the VM, my point was that the specific Virtual Machine is not much of an issue, as much as everyone standardizes on one. But what's the difference between standardizing on a virtual machine and a real machine? You pick your platform and you write to it. Either it's popular or not. What I'm asking is what does the fact that you are writing to a virtual platform benefit you rather than writing to a stable, widely-used hardware platform? If someone wants a different platform, they can virtualize. Witness Apple switching from 68K to PPC.
1) The development tool chain simply isn't there for non-x86 developments such as ARM, unless you pay for it
**********
Ummm... it's there for Sparc, PPC, Alpha, and others. More obscure architectures such as ARM do not require payment, just extra legwork. Have you seen.NET on ARM lately? I don't think so.
***********
alext:
2) The deployment problems are crippling because all apps have to be targeted. And not just ARM vs. x86, but often ARM 9 vs ARM 7, PIII vs. AMD vs. VIA etc.
************
What does this have to do with anything? There are many, _many_ sites that are dedicated repositories of binaries for particular architectures.
************
alext:
PDA users simply can't and won't build apps for themselves.
*************
Same for most Linux users. You know, it only takes one person to build it.
Having a VM is a waste of time. Why? Because why not just have a processor that does that VM. Any architecture can be virtualized, and the only benefit Java gives is the availability of VMs for it. You can VM x86 if you like.
However, having to target specific devices isn't a problem if you have a portable architecture. As I said, it only takes one.
For PDA users, there are only going to be so many PDA systems. I imagine those selling the PDAs will work on porting whatever needs to be ported. For most other devices, you don't add software. It just a box that does whatever, and any binary interoperability problems simply don't affect them.
Apple managed to debug a multi-threaded multi-processor microkernel-based system
*********
The problem is that the Hurd is a multi-server Microkernel architecture, and I'm pretty sure that has never been tried before, by any group.
You are correct that the Hurd has the ivory-tower problem, but when they do get it working, it will very much kick butt.
An example of a feature they are working on - soft reboots. You will be able to restart the operating system without shutting down your applications. Each OS server will be able to migrate it's data to another instance, and shut the previous instance off.
The design is excellent, but I do see where debugging it could be quite a bugger.
This is really funny considering that the GPL allows people to learn from the source code, and are allowed to use that knowledge for whatever purposes they wish.
It depends. Most users where I worked at Wolfram Research loved the web applications. Also, you assume that the deployment issues only affect the group doing the deploying. Deployment issues also affect the users, since it's their app that they need to work on, it's their box you have to upgrade Access on, etc.
There are some things that web apps work poorly for because of the limitations of HTML widgets. However, not as many as people would have you think.
If you're in marketing, you should be spending 85% of your time doing research. If you're in sales, you should be spending 85% of your time on the phone. If you're a secretary, I could see possibly someone spending that much time on office, but where I've worked they were usually using Netscape calendar, answering the phone, and using our internal database systems. Accountants would most likely be using accounting packages, not Excel.
I'm not saying these people aren't using Office, just not to the extent that some people are implying. If a marketing person is spending most of their time creating PowerPoint presentations, who exactly is viewing them? Usually, you create one and use it on many clients.
Now, there is some truth in that people overuse Office just because it's there. Scott McNealy outlawed PowerPoint from Sun, and the quarter he did that was their most productive quarter. Why? People weren't wasting their time making useless PowerPoint presentations.
I don't know about Konqueror, but I've never had any such problems w/ GNOME. If the user doesn't know what to do, they could just go back to the Windows way - reboot. However, I don't see that as an issue because most distributions ship code which works just fine. If you must run CVS versions of programs, then it's your own fault. If a vendor's software is having problems, complain to the vendor.
You don't need to explain anything about permissions to users. None at all. Not to use it.
If you are talking about adding/removing packages, Linux is _much_ easier.
It doesn't take 50 pages of doucmentation to run XCDRoast or whatever your vendor ships. My CD Burner autodetected just fine.
In fact, so did my graphics card. Then, when I changed it, it autodetected it again.
You could probably fix this by "quarantining" the affected users. Make sure that access to those data sources is extremely controlled. That way, even before migrating, you know specifically who is using these bad data sources, and you tackle them last, one-at-a-time. They will thank you for it if you give them a good web application instead.
Re:Design patterns and Lisp
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 2
Although the template solutions in that book were pretty clever, they generally pointed to deficiencies in the language itself. For example, look at how difficult the command pattern is to implement in C++! In better languages, it is simply a lambda expression.
In addition, a lot of the stuff in that book is pretty useless for what programmers do day-in and day-out, and the compile-time benefits are only really benefits if you have extremely time-critical code.
The stuff is good for computer languages theory, but for practice, C++ is way too complex for day-to-day efficient work.
Slashdot Mirror
What it really missed was the fact that the editorial outright LIED about the FSF's stance. They even point to the article. The FSF does NOT think that the computing effort will be done only by people who do it for fun. They, in fact, are funded in a large part by selling software development services.
The entire original article is based on a complete fabrication of the opposing side. It's always easy to beat an opponent you make up.
AHHHH! Drives me nuts.
Good point, but the fact remains that of all those hundreds of millions of Windows users nearly 100% could switch to Linux, but haven't. That does count for something.
********
No. It doesn't. It would count for something if
a) all those users knew what Linux was.
b) all those users knew the advantages and disadvantages of both systems
c) all those users knew how easy it is to switch
The fact is, 99% of those users don't know any of the above, and thus cannot make that choice. Add into that the amount of disinformation there is on Linux, and the possibility of this user knowing about this valid choice, and that it is valid, drops to near 0.
As for using Linux without editing config files, my wife and I do so every day. Installed and use regularly, and had to do a whole lot less configuration than with Windows. Even changing the video card was handled automatically, and the system detected and installed the appropriate 3D drivers for my new card automatically.
Your point 1 implies a deep misunderstanding of market economics. OEMs ship windows because thats what the users demand. The customers do prefer windows. Cold hard fact.
********
This is complete baloney. Most users have never tried anything else. Microsoft has taken control of the distribution channels, so there is no place for consumers to have a choice. If they go into best buy they get a choice between Windows and Windows. How would they manage to choose Linux in that scenario? Or Mac? They would have to have known about it before hand, AND know where to find it, AND know what it's capabilities are.
That's like saying the Chinese people prefer communism. The fact is the system doesn't give them a choice. Hopefully in the future the grassroots Linux movement will enable more choice and knowledge for users, but that takes time. Don't pretend like it's a choice today because it isn't.
As to your other point, preferences differ, but most people like KDE or GNOME as much or better than Windows, although less than Macintosh. GNOME, I know has gone through such usability testing as you mention. I don't know about KDE. What, specifically, do you find sucky about them?
Also, this only counted developers. A lot of people don't register themselves as developers, but still contribute and examine the code.
Several Scheme ones take this approach. Scheme and the Art of
r ammi ngGroundUp/
Programming
is excellent, and for more advanced students, Structure and
Interpretation
of Computer Programs.
If you want your students to learn more about how the computer
works, you
might try reading the book I'm in the middle of writing,
Programming from
the Ground Up. The current draft is available online at
http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/computers/Prog
This is quite true. The reason Microsoft should switch to open-source is that in the 10-year term, open-source is what will matter. They can currently milk their customers today, but they will lose them tomorrow. They make large profits today at the expense of profits tomorrow, or they can start down the path of open-source which will allow them on the playing field tomorrow.
Microsoft has always had a policy of being the first to destroy their own market-share, because it's better that they do so to themselves than another company do it. If they don't switch to open-source now, another company will destroy their market-share.
I think it depends on in what way it is better. I do not see the average user downloading a new Netscape, but Mozilla is possible. Why? Because it gets rid of popups, which are universally hated.
Mozilla has a lot of features that are better than this, but this one feature hits a such known problem area that it could get a large group of people to switch.
Of course, since Mozilla has no marketing budget, it is unknown whether anyone will ever know this besides us.
Anyhow, why should we even care that much about the IE monopoly?
**********
Because more and more sites are being written with on ly one standard in mind - the IE standard.
The problem is the interpretation of the PDF spec by GhostScript of blank pages. Acrobat 5 started being more strict about following the spec, but there are some vagaries, specifically with blank pages. GhostScript tries to make the Contents Key have an empty array, while the spec says that the Contents key should have an array of streams. Technically, an empty array could be considered to be an array of streams of length 0, but apparently Acrobat 5 disagrees.
J uly/000535.html
See http://www.ghostscript.com/pipermail/bug-gs/2001-
for details.
Have you tried looking on penguinppc.org? Or maybe one of the PPC distributions? Or even typing in Tetris PPC into the google search? You can find most Linux programs ported to PA-Risc at http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/. Pretty much, if there is an architecture, someone has a site full of ports. The point is not that each project owns the ports, but usually there is a single clearing house of ports to a particular platform, like the FreeBSD ports collection.
.NET on other architectures? Which has more ports, Linux or .NET?
.NET on ARM was a bad example. However, what about
As for the VM, my point was that the specific Virtual Machine is not much of an issue, as much as everyone standardizes on one. But what's the difference between standardizing on a virtual machine and a real machine? You pick your platform and you write to it. Either it's popular or not. What I'm asking is what does the fact that you are writing to a virtual platform benefit you rather than writing to a stable, widely-used hardware platform? If someone wants a different platform, they can virtualize. Witness Apple switching from 68K to PPC.
I _am_ writing a book. You can see it's current version at http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/computers/Programmi ngGroundUp/
If anyone is interested, please read what's there so far and let me know if it is helpful, where it needs work, and so forth.
I'm especially looking forward to critical comments.
alext:
.NET on ARM lately? I don't think so.
1) The development tool chain simply isn't there for non-x86 developments such as ARM, unless you pay for it
**********
Ummm... it's there for Sparc, PPC, Alpha, and others. More obscure architectures such as ARM do not require payment, just extra legwork. Have you seen
***********
alext:
2) The deployment problems are crippling because all apps have to be targeted. And not just ARM vs. x86, but often ARM 9 vs ARM 7, PIII vs. AMD vs. VIA etc.
************
What does this have to do with anything? There are many, _many_ sites that are dedicated repositories of binaries for particular architectures.
************
alext:
PDA users simply can't and won't build apps for themselves.
*************
Same for most Linux users. You know, it only takes one person to build it.
Having a VM is a waste of time. Why? Because why not just have a processor that does that VM. Any architecture can be virtualized, and the only benefit Java gives is the availability of VMs for it. You can VM x86 if you like.
However, having to target specific devices isn't a problem if you have a portable architecture. As I said, it only takes one.
For PDA users, there are only going to be so many PDA systems. I imagine those selling the PDAs will work on porting whatever needs to be ported. For most other devices, you don't add software. It just a box that does whatever, and any binary interoperability problems simply don't affect them.
It _is_ a cross-platform solution. In what way do you believe it is not?
It doesn't have GNOME :(
Apple managed to debug a multi-threaded multi-processor microkernel-based system
*********
The problem is that the Hurd is a multi-server Microkernel architecture, and I'm pretty sure that has never been tried before, by any group.
You are correct that the Hurd has the ivory-tower problem, but when they do get it working, it will very much kick butt.
An example of a feature they are working on - soft reboots. You will be able to restart the operating system without shutting down your applications. Each OS server will be able to migrate it's data to another instance, and shut the previous instance off.
The design is excellent, but I do see where debugging it could be quite a bugger.
the vast majority of PCs out there run on them.
********
Nope. NT is a microkernel (although, arguably, that is not the case anymore). However, win9x, which is what's on most PCs, is a monolithic kernel.
This is really funny considering that the GPL allows people to learn from the source code, and are allowed to use that knowledge for whatever purposes they wish.
Exactly.
It gives an accurate picture of physics, but not an accurate picture of anything with meaning, i.e. - relationships, love, peace, etc.
When it does, call me.
It depends. Most users where I worked at Wolfram Research loved the web applications. Also, you assume that the deployment issues only affect the group doing the deploying. Deployment issues also affect the users, since it's their app that
they need to work on, it's their box you have to upgrade Access on, etc.
There are some things that web apps work poorly for because of the limitations of HTML widgets. However, not as many as people would have you think.
If you're in marketing, you should be spending 85% of your time doing research. If you're in sales, you should be spending 85% of your time on the phone. If you're a secretary, I could see possibly someone spending that much time on office, but where I've worked they were usually using Netscape calendar, answering the phone, and using our internal database systems. Accountants would most likely be using accounting packages, not Excel.
I'm not saying these people aren't using Office, just not to the extent that some people are implying. If a marketing person is spending most of their time creating PowerPoint presentations, who exactly is viewing them? Usually, you create one and use it on many clients.
Now, there is some truth in that people overuse Office just because it's there. Scott McNealy outlawed PowerPoint from Sun, and the quarter he did that was their most productive quarter. Why? People weren't wasting their time making useless PowerPoint presentations.
Anything that a user uses 85% of the time is going to be something that they are very passionate about.
********
What on earth are they doing that they use Office products 85% of the time? Do they make PowerPoint presentations instead of working?
Although an Office app is usually necessary for reading stuff that comes in the mail, what on earth do you use it for on a daily basis?
I don't know about Konqueror, but I've never had any such problems w/ GNOME. If the user doesn't know what to do, they could just go back to the Windows way - reboot. However, I don't see that as an issue because most distributions ship code which works just fine. If you must run CVS versions of programs, then it's your own fault. If a vendor's software is having problems, complain to the vendor.
You don't need to explain anything about permissions to users. None at all. Not to use it.
If you are talking about adding/removing packages, Linux is _much_ easier.
It doesn't take 50 pages of doucmentation to run XCDRoast or whatever your vendor ships. My CD Burner autodetected just fine.
In fact, so did my graphics card. Then, when I changed it, it autodetected it again.
Have you used Linux since 1995?
You could probably fix this by "quarantining" the affected users. Make sure that access to those data sources is extremely controlled. That way, even before migrating, you know specifically who is using these bad data sources, and you tackle them last, one-at-a-time. They will thank you for it if you give them a good web application instead.
Although the template solutions in that book were pretty clever, they generally pointed to deficiencies in the language itself. For example, look at how difficult the command pattern is to implement in C++! In better languages, it is simply a lambda expression.
In addition, a lot of the stuff in that book is pretty useless for what programmers do day-in and day-out, and the compile-time benefits are only really benefits if you have extremely time-critical code.
The stuff is good for computer languages theory, but for practice, C++ is way too complex for day-to-day efficient work.