Most of the people who read this site can be labeled as "above average computer users"
OK, I'll buy that. Most of us are likely programmers, or admins, or helpdesk types, or the like. That said, what could possibly be wrong with trying to raise the level of the "average computer user" to something better than what it is now? Sure, the status quo is an often unmovable standard, but if we could, even in some small cases, tweak it ever so slightly upward, there can't possibly be a down side.
If you ever happen to see the book "When you can't find your Unix System Administrator", have a quick look at it. The sidebar stories, which are all from real users, are most enlightening. They all find out that learning new little ways to do things can be exciting, and rewarding, and in many cases it helps them to be less scared of trying completely new things. They still might need a little help with the new stuff, but they're more self-sufficient than they would otherwise have been.
I wish the publishers would wisen up and include with the paper book a CD containing an e-book version (preferably ASCII text).
Interesting idea. In some computer books I've seen there is a coupon that you can mail in for an electronic copy (floppy, cd, whatever) of the code examples in the book; the same could easily be done for the electronic text of the book. Or have a simple online method to do the same (not sure how that would work, though).
The first puzzle I ever solved in Myst was the rocket ship. A friend had been playing for weeks, and couldn't get the ship to work. I sat down, and 3 minutes later, the ship was off! Perfect pitch really is a curse, but it helped in that one instance.:)
For a while, before my gf got her own machine, she was using my Linux machine, and was almost perfectly happy with KDE 1.x. Her only complaint was that there was no M$-Office-compatible programs that she could use. She did try Staroffice 5.1, which did much of what she needed, but the M$-Office compatibility was fairly poor. Everything else she needed was there; MP3 player, file mangler, web browser.
My only wish is for the KOffice folks to get the input filters so that they read Excel files well, and without seg-faulting; the Word input filter seems to work pretty well already.
But what the GPL really is is a way of giving users the tools to build the environments they find useful; that the software ends up costing nothing in many cases is just a side-effect.
That's the thing that most people (especially around here) don't understand about the GPL. Nothing in the GPL says anything that the software should have no cost, but only that if you obtain the software, you get the source as well. Not only does it allow the users to modify the software for their own needs, but it provides protection for the users in case the software company goes belly-up - you can still fix bugs and get some level of support, even if it's only from your internal developers.
The way the software industry is going right now, even 5 years seems overly generous. 3 years sounds more reasonable; about enough time for the average company to release a major update.
find / -type f -perm +0111 -print | xargs grep 'too many length or distance symbols' 2>/dev/null
Good info. It's surprising how much stuff gets a hit using this - most of the commercially-produced stuff on my hosts. Real player, Adobe acrobat reader, Netscape, most of the Loki games, the Flash Netscape plugin, among others. I have an old version of commercial ssh, which has linked itself statically as well. That's the one I'm really concerned about; sounds like time to switch to openssh, and make sure it's compiled dynamically.
I already returned one, and when the same thing happened on the second copy I got, I was afraid that my PS2 was broken. This is good(ish) news. Now of course since I've just moved, the other DVD player must have gotten jostled the wrong way, and has decided to not put out any video any more.
They may be doing this already. I was in Microcenter the other day, and picked up 4 Loki titles for $5 apiece (Myth II, Railroad Tycoon II, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Eric's Ultimate Solitaire). There were another couple (Heretic II, Descent III) which were $10, but I didn't have the 3D accelerator they required, so I didn't get them. Though that could have just been the store trying to get rid of them... dunno.
Or it might remove the incentive for you to learn about the kernel, since everything would be handled for you. Most people would take the easy way out: "It's not something I have to think about, so I won't."
Every person who compiles their own kernels now has learned how to do it by doing it. Jumping in and just trying something out won't hurt, it will help. Trying new things is how we learn.
I remember the first time I did my own kernel compile, around 1.0.9; man was that a struggle. It was kinda scary, since I'd never done anything like that before. What happens if I mess up? menuconfig and xconfig had not shown their faces yet, so it was a matter of spending a half-hour going through the entire set of options (if you haven't done 'make config' before, try it). But I made it through, and the kernel worked. And on top of all that, I learned something new.
More troubling is that my word processor of choice is TeX. If TeX decides to eat a document (which it hasn't done yet) then is Don Knuth responsible? Do you think that Don Knuth would have distributed this piece of software if he were?
This is possibly not a really good example, because of the fact that Don Knuth will pay a bounty if you find a bug, and will make the appropriate fixes. Basically, he is putting his money where his mouth is, and is declaring himself liable for programming errors in TeX.
If the toaster is labeled "unplug when not in use", and someone leaves it plugged in, is the company responsible for their house?
The lawsuit-happiness of everybody these days is the problem there. If a manufacturer of, say, toasters, doesn't include the warning that their product should not be used in a bathtub, say, then they're probably going to be sued over it. For another example, a purveyor of coffee could be successfully sued if some clumsy person dumps a cup of their coffee in her lap, burning herself severely, and there was not a specific warning that the coffee was hot and could cause burns.
Having said that, DUH! Playing with an electrical appliance in the tub will almost surely electrocute you. DUH! Dumping hot coffee in your lap will almost surely burn you. The responsibility for peoples' stupid activity is now borne by the various companies, rather than the stupid-acting individuals themselves, which is ridiculous.
The problem at hand is that much software, even when used properly, doesn't work like it's supposed to. The various software companies are selling defective products, and not taking responsibility for the defects of those products (see any recent EULA). Effectively, the consumers are paying money for something that may not work at all, and the license s/he agreed to by opening, clicking, whatever, disallows him/her from calling bullshit on the company who produced it.
All countries do have 2-letter TLDs; check the IANA's ccTLD page. However, some countries choose to sell their namespace for cash, and allow anybody to buy a name in their domain..cc (Cocos (Keeling) Islands),.tv (Tuvalu) and.ws (Western Samoa) have done this, and I'm sure there'll be more to come. Just because registrars are billing these TLDs as "new" or whatever, and advertising the shit out of them, doesn't mean they're in any way special. AFAIK, ALL 2-letter TLDs are countries.
I wouldn't say a monopoly so much as something like a cabal. The RIAA, as far as I understand, is just a political lobbying association composed of representatives of the various recording companies. And all those recording companies surely compete with each other... they just compete more fiercely with everybody else. It's a whole lot like the way cable companies work - they have a local monopoly (over the artists, in the case of the recording companies), but there are many other companies in the same business.
It's sad that no viable alternative exists, and it also seems increasingly unlikely that one will arise, given the way the RIAA deals with its competitors, real or imagined. I'm sure they'd try to stomp anything that represented even a shadow of a threat to their stranglehold on the industry.
These forums (Usenet, Slashdot, etc) get good because creative folks invest themselves into making them good. Even the common user recognizes quality, and wants a part of it (or, more annoyingly, to destroy it).
I couldn't agree with you more on this point! But there's one thing I just don't get about it: why do the juveniles and anonymous cowards focus so much of their energy on destruction? One of the reasons I keep coming back to Slashdot is that sometimes the discussions, or even arguments, are well thought out, intelligent, and make me happy that some of my species actually exist. And then the inevitable "you stink like monkey ass" comments come out, or goatse.cx links, or what have you, and I just get embarrassed. There are people who actually thought hard enough (or did they?) to make a post that has no taste or redeeming value whatsoever. It's not funny, it's not meaningful, it's just, well, noise.
Are there little green men reading this stuff? What must they think of the bile that's spewed here, and on Usenet, and surely on IRC, and whatever other communications channels, daily? The USSR and the USA dealt with each other in a much more cordial manner at the height of the cold war, when each was prepared to completely annihilate the entire planet!
Absolutely! I used to have a copy of Netscape 3 around just because I liked using it - even though the standards support wasn't great. The interface was the cleanest of any Netscape - bold colors and simple graphics; there has been no finer looking browser. I hope to find/make an NS3 skin for Mozilla sometime.
But horror of horrors, my Netscape 3 got lost in an upgrade a year or so back. <sniff> Any ideas where I can score a copy?
It's good that they've worked hard to fix the package up. I used to work for an outfit which used PgSQL back in the 6.[23] days, and god was it awful! It would just wander off into the weeds with startling regularity. I might have to give it another go, just to see what they've done with it.
I don't know what you're doing, but for me it's as easy as (1) highlight the text I want to copy in Netscape, (2) move the mouse to where I want to paste it in Emacs, (3) hit the middle button (or chord the two buttons, if I don't have 3). Seems pretty easy to me.
I think there's really something to this idea. One of the other neat tricks is that the government can also prosecute non-paying spammers for tax evasion.:) Federal penitentiary, baby! They'd have to do it, or otherwise the law would be meaningless. The only problem that I can see there is that while the government is getting rich (heh) off the spam-tax money, that still doesn't make the cost to the end-victims of the spam go away.
OK, so if the user doesn't even know there's a root account (even though there will have to be), that means that they don't know what the root password is. Which means they didn't set it. Which means all the root passwords will be the same. Which means it's even a bigger security hole than it would be otherwise. Or am I just way off here?
When they started up the latest of the BMW commercials, I really liked the music they were using. I tried sending some mail to them to ask who did the music for their commmercials, but they never replied.
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Most of the people who read this site can be labeled as "above average computer users"
OK, I'll buy that. Most of us are likely programmers, or admins, or helpdesk types, or the like. That said, what could possibly be wrong with trying to raise the level of the "average computer user" to something better than what it is now? Sure, the status quo is an often unmovable standard, but if we could, even in some small cases, tweak it ever so slightly upward, there can't possibly be a down side.
If you ever happen to see the book "When you can't find your Unix System Administrator", have a quick look at it. The sidebar stories, which are all from real users, are most enlightening. They all find out that learning new little ways to do things can be exciting, and rewarding, and in many cases it helps them to be less scared of trying completely new things. They still might need a little help with the new stuff, but they're more self-sufficient than they would otherwise have been.
The plural of Unix is Unices. I've also seen it as Unixen, but I like the first better.
Interesting idea. In some computer books I've seen there is a coupon that you can mail in for an electronic copy (floppy, cd, whatever) of the code examples in the book; the same could easily be done for the electronic text of the book. Or have a simple online method to do the same (not sure how that would work, though).
And if you have a browser that doesn't use flash, the site is really easy to navigate also. There's only one control... the back button.
The first puzzle I ever solved in Myst was the rocket ship. A friend had been playing for weeks, and couldn't get the ship to work. I sat down, and 3 minutes later, the ship was off! Perfect pitch really is a curse, but it helped in that one instance. :)
To put it simply, the lack of M$ Office.
For a while, before my gf got her own machine, she was using my Linux machine, and was almost perfectly happy with KDE 1.x. Her only complaint was that there was no M$-Office-compatible programs that she could use. She did try Staroffice 5.1, which did much of what she needed, but the M$-Office compatibility was fairly poor. Everything else she needed was there; MP3 player, file mangler, web browser.
My only wish is for the KOffice folks to get the input filters so that they read Excel files well, and without seg-faulting; the Word input filter seems to work pretty well already.
That's the thing that most people (especially around here) don't understand about the GPL. Nothing in the GPL says anything that the software should have no cost, but only that if you obtain the software, you get the source as well. Not only does it allow the users to modify the software for their own needs, but it provides protection for the users in case the software company goes belly-up - you can still fix bugs and get some level of support, even if it's only from your internal developers.
The way the software industry is going right now, even 5 years seems overly generous. 3 years sounds more reasonable; about enough time for the average company to release a major update.
Good info. It's surprising how much stuff gets a hit using this - most of the commercially-produced stuff on my hosts. Real player, Adobe acrobat reader, Netscape, most of the Loki games, the Flash Netscape plugin, among others. I have an old version of commercial ssh, which has linked itself statically as well. That's the one I'm really concerned about; sounds like time to switch to openssh, and make sure it's compiled dynamically.
I already returned one, and when the same thing happened on the second copy I got, I was afraid that my PS2 was broken. This is good(ish) news. Now of course since I've just moved, the other DVD player must have gotten jostled the wrong way, and has decided to not put out any video any more.
Or the other joke: Why doesn't Texas fall into the Gulf of Mexico? Because Oklahoma sucks... :)
They may be doing this already. I was in Microcenter the other day, and picked up 4 Loki titles for $5 apiece (Myth II, Railroad Tycoon II, Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Eric's Ultimate Solitaire). There were another couple (Heretic II, Descent III) which were $10, but I didn't have the 3D accelerator they required, so I didn't get them. Though that could have just been the store trying to get rid of them... dunno.
Or it might remove the incentive for you to learn about the kernel, since everything would be handled for you. Most people would take the easy way out: "It's not something I have to think about, so I won't."
Every person who compiles their own kernels now has learned how to do it by doing it. Jumping in and just trying something out won't hurt, it will help. Trying new things is how we learn.
I remember the first time I did my own kernel compile, around 1.0.9; man was that a struggle. It was kinda scary, since I'd never done anything like that before. What happens if I mess up? menuconfig and xconfig had not shown their faces yet, so it was a matter of spending a half-hour going through the entire set of options (if you haven't done 'make config' before, try it). But I made it through, and the kernel worked. And on top of all that, I learned something new.
More troubling is that my word processor of choice is TeX. If TeX decides to eat a document (which it hasn't done yet) then is Don Knuth responsible? Do you think that Don Knuth would have distributed this piece of software if he were?
This is possibly not a really good example, because of the fact that Don Knuth will pay a bounty if you find a bug, and will make the appropriate fixes. Basically, he is putting his money where his mouth is, and is declaring himself liable for programming errors in TeX.
If the toaster is labeled "unplug when not in use", and someone leaves it plugged in, is the company responsible for their house?
The lawsuit-happiness of everybody these days is the problem there. If a manufacturer of, say, toasters, doesn't include the warning that their product should not be used in a bathtub, say, then they're probably going to be sued over it. For another example, a purveyor of coffee could be successfully sued if some clumsy person dumps a cup of their coffee in her lap, burning herself severely, and there was not a specific warning that the coffee was hot and could cause burns.
Having said that, DUH! Playing with an electrical appliance in the tub will almost surely electrocute you. DUH! Dumping hot coffee in your lap will almost surely burn you. The responsibility for peoples' stupid activity is now borne by the various companies, rather than the stupid-acting individuals themselves, which is ridiculous.
The problem at hand is that much software, even when used properly, doesn't work like it's supposed to. The various software companies are selling defective products, and not taking responsibility for the defects of those products (see any recent EULA). Effectively, the consumers are paying money for something that may not work at all, and the license s/he agreed to by opening, clicking, whatever, disallows him/her from calling bullshit on the company who produced it.
All countries do have 2-letter TLDs; check the IANA's ccTLD page. However, some countries choose to sell their namespace for cash, and allow anybody to buy a name in their domain. .cc (Cocos (Keeling) Islands), .tv (Tuvalu) and .ws (Western Samoa) have done this, and I'm sure there'll be more to come. Just because registrars are billing these TLDs as "new" or whatever, and advertising the shit out of them, doesn't mean they're in any way special. AFAIK, ALL 2-letter TLDs are countries.
I wouldn't say a monopoly so much as something like a cabal. The RIAA, as far as I understand, is just a political lobbying association composed of representatives of the various recording companies. And all those recording companies surely compete with each other... they just compete more fiercely with everybody else. It's a whole lot like the way cable companies work - they have a local monopoly (over the artists, in the case of the recording companies), but there are many other companies in the same business.
It's sad that no viable alternative exists, and it also seems increasingly unlikely that one will arise, given the way the RIAA deals with its competitors, real or imagined. I'm sure they'd try to stomp anything that represented even a shadow of a threat to their stranglehold on the industry.
I couldn't agree with you more on this point! But there's one thing I just don't get about it: why do the juveniles and anonymous cowards focus so much of their energy on destruction? One of the reasons I keep coming back to Slashdot is that sometimes the discussions, or even arguments, are well thought out, intelligent, and make me happy that some of my species actually exist. And then the inevitable "you stink like monkey ass" comments come out, or goatse.cx links, or what have you, and I just get embarrassed. There are people who actually thought hard enough (or did they?) to make a post that has no taste or redeeming value whatsoever. It's not funny, it's not meaningful, it's just, well, noise.
Are there little green men reading this stuff? What must they think of the bile that's spewed here, and on Usenet, and surely on IRC, and whatever other communications channels, daily? The USSR and the USA dealt with each other in a much more cordial manner at the height of the cold war, when each was prepared to completely annihilate the entire planet!
Absolutely! I used to have a copy of Netscape 3 around just because I liked using it - even though the standards support wasn't great. The interface was the cleanest of any Netscape - bold colors and simple graphics; there has been no finer looking browser. I hope to find/make an NS3 skin for Mozilla sometime.
But horror of horrors, my Netscape 3 got lost in an upgrade a year or so back. <sniff> Any ideas where I can score a copy?
You can get a login, and in your preferences you can select not to see anything he posts. Simple. Now quit your bitching!
You do know that you can edit out all the patent stories in your preferences, right? So you don't have to see them anymore and stuff?
It's good that they've worked hard to fix the package up. I used to work for an outfit which used PgSQL back in the 6.[23] days, and god was it awful! It would just wander off into the weeds with startling regularity. I might have to give it another go, just to see what they've done with it.
I don't know what you're doing, but for me it's as easy as (1) highlight the text I want to copy in Netscape, (2) move the mouse to where I want to paste it in Emacs, (3) hit the middle button (or chord the two buttons, if I don't have 3). Seems pretty easy to me.
I think there's really something to this idea. One of the other neat tricks is that the government can also prosecute non-paying spammers for tax evasion. :) Federal penitentiary, baby! They'd have to do it, or otherwise the law would be meaningless. The only problem that I can see there is that while the government is getting rich (heh) off the spam-tax money, that still doesn't make the cost to the end-victims of the spam go away.
OK, so if the user doesn't even know there's a root account (even though there will have to be), that means that they don't know what the root password is. Which means they didn't set it. Which means all the root passwords will be the same. Which means it's even a bigger security hole than it would be otherwise. Or am I just way off here?
When they started up the latest of the BMW commercials, I really liked the music they were using. I tried sending some mail to them to ask who did the music for their commmercials, but they never replied.