There's a common myth that "Users are Stupid." This article perpetuates that myth--shame on the journalist. I work with Real Users almost every day at the job, and many of them would be willing to trade some additional time investment for something that didn't crash all the time. Remember that it takes several hours for a new user to learn to use even a "bonehead computing environment" like the standard Windows/Mac GUI.
How many Linux users take advantage of access to source code?
The OS source is like a "home defense" handgun--not essential but Really Nice To Have in certain situations. I find that having gcc around is the best thing about Linux. How many other OSes have free compilers practically built in?
BeOS, on the other hand, is immediately satisfying.
Immediate gratification may be the American Way, but generally, the more powerful things are, the longer they take to learn. Tricycles are easy to ride; bicycles are not. Guess which goes faster. Everyone here knows where Linux stands in this setting...
not much actual content in the story. I almost ask "Why post it?"
It isn't important now, but might be later on. The story was fluff, but it at least lets us know something's going on. They should've started something like this survey 2 years ago, just when the Net was starting to take off with the common folk. (Read: when.com addresses been appearing on the sides of buses.)
The sample size worries me, though. Netsurfers tend towards heterogenity more than the general population (I think) and 2000 people, while practical, might not be enough to get a good data set that's reflective of actual usage patterns. And how many people will report checking out time-warner.com when they were really at illegalsexacts.net? *grin*
Another question: Why are they conducting this survey over the telephone? "Enter your userid/password on foo.net, and fill out the HTML forms..."
For example, it is possible to design a geocentric universe but the resulting mathematics are so complicated that nothing useful can be derived. Science really has nothing to do with Truth, it has a lot to do with Usefulness.
Geocentric universes are useful for a few things, including celestial navigation. There, it makes the math easier to assume the sun revolves around the earth, and the predictions work out to within a few feet. <shrug>.
Also consider: At the moment, quantum mechanics is the most "real" of the ways we can look at things. But the math is too bloody complex for Qmech to do much with, say... complex molecules. So we step back to chemistry, which is less complex, but has more "fuzzy areas." The chemical calculations get too complex to deal with all the chemical reactions going on in, say, a single bacterial cell. Enter molecular biology...
And in the vein of Science+Religion, the Principia Discordia says much the same thing as I said above: "The world consists of chaos and order... we perceive these through a set of preconceptions. Change these preconceptions and the same stuff will appear differently ordered/disordered."
(Just like us, to invent a parody religion where a paradigm shift is a religious experience!)
Why is it always so difficult to get through to qualified tech support? (Not a specific rant against BellSouth)
Because all the technically skilled people get jobs as programmers, leaving the idiots to man the phones... [-: And it's tough to diagnose some things over the phone because the system's not there in front of you. I've done a bit of phone tech support and probably sounded like an idiot to the person on the other end.
As for the ADSL thing, at least people are getting it to work. It's evil, but not nearly as evil as the WinModem Conspiracy--heck, many places like Dell and Gateway are bundling WinModems with new systems and not even telling their customers they're getting WinModems. (Yeah, I got burned like that...)
With that in mind, it probably won't be too long before we're seeing "WinADSL" stuff. AAAH!
The Office applications are the real monopoly. If I want to send email, use IRC, send files, non-MS OS's interoperate well enough with MS OS's. It is the _content_ of the files, i.e. Word/Excel that is where the real problem is.
*COUGH* StarOffice x.x can read/write/print MS Office documents rather handily, and that sucker works under Linux.... The price for StarOffice is much less than that for MS Office, as well.
As for the Word/Excel/Powerpoint file formats being nasty, M$ is trying. Not trying very hard, but trying, as at the moment, the.xls/.doc/.ppt files are interchangable among Mac/IBM platforms AFAIK. This didn't used to be the case.
As for interversion combatibility being a problem, the "latest and greatest" Office versions have always been able to read files from previous versions, going back at least 8 years. (Word 97 is happy reading Word 4.0 for Mac files, and Word 4.0 dates to 1989...)
It doesn't work the other way, of course, because of all the new crap^H^H^H^H features that get put into every new release. (This is one of the Big Problems in software design, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.) As always, if you need supreme portability, there's always ASCII formats like *TeX or HTML, and don't forget PDF.
Maybe what we really need is a document standard for word-processing documents kind of like the [C,C++,Java] source code standards. Of course, that'd open a whole NEW can 'o worms...
...they argued that the market will take too long to correct Microsoft's undue dominance, and that we need the government to speed things up. So, what are we, a year and a half into this? The judge is expected to issue his decision NEXT YEAR? And then appeals? Then maybe a delay for settlement talks?
Amen. The wheels of justice grind pretty slowly in the simplest of cases--it takes several months to get prosecuted/sentenced for drunk driving, so it's only natural that this (much more complicated) thing will take much longer.
That also raises the question: Does Microsoft have something to gain from the delay? Are they trying to muster public support by saying, "Look, the nasty government is doing evil things to us"?
Linux wasn't even on the general public's radar when this started. It might be on everybody's desktop by the time it's done.
File that one under "Pipe Dreams.":-] But seriously, I thought the best line in the original article was "IBM got its copies of Win95 much later than most other companies, which made them lose productivity..." I'd think missing out on the (many) bugs present in the first release would've been a productivity gain.
but the genius of Unix is as much in its focus upon small, highly-specialized programs that can be combined in ways never imagined by the original developers. Where is small in KDE/Gnome? Where is "lightweight"?
The problem with the "small, highly specialized" model is that it takes a bit of skill, talent, and experience to make it work--things that are always sadly lacking in many folks. So things bloat and multiply because "it's just easier" when everything you need is integrated into one package. (EMACS, anyone?)
Other posters are right when they say Linux needs an easy-to-install-and-use GUI frontend. Bloat is not going away anytime soon, as the 128MB minimum for running Windows2000 sadly points out. At least you can run KDE with 32M, and if the disk chatters too much for your liking, go back to the % prompt.
KDE's a very widely used GUI at the moment, but it will be interesting to see how Windows users react to it in the long term. I've been using KDE for a couple of weeks now and I'm still not nearly as comfortable with it as with Mac/Win environments... I tend to follow my own advice and do most everything from a kterm session.
Did they mention anything about the dark matter/"missing mass" question in the article? (I couldn't get to the NASA website; must be the famed/. Effect.) Regardless, I was thinking about that very question the other night and this is what I came up with:
The astronomers/cosmologists say they can't find the amount of mass in the universe that theory predicts.
Some have proposed "dark matter" which can't be seen. This could be something exotic and science-fictiony, or could be merely hundreds of small asteroids floating in interstellar space, or massive black holes...
But think for a second: There is a universal "background radiation" everywhere you look in the universe, as empty space has a temp. of about 3 K. (There's energy everywhere, in other words.) Now everybody knows E=mc^2, so it's easy to see that m=E/c^2. Photons have zero rest mass, but they're never at rest, and so have a little tiny bit of mass...
Empty space radiating at 3 K doesn't correspond to a lot of energy, of course, but there's a heck of a lot of space out there, all of it with some energy, and hence with some mass. Could that be where the "dark matter" has gotten to?
(Yeah, I know this is slightly off-topic, but I thought it might be of interest. My physics is probably completely screwed up, too...)
Oddly enough, I remember reading something about 5 years ago that claimed the universe was 15 billion years old. They keep revising the estimates of the universe's age, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. The earlier figure of 10 billion years didn't make much sense, as some globular clusters were obviously older than that... Who knows what they'll find out next, though?
My thought was that software, which has very low capital requirements to produce, and which, therefore, changes much more rapidly than machines and industrial processes, could use its own patent. A software patent would expire in 12-18 months. This is much more in line with the rate at which change occurs in our industry.
Sounds great to me. However, would there be exceptions or different patents for software intended to be "durable", like Win95/98/NT/ any OS you'd care to name? If the patent on OSes was only 18 months, I have this feeling that non-Open Source OSes would get even worse than they already are. ("We can only make money off this for 18 months... go ahead and leave the bugs and security holes in, it ain't worth the coding effort to take 'em out!")
Or this might be an excuse for even more frequent upgrades in the Win/DOS platform. (shudder.)
This raises another question, probably one that's been raised before, but a good one anyway: Is software meant to be like toilet paper, useful but temporary, or like a station wagon, "temporarily permanent"? That's a question for an alliance of lawyers and coders to answer, I think...
Interesting. So if people shouldn't have kids unless they can spend lots of time with them and/or hire other people to spend time with them, we'll have two segments of the population having kids: The very rich and the very poor. That'd Balkanize society even more than it already is... I thought the goal was to get the middle class to expand, not shrink!
Western culture as practiced in the USA is also flawed in that we think that raising kids is the parents' (and only the parents') job. Raising a kid demands lots of adults participating, and before state-sponsored education, that meant aunts/uncles/grandparents. Now, it means teachers. (Does that scare you? It scares me.)
Thing is, there are lots of people aged 65+ with lots of time, so possibly give kids "surrogate grandparents"? I'm sure this has been tried somewhere... whether it'd do any good is another matter.
There's no way Id could be found liable by any competent, reasonable jury, because some people are naturally violent; these people will find outlets for that somehow, some way. (Football/hockey/Quake...)
Computer games are the least expensive way to get the feeling of blowing another person away--checked paintball/lasertag prices lately? As such, they're going to be the choice of plenty of kids. Some of those kids will be psychos. When/if one of these psychos snaps, we look for a semi-large corporation with lots of $ to take the blame.
What can I say? It seems to be the American way--justice by lawsuit. Computer games are a contributing factor here, just as the Mir space station is a contributing factor to the tides.
And another thought: Many folks on/. and elsewhere have been saying either explicitly or between the lines "Structures existing within the US school system killed the Columbine kids." Has anyone thought of suing the schools?
"Do these games show violence in a positive, approving way? Yes. Is the player rewarded for blowing his virtual opponents away? Of course. Do these games cause violence? Well, that's hard to prove..." --Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes", paraphrased from "TV" to "games"
Interesting. I bought the same distro about a week ago and installed it--with some problems. Actually, I wiped my hard drive twice. *sigh*
The supplied manual, while not bad, doesn't go into enough detail for new users about a few things. "Run FIPS or forget running Winblows" might be a good start. Also, there's at least one spot where the typesetting got mangled in the middle of a series of commands that should be typed exactly as written. *oops*
Good tech support, though, and YaST is easy to mess around with. Guess I'll have a better point of comparison when/if I ever try RedHat.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Linux users take advantage of access to source code?
The OS source is like a "home defense" handgun--not essential but Really Nice To Have in certain situations. I find that having gcc around is the best thing about Linux. How many other OSes have free compilers practically built in?
BeOS, on the other hand, is immediately satisfying.
Immediate gratification may be the American Way, but generally, the more powerful things are, the longer they take to learn. Tricycles are easy to ride; bicycles are not. Guess which goes faster. Everyone here knows where Linux stands in this setting...
It isn't important now, but might be later on. The story was fluff, but it at least lets us know something's going on. They should've started something like this survey 2 years ago, just when the Net was starting to take off with the common folk. (Read: when .com addresses been appearing on the sides of buses.)
The sample size worries me, though. Netsurfers tend towards heterogenity more than the general population (I think) and 2000 people, while practical, might not be enough to get a good data set that's reflective of actual usage patterns. And how many people will report checking out time-warner.com when they were really at illegalsexacts.net? *grin*
Another question: Why are they conducting this survey over the telephone? "Enter your userid/password on foo.net, and fill out the HTML forms..."
Geocentric universes are useful for a few things, including celestial navigation. There, it makes the math easier to assume the sun revolves around the earth, and the predictions work out to within a few feet. <shrug>.
Also consider: At the moment, quantum mechanics is the most "real" of the ways we can look at things. But the math is too bloody complex for Qmech to do much with, say... complex molecules. So we step back to chemistry, which is less complex, but has more "fuzzy areas." The chemical calculations get too complex to deal with all the chemical reactions going on in, say, a single bacterial cell. Enter molecular biology...
And in the vein of Science+Religion, the Principia Discordia says much the same thing as I said above: "The world consists of chaos and order... we perceive these through a set of preconceptions. Change these preconceptions and the same stuff will appear differently ordered/disordered."
(Just like us, to invent a parody religion where a paradigm shift is a religious experience!)
Because all the technically skilled people get jobs as programmers, leaving the idiots to man the phones... [-: And it's tough to diagnose some things over the phone because the system's not there in front of you. I've done a bit of phone tech support and probably sounded like an idiot to the person on the other end.
As for the ADSL thing, at least people are getting it to work. It's evil, but not nearly as evil as the WinModem Conspiracy--heck, many places like Dell and Gateway are bundling WinModems with new systems and not even telling their customers they're getting WinModems. (Yeah, I got burned like that...)
With that in mind, it probably won't be too long before we're seeing "WinADSL" stuff. AAAH!
*COUGH* StarOffice x.x can read/write/print MS Office documents rather handily, and that sucker works under Linux.... The price for StarOffice is much less than that for MS Office, as well.
As for the Word/Excel/Powerpoint file formats being nasty, M$ is trying. Not trying very hard, but trying, as at the moment, the .xls/.doc/.ppt files are interchangable among Mac/IBM platforms AFAIK. This didn't used to be the case.
As for interversion combatibility being a problem, the "latest and greatest" Office versions have always been able to read files from previous versions, going back at least 8 years. (Word 97 is happy reading Word 4.0 for Mac files, and Word 4.0 dates to 1989...)
It doesn't work the other way, of course, because of all the new crap^H^H^H^H features that get put into every new release. (This is one of the Big Problems in software design, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.) As always, if you need supreme portability, there's always ASCII formats like *TeX or HTML, and don't forget PDF.
Maybe what we really need is a document standard for word-processing documents kind of like the [C,C++,Java] source code standards. Of course, that'd open a whole NEW can 'o worms...
Amen. The wheels of justice grind pretty slowly in the simplest of cases--it takes several months to get prosecuted/sentenced for drunk driving, so it's only natural that this (much more complicated) thing will take much longer.
That also raises the question: Does Microsoft have something to gain from the delay? Are they trying to muster public support by saying, "Look, the nasty government is doing evil things to us"?
Linux wasn't even on the general public's radar when this started. It might be on everybody's desktop by the time it's done.
File that one under "Pipe Dreams." :-] But seriously, I thought the best line in the original article was "IBM got its copies of Win95 much later than most other companies, which made them lose productivity..." I'd think missing out on the (many) bugs present in the first release would've been a productivity gain.
The problem with the "small, highly specialized" model is that it takes a bit of skill, talent, and experience to make it work--things that are always sadly lacking in many folks. So things bloat and multiply because "it's just easier" when everything you need is integrated into one package. (EMACS, anyone?)
Other posters are right when they say Linux needs an easy-to-install-and-use GUI frontend. Bloat is not going away anytime soon, as the 128MB minimum for running Windows2000 sadly points out. At least you can run KDE with 32M, and if the disk chatters too much for your liking, go back to the % prompt.
KDE's a very widely used GUI at the moment, but it will be interesting to see how Windows users react to it in the long term. I've been using KDE for a couple of weeks now and I'm still not nearly as comfortable with it as with Mac/Win environments... I tend to follow my own advice and do most everything from a kterm session.
But think for a second: There is a universal "background radiation" everywhere you look in the universe, as empty space has a temp. of about 3 K. (There's energy everywhere, in other words.) Now everybody knows E=mc^2, so it's easy to see that m=E/c^2. Photons have zero rest mass, but they're never at rest, and so have a little tiny bit of mass...
Empty space radiating at 3 K doesn't correspond to a lot of energy, of course, but there's a heck of a lot of space out there, all of it with some energy, and hence with some mass. Could that be where the "dark matter" has gotten to?
(Yeah, I know this is slightly off-topic, but I thought it might be of interest. My physics is probably completely screwed up, too...)
Oddly enough, I remember reading something about 5 years ago that claimed the universe was 15 billion years old. They keep revising the estimates of the universe's age, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. The earlier figure of 10 billion years didn't make much sense, as some globular clusters were obviously older than that... Who knows what they'll find out next, though?
Sounds great to me. However, would there be exceptions or different patents for software intended to be "durable", like Win95/98/NT/ any OS you'd care to name? If the patent on OSes was only 18 months, I have this feeling that non-Open Source OSes would get even worse than they already are. ("We can only make money off this for 18 months... go ahead and leave the bugs and security holes in, it ain't worth the coding effort to take 'em out!")
Or this might be an excuse for even more frequent upgrades in the Win/DOS platform. (shudder.)
This raises another question, probably one that's been raised before, but a good one anyway: Is software meant to be like toilet paper, useful but temporary, or like a station wagon, "temporarily permanent"? That's a question for an alliance of lawyers and coders to answer, I think...
Western culture as practiced in the USA is also flawed in that we think that raising kids is the parents' (and only the parents') job. Raising a kid demands lots of adults participating, and before state-sponsored education, that meant aunts/uncles/grandparents. Now, it means teachers. (Does that scare you? It scares me.)
Thing is, there are lots of people aged 65+ with lots of time, so possibly give kids "surrogate grandparents"? I'm sure this has been tried somewhere... whether it'd do any good is another matter.
Computer games are the least expensive way to get the feeling of blowing another person away--checked paintball/lasertag prices lately? As such, they're going to be the choice of plenty of kids. Some of those kids will be psychos. When/if one of these psychos snaps, we look for a semi-large corporation with lots of $ to take the blame.
What can I say? It seems to be the American way--justice by lawsuit. Computer games are a contributing factor here, just as the Mir space station is a contributing factor to the tides.
And another thought: Many folks on /. and elsewhere have been saying either explicitly or between the lines "Structures existing within the US school system killed the Columbine kids." Has anyone thought of suing the schools?
"Do these games show violence in a positive, approving way? Yes. Is the player rewarded for blowing his virtual opponents away? Of course. Do these games cause violence? Well, that's hard to prove..."
--Bill Watterson, "Calvin and Hobbes", paraphrased from "TV" to "games"
Interesting. I bought the same distro about a week ago and installed it--with some problems. Actually, I wiped my hard drive twice. *sigh*
The supplied manual, while not bad, doesn't go into enough detail for new users about a few things. "Run FIPS or forget running Winblows" might be a good start. Also, there's at least one spot where the typesetting got mangled in the middle of a series of commands that should be typed exactly as written. *oops*
Good tech support, though, and YaST is easy to mess around with. Guess I'll have a better point of comparison when/if I ever try RedHat.