Linux makes a great desktop for people who have a high level of computer "know-how" or programmers but lacks the consistency and polish need to be anyone's desktop.
What GNU/Linux needs in order to be truly desktop ready is consistency between distributions, specifially (in no particular order):
A common pacakage format. RPM and DEB are both nice but the Linux Standards Base (LSB) has decided on RPM so let's all just use it. RPM is open source software, if it doesn't have something that DEB does, suck it up and add it.
A consistent configuration layout. I should be able to log onto Gentoo, Fedora, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu and find that the configuration files for a given application or system feature are the _same_ format and exist in the _same_ places on the system. Why does every distro need to do something this simple in 10 different ways?
A solid set of GUI configuration tools. Following the previous point about a consistent configuration layout, there should be a common API for manipulation of said files and a set of GUI applications that can do common tasks without requiring a user to drop to the command prompt.
A package manager capable of installing software that the user downloads from the internet. Users of Mac OS and Windows expect to be able to go to Evolution's - for example - website and download and install the latest version of that application. This _has_ to work.
Actually, I could go on but these are the main things that are missing. However, progress is being made in a number of places. For example, FreeDesktop.org and the consistency it is setting for Gnome and KDE is great. Other things like HAL and DBUS are excellent as well.
I think we'll see a desktop ready Linux by 2010 when the distros realize that consistency of the base system is the most important thing. Competition should be based on target audience rather than everyone reinventing the wheel.
I'm not exactly sure that all of the complaints about RPM really stack up. RPM by itself is not inherently broken. It's actually a solid format for distributing source and binary software.
I think a number of the early complains about RPM stem from Red Hat's initial lack of a solid package dependency resolver and downloader like apt for Debian. In recent years this has been addressed by the likes of Yum and the very promising Smart package managers.
I have yet to see a trully perfect package management solution, but RPM certainly has some strengths over the options currently out there. Yes some pacakage maitainers can do a bad job at stating dependencies but this is more of QA issue than a problem w/the RPM format.
All Linux distros, other Unixes and even Windows suffer from some form of dependency / DLL hell. I think we really could set Linux apart or at least a distro apart is by coming up w/a small set of pacakages that constitute a base system and keeping them stable for a number of years. This is one of the areas that makes Windows look "more compatible" than the 20+ top Linux distros. This is what the LSB specification intended but mostly failed to do. Almost all Windows software is available for the two most popular OS releases (2K and XP) but in Linux it's all distro-specific, which is a shame.
Here's an example of a all too common disappiontment:
My boss installed a Linux distro the other day on his desktop. This was his first Linux desktop coming from a Windows background. I walked into his office and saw Firefox open to the Evolution website. When I asked him what he was doing, he said the distro had come with Evolution 2.2 and the latest release was 2.8. He was just trying to update Evolution. Well, anyone else tried this on a "packaged" Linux distro? You need to rebuild it from source, plus about 15 dependencies including a newer releaes of glibc. It just doesn't work "out of the box". We need to establish a flexible but solid base system so that people can just write software that JUST WORKS for GNU/Linux. This idea of having to get a 3rd party package built for YOUR distro is just a waste of everyone's time.
Me, Myself & I
on
Pro MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I see too many people, including the submitter, use myself where me or I should be used. Hey, you don't sound more professional when you use myself in places it doesn't belong, you actually sound like a moron.
The parent post and a number of other posts in this thread showcase the lack of understanding people have of depression and the medication used to treat it.
Depression is not sadness. It a serious mental illness that has very detrimental effects on a person's well being and livelyhood. There is no relationship between depression or its treatment and ones ability to feel emotions like outrage and regret.
Antidepressants are used to treat clinical depression. They are not "happy pills." I personally suffered from depression combined with panic disorder that set in approximately two years ago. Since then I have been taking Lexapro which effectively treated my depression and continues to treat my panic disorder. I don't run around feeling happy all day and I still very much posess the ability to feel sad, happy, angry, outraged and regretful.
I especially can't believe the parent's comment about people being non-chalant while on antidepressants. People who make the decision to take antidepressants don't just pop them like tylenol. They take antidepressants because of a mental illness. Did you consider that it could be the depression that is making these people non-chalant? When you're consumed by your own depression it's a little bit difficult not to be non-chalant about what's going on around you. You have bigger things to worry about.
I think this isn't just about the chipset but about Intel's compilers, which may also answer the "Why not AMD?" question. From the press release:
Intel plans to provide industry leading development tools support for Apple later this year, including the Intel C/C++ Compiler for Apple, Intel Fortran Compiler for Apple, Intel Math Kernel Libraries for Apple and Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for Apple.
Intel has already demonstrated a significant performance bump over Microsoft and GCC compilers on Windows and Linux respectively. A 30% performance boost just for swapping compilers isn't a bad start.
Say maybe like
Solaris Zones due for release on Solaris 10 later this year?
From the article:
The Solaris Zones feature is based on the same basic concepts as FreeBSD Jails. In both FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, each virtual view of the runtime environment is completely segregated, and processes from one environment cannot send signals to or even see processes in another. Both Jails and Zones share only one instance of the operating system, though, so multiple runtime environments can coexist on a machine with only one CPU.
I have been playing around with Zones on Solaris Express (Solaris 10 pre-release) and they deliver on their performance promise while easliy isolating applications.
I know everyone says this everytime another SCO store comes up, but may just be the final blow to finish off SCO when the lawsuits finally go to trial.
Funny thing is right now, SCO is just trying to keep their stock afloat, but this will bite them down the road. To win this, SCO would have to establish copyright on parts of the Linux kernel that is being used by Google. SCO simply has no case until they prove they have copyrights.
I could go on for pages about the ciclical nature of this dispute but seriously, Google might as well ignore this bullying and wait for SCO to go under.
Updates Anyone?
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What does $129 buy you? OS, application and security updates until Apple EOL's the product. You're not just buying a OS, you're getting updates and support for the life of the product as well.
For those who are counting, that's 5 minor releases of 10.2 since it was released and numerous security updates within 24-48 hours of the publishing of vulnerabilites.
Oh, and it all just works.
Nothing's free my friend. You can pay Red Hat $60/year or Apple $129. I think the Apple user experience is worth the extra $69 to support actual R&D, don't you?
Here's the Solution
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That preemtive, protected, multitasking NT kernel sure led to a lot of BSODs. I'd say that Mac OS X came to market around the same time that Win NT (2000) became usable for anything other than wasting CPU cycles on business desktops.
Bring a product to market and make it usable 4 years later. Great job MS!!!
It's great. I bought one of these a few weeks ago to run FreeBSD on as a wireless basestation. Just bought a mini case for it, both from iDot. And a $40 wireless card (Prism 2.5) from New Egg.
I installed FreeBSD 5.0 + IPFilter and I couldn't be happier. I use it to share my cable connection around the house. Best of all, it's right next to the TV and has S-Video out, so I'll be installing XWindows soon and using it to watch MPEG's, play MP3s, etc.
The best part is the thing only uses 5-15 watts, so it's super cheap to run. It's also totally fanless. Great little piece of hardware.
Anywone else catch the irony here? Intel has been leading the MHZ myth wars against Apple for a long time, however, Apple's been killing them in the power department.
So now Intel realized that if they can kill the processor speed and make a low power chip. Funny thing is my friends 900 MHZ P3 laptop with "Speed-Step" technology is slower than my 800 MHZ Powerbook by a long shot. I guess Intel finally found a way to make their battery life last longer than 1 1/2 hours by further crippling their inferior chip.
If you want a laptop that's fast, has a long battery life, and works well, you really want an Apple Powerbook G4.
5 hour advertised batter life
Powerful processor (speed not compromised to save the battery)
Cool, quiet running computer: won't burn your legs or run its fan forever
I have a FreeBSD box routing Wi cards over a cable connection in my house. I have no home phone, just a cell. Who needs to pay $40+ for a house phone when I have a cell that for $30 that has unlimited night and weekends (the time you'd actually use a house phone).
The lack of a phone does not impede my ability to setup a wireless router.:)
Yeah but that's 11 MB/S per connection not total bandwidth. 256 users can be connected, each consuming up to the 11 MB/S bandwidth. Herein lies the difference between wired and wireless. Of course these 256 users may be saturating the 100 base-t connected to the access point.:)
As for the packet overhead, I see this being deployed in home or office where a few dropped packets won't be a problem. If you're trying to guarantee real time data, you're probably using something faster anyway that can still take the extra traffic.
... but with all of these broadcast packets i would imagine it would saturate a low speed (read:wireless) network.
Although wireless networks offer slower bandwidth than their wired counterparts, they do offer one advantage over hard-connected ethernet: they don't suffer from the same saturation problems. While 100 demanding users could quickly saturate a shared 100 MB/S wire, the same users on wireless will not interfere with eachother. Wireless scales much better than you seem to think.
Secondly, a couple hunderd extra broadcast packets aren't going to saturate a 100 base-t network. A packet is tiny. If I do a tcpdump right now, you wouldn't believe the number of broadcast packets flying around here at this moment. My network connnection isn't being adversely affected.
Also, I'd really differ with you that Rendezvous isn't useful in a business setting. Obviously it's not going to replace DNS for the majority of services, but it could seriously simplfy things like, printing, scanning, and maybe even some file sharing. I don't doubt that this technology will find a great place in the home, but it certainly doesn't mean it's useless to businesses. It's worth noting though that Rendezvous is limited to the current machine's local subnet.
I would have done it myself but I thought it would be more useful to post a link to the Slashdot story for the clueless moderators who modded it up in the first place.
I have a question that possibly a lawyer-type could answer....
If I were the creator of a product like this, and the binary plugin breached a contract included with this API, could I still make available the source code without violating the license?
Is source code fully protected by the 1st Ammendment? Could source code that, when compiled and executed, breaches a license still be considered legal? Isn't source code simply a set of instructions telling a computer (or person) how to do something?
Suppose I simply posted a plain English description of how one might create such a plugin, this would be legal. Is providing source code any different?
Another great feature....
Safari blocks popups just as easily as Mozilla. Just click Safari->Block pop-up Windows !!!
Nice feature. This was a great Mac World!
The best piece of vaporware still goes to Microsoft for.Net. A software product that doesn't exist but MS claims to be anything and everything at the same time.
I hate to complain about posts but, Slashdot belongs in the "King of the misleading headlines department" lately.
P.S. - you can't really mod me down for being off topic, this whole damn story is off topic.
Why the hell do people release documents to the public, or anyone for that matter, in.doc format?
Seriously, I'm not trolling..doc is for text editors, not presentation. When I send out documents, like my resume, etc., I use PDFs. Why? PDFs are print-quality doucments that cannot be edited by the recipient. Furthermore, they don't display assinine red and grey lines underneath words that the viewer's editor doesn't understand.
People, if you are going to release documents, please, use a real print-formatted file format. Docs are for editing, PDFs are for viewing. sheeeesh!
Slashdot Mirror
Linux makes a great desktop for people who have a high level of computer "know-how" or programmers but lacks the consistency and polish need to be anyone's desktop.
What GNU/Linux needs in order to be truly desktop ready is consistency between distributions, specifially (in no particular order):
- A common pacakage format. RPM and DEB are both nice but the Linux Standards Base (LSB) has decided on RPM so let's all just use it. RPM is open source software, if it doesn't have something that DEB does, suck it up and add it.
- A consistent configuration layout. I should be able to log onto Gentoo, Fedora, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu and find that the configuration files for a given application or system feature are the _same_ format and exist in the _same_ places on the system. Why does every distro need to do something this simple in 10 different ways?
- A solid set of GUI configuration tools. Following the previous point about a consistent configuration layout, there should be a common API for manipulation of said files and a set of GUI applications that can do common tasks without requiring a user to drop to the command prompt.
- A package manager capable of installing software that the user downloads from the internet. Users of Mac OS and Windows expect to be able to go to Evolution's - for example - website and download and install the latest version of that application. This _has_ to work.
Actually, I could go on but these are the main things that are missing. However, progress is being made in a number of places. For example, FreeDesktop.org and the consistency it is setting for Gnome and KDE is great. Other things like HAL and DBUS are excellent as well. I think we'll see a desktop ready Linux by 2010 when the distros realize that consistency of the base system is the most important thing. Competition should be based on target audience rather than everyone reinventing the wheel.I'm not exactly sure that all of the complaints about RPM really stack up. RPM by itself is not inherently broken. It's actually a solid format for distributing source and binary software.
I think a number of the early complains about RPM stem from Red Hat's initial lack of a solid package dependency resolver and downloader like apt for Debian. In recent years this has been addressed by the likes of Yum and the very promising Smart package managers.
I have yet to see a trully perfect package management solution, but RPM certainly has some strengths over the options currently out there. Yes some pacakage maitainers can do a bad job at stating dependencies but this is more of QA issue than a problem w/the RPM format.
All Linux distros, other Unixes and even Windows suffer from some form of dependency / DLL hell. I think we really could set Linux apart or at least a distro apart is by coming up w/a small set of pacakages that constitute a base system and keeping them stable for a number of years. This is one of the areas that makes Windows look "more compatible" than the 20+ top Linux distros. This is what the LSB specification intended but mostly failed to do. Almost all Windows software is available for the two most popular OS releases (2K and XP) but in Linux it's all distro-specific, which is a shame.
Here's an example of a all too common disappiontment:
My boss installed a Linux distro the other day on his desktop. This was his first Linux desktop coming from a Windows background. I walked into his office and saw Firefox open to the Evolution website. When I asked him what he was doing, he said the distro had come with Evolution 2.2 and the latest release was 2.8. He was just trying to update Evolution. Well, anyone else tried this on a "packaged" Linux distro? You need to rebuild it from source, plus about 15 dependencies including a newer releaes of glibc. It just doesn't work "out of the box". We need to establish a flexible but solid base system so that people can just write software that JUST WORKS for GNU/Linux. This idea of having to get a 3rd party package built for YOUR distro is just a waste of everyone's time.
My output is listed below and does not appear to be affected ...
The list of recalled models is here.
I see too many people, including the submitter, use myself where me or I should be used. Hey, you don't sound more professional when you use myself in places it doesn't belong, you actually sound like a moron.
Here are some resources for anyone still confused about this.
</RANT>The parent post and a number of other posts in this thread showcase the lack of understanding people have of depression and the medication used to treat it.
Depression is not sadness. It a serious mental illness that has very detrimental effects on a person's well being and livelyhood. There is no relationship between depression or its treatment and ones ability to feel emotions like outrage and regret.
Antidepressants are used to treat clinical depression. They are not "happy pills." I personally suffered from depression combined with panic disorder that set in approximately two years ago. Since then I have been taking Lexapro which effectively treated my depression and continues to treat my panic disorder. I don't run around feeling happy all day and I still very much posess the ability to feel sad, happy, angry, outraged and regretful.
I especially can't believe the parent's comment about people being non-chalant while on antidepressants. People who make the decision to take antidepressants don't just pop them like tylenol. They take antidepressants because of a mental illness. Did you consider that it could be the depression that is making these people non-chalant? When you're consumed by your own depression it's a little bit difficult not to be non-chalant about what's going on around you. You have bigger things to worry about.
Intel has already demonstrated a significant performance bump over Microsoft and GCC compilers on Windows and Linux respectively. A 30% performance boost just for swapping compilers isn't a bad start.
Say maybe like Solaris Zones due for release on Solaris 10 later this year?
From the article:
I have been playing around with Zones on Solaris Express (Solaris 10 pre-release) and they deliver on their performance promise while easliy isolating applications.
Funny thing is right now, SCO is just trying to keep their stock afloat, but this will bite them down the road. To win this, SCO would have to establish copyright on parts of the Linux kernel that is being used by Google. SCO simply has no case until they prove they have copyrights.
I could go on for pages about the ciclical nature of this dispute but seriously, Google might as well ignore this bullying and wait for SCO to go under.
For those who are counting, that's 5 minor releases of 10.2 since it was released and numerous security updates within 24-48 hours of the publishing of vulnerabilites.
Oh, and it all just works.
Nothing's free my friend. You can pay Red Hat $60/year or Apple $129. I think the Apple user experience is worth the extra $69 to support actual R&D, don't you?
# cd
# ln -s
Bring a product to market and make it usable 4 years later. Great job MS!!!
I installed FreeBSD 5.0 + IPFilter and I couldn't be happier. I use it to share my cable connection around the house. Best of all, it's right next to the TV and has S-Video out, so I'll be installing XWindows soon and using it to watch MPEG's, play MP3s, etc.
The best part is the thing only uses 5-15 watts, so it's super cheap to run. It's also totally fanless. Great little piece of hardware.
I've always thought that versioning should be more related to features & point releases than anything external, like "marketing".
I see a few reasons for the "9" over 8.1
I'd really like to see a list of "new features" so I can decide for myself. :)
So now Intel realized that if they can kill the processor speed and make a low power chip. Funny thing is my friends 900 MHZ P3 laptop with "Speed-Step" technology is slower than my 800 MHZ Powerbook by a long shot. I guess Intel finally found a way to make their battery life last longer than 1 1/2 hours by further crippling their inferior chip.
If you want a laptop that's fast, has a long battery life, and works well, you really want an Apple Powerbook G4.
Forget Wintel's latest "toys". If you want a real computer, get one here.
The lack of a phone does not impede my ability to setup a wireless router. :)
All the source is right there on Red Hat's FTP servers. Download it and build it for yourself.
As for the packet overhead, I see this being deployed in home or office where a few dropped packets won't be a problem. If you're trying to guarantee real time data, you're probably using something faster anyway that can still take the extra traffic.
Although wireless networks offer slower bandwidth than their wired counterparts, they do offer one advantage over hard-connected ethernet: they don't suffer from the same saturation problems. While 100 demanding users could quickly saturate a shared 100 MB/S wire, the same users on wireless will not interfere with eachother. Wireless scales much better than you seem to think.
Secondly, a couple hunderd extra broadcast packets aren't going to saturate a 100 base-t network. A packet is tiny. If I do a tcpdump right now, you wouldn't believe the number of broadcast packets flying around here at this moment. My network connnection isn't being adversely affected.
Also, I'd really differ with you that Rendezvous isn't useful in a business setting. Obviously it's not going to replace DNS for the majority of services, but it could seriously simplfy things like, printing, scanning, and maybe even some file sharing. I don't doubt that this technology will find a great place in the home, but it certainly doesn't mean it's useless to businesses. It's worth noting though that Rendezvous is limited to the current machine's local subnet.
I loooks like Slashdot did run a story about the CVS bug.
What's next? Taco will read the parent and post a duplicate story without checking over yesterday's posts.... sheesh.
If I were the creator of a product like this, and the binary plugin breached a contract included with this API, could I still make available the source code without violating the license?
Is source code fully protected by the 1st Ammendment? Could source code that, when compiled and executed, breaches a license still be considered legal? Isn't source code simply a set of instructions telling a computer (or person) how to do something?
Suppose I simply posted a plain English description of how one might create such a plugin, this would be legal. Is providing source code any different?
Another great feature.... Safari blocks popups just as easily as Mozilla. Just click Safari->Block pop-up Windows !!! Nice feature. This was a great Mac World!
Also nice; it uses the Quartz rendering engine, so X11 is 3D pipelined. Sweet
The best piece of vaporware still goes to Microsoft for .Net. A software product that doesn't exist but MS claims to be anything and everything at the same time.
I hate to complain about posts but, Slashdot belongs in the "King of the misleading headlines department" lately.
P.S. - you can't really mod me down for being off topic, this whole damn story is off topic.
By far the best post I've read on Slashdot in a long, long time. Well said.
Seriously, I'm not trolling. .doc is for text editors, not presentation. When I send out documents, like my resume, etc., I use PDFs. Why? PDFs are print-quality doucments that cannot be edited by the recipient. Furthermore, they don't display assinine red and grey lines underneath words that the viewer's editor doesn't understand.
People, if you are going to release documents, please, use a real print-formatted file format. Docs are for editing, PDFs are for viewing. sheeeesh!