Could you repost this with paragraphs shorter than 150 lines, so it can actually be read without getting a headache?
I see this a lot. It does seem to make it harder to read. I think what's up is that people are in HTML using BR tags where they want to use a proper P tag. Or in ASCII, they're using one ENTER key rather than two.
Goodness, I hope it's not only "python scriptable". It shouldn't be bound to one programming language. Sure, Python has a lot of nice features, but it's not for everybody. I have gotten the possibly mistaken idea that the scripting mechanism will be language-neutral. I don't know anyone who's working on Perl bindings for it, however.
And yes, I'm thinking of graphical in and out and error, etc, connections. The big problem with graphical mechanisms is that your ability to specify any abstract criteria is severely limited. It's hard to find the happycon that represents all python scripts recursively beneath the current working directory that are owned by you and which were modified over the last 19 hours.
You just haven't figured out this out yet, but slashdot is what you call a Winix place. Unix is dead. Nobody cares what you programmers want. It's all about money, and money means copying Microsoft.
Well, certainly that's how it seems here sometimes. But I just don't believe it. I refuse to believe it. I know, I know: reality is what remains after you're out of the universe.
It's disappointing that the movement to make a free Unix seems now to have turned into a movement to make a free Windows. The objective criteria and design goals are completely altered.
I don't know. Maybe you're right, and Winix mindlessness will crush the rest of us into the dirt. I just don't plan to go quietly. I shall squeak beneath your heel!
About the manual orientation thing: I'm sure you can sed the docs to replace all the references from "left button" to "right button" and vice versa. I'll be happy to distribute "kde docs for leftys" for you.
I think you're misconnecting here. I'll talk about the issue of manual orientation. It's not actually related to Microsoft at all, unless perhaps they actually do this right. They could hardly do it worse. It's just something that has always irritated, and I was hoping KDE would have the foresight to address this bug. Apparently, they don't care--just like so many others have historically not cared.
Here's the bottom line: Anything that says "left" or "right" button is already fundamentally misdesigned, or at least, misrepresented. It's inaccurate and wrong. Now, it's either that, or else you in KDE just outlaw the X11 facility to switch these around. And you can't do that. So now you have a bug as pervasive as Y2K is alleged to have been. Fix it at the start, or suffer forever.
It seems to me that this means that you need to do one of two things to cope with the manual-orientation bug. Either be able to build all your menus and explanations so that the proper (current applicable) word appears, or else you devise a way to express this without left and right. I gave one suggestions: using "index" finger for button one and "ring" finger for button three. There are certainly other ideas, and quite probably better ones than these. But you should get the idea. Don't build in bias.
If you look at the fingering notes on piano music, the index finger is not #2 on the right and #4 on the left hand. It's #2 in both cases, just as the thumb is #1 in both cases. So why do people who talk about computers and mice almost always do this wrong? Don't they understand that an index finger is still an index no matter which hand you find it on? It doesn't go from "button one" to being "button three" just because it's on a different hand. It's still button one, because it's the finger closest to your thumb.
Intentionally making life hard on 1/7 or 1/10 the population merely because there are fewer of them than you is unfortunate at best, wicked at worst. And the thing is, you don't have to. But right-handed people never think about this, so left-handed people get screwed completely unnecessarily.
KDE's documentation, btw, is perfectly proper, and if you want man pages, you can generate them yourself from the SGML source. Everyone else can hapily [sic] use html, same as always.
I expect and demand a single, solitary, coherently and seemlessly integrated documentation system for the entire operating system. I expect and demand that every command be documented, and that every user-callable function be documented. I don't care what the hell that system is called, nor for the most part, how it works, provided it doesn't get any worse than man already is. But it must be ONE SINGLE SYSTEM.
I do not expect to go hunting through fricking alta vista to find something out. Documentation must be integrated. Don't make me hunt. Don't make me look one place for docs on this thing, and that place for docs on that thing. This hodgepodge scattering of documentation to random places on my system or the net all requiring distinct interfaces all ignorant of one another is a fundamentally brain-damaged Winix evil. You would never get away with this crap from a real vendor.
Just have make install generate and install proper manpages in proper. Anything else is wrong. If it's so damned easy, just shut up and do the right thing.
And remember, "elitist" is ignoramus-speak for "competent professional". I'll be happy to don that moniker and eschew its antonym. Anyone who touches a computer is severely handicapped if they can't type. Stop screwing over those of us who can by choosing a single-bit interface when there's a concerto just waiting to unfold beneath the expert's fingers.
You clearly lack the ability to understand why reliance on cascading and nested menus for command execution is fundamentally evil. You can't search them. You can't automate them. You can't ever get any better than the buffoon you were when you first got there. I could write an entire paper on why forcing this moronic model down all our throats is brain-numbing and counter-productive.
And please don't waste any more of my time trying to get me to tell the difference between whether you're a troll or whether you're a loon. Right now, you're batting 50-50, but guess what? I don't care which it is. I'm sure you'll have to bitch a little followup to everything I say, but go for it. I enjoying watching you waste your time flailing around like this, but as I've never seen anything particularly insighful from you (I've looked at your karma), and you never seem to actually learn from others, your rants will fall on deaf ears, and I shan't be responding to your trollings. Go ahead -- waste your life.
Tom, what I find "terribly, terribly disappointing" is the fact that you have very clearly never tried using KDE..
Your premise is false, which means your consequent is irrelevant.
Now, I've written at some length about what would be reasonable for a Unix user. Go see the thread I cited for some of that. Someday I'll write more.
To answer in broad, high-level terms your question about what might be "sensible to Unix people", I'd say that the biggest thing is to avoid optimizing for these incompetent, documentation-free, training-free, five-second users, expecially when that means screwing over the professional, long-time user who can actually remember something from one day to the next but who isn't allowed to make use of this experience. I don't see why both styles aren't possible. Allow people to learn, damn it!
The next thing is to stop discriminating against people who don't mind dealing with multiple layers of abstraction. Doug Gwyn said, "GUIs make easy things easy, and hard things impossible." That's because of the abstraction level and associated connectivities between those abstractions. You'll never do anything with a canned GUI that the author of that program didn't foresee. It doesn't let itself to that sort of power-user combinatorics. It's just a toy. GUIs don't have to be, but for some reason, that's all we have.
One should also stop discriminating against people who can actually touch type. The keyboard-mouse fight is self-defeating. Nothing could slow you down more. And the mouse is an RSI hazard. Use it for what's appropriate, not for everything. Going back to the pre-literate days of pointing and grunting rather than explaining what you're trying to do is hardly progress.
And finally, you should stop discrimating against people with non-Windows learning styles and and non-Western cultural backgrounds.
There's probably more, like not discrimating against left-handed people, but those are the big ones that came to mind.
It's disappointing because it does not have to be this way! And making something that isn't annoying for Unix people in no way rules out anything else, like something to make Prisoner of Bill not pee in fear.
Maybe you should reread my original article. One place where the toolkit and/or window mangler people could really help is the slow, stupid, repetitious, non-searchable menu paradigm. If I were to pick one thing after proper documentation, it would be this. Maybe even before. You don't want each program to cope with it. That's the wrong layer.
Happicons are another issue (how do you sort pictures? How do you choose things that make sense everywhere?), but I'll leave that one for now.
Please don't come off with this "let them use a 24x80 vt100" noise for Unix users. That's not fair, and it's not what Unix is really about. At all.
I believe that if they think Unix at design stage, they'll make something that's both Unix-friendly and extensible even in the unforeseeable future. But I also believe that if they do not think with the Unix mindset during that design phase, they will never, ever produce something which isn't annoying as hell to us non-Winix types.
This whole issue of "there's more of them than you, so you don't count" is the same pain in the ass that got us into the situation of nobody writing shrink-wrapped software for Unix. This is just another way to tell us we don't matter, that it's ok to ignore us and piss us off, because it's cheaper to take the heat than to do it right. And if that doesn't dissappoint you, I don't know what does.
We do try to emphasize the visual elements from Windows and MacOS because, let's face it, that's where the newbies are coming from and we want to make sure that they have a comfortable, intuitive environment to work in. It should be possible for an ex-Windows or ex-Mac user to sit down in front of a KDE workstation and figure out how to use it very quickly and with little or no help.
I guess that means that the answer to my question about What's in it for the rest of us (including the Manual Orientation thread) is "Not much, and we don't care". The goal quoted above seems to be none other than to make something that is sensible to non-Unix people, rather than something that's sensible to Unix people.
The reason they shouldn't release deltas is that it's the next letter after gamma, which comes after beta, which comes after alpha. By the time you hit delta, users of begging for production releases. They call you up and say "WHERE IS OUR SOFTWARE?" I don't think they like hearing that you're within epsilon of shipping, either.:-)
Yes, but we aren't speeking [sic] Greek, we are speaking English.
You're completely correct. Were it otherwise, one would have had to consider proper case inflections as well. Fortunately, English doesn't do that for nouns (genitives aside).:-)
Importing plurals along with loan words is a stupid anomaly.
Indeed, but that observation doesn't change how it works. You don't see that happening much in other widely-spoken European languages, where the normal approach is to convert to local conventions. But in English, this varies depending on the degree of assimilation. Occasionally competing forms even co-exist side by side, sometimes having different meanings, as in indexes of books but indices of an array.
That criterion and phenomenon, or bacterium and millennium, shall someday undergo more complete assimilation is far more likely a question of "when" than it is of "whether". As this occurs, strange corruptions like double plurals sometimes arise and occasionally persist, such as the "these bacteriae" example I read and recoiled from the other day. What's next, "millennias"?:-(
All you really have to go on is your ear, but checking the OED never hurt anybody.:-) And at this time, "criteria is" seems just jolting an error in numeric concordance as "pathos are". Yes, Greek sucks in its complexity. And English is annoying in its unpredictable assimilation strategies. But you really aren't going to change either. That's just how it is.
To make this posting useful and geek-relevant, you might check out Perl's Lingua::EN::In flect module. It's filled with boatloads of examples of these.
ObFunny: How many Germen [sic] does it take to change a language?:-)
It comes complete with self-serving lies (well, MS-serving ones) and gross technical misunderstandings built right into it. There's no reason for geeks to accept Microsoft's lies as gospel. Even when it's not a lie, it's horribly limiting. By using their Orwellian terms, you spread their lies and limitations for them. Let's not do that.
Then you go talking about this figmentational "desktop" bogosity again. I won't waste time talking about it again. I've done that a bunch lately. Check other threads.
Virtually no one writes anything for the Linux kernel. And very few people write anything for Linux-based operating systems. You're just seeing people work on Unix stuff, and you see it running on some vendor-supplied, Linux-based operating system and figure it's something specifically for the Linux OSes. In 99.98% of the cases, you're wrong in this.
And as for business computing... huh? What does that have to do with anything? Now you're coming very close to talking about the marketing world of lies and avarice. Geeks have no trek with that crap without losing their souls.
But quibbling aside, you're right about a good bit of this. For example, the need to have highly competent people managing the computers and the computing environments of the highly incompetent ones. You can never make computing easy enough for the idiots. The stupid shall be with us always. So you have to establish set-ups so that they have professional caretakers. System adminstration is as important as it ever was, if not more so. Show me a system that even an idiot can adminstrate, and I'll show you one that only idiots would ever use.
System adminstrators shouldn't have to be in the same hemisphere as their user unless new hardware requires installation. Anything else sould be location independent. Also, the number of sysadmins should be related more to the number of users than the number of machines. If you find that merely adding another host to your net incurs significantly more admin overhead, something's wrong. A professional sysadmin automates everything, so one more machine shouldn't matter very much. One more user, however, does, because it's the routine human interaction that takes all the non-exceptional-event time.
With M12 coming up, they are getting close to that stage, and have setup a criteria they think works. I don't know what "a criteria" might mean. I imagine that's either "one criterion" or "several criteria". Greek is funny that way.
Speaking of Greek, traditionally "alpha" was the designation applied to something that's little past the prototype stage, and sometimes, is nothing more than that. It doesn't refer to the propensity for bugginess, but rather to whether the interface is decided or not. And in the case of alpha, it's not. The interface can change completely in later stages. Parts may be missing. Parts may be added.
In beta, on the other hand, we're done with that. Beta is the stage after which functional changes are forbidden. You can't change the interface in the jump to production. Everything must behave as documented to behave. All you can do is fix bugs. No new features. No change in calling conventions.
I have actually seen "gamma" releases, too. This seems to mean "We hope to God this is production calibre."
After beta--or rarely, after gamma--comes production. Never issue deltas, except in the form of a patch.:-)
However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market.
I see you've bought into the silliness that there's such a computer as a "server".
But what about the desktop market???
I see you've also bought into the silliness that there's such a computer as a "desktop".
There are no servers. There are no desktops. There are only computers, networks, and programs. If the computer is on the net, and you can talk to it, then that doesn't mean it's a server. If it can talk to you, that doesn't mean you're a client.
Throw off the shackles of Microsoft's feudal system of lords and serfs. Start thinking about a free world of equal peers.
It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there.
And for strike three, we have this whole "PC" == "personal computer" silliness.
Sigh. Maybe Babelfish should offer a Microsoft-to-hacker translation service, and Slashdot can provide a link.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on/. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..
"Still"? Hello?
The answer is never. Never ever ever ever ever. I never did, and I never will. In two decades of computer use, I have not once had an MS-damaged computer. I've never touched the stuff, and neither have most of my programmer friends.
We are the masters of our own computers, independent wayfarers without enslaving ties to the local master, Lord Bill. To him we pay no taxes, nor from him do we hope for rescue in our hour of darkness. We grow our own food, defend our own homes, write our own tales, seek our own solutions. We are freemen, not serfs.
And how many actually use Linux as their primary desktop machine.
I think I've decided that that question is about as sensible as the one about whether you've stopped beating your wife yet. It requires tacit acceptance of too many notions nonsensical at best, alien at worst, to garner much in the way of a meaningful answer. Consequently, I'm going to delete that supremely silly buzzword bingo term, "desktop", from the cited question.
In a sane computing environment, any terminal provides complete access to any computer. I can and often do have situations in which I'm using a keyboard/monitor combination from computer #1, have got some software CD physically loaded in computer #2's CD drive, and am running the program from that CD that's NFS-mounted on computer #3--all the while with I/O going back to machine #1.
What I'm trying to tell you is that where I happen to be sitting makes absolutely no difference in determining what I'm doing. It's completely location-independent. The idea of actually physical collocation is some throwback to the Stone Age of computers. No matter where I am, everything is transparently accessible. This renders ridiculous the question of what kernel is being run by the computer physically closest to me. I don't have to move my body around to access any file or program. Given a network, all it takes is for these programs and files to exist somewhere on some machine on which I have a valid account.
As I look at the programs currently displaying on this terminal, I see that many of them are actually hosted on computers are running a Linux-based operating system, mainly RedHat with some SuSE. But several others are running running on an OpenBSD box, and one is running under FreeBSD. I currently have only one active program running on Solaris, and not under SunOS. The window manager keeping track of all this for me, tvtwm, happens to be running on OpenBSD. But really, this doesn't matter a bit.
I've found that Prisoners of Bill have a very hard time with this concept. The confusion is inherent in certain types of questions, such as the one I've answered here. Free yourself from the cognitive restrictions that Microsoft has insinuated into your worldview.
i wish linux could use the keyboard in the gui like you can alt, or tab around in windows.
This has nothing to do with the kernel! It's merely a function of your window manager. For example:
$ grep -i ring ~/.twmrc WindowRing { "eterm" "terminal" "Terminal" "Eterm" "xterm" } "F5" = : all : f.warpring "prev" "F6" = : all : f.warpring "next"
Check the manpage for your window manager. You can probably configure something like this. But you won't have to rebuild and reboot the kernel, or even restart X to play with it.
A couple of words...[...] 2. Most people who are not STUPID want their business servers to run an OS that is COMMERICAL so someone is liable if something ever goes wrong!
On those words, could you please define precisely what you mean by
stupid
commercial
server
business server
goes wrong
I could ask similar questions about the part I didn't quote, too, as in "win", "apps", "win apps", and "non-commericial use". (Note that "win" as you used it is a nice example of a single-word oxymoron.)
The fear of taking responsibility for one's own choices, and for solving one's own problems, has reached epidemic status in our litigious society. It's a wonder anything ever gets done at all with so many cowards and crybabies running to their licences and lawyers every day.
GNOME and KDE have made significant strides on making Linux a contender in the desktop environment.
Oh, how precious! It's time for buzzword bingo again.
I wish people would use scare quotes every time they used "desktop environment" with the restrictive and dedicated sense of that computing environment used by people who don't really know anything at all about computers and who don't want to, as opposed to the more intuitive and generic use in which it means "the set-up on people's personal computers", which obviously isn't what you meant even though it's what you said. It's as strange to many of us as using the term "personal computer" to mean "Intel-based IBM PC using whatever Microsoft wants you to use" rather than the more intuitive and generic "computer used by a particular person".
Sometimes it's really as though the Linux people were speaking Unix with a Microsoft accent. Be very afraid. That's how they want you to speak, and thus, to think.:-(
Not everyone derives their working vocabulary from the insidious Microsoft propaganda virus, you know--especially in this forum of all places. The whole idea of controlling the word-choice in order to control the implicit agenda and by entension, the entire world view is surely some Orwellian nightmare invented by somebody's marketing department trying to create tacit corporate branding on innocuous, general-purpose words. It's like the pro-life/pro-choice spin. Or the PC police (please take that in multiple senses) all over again trying to weed out choices that have a message they don't like.
In some ways Linux has already overtaken Windows:
Nothing you list there is inherent to the Linux kernel, nor even to any of the dizzying panoply of Linux-based operating systems that use some flavor of the same. I certainly don't see how any of these GUI toys really have anything to do with Linuces in particular rather than any of the myriad other Unix systems running X11.
The only thing that seems to distinguish itself is the price-point criterion, but it's unclear how important that truly is. First off, the Linux-based family of operating systems are hardly the only free OSes around. But more important, really, is that the price for even costly OSes continues to go down. So I can't see that, even if it were one today, this would long remain that distinguishing a factor. For many situations, a two-digit dollar amount is hardly enough to notice compared to all the other factors. It just gets lost in the noise.
I wrote: "I seen". Eek! I was not attempting to affect some dialect there. It was a simple typo.
Why the blazes don't these stupid TEXTAREA fields pop me into $EDITOR? The so-called editing capabilities are cretinous in the extreme, and, for some reason doubtless due to lazy fingers on my part, from time to time manage to delete the whole area and destroy significant work with no recourse to an undo. May the bowels of a thousand plague-infested camels burst in full projectile fury upon the Winix-minded instigators of this moronic and miserable mis-feature!
The "taint" to which I referred was, indeed, the festering pile of [CENSORED] known collectively as "Linux Distributions" and its kindred soul, the viral pestilence known as the GNU Public License.
I can empathize with nearly everything you've said, but one thing. I seen no connection between the level of craftsmanship used by the make-a-buckers in their cobbled-together products and the social, economic, and political goals of the aforedenigrated licence.
Also, you might consider whether to eschew "Linux distributions" and employ instead more explicative and honest terms such as any of the following, in decreasing order by formality:
Linux-based operating systems
Linux-based OSes
Linuxes
Linuces
The lattermost suggestions is derived by playful hyperapplication of the rule seen in Latin crux / cruces, or in index / indices.
As for trouble, I make enough of that for myself, so I'm used to it.;-)
Everytime I hear someone say "Debian GNU/FreeBSD", I lex it as "Debian GNU-free BSD".:-)
Considering how GNU-free BSD already is (modulo in most cases the compiler, but that's largely irrelevant to the user's experience, and doesn't produce infectious output), this always sounds strangely redundantly, so I always have to rescan a few times until the words jumble back into place.:-)
I've tried BSD, yes. BSDI, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. You know what I did not like with them? Their interface. Not the GUI - just elementary ease of use.
How strange: that's exactly why most of us like most about it: its elementary ease of use. I guess some folks prefer non-elementary difficulty of use, but if so, they deserve what they get.:-)
Actually, there are other important things, too, but none of them are related to making the moronic masses happy. Sometimes they're about making adminstrators, programmers, engineers, and scientists happy; in other words, people who aren't afraid of thinking and who aren't afraid of learning, people who aren't looking so much for a flashy new toaster without an instruction manual or a redundant TV set to babysit the kiddies, but rather for a complete system that does precisely what it was designed to do, one solidly integrated and tested by time.
Other venues exist for the less technophilic--like hiring a secretary.:-)
The userland of the OS will be BSD. The license under which any contributions to that userland will be accepted will be BSD - no exceptions. There will be no Linux "taint" to the code, it will simply be running on a Linux kernel rather than a BSD kernel.
That's... interesting.
Other people I've seen talk about this have used the term "FSF taint" instead. The kernel that Linux-based operating systems use is, for the most part, pretty well respected by other Unix programmers. The same cannot be universally said for the non-kernel clutter that various vendors slap together and call an operating system. So really, I'd try to avoid the term "Linux taint". I don't think it's really what you meant, and it won't get you in as much trouble. Try using the specific operating system, like "Redhat taint" or "Corel taint", or the specific political group, like "FSF taint", because that way you won't seem to be slamming the fine work that Linux Torvalds has done.
UNIX (Linux) was hard to learn. There was little documentation. There were few users. It was only used by engineers.
Each of those statements, commonly repeated, has little more than an echo of truth.
UNIX (Linux) was hard to learn.
Hard to learn compared with what? Compared with tying my shoe? Certainly. Compared with learning how to build a car? Hardly. Compared with learning what you have to learn to graduate from high school? Far, far from it. Hard compared to the vocational training needed in other jobs? The depends on the job. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
There was little documentation.
My goodness, whatever can you be talking about? Are you unaware of how revolution the Unix approach to documentation actually was? The BSD 4.4 documentation set, co-published by Usenix and O'Reilly, remains remarkably close to what we received in Version 7, although admittedly better than what we got in First Edition. I'm not talking about just manpages, either, essential though those are, but also the whole set of critical supplementary documents, all available on-line It's true that what some despectively refer to as "Winix" seems too often to have forgotten this lesson, but it was clearly present and revolutionary.
There were few users.
Again, there seems to be a difference of perspective here. Sure, maybe in the early 70s there weren't many, but by the early 80s, there were countless thousands upon thousands upon thousands of users. I remember putting 3,000 students per semester onto Unix systems, just as my university. There were scores of others across the world doing the same thing, but with higher numbers.
It was only used by engineers.
Not at all. It was used by huge numbers students, mathemeticians, programmers, scientists, and everybody else, even secretaries. At one point in time, the secretaries at very large institutions used vi to draft troff documents for all internal paperwork. They weren't idiots, but this is hardly rocket science.
This stuff I'm replying to should be labelled "mythology". No matter how often Microsoft tells you this story, it remains more lie than truth.
I don't know that I've ever heard Linux referred to as a microkernel. Perhaps you might please explain a bit why you say that. Mach is a microkernel. BSD is a monokernel (or macrokernel, if you prefer). Both structures can be used to implement what folks think of as the kernel. In fact, MkLinux is a Linux-based operating system built on top of Mach, whereas Apple's Mac OS X is a BSD-based operating system that is also built on top of Mach. Chorus's experiences of having to roll the microkernel back into the monokernel are also interesting.
As for the licensing, I well and truly believe that the lion's share of the daily users of these systems could not possibly care one wee whit less about the distinctions in the licences.
Finally, just some would prefer an operating system with an FSF-derived user environment but a BSD kernel, others would prefer the world the other way around. You read about what progress they're making toward this goal in active threads the BSD newsgroups today.
But please, please consider those threads read-only. Don't flame. Just read. In particular, don't have a coronary when you hear about how like Microsoft's dirty tricks some people find GNU's "embrace-and-extend" and anti-POSIX strategies.
Just let people have what they want to have. Sure, a BSD kernel and FSF non-kernel would end up making one more free Unix operating system than we had before, but likewise would a Linux kernel (I don't believe the FSF owns it yet, right?) combined with a BSD non-kernel.
So what? The Linuxes are so splintered and disorganized now that people would never even notice another one. Sure, you'd be upping the number of BSD-based operating systems by a far bigger jump than you'd be upping the number of Linux-based operating systems.
(4+1)/4 is a a bigger number than (122+1)/122--or whatever--is. Strangely, the complaints about the smaller number involved here dramatically outnumber those about the larger one. Isn't that peculiar? Try to resist.
TRY TO RESIST!
Let's just let everybody have what they want to have, ok? Unix is Unix. It's not Microsoft. Isn't that enough?
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I'm thinking of graphical in and out and error, etc, connections. The big problem with graphical mechanisms is that your ability to specify any abstract criteria is severely limited. It's hard to find the happycon that represents all python scripts recursively beneath the current working directory that are owned by you and which were modified over the last 19 hours.
It's disappointing that the movement to make a free Unix seems now to have turned into a movement to make a free Windows. The objective criteria and design goals are completely altered.
I don't know. Maybe you're right, and Winix mindlessness will crush the rest of us into the dirt. I just don't plan to go quietly. I shall squeak beneath your heel!
Here's the bottom line: Anything that says "left" or "right" button is already fundamentally misdesigned, or at least, misrepresented. It's inaccurate and wrong. Now, it's either that, or else you in KDE just outlaw the X11 facility to switch these around. And you can't do that. So now you have a bug as pervasive as Y2K is alleged to have been. Fix it at the start, or suffer forever.
It seems to me that this means that you need to do one of two things to cope with the manual-orientation bug. Either be able to build all your menus and explanations so that the proper (current applicable) word appears, or else you devise a way to express this without left and right. I gave one suggestions: using "index" finger for button one and "ring" finger for button three. There are certainly other ideas, and quite probably better ones than these. But you should get the idea. Don't build in bias.
If you look at the fingering notes on piano music, the index finger is not #2 on the right and #4 on the left hand. It's #2 in both cases, just as the thumb is #1 in both cases. So why do people who talk about computers and mice almost always do this wrong? Don't they understand that an index finger is still an index no matter which hand you find it on? It doesn't go from "button one" to being "button three" just because it's on a different hand. It's still button one, because it's the finger closest to your thumb.
Intentionally making life hard on 1/7 or 1/10 the population merely because there are fewer of them than you is unfortunate at best, wicked at worst. And the thing is, you don't have to. But right-handed people never think about this, so left-handed people get screwed completely unnecessarily.
I do not expect to go hunting through fricking alta vista to find something out. Documentation must be integrated. Don't make me hunt. Don't make me look one place for docs on this thing, and that place for docs on that thing. This hodgepodge scattering of documentation to random places on my system or the net all requiring distinct interfaces all ignorant of one another is a fundamentally brain-damaged Winix evil. You would never get away with this crap from a real vendor.
Just have make install generate and install proper manpages in proper. Anything else is wrong. If it's so damned easy, just shut up and do the right thing.
And remember, "elitist" is ignoramus-speak for "competent professional". I'll be happy to don that moniker and eschew its antonym. Anyone who touches a computer is severely handicapped if they can't type. Stop screwing over those of us who can by choosing a single-bit interface when there's a concerto just waiting to unfold beneath the expert's fingers.
You clearly lack the ability to understand why reliance on cascading and nested menus for command execution is fundamentally evil. You can't search them. You can't automate them. You can't ever get any better than the buffoon you were when you first got there. I could write an entire paper on why forcing this moronic model down all our throats is brain-numbing and counter-productive.
And please don't waste any more of my time trying to get me to tell the difference between whether you're a troll or whether you're a loon. Right now, you're batting 50-50, but guess what? I don't care which it is. I'm sure you'll have to bitch a little followup to everything I say, but go for it. I enjoying watching you waste your time flailing around like this, but as I've never seen anything particularly insighful from you (I've looked at your karma), and you never seem to actually learn from others, your rants will fall on deaf ears, and I shan't be responding to your trollings. Go ahead -- waste your life.
Now, I've written at some length about what would be reasonable for a Unix user. Go see the thread I cited for some of that. Someday I'll write more.
To answer in broad, high-level terms your question about what might be "sensible to Unix people", I'd say that the biggest thing is to avoid optimizing for these incompetent, documentation-free, training-free, five-second users, expecially when that means screwing over the professional, long-time user who can actually remember something from one day to the next but who isn't allowed to make use of this experience. I don't see why both styles aren't possible. Allow people to learn, damn it!
The next thing is to stop discriminating against people who don't mind dealing with multiple layers of abstraction. Doug Gwyn said, "GUIs make easy things easy, and hard things impossible." That's because of the abstraction level and associated connectivities between those abstractions. You'll never do anything with a canned GUI that the author of that program didn't foresee. It doesn't let itself to that sort of power-user combinatorics. It's just a toy. GUIs don't have to be, but for some reason, that's all we have.
One should also stop discriminating against people who can actually touch type. The keyboard-mouse fight is self-defeating. Nothing could slow you down more. And the mouse is an RSI hazard. Use it for what's appropriate, not for everything. Going back to the pre-literate days of pointing and grunting rather than explaining what you're trying to do is hardly progress.
And finally, you should stop discrimating against people with non-Windows learning styles and and non-Western cultural backgrounds.
There's probably more, like not discrimating against left-handed people, but those are the big ones that came to mind.
Maybe you should reread my original article. One place where the toolkit and/or window mangler people could really help is the slow, stupid, repetitious, non-searchable menu paradigm. If I were to pick one thing after proper documentation, it would be this. Maybe even before. You don't want each program to cope with it. That's the wrong layer.
Happicons are another issue (how do you sort pictures? How do you choose things that make sense everywhere?), but I'll leave that one for now.
Please don't come off with this "let them use a 24x80 vt100" noise for Unix users. That's not fair, and it's not what Unix is really about. At all.
I believe that if they think Unix at design stage, they'll make something that's both Unix-friendly and extensible even in the unforeseeable future. But I also believe that if they do not think with the Unix mindset during that design phase, they will never, ever produce something which isn't annoying as hell to us non-Winix types.
This whole issue of "there's more of them than you, so you don't count" is the same pain in the ass that got us into the situation of nobody writing shrink-wrapped software for Unix. This is just another way to tell us we don't matter, that it's ok to ignore us and piss us off, because it's cheaper to take the heat than to do it right. And if that doesn't dissappoint you, I don't know what does.
How terribly, terribly disappointing!
The reason they shouldn't release deltas is that it's the next letter after gamma, which comes after beta, which comes after alpha. By the time you hit delta, users of begging for production releases. They call you up and say "WHERE IS OUR SOFTWARE?" I don't think they like hearing that you're within epsilon of shipping, either. :-)
That criterion and phenomenon, or bacterium and millennium, shall someday undergo more complete assimilation is far more likely a question of "when" than it is of "whether". As this occurs, strange corruptions like double plurals sometimes arise and occasionally persist, such as the "these bacteriae" example I read and recoiled from the other day. What's next, "millennias"? :-(
All you really have to go on is your ear, but checking the OED never hurt anybody. :-) And at this time, "criteria is" seems just jolting an error in numeric concordance as "pathos are". Yes, Greek sucks in its complexity. And English is annoying in its unpredictable assimilation strategies. But you really aren't going to change either. That's just how it is.
To make this posting useful and geek-relevant, you might check out Perl's Lingua::EN::In flect module. It's filled with boatloads of examples of these.
ObFunny: How many Germen [sic] does it take to change a language? :-)
Then you go talking about this figmentational "desktop" bogosity again. I won't waste time talking about it again. I've done that a bunch lately. Check other threads.
Virtually no one writes anything for the Linux kernel. And very few people write anything for Linux-based operating systems. You're just seeing people work on Unix stuff, and you see it running on some vendor-supplied, Linux-based operating system and figure it's something specifically for the Linux OSes. In 99.98% of the cases, you're wrong in this.
And as for business computing... huh? What does that have to do with anything? Now you're coming very close to talking about the marketing world of lies and avarice. Geeks have no trek with that crap without losing their souls.
But quibbling aside, you're right about a good bit of this. For example, the need to have highly competent people managing the computers and the computing environments of the highly incompetent ones. You can never make computing easy enough for the idiots. The stupid shall be with us always. So you have to establish set-ups so that they have professional caretakers. System adminstration is as important as it ever was, if not more so. Show me a system that even an idiot can adminstrate, and I'll show you one that only idiots would ever use.
System adminstrators shouldn't have to be in the same hemisphere as their user unless new hardware requires installation. Anything else sould be location independent. Also, the number of sysadmins should be related more to the number of users than the number of machines. If you find that merely adding another host to your net incurs significantly more admin overhead, something's wrong. A professional sysadmin automates everything, so one more machine shouldn't matter very much. One more user, however, does, because it's the routine human interaction that takes all the non-exceptional-event time.
Speaking of Greek, traditionally "alpha" was the designation applied to something that's little past the prototype stage, and sometimes, is nothing more than that. It doesn't refer to the propensity for bugginess, but rather to whether the interface is decided or not. And in the case of alpha, it's not. The interface can change completely in later stages. Parts may be missing. Parts may be added.
In beta, on the other hand, we're done with that. Beta is the stage after which functional changes are forbidden. You can't change the interface in the jump to production. Everything must behave as documented to behave. All you can do is fix bugs. No new features. No change in calling conventions.
I have actually seen "gamma" releases, too. This seems to mean "We hope to God this is production calibre."
After beta--or rarely, after gamma--comes production. Never issue deltas, except in the form of a patch. :-)
There are no servers. There are no desktops. There are only computers, networks, and programs. If the computer is on the net, and you can talk to it, then that doesn't mean it's a server. If it can talk to you, that doesn't mean you're a client.
Throw off the shackles of Microsoft's feudal system of lords and serfs. Start thinking about a free world of equal peers.
And for strike three, we have this whole "PC" == "personal computer" silliness.Sigh. Maybe Babelfish should offer a Microsoft-to-hacker translation service, and Slashdot can provide a link.
"Still"? Hello?The answer is never. Never ever ever ever ever. I never did, and I never will. In two decades of computer use, I have not once had an MS-damaged computer. I've never touched the stuff, and neither have most of my programmer friends.
We are the masters of our own computers, independent wayfarers without enslaving ties to the local master, Lord Bill. To him we pay no taxes, nor from him do we hope for rescue in our hour of darkness. We grow our own food, defend our own homes, write our own tales, seek our own solutions. We are freemen, not serfs.
In a sane computing environment, any terminal provides complete access to any computer. I can and often do have situations in which I'm using a keyboard/monitor combination from computer #1, have got some software CD physically loaded in computer #2's CD drive, and am running the program from that CD that's NFS-mounted on computer #3--all the while with I/O going back to machine #1.
What I'm trying to tell you is that where I happen to be sitting makes absolutely no difference in determining what I'm doing. It's completely location-independent. The idea of actually physical collocation is some throwback to the Stone Age of computers. No matter where I am, everything is transparently accessible. This renders ridiculous the question of what kernel is being run by the computer physically closest to me. I don't have to move my body around to access any file or program. Given a network, all it takes is for these programs and files to exist somewhere on some machine on which I have a valid account.
As I look at the programs currently displaying on this terminal, I see that many of them are actually hosted on computers are running a Linux-based operating system, mainly RedHat with some SuSE. But several others are running running on an OpenBSD box, and one is running under FreeBSD. I currently have only one active program running on Solaris, and not under SunOS. The window manager keeping track of all this for me, tvtwm, happens to be running on OpenBSD. But really, this doesn't matter a bit.
I've found that Prisoners of Bill have a very hard time with this concept. The confusion is inherent in certain types of questions, such as the one I've answered here. Free yourself from the cognitive restrictions that Microsoft has insinuated into your worldview.
- stupid
- commercial
- server
- business server
- goes wrong
I could ask similar questions about the part I didn't quote, too, as in "win", "apps", "win apps", and "non-commericial use". (Note that "win" as you used it is a nice example of a single-word oxymoron.)The fear of taking responsibility for one's own choices, and for solving one's own problems, has reached epidemic status in our litigious society. It's a wonder anything ever gets done at all with so many cowards and crybabies running to their licences and lawyers every day.
I wish people would use scare quotes every time they used "desktop environment" with the restrictive and dedicated sense of that computing environment used by people who don't really know anything at all about computers and who don't want to, as opposed to the more intuitive and generic use in which it means "the set-up on people's personal computers", which obviously isn't what you meant even though it's what you said. It's as strange to many of us as using the term "personal computer" to mean "Intel-based IBM PC using whatever Microsoft wants you to use" rather than the more intuitive and generic "computer used by a particular person".
Sometimes it's really as though the Linux people were speaking Unix with a Microsoft accent. Be very afraid. That's how they want you to speak, and thus, to think. :-(
Not everyone derives their working vocabulary from the insidious Microsoft propaganda virus, you know--especially in this forum of all places. The whole idea of controlling the word-choice in order to control the implicit agenda and by entension, the entire world view is surely some Orwellian nightmare invented by somebody's marketing department trying to create tacit corporate branding on innocuous, general-purpose words. It's like the pro-life/pro-choice spin. Or the PC police (please take that in multiple senses) all over again trying to weed out choices that have a message they don't like.
Nothing you list there is inherent to the Linux kernel, nor even to any of the dizzying panoply of Linux-based operating systems that use some flavor of the same. I certainly don't see how any of these GUI toys really have anything to do with Linuces in particular rather than any of the myriad other Unix systems running X11.The only thing that seems to distinguish itself is the price-point criterion, but it's unclear how important that truly is. First off, the Linux-based family of operating systems are hardly the only free OSes around. But more important, really, is that the price for even costly OSes continues to go down. So I can't see that, even if it were one today, this would long remain that distinguishing a factor. For many situations, a two-digit dollar amount is hardly enough to notice compared to all the other factors. It just gets lost in the noise.
Why the blazes don't these stupid TEXTAREA fields pop me into $EDITOR? The so-called editing capabilities are cretinous in the extreme, and, for some reason doubtless due to lazy fingers on my part, from time to time manage to delete the whole area and destroy significant work with no recourse to an undo. May the bowels of a thousand plague-infested camels burst in full projectile fury upon the Winix-minded instigators of this moronic and miserable mis-feature!
Also, you might consider whether to eschew "Linux distributions" and employ instead more explicative and honest terms such as any of the following, in decreasing order by formality:
- Linux-based operating systems
- Linux-based OSes
- Linuxes
- Linuces
The lattermost suggestions is derived by playful hyperapplication of the rule seen in Latin crux / cruces, or in index / indices. So I see, so I see.Considering how GNU-free BSD already is (modulo in most cases the compiler, but that's largely irrelevant to the user's experience, and doesn't produce infectious output), this always sounds strangely redundantly, so I always have to rescan a few times until the words jumble back into place. :-)
Actually, there are other important things, too, but none of them are related to making the moronic masses happy. Sometimes they're about making adminstrators, programmers, engineers, and scientists happy; in other words, people who aren't afraid of thinking and who aren't afraid of learning, people who aren't looking so much for a flashy new toaster without an instruction manual or a redundant TV set to babysit the kiddies, but rather for a complete system that does precisely what it was designed to do, one solidly integrated and tested by time.
Other venues exist for the less technophilic--like hiring a secretary. :-)
Other people I've seen talk about this have used the term "FSF taint" instead. The kernel that Linux-based operating systems use is, for the most part, pretty well respected by other Unix programmers. The same cannot be universally said for the non-kernel clutter that various vendors slap together and call an operating system. So really, I'd try to avoid the term "Linux taint". I don't think it's really what you meant, and it won't get you in as much trouble. Try using the specific operating system, like "Redhat taint" or "Corel taint", or the specific political group, like "FSF taint", because that way you won't seem to be slamming the fine work that Linux Torvalds has done.
- UNIX (Linux) was hard to learn.
- There was little documentation.
- There were few users.
- It was only used by engineers.
This stuff I'm replying to should be labelled "mythology". No matter how often Microsoft tells you this story, it remains more lie than truth.Hard to learn compared with what? Compared with tying my shoe? Certainly. Compared with learning how to build a car? Hardly. Compared with learning what you have to learn to graduate from high school? Far, far from it. Hard compared to the vocational training needed in other jobs? The depends on the job. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
My goodness, whatever can you be talking about? Are you unaware of how revolution the Unix approach to documentation actually was? The BSD 4.4 documentation set, co-published by Usenix and O'Reilly, remains remarkably close to what we received in Version 7, although admittedly better than what we got in First Edition. I'm not talking about just manpages, either, essential though those are, but also the whole set of critical supplementary documents, all available on-line It's true that what some despectively refer to as "Winix" seems too often to have forgotten this lesson, but it was clearly present and revolutionary.
Again, there seems to be a difference of perspective here. Sure, maybe in the early 70s there weren't many, but by the early 80s, there were countless thousands upon thousands upon thousands of users. I remember putting 3,000 students per semester onto Unix systems, just as my university. There were scores of others across the world doing the same thing, but with higher numbers.
Not at all. It was used by huge numbers students, mathemeticians, programmers, scientists, and everybody else, even secretaries. At one point in time, the secretaries at very large institutions used vi to draft troff documents for all internal paperwork. They weren't idiots, but this is hardly rocket science.
As for the licensing, I well and truly believe that the lion's share of the daily users of these systems could not possibly care one wee whit less about the distinctions in the licences.
Finally, just some would prefer an operating system with an FSF-derived user environment but a BSD kernel, others would prefer the world the other way around. You read about what progress they're making toward this goal in active threads the BSD newsgroups today.
But please, please consider those threads read-only. Don't flame. Just read. In particular, don't have a coronary when you hear about how like Microsoft's dirty tricks some people find GNU's "embrace-and-extend" and anti-POSIX strategies.
Just let people have what they want to have. Sure, a BSD kernel and FSF non-kernel would end up making one more free Unix operating system than we had before, but likewise would a Linux kernel (I don't believe the FSF owns it yet, right?) combined with a BSD non-kernel.
So what? The Linuxes are so splintered and disorganized now that people would never even notice another one. Sure, you'd be upping the number of BSD-based operating systems by a far bigger jump than you'd be upping the number of Linux-based operating systems.
(4+1)/4 is a a bigger number than (122+1)/122--or whatever--is. Strangely, the complaints about the smaller number involved here dramatically outnumber those about the larger one. Isn't that peculiar? Try to resist.
TRY TO RESIST!
Let's just let everybody have what they want to have, ok? Unix is Unix. It's not Microsoft. Isn't that enough?