Ok, it's a beta; but could we have a few more details? #1 on my list is: What's it like with the 2.6 kernel?
Closely followed by how is the driver scene and hardware compatibility list is, what X version is being used, and so on.
The hard thing will be having to wait for this release.:-) If it's coming out in early May in Germany, it'll be the 3rd or 4th week of May before it gets to the US. Or at least that's how it's been historically. It'll be interesting to see if Novell's recent ownership changes that.
Seriously, besides GNU, who else favors info over man? I find the system difficult to navigate. For instance, when I was first learning {,ba}sh... damn, the bash info page sucks.
Totally agree! Either use "tkinfo", or if you redirect the output of "info", you will get something a little more like "man" output. E.g. try "info bash | less".
I'm trying to think what they should be promoting. What's their biggest positive differentiators? It's hard to think of many. I'm not trolling, I'm being serious. Here's the short list I came up with:
1)...
2) Everything has a GUI. Not just the presence of a GUI, but the pervasiveness of it is important. Anything with monospaced fonts and a blinking cursor gives you the creeps. The fact that you have a graphical login and full desktop with solitaire on your webserver lets you sleep more comfortably at night.
GUI are actually a liability after more than a few machines. When I need to push new software out to all 15 machines that look to me, I can do:
machines="host1 host2..." for m in $machines do scp package.rpm $m:/tmp ssh $m "rpm -U/tmp/package.rpm; rm/tmp/package.rpm" done
and I'm done. Now imagine installing patches on 15 ms-windows machines w/ a GUI, or try 150 machines. Still want that GUI? Not me.
I've found VMware to be highly kernel dependent. I tried upgrading my box from 2.4.19 to 2.4.21 and I never could make VMware work correctly. I had to downrev my system, and will have to wait on an upgrade from VMware. It was a real hassle, but that's why I'm the admin and do this to my box first, so if it doesn't work, I don't disrupt 15 developers.
has a much lower TCO than microsoft (and it really does... the cost of licensing Microsoft products alone makes this case).
Whoa. Hold on here. TCO means Total Cost of Ownership. The cost of licensing MS software may be high, but the whole idea of TCO is that this is only part of the picture. Whether it's the lion's share or not depends on the size of the transition, the organization involved, and whose numbers you trust.
For those who say MS has a lower TCO (not the author I'm quoting), don't forget that total also include handling viruses, upgrading even if you don't want to, and retraining (or less productivity) when new versions of ms-windows come out.
The the real point I want to make is that focusing on TCO is not the correct answer. You need to focus on ROI.
Why? What happens when product M has a TCO of 1000 (pick your units), and product L has a TCO of 1500? Product M looks pretty good.
Also consider that product L make the users 300% more productive. Which is the better product now? So don't stop halfway at TCO, complete the analysis with ROI.
I can understand complaining about being forced to use Windows. However, no one is "forced" to use Internet Explorer, even on Windows---Mozilla is a better alternative in Windows.
I agree that Mozilla is a better and safer alternative; but sometimes you are still forced to use IE. At work, our product uses controls that are only in IE (not sure if it's extensions or ActiveX), so if I need to test it or use it, I must use IE.
I can pretty much get around the insecurity though, as I can run IE in CrossOver Office on my Linux machine.:-)
I happily use MSWord out of Office 97 (when I have to:-) at home, and Office 2000 at work. The only feature I've ever found in the 2000 version that is useful is the "outline" mode. But while useful, I can easily live without it.
I really don't see any reason to upgrade from Office 97, and I think a lot of others feel the same. OpenOffice is getting better with every release. I may buy the new v7.0 of OO just to help spur on development.
Yes it is different. The PC bare is almost equal in price to the PC + Linux. OTOH, the PC + MSWindows is quite a bit more (33% of their/annual/ income*).
I see your point about the forcing, but from the computer vendors point of view, there really is almost no difference in price to pre-install Linux. This is commonly called the "Microsoft Tax".
If the buyer wants MSWindows, and can afford it (legally), the buyer can put that on his machine.
*To put that in American terms, I've seen $40K per year in income bandied about, so that would mean we'd pay about $13,000 for MSWindows. When put that way, it seems MS has priced themselves out of the market.
I see a lot of entries about application level stuff (yeh I got a list there too.:-) But laptops still have a lot of variables connected to the kernel:
* APM / ACPI (still very hit & miss, and many vendors don't seem to follow the standard making it harder) * docking station support (sometimes works, sometimes it freezes hard) * hot swapping mice & keyboards (maybe 2.6 will make this better?) * Function (FN) keys don't work (you know, the vendor function keys that get you the keypad; this may be an X thing but I've never seen them work even under the console)
Probably more, but that's a good start.
On the app side, better video drivers would be my #1 wish. Many of the ones we have now for laptops are so incomplete or problematic (generally because the driver writers are at a real disadvantage working without specs; they do a great job with what they have, but the result can be hard to live with...such a catch-22).
The usefulness of POD is directly proportional to how you use and write it, just like any other comment. You can write it just like you do for javadoc. For example:
...other code...
=head array_ref get_row(sql_statement)
This sub takes an sql statement and return the values of the first row only...yada...
Args:...
Returns:...
Notes:...
=cut
sub get_row { ...code... }
and so on. I just keep the comment with each sub, just like you would with javadoc. You can even embed it into the sub if you want, but that seems confusing to me personally. If you have any familarity with Unix man pages, it will seem quite natural to you.
The other big deal is the variety of outputs you can have with POD. You can output man pages, text, HTML, and LaTeX. And if that's not good enough, you can write your own backend to produce the output you need. Check out "perldoc perlpod".
More than you'd initially suspect.:-)
I used to work for a Wall Street firm that had the policy that if you worked more than 10 hours a day, they'd buy you dinner. We were on a tight schedule so this was very common for our small team. We rotated the "order dinner" duty around. Anyway, one day several months after the crunch, I was working on some code written by another guy and found something like this in the code./* thu's order
2 canoli
1 raviloli
1 pepperoni pizza
3 salads
2 chocolate cakes
1 carrot cake
1 bread sticks
3 cokes
1 diet coke
*/
Looking back thru CVS, I found it had been there a good long while. After a good laugh, I deleted it.
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Ok, it's a beta; but could we have a few more details? #1 on my list is: What's it like with the 2.6 kernel?
:-) If it's coming out in early May in Germany, it'll be the 3rd or 4th week of May before it gets to the US. Or at least that's how it's been historically. It'll be interesting to see if Novell's recent ownership changes that.
Closely followed by how is the driver scene and hardware compatibility list is, what X version is being used, and so on.
The hard thing will be having to wait for this release.
Totally agree! Either use "tkinfo", or if you redirect the output of "info", you will get something a little more like "man" output. E.g. try "info bash | less".
1)
2) Everything has a GUI. Not just the presence of a GUI, but the pervasiveness of it is important. Anything with monospaced fonts and a blinking cursor gives you the creeps. The fact that you have a graphical login and full desktop with solitaire on your webserver lets you sleep more comfortably at night.
GUI are actually a liability after more than a few machines. When I need to push new software out to all 15 machines that look to me, I can do:
and I'm done. Now imagine installing patches on 15 ms-windows machines w/ a GUI, or try 150 machines. Still want that GUI? Not me.
I've found VMware to be highly kernel dependent. I tried upgrading my box from 2.4.19 to 2.4.21 and I never could make VMware work correctly. I had to downrev my system, and will have to wait on an upgrade from VMware. It was a real hassle, but that's why I'm the admin and do this to my box first, so if it doesn't work, I don't disrupt 15 developers.
Whoa. Hold on here. TCO means Total Cost of Ownership. The cost of licensing MS software may be high, but the whole idea of TCO is that this is only part of the picture. Whether it's the lion's share or not depends on the size of the transition, the organization involved, and whose numbers you trust.
For those who say MS has a lower TCO (not the author I'm quoting), don't forget that total also include handling viruses, upgrading even if you don't want to, and retraining (or less productivity) when new versions of ms-windows come out.
The the real point I want to make is that focusing on TCO is not the correct answer. You need to focus on ROI.
Why? What happens when product M has a TCO of 1000 (pick your units), and product L has a TCO of 1500? Product M looks pretty good.
Also consider that product L make the users 300% more productive. Which is the better product now? So don't stop halfway at TCO, complete the analysis with ROI.
I can pretty much get around the insecurity though, as I can run IE in CrossOver Office on my Linux machine. :-)
I happily use MSWord out of Office 97 (when I have to :-) at home, and Office 2000 at work. The only feature I've ever found in the 2000 version that is useful is the "outline" mode. But while useful, I can easily live without it.
I really don't see any reason to upgrade from Office 97, and I think a lot of others feel the same. OpenOffice is getting better with every release. I may buy the new v7.0 of OO just to help spur on development.
Yes it is different. The PC bare is almost equal in price to the PC + Linux. OTOH, the PC + MSWindows is quite a bit more (33% of their /annual/ income*).
I see your point about the forcing, but from the computer vendors point of view, there really is almost no difference in price to pre-install Linux. This is commonly called the "Microsoft Tax".
If the buyer wants MSWindows, and can afford it (legally), the buyer can put that on his machine.
*To put that in American terms, I've seen $40K per year in income bandied about, so that would mean we'd pay about $13,000 for MSWindows. When put that way, it seems MS has priced themselves out of the market.
I see a lot of entries about application level stuff (yeh I got a list there too. :-) But laptops still have a lot of variables connected to the kernel:
* APM / ACPI (still very hit & miss, and many vendors don't seem to follow the standard making it harder)
* docking station support (sometimes works, sometimes it freezes hard)
* hot swapping mice & keyboards (maybe 2.6 will make this better?)
* Function (FN) keys don't work (you know, the vendor function keys that get you the keypad; this may be an X thing but I've never seen them work even under the console)
Probably more, but that's a good start.
On the app side, better video drivers would be my #1 wish. Many of the ones we have now for laptops are so incomplete or problematic (generally because the driver writers are at a real disadvantage working without specs; they do a great job with what they have, but the result can be hard to live with...such a catch-22).
and so on. I just keep the comment with each sub, just like you would with javadoc. You can even embed it into the sub if you want, but that seems confusing to me personally. If you have any familarity with Unix man pages, it will seem quite natural to you.
The other big deal is the variety of outputs you can have with POD. You can output man pages, text, HTML, and LaTeX. And if that's not good enough, you can write your own backend to produce the output you need. Check out "perldoc perlpod".
HTH!
More than you'd initially suspect. :-)
I used to work for a Wall Street firm that had the policy that if you worked more than 10 hours a day, they'd buy you dinner. We were on a tight schedule so this was very common for our small team. We rotated the "order dinner" duty around. Anyway, one day several months after the crunch, I was working on some code written by another guy and found something like this in the code. /* thu's order
2 canoli
1 raviloli
1 pepperoni pizza
3 salads
2 chocolate cakes
1 carrot cake
1 bread sticks
3 cokes
1 diet coke
*/
Looking back thru CVS, I found it had been there a good long while. After a good laugh, I deleted it.