Please point this out to me if you see this happen and I'm active. I want to know where people think that the line has been crossed between being sane (the asker reading the manual being better than us just reciting bits of it) and being total assholes.
Quite a lot of what you have interpreted as douchebagginess is just us telling people what to read so that we don't wind up typing everything out ourselves. We get agitated if people won't read documents that solve their problems. If you're willing to learn, you'll find that we're actually a nice bunch. #ubuntu people are a lot more friendly, but there must be some reason why Ubuntu users come and try to get help in #debian instead (whereupon we don't help them, for exactly the reasons which are the point of this article).
I go by the same nick there. If you see examples of where people are pointlessly assholey, please feel free to point it out to me.
It doesn't have games that you can buy down at the local shop? Unreal Tournament 2003 which comes with the Linux client on the disk? Oh, and I'm happily running Quake 3 natively here, a native Doom 3 client is available, and Half Life 2, Deus Ex etc work in Cedega. (And, in fact, HL2 now works in WineHQ Wine.)
Oh, and I've just been trying my Windows-using parents on Gnome (and Debian Sarge, FWIW). They find it easier to use. Note that I said use, not administer -- but then they don't know how to administer Windows either.
I think you miss the point. That's not an example of OSS being crap, it's an example of the hardware manufacturers being useless and not releasing hardware specs. That chipset is only usable on Linux/x86 because of ndiswrapper, a cunning piece of code which allows you to use x86 Windows network drivers on x86 Linux. That's an example of OSS being good beyond what could be expected of any system. (Can you use Linux kernel modules on Windows? Of course not.) Something similiar does not yet exist for PowerPC, but surely you can still see that you're pointing the finger at the wrong group. RTFA, and blame Broadcom.
You're wrong: it's a fork, no matter whether or not any fixes are contributed back to Debian and despite even the fact that the packages are Debian-derived. Please stop spreading the myth that Debian-derived distros are equivalent to Debian: they're not. It's particularly irritating for those of us who give up our time to help people on #debian on freenode: when people come and ask for help with Ubuntu, we just can't help, since we don't know that some change hasn't been made that would render our instructions useless, but we receive abuse for being "stubborn".
</rant>
Re:LOL, "familiarize new users"
on
Grokking Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
Have you actually installed Debian lately? You do know that Ubuntu uses the exact same installer, don't you? Sure, you have to choose what packages you want when you install Debian, but there are sane, self-explanatory categories set up for you. The most hairy bit is the partitioning screen, and wait for it Ubuntu's is identical. "No hand-holding for you!"
On every other count I agree with you. Fedora is the tool of Satan, etc.
(For those who don't know, make a bookmark to the query page, replacing the query string with %s. Give the bookmark a keyword. Then typing keyword search terms into the address bar and hitting enter will replace %s with search terms before loading that bookmark. So I have an IMDB bookmark, with the keyword imdb and url string http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s. No IMDB toolbar mallarkey for me!)
I will concur that we may be somewhat quick to bite off the heads of those who would read the documentation if they knew what they were looking for in it. I don't think that the channel is as vicious as you think that it is: it just takes a little adjustment of what you're expecting. There was a discussion of these issues with the channel on the debian-user list the other day, you might want to have a read.
In any case, if you find yourself on #debian and see examples of what you describe, I'd be interested to have them pointed out to me to see if we agree on what defines an asshole.
If you'd spent slightly longer in #debian, you'd know that we're absolutely flooded with people who aren't prepared to learn things, and just want those who already know to do everything for them. When questions are asked by someone who is having troubles which the documentation (which they have read) does not solve, they do generally get helpful and correct answers quickly. I got struck down repeatedly when I first started going there, and was not a complete "n00b" either. However, I'm not so thin-skinned as to take it personally, and now I'm more at home with reading things for myself, which is the right way to be.
In any case, with regard to your grandma, you ought to send her to the Debian Reference instead;-)
So the final results page offers some mild amusement when looking at the file types on offer. In June 2002, the "Open Source Software Policy Document" was released in RTF, PDF, HTML and... Word DOC. September 2002's "Guidance on implementing OSS" was only released in PDF. Then, a glimmer of hope! The Qinetiq (what a stupid name...) report was released in PDF, RTF and none other than OOo SXW! There may be hope yet... but no, the final report that this article is about was released in RTF, PDF, HTML and DOC.
The question is: why bother releasing in.DOC when there's an RTF right above it? Hmm...
...but [Isaac Newton] is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement: If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants...
I always find it amusing when people use this particular Newton quote in this context. See, at the time that he said this, Robert Hooke (yes, as in the law) was alleging that Newton had stolen his work and ideas. Newton's response was the sentence above. Hooke was a very small man, you see...
Ah, yes, those Human Interface Guidelines guidelines. I like that. Much like "personal PIN number" (as seen at Aberdeen airport), and the occasionally-seen KDE Desktop Environment. These GNU-ish people have a thing about recursive/self-referential acronymns...
The best-known unauthorized filesharing network is KaZaA, but others include Bearshare, WinMX, iMesh and BitTorrent.
Hmm. I was under the impression that the main use for BitTorrent is to share the load of software downloads. Given that (as far as I know) there is no way to search for a file over BitTorrent (other than finding the appropriate tracker), using it as a Napster-alike would be both impractical and somewhat masochistic. <hat type="tinfoil">Perhaps this is also a cunningly concealed smear campaign against free software?</hat>
In all seriousness, though, when we're encouraging people to download new releases of (say) Firefox via BitTorrent, its association with KaZaA and other somewhat dodgy software of its ilk could discourage "upstanding citizens".
On a totally unrelated note, the newspapers I've seen today are using a photo of Avril Lavigne to illustrate this tale of the plight of the poor starving musicians...
I think what my grandparent meant was that, in BeOS, you stick in a new disk and, lo, it is merely a click away. (I never used BeOS for any serious length of time, so I am just guessing.) Here in Linux-land, we cat/proc/partitions, then su, then mount, then become mortal once more, then use, then su again, then umount, then go get a beer. Oh sure, we could just add/dev/sda1 to/etc/fstab, but then what happens when we want to use two USB disks? Or maybe we sometimes use a USB Zip drive? (They use partition 4, for no apparent reason.) Or maybe the USB disk lacks a partition table, so the device we should mount is/dev/sda? It's all stuff we have/had to learn, which is more than just clicking "USB Disk".
Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with it. Just feeding the flames...
Since we're talking about knowing pilots, my father is currently a 747 pilot. A few years ago, when he was flying 777s, he flew from London to Abu Dhabi, and realised after landing that his (digital) mobile phone had been on in his briefcase, beside him in the cockpit, the whole way. No problems whatsoever.
Now I'm afraid I have to invoke a fearsome date...
On 9/11 (or 11/9, since I'm British:p ), I distinctly remember that just about everyone on board the appropriate flights was using their phone. No interference was observed there, either.
Disagreement is often ultimately productive
on
Stirring The GNOME Fires
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So, basically, some people think that GNOME is going about things the wrong way, and are in the process of forking the project. Every time this happens, people have to be reminded that forking a project is usually productive in the long term. Take XFree86, for example. Months ago, the X.org fork was created in response to a collection of issues (the closed development model, and the licence changes, to name a couple). The object was to create a more dynamic (excuse my buzzword) project, quickly incorporating improvements to the codebase supplied by anyone. Fast-forward to today, and their fork is becoming the de facto standard, with XFree86 proper on the verge of disappearance; Darwin in action. I'm not an EMACS user, but I understand that the Lucid fork concentrates on new features, while the GNU version adopts a more considered approach. In that case, both versions have found their own niche.
In all likelihood, these disagreements and discussions about the future of GNOME will lead to one or more better desktop environments. Isn't that a good thing?
Does no-one else find it amusing that the first non-menu text on that page is "Dell recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional"? Then again, I suppose they do recommend it, which explains why most of their computers sell with it (such as this one I'm posting from:s).
Dell clearly must be good business-people (in general), or else how would they have achieved such a massive market share? It makes business sense to recommend Windows in the present market, given that the majority of their target audience probably don't know that any (non-Apple) alternatives exist, and don't care even if they do. Maybe in a few years time, those "recommendations" (which, I suspect, must be part of the agreement with Microsoft, given the number of vendors who use the exact same wording) will disappear.
You do, of course, mean: "Wonder why it's easier to put a camel through a mobile phone than a British comedy troupe.
1.16 Why is it called Python?
At the same time he began implementing Python, Guido van Rossum was also reading the published scripts from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (a BBC comedy series from the seventies, in the unlikely case you didn't know). It occurred to him that he needed a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious, so he decided to call the language Python.
I'm not someone at Verisign, but I am willing to suggest possible logic in this change.
The previous format, YYYYMMDDNN (where NN is an arbitrary sequence number), conforms to no standard but its own. The UNIX timestamp format is recognised by any date/time manipulation tool worth using, as well as being a standard (de facto or otherwise, I don't know). While switching format now is a PITA for those who have already written tools that work with it, it will make future development fractionally easier, as well as allowing more accuracy than could practically be used.
"Hi-MD" uses the File Allocation Table (FAT) system...
I guess Sony aren't bothered by Microsoft enforcing their FAT patents, but perhaps it will block the manufacture of no-brand MDs? I wonder if Sony thought of that, or whether they chose FAT for its ubiquity alone.
Actually, there is no word "copyrighted." There is no verb "to copyright." If you made it, you have copyright.
And, if the copyright owner grants permission for his/her software (in this case) to be copied, you may copy it. So, "copyrighted" doesn't mean "no copy," or, in fact, anything at all.
The difference, my friend, is that Google does not rate the accuracy of the content it links to. Sure, they work out how frequently it is linked to, and they have those little rating buttons on the browser bar in IE, but ultimately, you have no idea how reliable the information you find with Google is.
Slashdot Mirror
Please point this out to me if you see this happen and I'm active. I want to know where people think that the line has been crossed between being sane (the asker reading the manual being better than us just reciting bits of it) and being total assholes.
But we don't do that. /me shrugs and gives up on trying to defend #debian since people will never agree.
Quite a lot of what you have interpreted as douchebagginess is just us telling people what to read so that we don't wind up typing everything out ourselves. We get agitated if people won't read documents that solve their problems. If you're willing to learn, you'll find that we're actually a nice bunch. #ubuntu people are a lot more friendly, but there must be some reason why Ubuntu users come and try to get help in #debian instead (whereupon we don't help them, for exactly the reasons which are the point of this article).
I go by the same nick there. If you see examples of where people are pointlessly assholey, please feel free to point it out to me.
It doesn't have games that you can buy down at the local shop? Unreal Tournament 2003 which comes with the Linux client on the disk? Oh, and I'm happily running Quake 3 natively here, a native Doom 3 client is available, and Half Life 2, Deus Ex etc work in Cedega. (And, in fact, HL2 now works in WineHQ Wine.)
Oh, and I've just been trying my Windows-using parents on Gnome (and Debian Sarge, FWIW). They find it easier to use. Note that I said use, not administer -- but then they don't know how to administer Windows either.
CherryOS!
(...for those of you who don't remember...)
I think you miss the point. That's not an example of OSS being crap, it's an example of the hardware manufacturers being useless and not releasing hardware specs. That chipset is only usable on Linux/x86 because of ndiswrapper, a cunning piece of code which allows you to use x86 Windows network drivers on x86 Linux. That's an example of OSS being good beyond what could be expected of any system. (Can you use Linux kernel modules on Windows? Of course not.) Something similiar does not yet exist for PowerPC, but surely you can still see that you're pointing the finger at the wrong group. RTFA, and blame Broadcom.
<rant type="regrettable_but_necessary">
You're wrong: it's a fork, no matter whether or not any fixes are contributed back to Debian and despite even the fact that the packages are Debian-derived. Please stop spreading the myth that Debian-derived distros are equivalent to Debian: they're not. It's particularly irritating for those of us who give up our time to help people on #debian on freenode: when people come and ask for help with Ubuntu, we just can't help, since we don't know that some change hasn't been made that would render our instructions useless, but we receive abuse for being "stubborn".
</rant>
Have you actually installed Debian lately? You do know that Ubuntu uses the exact same installer, don't you? Sure, you have to choose what packages you want when you install Debian, but there are sane, self-explanatory categories set up for you. The most hairy bit is the partitioning screen, and wait for it Ubuntu's is identical. "No hand-holding for you!"
On every other count I agree with you. Fedora is the tool of Satan, etc.
</defensive-of-Debian-mode>
*cough*Keywords in Mozilla[ Firefox]*cough*
(For those who don't know, make a bookmark to the query page, replacing the query string with %s. Give the bookmark a keyword. Then typing keyword search terms into the address bar and hitting enter will replace %s with search terms before loading that bookmark. So I have an IMDB bookmark, with the keyword imdb and url string http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%s. No IMDB toolbar mallarkey for me!)
I will concur that we may be somewhat quick to bite off the heads of those who would read the documentation if they knew what they were looking for in it. I don't think that the channel is as vicious as you think that it is: it just takes a little adjustment of what you're expecting. There was a discussion of these issues with the channel on the debian-user list the other day, you might want to have a read.
In any case, if you find yourself on #debian and see examples of what you describe, I'd be interested to have them pointed out to me to see if we agree on what defines an asshole.
If you'd spent slightly longer in #debian, you'd know that we're absolutely flooded with people who aren't prepared to learn things, and just want those who already know to do everything for them. When questions are asked by someone who is having troubles which the documentation (which they have read) does not solve, they do generally get helpful and correct answers quickly. I got struck down repeatedly when I first started going there, and was not a complete "n00b" either. However, I'm not so thin-skinned as to take it personally, and now I'm more at home with reading things for myself, which is the right way to be.
In any case, with regard to your grandma, you ought to send her to the Debian Reference instead ;-)
So the final results page offers some mild amusement when looking at the file types on offer. In June 2002, the "Open Source Software Policy Document" was released in RTF, PDF, HTML and ... Word DOC. September 2002's "Guidance on implementing OSS" was only released in PDF. Then, a glimmer of hope! The Qinetiq (what a stupid name...) report was released in PDF, RTF and none other than OOo SXW! There may be hope yet... but no, the final report that this article is about was released in RTF, PDF, HTML and DOC.
The question is: why bother releasing in .DOC when there's an RTF right above it? Hmm...
I always find it amusing when people use this particular Newton quote in this context. See, at the time that he said this, Robert Hooke (yes, as in the law) was alleging that Newton had stolen his work and ideas. Newton's response was the sentence above. Hooke was a very small man, you see...
(about halfway through the optics paragraph)
Ah, yes, those Human Interface Guidelines guidelines. I like that. Much like "personal PIN number" (as seen at Aberdeen airport), and the occasionally-seen KDE Desktop Environment. These GNU-ish people have a thing about recursive/self-referential acronymns...
</nitpick>
From the statement:
Hmm. I was under the impression that the main use for BitTorrent is to share the load of software downloads. Given that (as far as I know) there is no way to search for a file over BitTorrent (other than finding the appropriate tracker), using it as a Napster-alike would be both impractical and somewhat masochistic. <hat type="tinfoil">Perhaps this is also a cunningly concealed smear campaign against free software?</hat>
In all seriousness, though, when we're encouraging people to download new releases of (say) Firefox via BitTorrent, its association with KaZaA and other somewhat dodgy software of its ilk could discourage "upstanding citizens".
On a totally unrelated note, the newspapers I've seen today are using a photo of Avril Lavigne to illustrate this tale of the plight of the poor starving musicians...
I think what my grandparent meant was that, in BeOS, you stick in a new disk and, lo, it is merely a click away. (I never used BeOS for any serious length of time, so I am just guessing.) Here in Linux-land, we cat /proc/partitions, then su, then mount, then become mortal once more, then use, then su again, then umount, then go get a beer. Oh sure, we could just add /dev/sda1 to /etc/fstab, but then what happens when we want to use two USB disks? Or maybe we sometimes use a USB Zip drive? (They use partition 4, for no apparent reason.) Or maybe the USB disk lacks a partition table, so the device we should mount is /dev/sda? It's all stuff we have/had to learn, which is more than just clicking "USB Disk".
Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with it. Just feeding the flames...
Since we're talking about knowing pilots, my father is currently a 747 pilot. A few years ago, when he was flying 777s, he flew from London to Abu Dhabi, and realised after landing that his (digital) mobile phone had been on in his briefcase, beside him in the cockpit, the whole way. No problems whatsoever.
:p ), I distinctly remember that just about everyone on board the appropriate flights was using their phone. No interference was observed there, either.
Now I'm afraid I have to invoke a fearsome date...
On 9/11 (or 11/9, since I'm British
So, basically, some people think that GNOME is going about things the wrong way, and are in the process of forking the project. Every time this happens, people have to be reminded that forking a project is usually productive in the long term. Take XFree86, for example. Months ago, the X.org fork was created in response to a collection of issues (the closed development model, and the licence changes, to name a couple). The object was to create a more dynamic (excuse my buzzword) project, quickly incorporating improvements to the codebase supplied by anyone. Fast-forward to today, and their fork is becoming the de facto standard, with XFree86 proper on the verge of disappearance; Darwin in action. I'm not an EMACS user, but I understand that the Lucid fork concentrates on new features, while the GNU version adopts a more considered approach. In that case, both versions have found their own niche.
In all likelihood, these disagreements and discussions about the future of GNOME will lead to one or more better desktop environments. Isn't that a good thing?
Does no-one else find it amusing that the first non-menu text on that page is "Dell recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional"? Then again, I suppose they do recommend it, which explains why most of their computers sell with it (such as this one I'm posting from :s).
Dell clearly must be good business-people (in general), or else how would they have achieved such a massive market share? It makes business sense to recommend Windows in the present market, given that the majority of their target audience probably don't know that any (non-Apple) alternatives exist, and don't care even if they do. Maybe in a few years time, those "recommendations" (which, I suspect, must be part of the agreement with Microsoft, given the number of vendors who use the exact same wording) will disappear.
You do, of course, mean: "Wonder why it's easier to put a camel through a mobile phone than a British comedy troupe .
I'm not someone at Verisign, but I am willing to suggest possible logic in this change.
The previous format, YYYYMMDDNN (where NN is an arbitrary sequence number), conforms to no standard but its own. The UNIX timestamp format is recognised by any date/time manipulation tool worth using, as well as being a standard (de facto or otherwise, I don't know). While switching format now is a PITA for those who have already written tools that work with it, it will make future development fractionally easier, as well as allowing more accuracy than could practically be used.
Then again, they could just leave things alone.
From the specs:
I guess Sony aren't bothered by Microsoft enforcing their FAT patents, but perhaps it will block the manufacture of no-brand MDs? I wonder if Sony thought of that, or whether they chose FAT for its ubiquity alone.
Probably the latter; just a thought.
Actually, there is no word "copyrighted." There is no verb "to copyright." If you made it, you have copyright. And, if the copyright owner grants permission for his/her software (in this case) to be copied, you may copy it. So, "copyrighted" doesn't mean "no copy," or, in fact, anything at all.
The difference, my friend, is that Google does not rate the accuracy of the content it links to. Sure, they work out how frequently it is linked to, and they have those little rating buttons on the browser bar in IE, but ultimately, you have no idea how reliable the information you find with Google is.
You believe right. I understand that it used to be common practice in the Royal Family. This might well explain Prince Charles.