However, until the code is in place for a recent version of M$-Office (XP or 2003) flawlessly running on Linux with WINE, (and that includes the entire suite, including MS-Access), desktop Linux adoption will continue at its piddly rate.
Erm, Office XP (all of it, or at least all the bits I have tried) runs perfectly well under Wine.
It's much easier to measure OS X adoption since most of it is just purchases of Mac computers. It's impossible to do the same with Linux.
What's interesting is that you've stated a common method to measure installed base:
sell a laptop with Windows = +1 Windows, sell a Mac = +1 Mac, sell a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux = +1 Linux, etc.
This is, of course, a totally stupid way to measure installed base (no offense to you -- everyone is doing it this way).
It doesn't take into account people who install Linux on their laptops, or huge companies like Google who build computers from components and
install a million copies of Linux from a single download, or Windows laptops which break down and get thrown away, and many other confounding
factors.
We don't measure TV programme audiences like this. Can you imagine if a TV company said "well, we broadcast the signal nationwide, therefore
our audience is 250 million"? No, whole companies exist to measure TV audiences (mainly to come up with solid figures for advertisers to use), and
they go out and do difficult sampling with special equipment and surveys in peoples' homes.
It's costly and time-consuming, but the figures
are surely important because if I'm going to develop commercial software I would really like to know exactly how many
people I'm excluding by not developing for (eg) Mac OS X, and is OS X really up and coming so should I be looking at
porting? How much money will it cost me versus what is my expected audience? What's this Linux thing and how many
people are using it? Should I target Fedora or Ubuntu?
And all of this will be enforced by treacherous computing PC hardware.
Sure, but the treacherous hardware is here, in my hands. (Literally in fact - my desktop machine
is an Intel development box which contains a TPM chip). Since it's in my hands, I can use whatever
resources are available, and all the time and ingenuity in the world to break the DRM.
Once one person anywhere breaks the DRM on a piece of content and releases that content
DRM-free, then everyone has the DRM-free content
Still don't believe me? If you want a parallel case, think about games consoles & "ROMs" (ie. game
images) which are distributed on the net because a tiny fraction of a percent of console owners broke apart their consoles,
found out how they worked, and removed the DRM from the games.
Don't believe for a minute this is about security, it's about control.
Nah, it's about stupidity. Our lawmakers are self-confessed proud technophobes, trying
to legislate on stuff they know nothing about, driven by lobbyists who are trying to
manipulate them.
Great, now we can soon get on with the job of assigning static ip addresses to all our toasters, refrigerators, furnaces, thermostats, tv sets, electric hairdryers, etc.
Actually with IPv6 you don't need to do that. They can form their own unique, static
addresses completely automatically. The top part of the address comes from your ISP-assigned
prefix, which they can determine statelessly and automatically when they boot. The bottom
part comes from the MAC address which they have already.
This is precisely why Cyrillic symbols are not used in DNS. It is possible to have two URLs, one having latin letters only, the other one latin and cyrillic, that look exactly the same in most fonts but are completely different as strings,[...]
This is not the reason why Cyrillic symbols are not used in (old, non i18n) DNS. It's
because DNS was invented before people took i18n seriously. If phishing was a real
concern then ASCII characters such as '1/l', 'O/o/0' would also be banned.
I didn't read TFA but it seems naive to believe that there are such "teams of experts" designing
remote controls and whatnot. Here's the thing: Consumers don't think about usability at all
when they buy, and as a simple consequence of that no time or effort is spent on it.
I was talking to a friend who has just spent thousands on a very nice looking oven/hobb. To my
dismay (but not my surprise) it still has the hobb controls in a straight line, not in any
way related to the layout of the hobb rings themselves, meaning that she will still make mistakes
turning the wrong ring off or up, burning food and so on, and she'll constantly have to look at the
tiny diagrams by each control to try to work out which hobb ring it corresponds to.
Meanwhile the light switches in her new half-million-pound house are grouped together
randomly so you have to experiment by switching lights on and off at random until you
hit the right switch.
Her fridge has a temperature control that goes from '-' to '+'. Is that "more heat" or "more refrigeration"?
Oh, and all the power sockets in the house are at floor level, not convenient waist or hand height.
Her DVD/TV remote probably has 50 unused buttons on it (I didn't look).
These are #1 usability problem with hobbs, light switches, fridges, power points, etc.; there are books written about it,
yet you can't buy an oven, light switch, or new house which doesn't have these problems.
Well, the article is about capabilities, not ACLs, and Linux has had ACLs in the filesystem for years too.
To get to the point though: Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much
harder to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness. Simple user/other permissions
are easy to understand and work 99% of the time, groups fill in another few cases (eg. permissions on shared sockets),
and ACLs are almost never necessary.
SELinux is another "interesting" area. Since I started to use Fedora again, I really wanted to use SELinux. I really did. But because
I'm always using Rawhide (the bleeding-edge development version) I've had to turn SELinux off. It's too complex to
understand and breaks too often on Rawhide. I'd only recommend it on a stable version (eg. RHEL/Centos)
and then just as a final line of defense security measure, not to implement ACLs.
If you thought you had $billion worth of widgets in the warehouse, but
now you don't expect to sell as many, or expect them to sell at a lower price,
then in your end of year accounts you'll write down the value of this asset.
Now you might try to sell the widgets at a marked down (ie. lower) price and thus
just take a small loss (a small write down). But
you might also just not be able to sell them at all in which case they'll end
up in a landfill somewhere.
His "solution" to this seems to be to close the source for parts of the program, which
is a major overreaction to this joker.
I don't think he should be worried - as long as his (the "genuine") program appears higher up
in Google for the name and the important search terms, people will ignore the plagiarist.
Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
But you missed the point in the grandparent posting -- this system is
sold to the suits who run the hospital, not the poor sods who
actually get to use it. As a result there is really no impetus for
the management of the software company to spend anything more than the
barest minimum they can get away with to actually develop the software
or make sure it runs right.
I've been in this sort of situation (as a programmer) and I can say that
it's not pleasant, nor conducive to good software development, usability,
reliability etc.
OK, instead of broadcasting in the clear, the keyboard gets a little encryption algorithm to prevent anyone from listening in. Some blowhard then takes it upon himself to crack the gradeschool encryption, and trumpets it far and wide as a "security breach". Durrrr...
I hope you never type any passwords or credit card numbers on your keyboard...
I noticed that even with Tiger (even thaugh Tiger didn't crash, there I had slowdowns, app-evel issues etc). OS X/PPC just runs better than OS X/Intel.
You've got something here. I'll swear my 2 year old iBook G4 (1.something GHz) running
Tiger just feels smoother than my Macbook Pro (Intel dual core2).
Going by the numbers this shouldn't be the case, but boot times, application launch
times and general "smoothness" makes me prefer the iBook...
One thing that does make a big difference is RAM. 2GB RAM is the minimum I'd
consider for any Mac, particularly if you use the "switch user" feature.
You use = for binding and equality. This is like 99% of uses
in well-written functional code.
I've been a professional OCaml programmer for > 3 years and
I don't recall ever having used == (pointer equality). You might
use it in certain lowlevel code.
:= and <- indicate that you're using mutable fields, which you
should only do when you really need C-like performance. If you
forget and use = instead by accident, you'll get a compile-time error. Unlike in
C where if you confuse = and == you'll get at most a warning before
your code stomps (or doesn't stomp) on some important variable.
"=" is an assignment; "==" is pronounced "is equal to"
... In a certain rather poorly designed programming language where it causes
problems for beginners and experts alike. Other languages use
more sensible notation.
It is a black box of "soft
somewhat arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at,
question or change.
SimCity has an interesting American bias that you probably wouldn't
get unless you live in Europe. Try setting taxes in SimCity to
somewhere below a European level -- eg. 20-25% -- and your cities
literally fall into ruins. Well, I'm in Europe now, taxes above that, and the cities seem to be thriving.
Actually your Minix figures are a bit out. My first Minix computer was
an 8086, 8 MHz CPU (I think?) with 640KB of RAM. And one 3.5" floppy drive.
Minix runs quite nicely in this amount of memory.
With a dumb terminal
attached to the serial port you could even have a couple of users on the
above machine, so
with a whole 4 MB of RAM (or did you really mean 4 megabits?) I'm guessing
4 - 8 users easily.
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
You mean: they didn't set up a correct daily budget, which is one of the simplest and most prominent
adjustables in the AdWords interface. (In fact IIRC Google forces you to set a campaign daily budget
whenever you set up a campaign through the web interface).
2) They are "forcing" adwords customers to have their ads listed on "link sites". that is a bad product, and if you are on adwords you are FORCED to have your ads listed there as there is no way to opt out
This is also nonsense. There are simple campaign targetting options so you can choose either where you
do want your adverts to appear, or which sites you don't want them to appear on, or you can turn off
content network entirely.
What you're really saying is that they had an incompetent campaign manager
and a stupid business model (depending on a single form of marketing).
I haven't played the UK lottery, ever, so I don't know if they have the "quick pick" feature over here.
But on the other hand, it means I've won £1/week every week for the past 15 or so years
by not playing, with only a miniscule chance that I could have won the big prize!
While you can analyse the numbers that come up, the interesting data isn't
usually available to you: namely what numbers people are betting on. For example in
the UK lottery it is known that about 10,000 people a week bet on
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So that automatically is a really bad choice because if that
combination came up, you would get £prize / 10,000.
Example: if lots of people bet on (eg.) birthdays, then you'd expect
the people to select numbers > 31 less frequently, which means you
could try to cover bets with numbers > 31 and have a greater payout.
Without the distribution of betting numbers though you can't tell.
Slashdot Mirror
However, until the code is in place for a recent version of M$-Office (XP or 2003) flawlessly running on Linux with WINE, (and that includes the entire suite, including MS-Access), desktop Linux adoption will continue at its piddly rate.
Erm, Office XP (all of it, or at least all the bits I have tried) runs perfectly well under Wine.
Rich.
It's much easier to measure OS X adoption since most of it is just purchases of Mac computers. It's impossible to do the same with Linux.
What's interesting is that you've stated a common method to measure installed base: sell a laptop with Windows = +1 Windows, sell a Mac = +1 Mac, sell a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux = +1 Linux, etc.
This is, of course, a totally stupid way to measure installed base (no offense to you -- everyone is doing it this way). It doesn't take into account people who install Linux on their laptops, or huge companies like Google who build computers from components and install a million copies of Linux from a single download, or Windows laptops which break down and get thrown away, and many other confounding factors.
We don't measure TV programme audiences like this. Can you imagine if a TV company said "well, we broadcast the signal nationwide, therefore our audience is 250 million"? No, whole companies exist to measure TV audiences (mainly to come up with solid figures for advertisers to use), and they go out and do difficult sampling with special equipment and surveys in peoples' homes.
It's costly and time-consuming, but the figures are surely important because if I'm going to develop commercial software I would really like to know exactly how many people I'm excluding by not developing for (eg) Mac OS X, and is OS X really up and coming so should I be looking at porting? How much money will it cost me versus what is my expected audience? What's this Linux thing and how many people are using it? Should I target Fedora or Ubuntu?
Rich.
And all of this will be enforced by treacherous computing PC hardware.
Sure, but the treacherous hardware is here, in my hands. (Literally in fact - my desktop machine is an Intel development box which contains a TPM chip). Since it's in my hands, I can use whatever resources are available, and all the time and ingenuity in the world to break the DRM.
Once one person anywhere breaks the DRM on a piece of content and releases that content DRM-free, then everyone has the DRM-free content
Still don't believe me? If you want a parallel case, think about games consoles & "ROMs" (ie. game images) which are distributed on the net because a tiny fraction of a percent of console owners broke apart their consoles, found out how they worked, and removed the DRM from the games.
Rich.
Don't believe for a minute this is about security, it's about control.
Nah, it's about stupidity. Our lawmakers are self-confessed proud technophobes, trying to legislate on stuff they know nothing about, driven by lobbyists who are trying to manipulate them.
Rich.
Great, now we can soon get on with the job of assigning static ip addresses to all our toasters, refrigerators, furnaces, thermostats, tv sets, electric hairdryers, etc.
Actually with IPv6 you don't need to do that. They can form their own unique, static addresses completely automatically. The top part of the address comes from your ISP-assigned prefix, which they can determine statelessly and automatically when they boot. The bottom part comes from the MAC address which they have already.
Rich.
This is precisely why Cyrillic symbols are not used in DNS. It is possible to have two URLs, one having latin letters only, the other one latin and cyrillic, that look exactly the same in most fonts but are completely different as strings,[...]
This is not the reason why Cyrillic symbols are not used in (old, non i18n) DNS. It's because DNS was invented before people took i18n seriously. If phishing was a real concern then ASCII characters such as '1/l', 'O/o/0' would also be banned.
Rich.
Yeah, and Re-volt for the N-64.
Rich.
I meant "hob" (kitchen stove in US parlance).
Hobb is an old name for the devil. Pretty relevant considering how many times I manage to burn food on my "linear controls" stove top.
Rich.
I didn't read TFA but it seems naive to believe that there are such "teams of experts" designing remote controls and whatnot. Here's the thing: Consumers don't think about usability at all when they buy, and as a simple consequence of that no time or effort is spent on it.
I was talking to a friend who has just spent thousands on a very nice looking oven/hobb. To my dismay (but not my surprise) it still has the hobb controls in a straight line, not in any way related to the layout of the hobb rings themselves, meaning that she will still make mistakes turning the wrong ring off or up, burning food and so on, and she'll constantly have to look at the tiny diagrams by each control to try to work out which hobb ring it corresponds to.
Meanwhile the light switches in her new half-million-pound house are grouped together randomly so you have to experiment by switching lights on and off at random until you hit the right switch.
Her fridge has a temperature control that goes from '-' to '+'. Is that "more heat" or "more refrigeration"?
Oh, and all the power sockets in the house are at floor level, not convenient waist or hand height. Her DVD/TV remote probably has 50 unused buttons on it (I didn't look).
These are #1 usability problem with hobbs, light switches, fridges, power points, etc.; there are books written about it, yet you can't buy an oven, light switch, or new house which doesn't have these problems.
Rich.
Well, the article is about capabilities, not ACLs, and Linux has had ACLs in the filesystem for years too.
To get to the point though: Administrators don't use ACLs on Linux because they make file permissions much harder to understand, for what is in reality an unimportant increase in expressiveness. Simple user/other permissions are easy to understand and work 99% of the time, groups fill in another few cases (eg. permissions on shared sockets), and ACLs are almost never necessary.
SELinux is another "interesting" area. Since I started to use Fedora again, I really wanted to use SELinux. I really did. But because I'm always using Rawhide (the bleeding-edge development version) I've had to turn SELinux off. It's too complex to understand and breaks too often on Rawhide. I'd only recommend it on a stable version (eg. RHEL/Centos) and then just as a final line of defense security measure, not to implement ACLs.
Rich
No, write down is the correct term.
If you thought you had $billion worth of widgets in the warehouse, but now you don't expect to sell as many, or expect them to sell at a lower price, then in your end of year accounts you'll write down the value of this asset.
Now you might try to sell the widgets at a marked down (ie. lower) price and thus just take a small loss (a small write down). But you might also just not be able to sell them at all in which case they'll end up in a landfill somewhere.
Rich.
I don't know why this post was marked 'flamebait'. To me it seemed spot on.
Rich.
His "solution" to this seems to be to close the source for parts of the program, which is a major overreaction to this joker.
I don't think he should be worried - as long as his (the "genuine") program appears higher up in Google for the name and the important search terms, people will ignore the plagiarist.
Rich.
Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
But you missed the point in the grandparent posting -- this system is sold to the suits who run the hospital, not the poor sods who actually get to use it. As a result there is really no impetus for the management of the software company to spend anything more than the barest minimum they can get away with to actually develop the software or make sure it runs right.
I've been in this sort of situation (as a programmer) and I can say that it's not pleasant, nor conducive to good software development, usability, reliability etc.
Rich.
Its similar to trains. What innovation we had since 1930s for Box Cars, etc?
Actually lots and lots in Europe and Japan.
Rich.
OK, instead of broadcasting in the clear, the keyboard gets a little encryption algorithm to prevent anyone from listening in. Some blowhard then takes it upon himself to crack the gradeschool encryption, and trumpets it far and wide as a "security breach". Durrrr...
I hope you never type any passwords or credit card numbers on your keyboard ...
Rich.
I noticed that even with Tiger (even thaugh Tiger didn't crash, there I had slowdowns, app-evel issues etc). OS X/PPC just runs better than OS X/Intel.
You've got something here. I'll swear my 2 year old iBook G4 (1.something GHz) running Tiger just feels smoother than my Macbook Pro (Intel dual core2). Going by the numbers this shouldn't be the case, but boot times, application launch times and general "smoothness" makes me prefer the iBook ...
One thing that does make a big difference is RAM. 2GB RAM is the minimum I'd
consider for any Mac, particularly if you use the "switch user" feature.
Rich.
Just to clarify the parent posting ...
You use = for binding and equality. This is like 99% of uses in well-written functional code.
I've been a professional OCaml programmer for > 3 years and I don't recall ever having used == (pointer equality). You might use it in certain lowlevel code.
Rich.
"=" is an assignment; "==" is pronounced "is equal to"
Rich.
It is a black box of "soft somewhat arbitrary knowledge" that the children can't look at, question or change.
SimCity has an interesting American bias that you probably wouldn't get unless you live in Europe. Try setting taxes in SimCity to somewhere below a European level -- eg. 20-25% -- and your cities literally fall into ruins. Well, I'm in Europe now, taxes above that, and the cities seem to be thriving.
Rich.
During the last few summer, Chicago was one of the cities that experienced rolling black outs
Perhaps Microsoft are trying to replicate their desktop experience for their hosted products?
4Mb RAM, 4MHz CPU, 500Kb ram disk - Minix: ?
Actually your Minix figures are a bit out. My first Minix computer was an 8086, 8 MHz CPU (I think?) with 640KB of RAM. And one 3.5" floppy drive. Minix runs quite nicely in this amount of memory.
With a dumb terminal attached to the serial port you could even have a couple of users on the above machine, so with a whole 4 MB of RAM (or did you really mean 4 megabits?) I'm guessing 4 - 8 users easily.
Rich.
They went from using $1-2 thousand per week, to suddenly $2000 would get spent in 10 minutes between the hours of 1 and 2am. Google stone walled, denied, and finally did nothing for these small companies. I'm sure they aren't the only ones.
You mean: they didn't set up a correct daily budget, which is one of the simplest and most prominent adjustables in the AdWords interface. (In fact IIRC Google forces you to set a campaign daily budget whenever you set up a campaign through the web interface).
2) They are "forcing" adwords customers to have their ads listed on "link sites". that is a bad product, and if you are on adwords you are FORCED to have your ads listed there as there is no way to opt out
This is also nonsense. There are simple campaign targetting options so you can choose either where you do want your adverts to appear, or which sites you don't want them to appear on, or you can turn off content network entirely.
What you're really saying is that they had an incompetent campaign manager and a stupid business model (depending on a single form of marketing).
Rich.
(and yes I used to work at an AdWords campaign management company)That's interesting, thanks.
I haven't played the UK lottery, ever, so I don't know if they have the "quick pick" feature over here.
But on the other hand, it means I've won £1/week every week for the past 15 or so years by not playing, with only a miniscule chance that I could have won the big prize!
Rich.
While you can analyse the numbers that come up, the interesting data isn't usually available to you: namely what numbers people are betting on. For example in the UK lottery it is known that about 10,000 people a week bet on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So that automatically is a really bad choice because if that combination came up, you would get £prize / 10,000.
Example: if lots of people bet on (eg.) birthdays, then you'd expect the people to select numbers > 31 less frequently, which means you could try to cover bets with numbers > 31 and have a greater payout. Without the distribution of betting numbers though you can't tell.
Rich.