1) See my above comment. Big Conservative Companies want things to work out of the box. The guy restoring a system that failed at 3am shouldn't have to head out to Sun's site to find the proper JDK at 3am. This isn't a huge deal, but big enough.
2) Yeah, it's included. Now tell me how to get it to show up in the installer. See above comments about the guy at 3am and mix them with kernel parameters on install.
3) If RH wants to mix it up with the big boys, which they clearly want to, don't irritate the sysadmins by making them learn new stuff. It's nice to leverage existing skills.
1) ext3 was far from stable at that time as well. Why choose one quasi-stable filesystem over another?
2) IBMs JDK does not work on MP systems out of the box. At least, not the one that RH ships. Want proof? Install and Run Tomcat 4.1. It won't work. Switch to Sun's JDK. It will work. Then read the readme, and notice that IBMs JDK has 'issues' with MP systems.
Yes, I know you can install sun's JDK yourself. But that's not the point. When you're trying to make this simple and easy to install so the guy in the Toledo datacenter can reinstall a machine that exploded, died, was abducted by aliens, or is missing, you really don't want to have him doing stuff like that.
3) Configuration is a big deal when you have tons of Solaris and AIX admins grumbling about having to learn something new. Personally I don't think it's a big deal, but it does seem very RedHatish to screw with everyone else.
We're using RHAS here at work, and I have to say, to date I've been very unimpressed.
One of the RH sales rep went on about how RH made a lot of kernel modifications so their kernel worked better on MP machines than the default Linux kernel. Fair enough. But they also prefer you use IBM's JDK/JRE, which doesn't work out of the box on MP machines. Not to mention it seems to eat twice the memory of Sun's JDK/JRE.
It also seems that RedHat only supports ext3 in their Advanced Server. It seems to me that anything calling itself an "Advanced Server" should support JFS or ReiserFS. Now, I know that JFS is relatively new, but Reiser has been around long enough and was considered "stable" before ext3 I believe, so I see no reason why it shouldn't be available for me to use without having to pass silly kernel paramaters to get it to show up.
Don't even start me on xinetd. Stuff like "maintaining compatibility with other unix flavors" is important if they want to move AS into big iron shops where Solaris and AIX are the norms.
So, instead of Ximian telling us that a horrible element of their UI will be fixed, and that everything will be good, they want to keep us guessing... Will they fix the horrible box, or will they not fix it?
That doesn't sound like a good way to get good marketing. That sounds like a way to get lots of reviews where people say "The file selector box is still broken in 2.0, and we're not sure when Ximian will fix it"
Can anyone tell me if they've fixed the file chooser dialog? If they haven't, they have 2 options...
(1) Fix the file chooser dialog. It's horrible. I've used DOS applications from the 80s which had better faux file chooser dialogs. QT 1.x had a better file chooser box.
(2) Give up. They haven't gotten it fixed yet, when will they.
Seriously, it's horrible. I've never had to interact with such a horribly designed file chooser box as much as I do because I use evolution. I love how when you change directories; the filename of whatever you're trying to save disappears. Great feature guys.
Seriously. Give me something with a "up a level button". And put the directories and files in one window, with "icons" so I can tell the difference between the two.
You're totally right...
I use KDE, but there are a few GTK/Gnome applications that I can't do without (Evolution, gaim, xmms).
And every single time I see that file selection box, I cringe. I mean, come in, it's hideous in so many ways that usability experts should explode on contact with the thing.
How hard would it have been to add a "up a level" button. Is this fixed in GTK2? Evolution still uses those boxes (at least, my version does). Is this fixed in Gnome2? Hell, even the QT 1.x file selection box was nicer than the load of crap that GTK dumps on users.
One of the sweetest things about KDE is that file selection dialog. I mean, you can open URLs, FTP sites, SMB shares, pretty much anything with that box. Set bookmarks, get previews. It's fantastic.
Re:They're all pretty easy..
on
Ark Linux
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· Score: 1
Well...
I know with windows to change a video card I have to jump thru about 800 hoops.. Okay, not 800, but more than I do with suse.
Plug and play on Windows has alwasy been plug and pray.
They're all pretty easy..
on
Ark Linux
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· Score: 1
Ya know, I'm amazed that Linux still has this "hard to use" stigma attached to it.
I don't know what everyone else uses, but I use Suse. For the longest time I stuck with 7.0, just upgraded, rebuilt, etc. I recently upgraded to 8.1 (installed it on some servers at work, and figured it was time to upgrade at home).
It's amazing how far it's come. I can plug in a USB drive, and have the icon show up on the desktop. Just like a mac. NO fooling with drivers, no rebooting. Very unlike windows. Change some hardware? Suse catches that on boot and prompts you to configure it. Very unlike windows.
And we won't even talk about how easy Linux is to install compared to windows.
This "hard to use" stigma seems to be stuck in the mind of tech reporters, who tend to hover a year or two behind the current reality.
Anyone use this on linux?
on
Real DRM
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that all the people complaining must be windows users.
I've used RealPlayer on Linux, and aside from asking me to register, it doesn't do anything obnoxious. It plays BBC News, streaming, and the quality is great and I don't get any dropouts.
Maybe the problems related to the windows version has to do with the "windows" in there. Doesn't Media Player 8/9 do all sorts of obnoxious stuff. As someone who uses an XP laptop at work, I know WMP does all sorts of annoying things. Come to think of it, so does that horrible Winamp3. Ashampoo (or whatever that other semi-popular media player is) also does these things.
You're screaming at real because they do what all the other applications do. Maybe you need to scream about changing the rules that govern the way apps play together on windows.
As someone with programming experience for a financial company I can tell you that the reason the charts are generated periodically and not custom generated is costs. If they provided real time finanical updates, it'd cost them a fortune. Providing you with data that's 15 minutes old costs them almost nothing.
Re:If RedHat used honest version numbers...
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 1
I don't care if you've got the freakin fastest computer in the world, but 10 minutes to compile a custom kernel is only half the story. You've got to add the entry into grub, make your modules directories, copy modules over, etc.
And if you've got any sort of soundcard, you'll have to reboot, recompile alsa, do the same module dance. Same thing for Nvidia.
Not to mention testing. If you're taking 10 minutes to do your custom kernel on any sort of production server, you're obviously not testing, and *somebody* needs to be fired.
Limewire seems to be a well written program. It used to run just fine on my 256MB box. As for the relative usefulness of the program, that remains to be seen.
Likewise, JRio was/is a great utility for managing songs on my Rio500.
Java's come a long way from that first version of AIM. Please don't use that as your reference for a modern java program.
That's true that the mall stores charge more. But most kids are going to buy their stuff at a mall store or a best buy type place. Even the mom & pop type stores around here (Princeton, NJ) aren't much, if any, cheaper than the best buys.
Going back to weezer... on amazon.com, you get.. List Price: $18.98 Price: $13.99
So Amazon is in line with bestbuy. The FYE is selling it at above list price. Fine. The wrinkle is...
Used & new from $6.49
Some quick digging there shows 5 vendors selling used cd's for under 7.50. New, on average, seems to hover around in the high 9 range.
And maybe not $20 dollars, but right here in the good ol' US of A you can get royally ripped. The worst example I have seen was the "green" weezer album. I think it was selling for $18.99 dollars in one of those FYE stores up in the local mall. This was when "Hash Pipe" was in heavy rotation on all the pop/rock stations. As of right this second, the CD is 13.99 at bestbuy.com.
That's ~$19 dollars for roughly 30 minutes of music. Think about it. I know it's a matter of supply and demand, people are going to pay that price to get the CD, but that seems incredibly high.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. I'm sure at $14-$20 per CD, someone somewhere is making a huge profit. Does it really matter who? I know the popular cry is for the artist who doesn't get much money on album sales, but do you really think if the artist was raking it in, and if they had control, the situation would be that much different?
It's really, I think, the entire industry that's screwed up at this point. There's a nice status quo, and nobody (except the artists, who really aren't making that much, so I hear) wants it changed. Personally I'd be happier if the money I spent on CDs went to the artists, rather than to the industry. But it wouldn't change the fact that CDs are still overpriced. Why do you think people jump on used CDs if they can? If you can pick up the previously mentioned Weezer CD for half the price of a new one, wouldn't you? Further, if you could download it for free and just burn the CD, wouldn't most people?
These days, I buy most of my CDs used. If CD prices came inline with what they're really worth (and who determines that really), I'd probably buy more new CDs. But until the industry gets it's head out of it's rear, nothing's going to change. Maybe the internet is their wakeup call.
I'm not sure if it's still this way today; but it may well be, since it would take a huge change to redo the system, but...
Back in '97 or so, Sears used a nice OS/2 setup. The main store computer was actually an OS/2 2.x box that ran a huge DB/2 database with all of the store's inventory, pricing, etc. It may have been an SMP version of OS/2, but I'm not sure on that.
The cash registers all ran a weird version of OS/2, I guess you'd call it an embedded OS/2. Standard 486 processor and whatnot, but they all (obviously) communicated with the main OS/2 system to do purchases, reservations, credit payments, etc.
Around the store, and you can still see them if you go looking, you can find these very plain looking terminals, with green CRTs. They're basically dumb terminals that managers can use to order products, check inventory, etc. And they all seemed to work by letting you run sessions on the main OS/2 box.
It was really more like OS/2 on a mainframe than your standard OS/2 desktop. But what's amazing was that it was basically the OS/2 system you could run on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be true, but it's still part of the region's collective culture.
You could say the same for Egypt, except they care for and maintain the pyramids and their heritage. Why should the people of Iraq be denied the same?
It's always been my opinion that with the status of free drinks within a company you can figure out the company's financial status.
Example. My old company used to give us free snapple. This soon changed to free cokes (the plastic bottles). Then cans of coke. Then Fanta.
We were laid off a few months later.
Seriously...
Give me Delphi over VB anyday.
It is when your understaffed/overworked admins have to instantly learn yet another configuration scheme when something breaks.
Where to begin:
1) See my above comment. Big Conservative Companies want things to work out of the box. The guy restoring a system that failed at 3am shouldn't have to head out to Sun's site to find the proper JDK at 3am. This isn't a huge deal, but big enough.
2) Yeah, it's included. Now tell me how to get it to show up in the installer. See above comments about the guy at 3am and mix them with kernel parameters on install.
3) If RH wants to mix it up with the big boys, which they clearly want to, don't irritate the sysadmins by making them learn new stuff. It's nice to leverage existing skills.
My points were
1) ext3 was far from stable at that time as well. Why choose one quasi-stable filesystem over another?
2) IBMs JDK does not work on MP systems out of the box. At least, not the one that RH ships. Want proof? Install and Run Tomcat 4.1. It won't work. Switch to Sun's JDK. It will work. Then read the readme, and notice that IBMs JDK has 'issues' with MP systems.
Yes, I know you can install sun's JDK yourself. But that's not the point. When you're trying to make this simple and easy to install so the guy in the Toledo datacenter can reinstall a machine that exploded, died, was abducted by aliens, or is missing, you really don't want to have him doing stuff like that.
3) Configuration is a big deal when you have tons of Solaris and AIX admins grumbling about having to learn something new. Personally I don't think it's a big deal, but it does seem very RedHatish to screw with everyone else.
We're using RHAS here at work, and I have to say, to date I've been very unimpressed.
One of the RH sales rep went on about how RH made a lot of kernel modifications so their kernel worked better on MP machines than the default Linux kernel. Fair enough. But they also prefer you use IBM's JDK/JRE, which doesn't work out of the box on MP machines. Not to mention it seems to eat twice the memory of Sun's JDK/JRE.
It also seems that RedHat only supports ext3 in their Advanced Server. It seems to me that anything calling itself an "Advanced Server" should support JFS or ReiserFS. Now, I know that JFS is relatively new, but Reiser has been around long enough and was considered "stable" before ext3 I believe, so I see no reason why it shouldn't be available for me to use without having to pass silly kernel paramaters to get it to show up.
Don't even start me on xinetd. Stuff like "maintaining compatibility with other unix flavors" is important if they want to move AS into big iron shops where Solaris and AIX are the norms.
Actually, I don't think it'd be hard for the companies to build a BIOS updater that ran in linux.
It's more like the demand has to be there.
There actually may have something like that for IBM machines, which are very well supported as far as linux goes.
Actually...
I flashed the bios on both my thinkpad at work, and my homebrew at home without using a floppy.
They required me to use windows, which was another headache altogether tho.
Did the existing file dialog in GTK 2.x go through any usability reviews? If so...
1) Can I hire those people to do usabililty reviews on the code I produce? I have a feeling my job would get 1000x easier.
2) Do those people have any idea what they're doing.
That file selector box makes me wanna vomit.
I know I'm beating a dead horse, but it bothers the hell out of me.
Will it do anything to fix that godawful file selector box in Gnome? No? Then work on that first.
Thank you. I'll be here all week.
So, instead of Ximian telling us that a horrible element of their UI will be fixed, and that everything will be good, they want to keep us guessing... Will they fix the horrible box, or will they not fix it?
That doesn't sound like a good way to get good marketing. That sounds like a way to get lots of reviews where people say "The file selector box is still broken in 2.0, and we're not sure when Ximian will fix it"
I'll take Swing's file chooser any day over the suck-ass one that's the GTK/Gnome file chooser.
At least Swing's has the basic buttons I like. Home. Up a level. Create a folder. And it lets me sort files by different options.
GTK has none of those. The fact that swing has them really elelvates it waaay above GTK's selector. It is so not close to "almost as bad".
Can anyone tell me if they've fixed the file chooser dialog? If they haven't, they have 2 options...
(1) Fix the file chooser dialog. It's horrible. I've used DOS applications from the 80s which had better faux file chooser dialogs. QT 1.x had a better file chooser box.
(2) Give up. They haven't gotten it fixed yet, when will they.
Seriously, it's horrible. I've never had to interact with such a horribly designed file chooser box as much as I do because I use evolution. I love how when you change directories; the filename of whatever you're trying to save disappears. Great feature guys.
Seriously. Give me something with a "up a level button". And put the directories and files in one window, with "icons" so I can tell the difference between the two.
You're totally right... I use KDE, but there are a few GTK/Gnome applications that I can't do without (Evolution, gaim, xmms). And every single time I see that file selection box, I cringe. I mean, come in, it's hideous in so many ways that usability experts should explode on contact with the thing. How hard would it have been to add a "up a level" button. Is this fixed in GTK2? Evolution still uses those boxes (at least, my version does). Is this fixed in Gnome2? Hell, even the QT 1.x file selection box was nicer than the load of crap that GTK dumps on users. One of the sweetest things about KDE is that file selection dialog. I mean, you can open URLs, FTP sites, SMB shares, pretty much anything with that box. Set bookmarks, get previews. It's fantastic.
Well...
I know with windows to change a video card I have to jump thru about 800 hoops.. Okay, not 800, but more than I do with suse.
Plug and play on Windows has alwasy been plug and pray.
Ya know, I'm amazed that Linux still has this "hard to use" stigma attached to it.
I don't know what everyone else uses, but I use Suse. For the longest time I stuck with 7.0, just upgraded, rebuilt, etc. I recently upgraded to 8.1 (installed it on some servers at work, and figured it was time to upgrade at home).
It's amazing how far it's come. I can plug in a USB drive, and have the icon show up on the desktop. Just like a mac. NO fooling with drivers, no rebooting. Very unlike windows. Change some hardware? Suse catches that on boot and prompts you to configure it. Very unlike windows.
And we won't even talk about how easy Linux is to install compared to windows.
This "hard to use" stigma seems to be stuck in the mind of tech reporters, who tend to hover a year or two behind the current reality.
It seems to me that all the people complaining must be windows users.
I've used RealPlayer on Linux, and aside from asking me to register, it doesn't do anything obnoxious. It plays BBC News, streaming, and the quality is great and I don't get any dropouts.
Maybe the problems related to the windows version has to do with the "windows" in there. Doesn't Media Player 8/9 do all sorts of obnoxious stuff. As someone who uses an XP laptop at work, I know WMP does all sorts of annoying things. Come to think of it, so does that horrible Winamp3. Ashampoo (or whatever that other semi-popular media player is) also does these things.
You're screaming at real because they do what all the other applications do. Maybe you need to scream about changing the rules that govern the way apps play together on windows.
As someone with programming experience for a financial company I can tell you that the reason the charts are generated periodically and not custom generated is costs. If they provided real time finanical updates, it'd cost them a fortune. Providing you with data that's 15 minutes old costs them almost nothing.
I don't care if you've got the freakin fastest computer in the world, but 10 minutes to compile a custom kernel is only half the story. You've got to add the entry into grub, make your modules directories, copy modules over, etc.
And if you've got any sort of soundcard, you'll have to reboot, recompile alsa, do the same module dance. Same thing for Nvidia.
Not to mention testing. If you're taking 10 minutes to do your custom kernel on any sort of production server, you're obviously not testing, and *somebody* needs to be fired.
Limewire seems to be a well written program. It used to run just fine on my 256MB box. As for the relative usefulness of the program, that remains to be seen.
Likewise, JRio was/is a great utility for managing songs on my Rio500.
Java's come a long way from that first version of AIM. Please don't use that as your reference for a modern java program.
That's true that the mall stores charge more. But most kids are going to buy their stuff at a mall store or a best buy type place. Even the mom & pop type stores around here (Princeton, NJ) aren't much, if any, cheaper than the best buys.
Going back to weezer... on amazon.com, you get..
List Price: $18.98
Price: $13.99
So Amazon is in line with bestbuy. The FYE is selling it at above list price. Fine. The wrinkle is...
Used & new from $6.49
Some quick digging there shows 5 vendors selling used cd's for under 7.50. New, on average, seems to hover around in the high 9 range.
No, not Canada.
.02
And maybe not $20 dollars, but right here in the good ol' US of A you can get royally ripped. The worst example I have seen was the "green" weezer album. I think it was selling for $18.99 dollars in one of those FYE stores up in the local mall. This was when "Hash Pipe" was in heavy rotation on all the pop/rock stations. As of right this second, the CD is 13.99 at bestbuy.com.
That's ~$19 dollars for roughly 30 minutes of music. Think about it. I know it's a matter of supply and demand, people are going to pay that price to get the CD, but that seems incredibly high.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. I'm sure at $14-$20 per CD, someone somewhere is making a huge profit. Does it really matter who? I know the popular cry is for the artist who doesn't get much money on album sales, but do you really think if the artist was raking it in, and if they had control, the situation would be that much different?
It's really, I think, the entire industry that's screwed up at this point. There's a nice status quo, and nobody (except the artists, who really aren't making that much, so I hear) wants it changed. Personally I'd be happier if the money I spent on CDs went to the artists, rather than to the industry. But it wouldn't change the fact that CDs are still overpriced. Why do you think people jump on used CDs if they can? If you can pick up the previously mentioned Weezer CD for half the price of a new one, wouldn't you? Further, if you could download it for free and just burn the CD, wouldn't most people?
These days, I buy most of my CDs used. If CD prices came inline with what they're really worth (and who determines that really), I'd probably buy more new CDs. But until the industry gets it's head out of it's rear, nothing's going to change. Maybe the internet is their wakeup call.
Just my
When I was in college, I worked at sears and I worked on your CICS port for OS/2. See my comment above somewhere. :)
I'm not sure if it's still this way today; but it may well be, since it would take a huge change to redo the system, but...
Back in '97 or so, Sears used a nice OS/2 setup. The main store computer was actually an OS/2 2.x box that ran a huge DB/2 database with all of the store's inventory, pricing, etc. It may have been an SMP version of OS/2, but I'm not sure on that.
The cash registers all ran a weird version of OS/2, I guess you'd call it an embedded OS/2. Standard 486 processor and whatnot, but they all (obviously) communicated with the main OS/2 system to do purchases, reservations, credit payments, etc.
Around the store, and you can still see them if you go looking, you can find these very plain looking terminals, with green CRTs. They're basically dumb terminals that managers can use to order products, check inventory, etc. And they all seemed to work by letting you run sessions on the main OS/2 box.
It was really more like OS/2 on a mainframe than your standard OS/2 desktop. But what's amazing was that it was basically the OS/2 system you could run on the desktop.