Seriously! My wife uses Linux every day. When she uses Windows she's always swearing, getting scared (by dialogs that say something like "That application you are running has committed an illegal instruction and will be shutdown"), generally getting nervous, and always afraid she's going to break something. It's a lot like watching someone trying to walk across a field of eggs without breaking any of them and trying to balance a big bottle of wine on the tip of their nose.
On the other hand, she uses Linux without any of these problems. She gets her stuff done, and done quick. And no, she doesn't know jack shit about computers, she's the subject of one of the articles cited in TFA.
Sure, this is only subjective evidence, but I don't see you offering anything more than broad generalizations. I've watched person after person, kids young and old, and all kinds sit at my computer and just fucking use it. I've got tons of email from people who are just like my wife who have switched to Linux, some who made the switch after reading my own article. And the older ones tell me their ages. We're talking people in their 60s and 70s here. One grandma wrote me to tell me her son installed it for her and she was so happy about it, she never calls him anymore to fix her computer because it always works and it always does what she needs.
So who, exactly, are you talking about that can't use Linux? I've got hundreds of emails from 'idiot users' saying they're running it, some of them have been running it for a year, two years, or more! These people are the masses (with the exception that they left Windows behind). So who are you talking about? Put up or shut up.
Try installing the ati.2 package, if available. Looks like you're saying you've already tried it, though.;( Me personally, I'd like to get this Mobility working with DRI extensions. It's working with someone's driver (I don't remember who), but it's not quite working a well as I think it should. How well should it work, anyway?;)
Anyway, the guys that have the ati.2 driver claim it works with that particular plug you're trying to use, and I seem to remember them listing your card in the compatibility list. Sorry I don't have a link.
I call bullshit. I wrote one of the articles cited by this article, and in all the email I get about it I get a lot of people who want to cut expenses by not having to pay someone else to maintain their box, and these people are willing to pay someone up front to build the thing, so long as they don't have to pay someone to fix it. Most of the other responses I get are people who are tired of calling in their neighbor/cousin/brotherinlaw/son to fix their computers. Fact is, most people don't maintain their Windows boxes, so why should we expect them to maintain their Linux boxes? Getting people to use Linux isn't about giving them something they can maintain, it's about making our own lives easier when we have to maintain it.
Because we are the ones who do it. I don't maintain Windows boxes anymore, and when my friends ask me to fix their Windows boxes I give them a copy of Mandrake. When they ask me to help them with that I fall all over myself to do it, because I can fix a Mandrake installation with three clicks, whereas I'd've spent hours fixing the Windows box.
I call bullshit. I've actually worked at Jiffy Lube, and while there I changed oil on a DeLorean and observed a Ferrari getting its oil change (I wasn't lucky enough to be the guy doing it, but I did go down below and take a look at it). I've actually changed the oil on a number of "rare" cars, antiques and classics as well (ever try to find an oil filter for a Ford Model A? I didn't even try, because I saw quite clearly that the thing didn't have one).
I've also changed stereos on a pretty wide variety of cars, and I can promise you there ain't no such thing as an easy stereo installation, unless someone else came in before you and stuck in an aftermarket installation. Talk about proprietary connectors and intentionally incompatible wiring. Ever try to wire in an aftermarket four-speaker system on top of a factory four-speaker harness? Good luck. It's possible, but you'll be lucky if you don't blow up your shiny new CD player.
Dealership? As long as your shop can get parts, or make them, or get them made, most local shops will be happy to work on the thing. As a matter of fact, I've been in shops that took the car in, called the dealer, and then couldn't get parts to fix the damn thing! The car was too new...
Sorry, this metaphor doesn't work. It supports both points, from my personal experience.
He wasn't questioning facts, he was questioning assertions. Big difference there, buddy. According to my log files, though, IE only accounts for 35% of the traffic, with Mozilla and Konqueror taking the Lion's share. Sure, IE is the single most used browser on my site, but it's a hard minority.
Disclaimer: I wrote one of the articles cited in this article.;)
The problem is that FOSS developers are just now working on trying to get the thing to be somewhat user friendly, while Apple and Microsoft (To a lesser degree) are adding shiny new features. Linux is playing a never-ending game of catch-up.
Ok, I'll bite, because this is possibly one of the most ignorant and oft-repeated statements I see.
Linux isn't playing catch-up, never has been and never will be. What Microsoft and Apple spent all their time on was the skin and they just let shit grow for the core. What linux boys have spent their time on is a golden core, and now that they're finally getting to the skin, they've built something that's more solid than the piles of manure that have been spewing from Redmond. When, not if, Linux finally "catches up" to Windows, Microsoft will never again be able to compete against Linux in form, feature, and solidity.
This isn't about whether or not Linux boys can catch up, it's about priorities, and the UNIX Way(tm) is to build each brick handcrafted and perfect before moving on to the next brick. So now we have arguably equal or better usability than Windows, and it indicates a system that has more stability and solidity than Microsoft is even capable of imagining, let alone engineering.
I find your metaphor flawed. Machining the cylinder heads is more like "I was working on this particular class and decided to get the interface rewritten by a professional". I would suggest that requiring the user to learn the word "compile" is more like saying that if you buy a Toyota, you're going to have to install that shitty aftermarket spoiler yourself, but you're just better off sticking with what Toyota already gave you because it runs just fine.
It doesn't seem that ebay would hire a third
party to create an ID system that the users
would have to shell out money for. That mixed
with the external link give it away
Actually, eBay used Microsoft Passport already, which is provided by a third party. So the fact of it defeats your "doesn't seem" sentence and also provides the information you need to identify this is a scam.;)
4th email:
I personally hope a bank doesn't deal with
security issues by relying on internet
communication, but it doesn't sound right for
a bank to contact a hacked account victim
through email. Plus the 4 appended to the www
part of the url makes it seem that it could
possibly be a false url.
Actually, the url was confusing, because USBank *does* use that 4 appended to the www. I marked it fraud, was it? I marked it fraud because of the signature line, actually. I was right, it's fraud, but the link displayed is a real USBank link (I'm a USBank customer, btw). The test didn't work quite right in Konqueror, but now I can clearly see the bogus url the link points to.
Do it! And I"ll write a plugin that'll translate to corporate speak so I can finally write hard-hitting proposals for people who can't breath through their ties.
I'll write "Make more money with" and it'll automatically convert it to "Maximize revenue, minimize cost by opting for"
show the Secret Service (hey, this is sarcasm. I don't need you guys to visit) how easy it is to jump the fence at the whitehouse and run across the lawn
Yes, but show me how you can do this undetected and potentially kill the president? (I am not daring anyone to do this, nor implying that I would want to kill anyone!;-)
Alright, now somebody do this and shoot the president with a water gun. That would be soooooooooo cooooooooooool. Seriously.;) Or a little (obviously fake) gun that puts out a flag that says "Bang". Probably better, no actual contact with the president, just show them you can do it. Nothing really threatening, don't do it with a gun that even remotely looks like it might shoot bullets (you'll get shot). In fact, you might just want to say "bang" and possibly add "this is a prank to show how insecure the system is in an attempt to help to secure the president better, and I have a toy pistol that will put out a flag that says 'bang' and it would be really funny and we'll all get a good laugh, but I don't want any of the SS guys to think I'm actually shooting the president. May I?"
So, yeah, don't get shot, and don't hurt anybody, and don't actually break any laws doing it.;)
Hmmm, forgot to mention I was in the fifth grade, I think. Maybe fourth. Awhile ago, anyway. I'm having trouble picturing the library itself right now, and I'm seeing several libraries all at once from elementary school years, and I went to like four elementary schools.
My first school hack was a real hack. I was playing some BASIC game on the Commodore 64 in the library and I hit a bug that prevented me from winning the game. A real, live bug. So I listed the line, identified the bug, and started fixing it when the librarian walked up and asked what I was doing. She wound up calling my parents saying I was trying to rewrite the game so I could win, you know, cheating.
My parents were cool about it. When I got home my dad asked me what had happened, and since I had previously saved the game to my own disk (we weren't allowed to do that...) and brought it home I fired it up and reproduced the bug for him. Then he watched me fix it, called the librarian and bitched at her, because it was a real bug.
I got kicked off the computer in the library after that. No big loss, we had two of those machines at home and tons more stuff.;) But I've had a severe prejudice against librarians every since then...
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English, thank a soldier.
Um, what soldiers should I thank? Just out of curiosity.... (And I could read before I started school. That's probably true of a lot of people around here)
What about when the webserver is running php in cgi mode? My host is doing this (don't know why, those bastards, but other than that caveat it's a wonderful service), but it'll probably be awhile before they upgrade.
I still say 'ick'. Perl has a lot more native shell like functions and better input/output control IMHO. Still for most stuff I use a real shell script. But to each his own I guess.
I can't imagine using php for shell scripting, but for any shell script of any sizeable workload, you've got to load an interpreter of some sort. I just find Python easier to work with and provides mostly the same level of I/O ease that Perl does. The thing about Python is how much time it cuts back in debugging, for me. The problems I had with Perl had to do with how many ways you can typo on a line and still have it be syntactically correct. Psychologically, it can be hard to find these typos because you *know* they're syntactically correct. Python won't let you do that. By enforcing coding standards (not the best, granted, but at least some) the interpreter actually helps you debug shit, because if you typod something, it doesn't run and you get umpteen fucking errors about it.
And that's great. I think that PHP has its uses even if I personally dislike it. Its the "X language is so great that Y language is dead" statements that get under my skin. And the people who say such things are typically blind the short comings of X language and don't really know anything about Y language.
I have to admit, those things irritate me too. I haven't yet learned a language that I haven't wished I had easy access to in the last year, and that includes BASIC and Pascal from back in the days. Yeah, I know, I can get that stuff somewhere if I dig hard enough, but the problem is library support and community. Without supporting libraries and an active community, a language is dead or dying, or just starting up, and therefore a pain to use for anything useful and modern.
Ummm, with one minor exception. I'm fucking happy I don't have to use C anymore.;)
If you properly abstracted your db layer in the first place, then you're safe to use mysql_* without having to worry about rewriting large sections of your code later.
Pet peeve: all these open source PHP applications that embed every single fucking query right where they use it. Inheritance works great for this, and I've got an object model put together that solves this problem nicely. Two classes, one that you derive from. That one you call for your data, whatever you need. It (dbPage or dbCategory, depending on what it is, you have to write this one, it's not generic) calls dbBase->Query for the data you requested. dbBase returns true on success, or an error on failure. On success it stores the results in a member, which you then dbBase->Results to get. dbBase also manages the connection and so forth.
Later on, when I want to migrate to another database, I only have to rewrite *one* class, and PHP happens to provide a number of nice features that'll let me choose which version of the class to use at runtime. And even then, I don't have to rewrite the whole class, just three core methods, all of the others of which are just error-handling based on results from those methods.
Really, there's very little excuse in this day and age for having to rewrite large portions of your code just because your database changed. Don't we all have some generic db abstractors laying around in our pet languages by now? I've got 'em for php and python (the only languages I use anymore).
If you know all those other languages, you probably don't need much to learn one more. Come on! The first one's tricky, the second one's annoying, all the rest are easy.
Hell, I can't remember the last time it took me more than 15 minutes before I could code a new language (and I'm not talking 'hello, world' either).
Wait a minute, you count VB, Bash, and SQL as programming? Maybe that explains it all. Some of us consider those UI.
The news is different now than a couple of hours ago, but read this. Bush's new agency to "help" make elections run smoothly wants to postpone the elections for fear of a terrorist attack (or something along those lines).
Newsweek reported Sunday that U.S. counterterrorism officials are reviewing a proposal that provides for postponing the elections in the event of an attack.
The articles from earlier today were much more direct, I wish I had a link to one of them instead. They made it sound like Bush's fancy election agency was asking to postpone the elections. This article is a bit different.
Ok, I went and read up on Hitler's rise to power, and it looks a bit different than Bush's attempts. Some parallels, for sure, but Germany's power structure was totally different at the start of Hitler's rise than America's was in 2001 (assuming someone's rise started then. In exact parallel, it looks like Kerry is filling Hitler's shoes and Bush is playing the role of the imcompetent chancellor).
Were you born this stupid or are you paid to be?
Seriously! My wife uses Linux every day. When she uses Windows she's always swearing, getting scared (by dialogs that say something like "That application you are running has committed an illegal instruction and will be shutdown"), generally getting nervous, and always afraid she's going to break something. It's a lot like watching someone trying to walk across a field of eggs without breaking any of them and trying to balance a big bottle of wine on the tip of their nose.
On the other hand, she uses Linux without any of these problems. She gets her stuff done, and done quick. And no, she doesn't know jack shit about computers, she's the subject of one of the articles cited in TFA.
Sure, this is only subjective evidence, but I don't see you offering anything more than broad generalizations. I've watched person after person, kids young and old, and all kinds sit at my computer and just fucking use it. I've got tons of email from people who are just like my wife who have switched to Linux, some who made the switch after reading my own article. And the older ones tell me their ages. We're talking people in their 60s and 70s here. One grandma wrote me to tell me her son installed it for her and she was so happy about it, she never calls him anymore to fix her computer because it always works and it always does what she needs.
So who, exactly, are you talking about that can't use Linux? I've got hundreds of emails from 'idiot users' saying they're running it, some of them have been running it for a year, two years, or more! These people are the masses (with the exception that they left Windows behind). So who are you talking about? Put up or shut up.
Try installing the ati.2 package, if available. Looks like you're saying you've already tried it, though. ;( Me personally, I'd like to get this Mobility working with DRI extensions. It's working with someone's driver (I don't remember who), but it's not quite working a well as I think it should. How well should it work, anyway? ;)
Anyway, the guys that have the ati.2 driver claim it works with that particular plug you're trying to use, and I seem to remember them listing your card in the compatibility list. Sorry I don't have a link.
I call bullshit. I wrote one of the articles cited by this article, and in all the email I get about it I get a lot of people who want to cut expenses by not having to pay someone else to maintain their box, and these people are willing to pay someone up front to build the thing, so long as they don't have to pay someone to fix it. Most of the other responses I get are people who are tired of calling in their neighbor/cousin/brotherinlaw/son to fix their computers. Fact is, most people don't maintain their Windows boxes, so why should we expect them to maintain their Linux boxes? Getting people to use Linux isn't about giving them something they can maintain, it's about making our own lives easier when we have to maintain it.
Because we are the ones who do it. I don't maintain Windows boxes anymore, and when my friends ask me to fix their Windows boxes I give them a copy of Mandrake. When they ask me to help them with that I fall all over myself to do it, because I can fix a Mandrake installation with three clicks, whereas I'd've spent hours fixing the Windows box.
I call bullshit. I've actually worked at Jiffy Lube, and while there I changed oil on a DeLorean and observed a Ferrari getting its oil change (I wasn't lucky enough to be the guy doing it, but I did go down below and take a look at it). I've actually changed the oil on a number of "rare" cars, antiques and classics as well (ever try to find an oil filter for a Ford Model A? I didn't even try, because I saw quite clearly that the thing didn't have one).
I've also changed stereos on a pretty wide variety of cars, and I can promise you there ain't no such thing as an easy stereo installation, unless someone else came in before you and stuck in an aftermarket installation. Talk about proprietary connectors and intentionally incompatible wiring. Ever try to wire in an aftermarket four-speaker system on top of a factory four-speaker harness? Good luck. It's possible, but you'll be lucky if you don't blow up your shiny new CD player.
Dealership? As long as your shop can get parts, or make them, or get them made, most local shops will be happy to work on the thing. As a matter of fact, I've been in shops that took the car in, called the dealer, and then couldn't get parts to fix the damn thing! The car was too new...
Sorry, this metaphor doesn't work. It supports both points, from my personal experience.
You forgot to try "harddrak". If that doesn't work, nothing will. Luckily I haven't yet seen a situation where that doesn't work. ;)
He wasn't questioning facts, he was questioning assertions. Big difference there, buddy. According to my log files, though, IE only accounts for 35% of the traffic, with Mozilla and Konqueror taking the Lion's share. Sure, IE is the single most used browser on my site, but it's a hard minority.
Disclaimer: I wrote one of the articles cited in this article. ;)
The problem is that FOSS developers are just now working on trying to get the thing to be somewhat user friendly, while Apple and Microsoft (To a lesser degree) are adding shiny new features. Linux is playing a never-ending game of catch-up.
Ok, I'll bite, because this is possibly one of the most ignorant and oft-repeated statements I see.
Linux isn't playing catch-up, never has been and never will be. What Microsoft and Apple spent all their time on was the skin and they just let shit grow for the core. What linux boys have spent their time on is a golden core, and now that they're finally getting to the skin, they've built something that's more solid than the piles of manure that have been spewing from Redmond. When, not if, Linux finally "catches up" to Windows, Microsoft will never again be able to compete against Linux in form, feature, and solidity.
This isn't about whether or not Linux boys can catch up, it's about priorities, and the UNIX Way(tm) is to build each brick handcrafted and perfect before moving on to the next brick. So now we have arguably equal or better usability than Windows, and it indicates a system that has more stability and solidity than Microsoft is even capable of imagining, let alone engineering.
I find your metaphor flawed. Machining the cylinder heads is more like "I was working on this particular class and decided to get the interface rewritten by a professional". I would suggest that requiring the user to learn the word "compile" is more like saying that if you buy a Toyota, you're going to have to install that shitty aftermarket spoiler yourself, but you're just better off sticking with what Toyota already gave you because it runs just fine.
It doesn't seem that ebay would hire a third
party to create an ID system that the users
would have to shell out money for. That mixed
with the external link give it away
Actually, eBay used Microsoft Passport already, which is provided by a third party. So the fact of it defeats your "doesn't seem" sentence and also provides the information you need to identify this is a scam. ;)
4th email:
I personally hope a bank doesn't deal with
security issues by relying on internet
communication, but it doesn't sound right for
a bank to contact a hacked account victim
through email. Plus the 4 appended to the www
part of the url makes it seem that it could
possibly be a false url.
Actually, the url was confusing, because USBank *does* use that 4 appended to the www. I marked it fraud, was it? I marked it fraud because of the signature line, actually. I was right, it's fraud, but the link displayed is a real USBank link (I'm a USBank customer, btw). The test didn't work quite right in Konqueror, but now I can clearly see the bogus url the link points to.
IF you go back to the top of the thread, you'll probably be ble to easily ascertain that the books cover Boba Fett pretty well.
The one that goes "I've got one hand in my pocket, and the other one's embracing Bill Gates's cock"?
Shit, if i weren't moving to texas I could try Redmondows. ;)
I'm getting Smegindows.com, and Microsmeg.com, and I'm hoping to get more than $20M each just by getting Kryton to go over there and terrorize them.
Do it! And I"ll write a plugin that'll translate to corporate speak so I can finally write hard-hitting proposals for people who can't breath through their ties.
I'll write "Make more money with" and it'll automatically convert it to "Maximize revenue, minimize cost by opting for"
The only part of this deal that I don't like is turning over the domain name...just what does Lindows have to do with Windows?
That's so Microsoft can get lindows.jp uncontested.
show the Secret Service (hey, this is sarcasm. I don't need you guys to visit) how easy it is to jump the fence at the whitehouse and run across the lawn
Yes, but show me how you can do this undetected and potentially kill the president? (I am not daring anyone to do this, nor implying that I would want to kill anyone! ;-)
Alright, now somebody do this and shoot the president with a water gun. That would be soooooooooo cooooooooooool. Seriously. ;) Or a little (obviously fake) gun that puts out a flag that says "Bang". Probably better, no actual contact with the president, just show them you can do it. Nothing really threatening, don't do it with a gun that even remotely looks like it might shoot bullets (you'll get shot). In fact, you might just want to say "bang" and possibly add "this is a prank to show how insecure the system is in an attempt to help to secure the president better, and I have a toy pistol that will put out a flag that says 'bang' and it would be really funny and we'll all get a good laugh, but I don't want any of the SS guys to think I'm actually shooting the president. May I?"
So, yeah, don't get shot, and don't hurt anybody, and don't actually break any laws doing it. ;)
Hmmm, forgot to mention I was in the fifth grade, I think. Maybe fourth. Awhile ago, anyway. I'm having trouble picturing the library itself right now, and I'm seeing several libraries all at once from elementary school years, and I went to like four elementary schools.
My first school hack was a real hack. I was playing some BASIC game on the Commodore 64 in the library and I hit a bug that prevented me from winning the game. A real, live bug. So I listed the line, identified the bug, and started fixing it when the librarian walked up and asked what I was doing. She wound up calling my parents saying I was trying to rewrite the game so I could win, you know, cheating.
My parents were cool about it. When I got home my dad asked me what had happened, and since I had previously saved the game to my own disk (we weren't allowed to do that...) and brought it home I fired it up and reproduced the bug for him. Then he watched me fix it, called the librarian and bitched at her, because it was a real bug.
I got kicked off the computer in the library after that. No big loss, we had two of those machines at home and tons more stuff. ;) But I've had a severe prejudice against librarians every since then...
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English, thank a soldier.
Um, what soldiers should I thank? Just out of curiosity.... (And I could read before I started school. That's probably true of a lot of people around here)
What about when the webserver is running php in cgi mode? My host is doing this (don't know why, those bastards, but other than that caveat it's a wonderful service), but it'll probably be awhile before they upgrade.
I still say 'ick'. Perl has a lot more native shell like functions and better input/output control IMHO. Still for most stuff I use a real shell script. But to each his own I guess.
I can't imagine using php for shell scripting, but for any shell script of any sizeable workload, you've got to load an interpreter of some sort. I just find Python easier to work with and provides mostly the same level of I/O ease that Perl does. The thing about Python is how much time it cuts back in debugging, for me. The problems I had with Perl had to do with how many ways you can typo on a line and still have it be syntactically correct. Psychologically, it can be hard to find these typos because you *know* they're syntactically correct. Python won't let you do that. By enforcing coding standards (not the best, granted, but at least some) the interpreter actually helps you debug shit, because if you typod something, it doesn't run and you get umpteen fucking errors about it.
And that's great. I think that PHP has its uses even if I personally dislike it. Its the "X language is so great that Y language is dead" statements that get under my skin. And the people who say such things are typically blind the short comings of X language and don't really know anything about Y language.
I have to admit, those things irritate me too. I haven't yet learned a language that I haven't wished I had easy access to in the last year, and that includes BASIC and Pascal from back in the days. Yeah, I know, I can get that stuff somewhere if I dig hard enough, but the problem is library support and community. Without supporting libraries and an active community, a language is dead or dying, or just starting up, and therefore a pain to use for anything useful and modern.
Ummm, with one minor exception. I'm fucking happy I don't have to use C anymore. ;)
If you properly abstracted your db layer in the first place, then you're safe to use mysql_* without having to worry about rewriting large sections of your code later.
Pet peeve: all these open source PHP applications that embed every single fucking query right where they use it. Inheritance works great for this, and I've got an object model put together that solves this problem nicely. Two classes, one that you derive from. That one you call for your data, whatever you need. It (dbPage or dbCategory, depending on what it is, you have to write this one, it's not generic) calls dbBase->Query for the data you requested. dbBase returns true on success, or an error on failure. On success it stores the results in a member, which you then dbBase->Results to get. dbBase also manages the connection and so forth.
Later on, when I want to migrate to another database, I only have to rewrite *one* class, and PHP happens to provide a number of nice features that'll let me choose which version of the class to use at runtime. And even then, I don't have to rewrite the whole class, just three core methods, all of the others of which are just error-handling based on results from those methods.
Really, there's very little excuse in this day and age for having to rewrite large portions of your code just because your database changed. Don't we all have some generic db abstractors laying around in our pet languages by now? I've got 'em for php and python (the only languages I use anymore).
If you know all those other languages, you probably don't need much to learn one more. Come on! The first one's tricky, the second one's annoying, all the rest are easy.
Hell, I can't remember the last time it took me more than 15 minutes before I could code a new language (and I'm not talking 'hello, world' either).
Wait a minute, you count VB, Bash, and SQL as programming? Maybe that explains it all. Some of us consider those UI.
Not to mention, if you're driving a stick-shift you also get added stopping power from engine compression if you're downshifting while you stop.
No telling how much it'll unbalance the brakes, though, since brakes are weighted at different power from front to rear than 4WD.
The news is different now than a couple of hours ago, but read this. Bush's new agency to "help" make elections run smoothly wants to postpone the elections for fear of a terrorist attack (or something along those lines).
The articles from earlier today were much more direct, I wish I had a link to one of them instead. They made it sound like Bush's fancy election agency was asking to postpone the elections. This article is a bit different.
Ok, I went and read up on Hitler's rise to power, and it looks a bit different than Bush's attempts. Some parallels, for sure, but Germany's power structure was totally different at the start of Hitler's rise than America's was in 2001 (assuming someone's rise started then. In exact parallel, it looks like Kerry is filling Hitler's shoes and Bush is playing the role of the imcompetent chancellor).