First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?
I like Chrome's UI. I like as little clutter as possible in all my GUI applications. I know some people that can ignore any amount of clutter and get to business, but some of us have trouble concentrating when there is a lot of clutter. I think that's one of the reasons Adblock Plus became so popular.
About the only thing I dislike about Chrome's UI is that when I tell my OS to tile my windows, Chrome's window doesn't get tiled.
One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.
I love that Google Chrome has that feature, and would also love it if Mozilla Firefox got that feature.
As of late, I've become annoyed at all the hand holding and maintenance that applications require. I want things to Just Work, thank you very much.
When I do maintenance work on the computers of friends and relatives, I encourage them to try Google Chrome, and install it for them. Why Google Chrome? Well, besides the great security model, I know it'll keep itself silently updated.
There's no reason to burden non-technical users (and even technical users) with applications that needlessly involve the user in routine maintenance tasks (like updating).
That said, I hope Mozilla Firefox implements it as a default feature, but also as something that can be turned off as well, so that everyone can be happy.
I walked into Best Buy on launch day (this was in Boston) and they had a big display with 5 iPads. No lines, 3 of them were not even being used, so I wandered up and played with one for 10 minutes and only at the end did someone else come up behind me to try one out.
A week or two ago, I walked into Best Buy, and saw some iPads on display as well. One was available, and I wanted to toy around with it, but the greasy, oily fingerprints all over it made me want to vomit. I gazed at it wistfully and forlornly for a few moments, and then left.
There are two types of people who use the word "cloud". People who are in charge who have absolutely no idea how technology works, and those who make fun of those who use the word "cloud". Back in the day, we use to call the "cloud" the "network". Of course, the clueless now confuse the cloud with components of the cloud, such as clusters, SAN's, and mainframes
Words evolve. Just adapt, for crying out loud.
When I was a wee programmer lad, "hacker" meant "programmer". My friends and I proudly proclaimed ourselves "hackers". Now it has a negative connotation. Instead of whining about how the word "hacker" evolved, we adapted.
All you whiners hating on how the word "cloud" is used today are wankers.
the "higher level" style of programming -- where you lose some control but can supposedly create more apps in the same unit time. I'm not convinced that this is a win for anyone. I'm a bit of a control freak though.
Don't forget that applications written in some higher level (and more "bloated") programming languages aren't as susceptible to nearly as many exploits; e.g., buffer overruns.
I'm happy to run a program that's a little slower in exchange for it being much more secure.
Dude, take your pick. Either you'll have more HB1s inside America, or you'll have competition from abroad. This is a binary decision.
Wow, this is so completely wrong that I'd think even Slashdot mods would see through the fallacy.
It's not a binary decision. The U.S. will see fierce competition from abroad whether or not we import hordes of H1-B workers during an economic crisis when unemployment is already high.
And if you think importing hordes of H1-B workers will "save" the U.S., you're a deluded fool. The main impediment to the U.S. competing is our cost of living, and no, importing a horde of H1-B workers won't help.
But of course, all of those 5.700.000.000 people from outside America aren't as smart or deserving as real Americans...
Ah, yes. You don't have a real argument, so you throw in an appeal to emotion.
Now I am fully aware that this is a fine and dandy way to waste some good earned karma, but sorry, it's much closer to the truth.
Good job, lock in your +5 with the old "I know this will get me modded down..." trick.
I love git. Oh, no, I don't actually use it myself. I love watching other people trying to use it. My God, what a usability train wreck git is. And since it's promoted by Linus, lots of people use it blindly. Love it!
We look at Linux as being vastly superior in nearly every way, and we can't understand why regular people see it differently. When we approach linux as nerds, we miss the 1st thing that non-techy people see. That is the interface.
Speaking as someone that works for an actual software company, and not in an IT shop, it has over the years become my opinion that the primary reason for the continued failure of Linux on the desktop is because Linux is a hostile environment for commercial software developers to target. DLL Hell, different packaging formats between distributions, unacceptable licenses for basic libraries that are 100% free (as in beer) to use on Windows and OSX, the list goes on. Everything about Linux makes it really, really, extra hard for me to target (again, speaking as a commercial software developer).
Now I already know the chest-thumping uber-geeks out there are lining up to tell me what I complete dummy I am and that targeting Linux is easy, but really, it's not.
How would this get paid for, I wonder? It's written by the same people that brought you "Cash for Clunkers" and the "Stimulus Package", and we know what came of THEM.
When it comes to this recession, the first stimulus package happened on George W. Bush's watch.
Also, Ronald Reagan passed a massive stimulus package as well. When inflation is factored in, it was larger than Obama's stimulus.
Even factoring in the Obama stimulus package, the vast majority of U.S. debt was accrued under the watch of Republican presidents.
Let's try to stay grounded in reality and realize that both dominant political parties in the U.S. spend too much. There is plenty of blame to go around. Partisan bickering is blinding Americans to the fact that the real problem is that the government is even allowed to spend money it doesn't have.
Apple's "fat binary" approach to solving this problem is okay, but I think Linux could probably do better. How about something more clever/elegant, like distributing the binaries in a universal byte-code format (e.g. using LLVM), and then, either as part of the install process or during their first execution, they compile themselves into the appropriate native executable code for the machine they are running on?
I think that's a great idea. That's what IBM's AS/400 does, and it works great. IBM was able to change the AS/400 from one CPU architecture to another using this approach.
Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.
This has actually been happening for decades.
I logged into my first online chat room in 1979. That's not a typo. 1979. Not 1989. Not 1999. 1979.
A lot of "old timers" like me used bulletin board systems throughout the 1980s and many of us felt the same about the Internet that you feel about technology becoming pedestrian now.
This is just more of the same. Technology continues to become more common and accessible and the "early adopters" lament the way it "used to be".
But... "compiling for your platform" is just another way to install software. You could wrap this in a little application (call it "setup"), where you click "Next >" several times, and as a result you have a binary for your platform.
Wow, the lack of grasp on reality around here really amazes me sometimes. But it looks like it worked for you. The open source fanatic fan boys shot your karma through the roof. Congratulations!
Compiling non-trivial applications from source can take a long time. That fact alone can make precompiled binaries a big win for most users.
I did the "compile from source" thing for a long time on FreeBSD before finally realizing the pointlessness of it all. Not only was I completely unnecessarily beating up on my hardware, but spending far too much time waiting for compiles to complete.
These days, I grab precompiled packages whenever possible, and you know what? It's a hell of a lot better.
I am in this position right now. I am an H1-B holder. I have a Masters in Computer Science. While most of my coworkers worked 40-45 hours a week I was doing 80 and quickly gained higher positions and expertise (hard work pays off in the land of opportunity). I love the US. Its a great place to live and I've lived here since I came to do my Bachelors (Computer Science also). I paid out of state tuition for all 7 years, out of my own pocket (which totaled > 60K).
If you regularly worked 80 hours per week, I'm not sure I'd call what you did "living".
The quality hasn't changed because it's the same machine.
Sorry, but...no, it's not.
My company has been using ThinkPads exclusively for years, and once IBM sold the unit to Lenovo, the quality of the ThinkPad line has gone down, in my opinion.
I think IBM demanded a higher of level quality than Lenovo demands of itself. My experience seems to indicate there is now a higher failure rate, as well as evidence of cutting corners.
Technology can and does change our lives in profound and wonderful ways, but...
I think a pad of paper and a pen might be a better solution, or even a PDA (remember when they were called PDAs?) with a calendar and note taking application.
8:10 AM - Took heart medication.
9:45 AM - Went to market to pick up bread for dinner.
10:30 AM - Took blood pressure medication.
10:40 AM - Maintenance stopped by and fixed the leaky faucet in the bathroom. If it starts leaking again, call 555-1212 and ask for Ben and let him know it's still leaking.
People with memory problems need a convenient and reliable memory enhancer. I doubt recording your life and having to watch it back over and over to see what you've done is convenient or reliable. Glancing at your pad of paper or calendar plus note taking application is easy, fast, convenient, and reliable.
Maybe the way it was written is why FOSS is where it's at? Might not be such a bad idea to keep it around?
Then again, maybe the GPL isnotresponsible for great free software and open source software being written.
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should be allowed to pick their license of choice, including GPL. But there are plenty of examples of free software and open source software being highly successful and widely used that are not GPL'd.
The assumption that the GPL is responsible for the success of FOSS reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer is carrying a rock around that supposedly repels lions (or something). Lisa says, "That's ridiculous! What makes you think that repels lions?" and Homer replies, "You don't see any lions around, do you?"
What about netbooks running 32-bit CPUs? Those will all be declared incompatible with Windows 7, even though 32-bit Windows 7 will run on them? I think I must be missing something.
If only Microsoft had done the world a huge favor, and made Windows 7 64-bit only. And if only they had dropped a few different flavors of Windows 7, too. It would all be so much less confusing and frustrating.
... is my key principle. I'm capable of RTM'ing and Googling to find answers, but especially as I get older, I don't have the time I used to.
Amen to that.
Not long ago, I was struggling getting vino/vnc to work under Ubuntu Linux (desktop edition). I spent hours Googling and trying to juggle conflicting and just plain wrong information. Eventually, I discovered the culprit was that IPv6 was enabled on Ubuntu by default.
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
Second, I was stunned vino/vnc would fail to accept connections if IPv6 was enabled but my networking gear didn't support it. I literally could not VNC into my Ubuntu desktop machine unless I disabled IPv6 on the Ubuntu machine, even if all my IPv4 firewall and tunnel settings were correct.
Third, I was stunned that the solution (which was remarkably hard to discover) was to hand edit some weird blacklist file so that I could blacklist IPv6. Nope, no GUI option to just frakking disable IPv6, at least not that I could find.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
I'll continue to use Linux, of course, but FOSS in general has a long ways to go.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, am I the only one who hates Chrome's interface?
I like Chrome's UI. I like as little clutter as possible in all my GUI applications. I know some people that can ignore any amount of clutter and get to business, but some of us have trouble concentrating when there is a lot of clutter. I think that's one of the reasons Adblock Plus became so popular.
About the only thing I dislike about Chrome's UI is that when I tell my OS to tile my windows, Chrome's window doesn't get tiled.
One thing I hope is that "silently updating in the background" doesn't mean there will be some sort of "Firefox updater.exe" service loaded in the background when I start up my PC. I hate it when applications do that.
I love that Google Chrome has that feature, and would also love it if Mozilla Firefox got that feature.
As of late, I've become annoyed at all the hand holding and maintenance that applications require. I want things to Just Work, thank you very much.
When I do maintenance work on the computers of friends and relatives, I encourage them to try Google Chrome, and install it for them. Why Google Chrome? Well, besides the great security model, I know it'll keep itself silently updated.
There's no reason to burden non-technical users (and even technical users) with applications that needlessly involve the user in routine maintenance tasks (like updating).
That said, I hope Mozilla Firefox implements it as a default feature, but also as something that can be turned off as well, so that everyone can be happy.
I walked into Best Buy on launch day (this was in Boston) and they had a big display with 5 iPads. No lines, 3 of them were not even being used, so I wandered up and played with one for 10 minutes and only at the end did someone else come up behind me to try one out.
A week or two ago, I walked into Best Buy, and saw some iPads on display as well. One was available, and I wanted to toy around with it, but the greasy, oily fingerprints all over it made me want to vomit. I gazed at it wistfully and forlornly for a few moments, and then left.
I'm not sure the iPad is for OCD types like me. :(
There are two types of people who use the word "cloud". People who are in charge who have absolutely no idea how technology works, and those who make fun of those who use the word "cloud". Back in the day, we use to call the "cloud" the "network". Of course, the clueless now confuse the cloud with components of the cloud, such as clusters, SAN's, and mainframes
Words evolve. Just adapt, for crying out loud.
When I was a wee programmer lad, "hacker" meant "programmer". My friends and I proudly proclaimed ourselves "hackers". Now it has a negative connotation. Instead of whining about how the word "hacker" evolved, we adapted.
All you whiners hating on how the word "cloud" is used today are wankers.
the "higher level" style of programming -- where you lose some control but can supposedly create more apps in the same unit time. I'm not convinced that this is a win for anyone. I'm a bit of a control freak though.
Don't forget that applications written in some higher level (and more "bloated") programming languages aren't as susceptible to nearly as many exploits; e.g., buffer overruns.
I'm happy to run a program that's a little slower in exchange for it being much more secure.
Ah, Scepter aka Scepter of Goth aka Milieu. I played far too many hours of that game rather than doing my grade school homework. :-)
I have the Pascal source to the game kicking around. Once in a great while it's fun to take it out and browse through it.
I like listening to "kids these days" talk about how MUDs were invented in the late 80s or early 90s. So naive of history... :-)
Dude, take your pick. Either you'll have more HB1s inside America, or you'll have competition from abroad. This is a binary decision.
Wow, this is so completely wrong that I'd think even Slashdot mods would see through the fallacy.
It's not a binary decision. The U.S. will see fierce competition from abroad whether or not we import hordes of H1-B workers during an economic crisis when unemployment is already high.
And if you think importing hordes of H1-B workers will "save" the U.S., you're a deluded fool. The main impediment to the U.S. competing is our cost of living, and no, importing a horde of H1-B workers won't help.
But of course, all of those 5.700.000.000 people from outside America aren't as smart or deserving as real Americans...
Ah, yes. You don't have a real argument, so you throw in an appeal to emotion.
Now I am fully aware that this is a fine and dandy way to waste some good earned karma, but sorry, it's much closer to the truth.
Good job, lock in your +5 with the old "I know this will get me modded down..." trick.
Personally I've been happy with git.
I love git. Oh, no, I don't actually use it myself. I love watching other people trying to use it. My God, what a usability train wreck git is. And since it's promoted by Linus, lots of people use it blindly. Love it!
We look at Linux as being vastly superior in nearly every way, and we can't understand why regular people see it differently. When we approach linux as nerds, we miss the 1st thing that non-techy people see. That is the interface.
Speaking as someone that works for an actual software company, and not in an IT shop, it has over the years become my opinion that the primary reason for the continued failure of Linux on the desktop is because Linux is a hostile environment for commercial software developers to target. DLL Hell, different packaging formats between distributions, unacceptable licenses for basic libraries that are 100% free (as in beer) to use on Windows and OSX, the list goes on. Everything about Linux makes it really, really, extra hard for me to target (again, speaking as a commercial software developer).
Now I already know the chest-thumping uber-geeks out there are lining up to tell me what I complete dummy I am and that targeting Linux is easy, but really, it's not.
How would this get paid for, I wonder? It's written by the same people that brought you "Cash for Clunkers" and the "Stimulus Package", and we know what came of THEM.
When it comes to this recession, the first stimulus package happened on George W. Bush's watch.
Also, Ronald Reagan passed a massive stimulus package as well. When inflation is factored in, it was larger than Obama's stimulus.
Even factoring in the Obama stimulus package, the vast majority of U.S. debt was accrued under the watch of Republican presidents.
Let's try to stay grounded in reality and realize that both dominant political parties in the U.S. spend too much. There is plenty of blame to go around. Partisan bickering is blinding Americans to the fact that the real problem is that the government is even allowed to spend money it doesn't have.
That's a fine-sounding liberal opinion...
It's too bad you had to politicize an otherwise reasonable post and opinion.
...the full freedom offered by the GPL
The GPL does not offer full freedom. Public domain offers full freedom.
I don't know about any of you, but being in a smelly, disgusting store makes me unhappy.
Yeah, I don't like Walmart either...
now i'm waiting for my fiber-optic headphones
I'm holding out for one of these new crystals to hold the audio and video of a complete Low Budget HDV Filipino Horror Movie in NYC myself.
Apple's "fat binary" approach to solving this problem is okay, but I think Linux could probably do better. How about something more clever/elegant, like distributing the binaries in a universal byte-code format (e.g. using LLVM), and then, either as part of the install process or during their first execution, they compile themselves into the appropriate native executable code for the machine they are running on?
I think that's a great idea. That's what IBM's AS/400 does, and it works great. IBM was able to change the AS/400 from one CPU architecture to another using this approach.
Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.
This has actually been happening for decades.
I logged into my first online chat room in 1979. That's not a typo. 1979. Not 1989. Not 1999. 1979.
A lot of "old timers" like me used bulletin board systems throughout the 1980s and many of us felt the same about the Internet that you feel about technology becoming pedestrian now.
This is just more of the same. Technology continues to become more common and accessible and the "early adopters" lament the way it "used to be".
But... "compiling for your platform" is just another way to install software. You could wrap this in a little application (call it "setup"), where you click "Next >" several times, and as a result you have a binary for your platform.
Wow, the lack of grasp on reality around here really amazes me sometimes. But it looks like it worked for you. The open source fanatic fan boys shot your karma through the roof. Congratulations!
Compiling non-trivial applications from source can take a long time. That fact alone can make precompiled binaries a big win for most users.
I did the "compile from source" thing for a long time on FreeBSD before finally realizing the pointlessness of it all. Not only was I completely unnecessarily beating up on my hardware, but spending far too much time waiting for compiles to complete.
These days, I grab precompiled packages whenever possible, and you know what? It's a hell of a lot better.
I am in this position right now. I am an H1-B holder. I have a Masters in Computer Science. While most of my coworkers worked 40-45 hours a week I was doing 80 and quickly gained higher positions and expertise (hard work pays off in the land of opportunity). I love the US. Its a great place to live and I've lived here since I came to do my Bachelors (Computer Science also). I paid out of state tuition for all 7 years, out of my own pocket (which totaled > 60K).
If you regularly worked 80 hours per week, I'm not sure I'd call what you did "living".
The quality hasn't changed because it's the same machine.
Sorry, but...no, it's not.
My company has been using ThinkPads exclusively for years, and once IBM sold the unit to Lenovo, the quality of the ThinkPad line has gone down, in my opinion.
I think IBM demanded a higher of level quality than Lenovo demands of itself. My experience seems to indicate there is now a higher failure rate, as well as evidence of cutting corners.
R.I.P. ThinkPad
Technology can and does change our lives in profound and wonderful ways, but...
I think a pad of paper and a pen might be a better solution, or even a PDA (remember when they were called PDAs?) with a calendar and note taking application.
8:10 AM - Took heart medication.
9:45 AM - Went to market to pick up bread for dinner.
10:30 AM - Took blood pressure medication.
10:40 AM - Maintenance stopped by and fixed the leaky faucet in the bathroom. If it starts leaking again, call 555-1212 and ask for Ben and let him know it's still leaking.
People with memory problems need a convenient and reliable memory enhancer. I doubt recording your life and having to watch it back over and over to see what you've done is convenient or reliable. Glancing at your pad of paper or calendar plus note taking application is easy, fast, convenient, and reliable.
Maybe the way it was written is why FOSS is where it's at? Might not be such a bad idea to keep it around?
Then again, maybe the GPL is not responsible for great free software and open source software being written.
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should be allowed to pick their license of choice, including GPL. But there are plenty of examples of free software and open source software being highly successful and widely used that are not GPL'd.
The assumption that the GPL is responsible for the success of FOSS reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer is carrying a rock around that supposedly repels lions (or something). Lisa says, "That's ridiculous! What makes you think that repels lions?" and Homer replies, "You don't see any lions around, do you?"
I got all those side effects just from reading your idiotic post!
Quick answer: The Slashdot headline is plain wrong.
Please keep that in mind before asking questions on this site, since the Slashdot summary is wrong or misleading probably 30-40% of the time.
I should have waited before posting, giving people the time to figure out the real story. My bad.
What about netbooks running 32-bit CPUs? Those will all be declared incompatible with Windows 7, even though 32-bit Windows 7 will run on them? I think I must be missing something.
If only Microsoft had done the world a huge favor, and made Windows 7 64-bit only. And if only they had dropped a few different flavors of Windows 7, too. It would all be so much less confusing and frustrating.
... is my key principle. I'm capable of RTM'ing and Googling to find answers, but especially as I get older, I don't have the time I used to.
Amen to that.
Not long ago, I was struggling getting vino/vnc to work under Ubuntu Linux (desktop edition). I spent hours Googling and trying to juggle conflicting and just plain wrong information. Eventually, I discovered the culprit was that IPv6 was enabled on Ubuntu by default.
First, I was stunned Ubuntu would be misguided enough to enable IPv6 in their desktop distro by default, when less than 1% of ISPs support it, and most consumer networking equipment either doesn't support it or doesn't have it enabled by default.
Second, I was stunned vino/vnc would fail to accept connections if IPv6 was enabled but my networking gear didn't support it. I literally could not VNC into my Ubuntu desktop machine unless I disabled IPv6 on the Ubuntu machine, even if all my IPv4 firewall and tunnel settings were correct.
Third, I was stunned that the solution (which was remarkably hard to discover) was to hand edit some weird blacklist file so that I could blacklist IPv6. Nope, no GUI option to just frakking disable IPv6, at least not that I could find.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
I'll continue to use Linux, of course, but FOSS in general has a long ways to go.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.