The argument also exists that they should tell the user what's going on rather than silently redirect stuff.
Tell me the program's broken, tell me there's a problem, block writes to PFs, whatever. Don't just silently squirrel stuff away somewhere else and then show different users different versions of the same file...
Sure, the prompts are, but it also restricts what can be run at startup (regardless of permissions) and messes around with various directories that MS have decided are sacred, silently redirecting write operations to other places.
What about applications that have system-wide (NOT per-user) configuration that is changed very infrequently? What's the problem with me, the system administrator, editing those so that when the service next reads its config it can grab them?
Silently redirecting things to a secret, non-shared location is just wrong.
I've read those. There are two books called rediscovery; the first one I got was missing those things you mention, then I found out about the bigger volume. Looks like I've got it all:(
I like 81-Q, though I'd be hard pushed to name a favourite. From Gustible's Planet is ace, as a standalone, comical short story. I think one of the things I love about his stuff is that it describes a (semi) coherent future/world/universe over a period of many thousands of years. The way it's just told in snippets of story, little pertinent episodes, leaving this feeling of a great deal that's unexplored and left to you to explore or just wonder at.
Cool, I had some trouble picking up The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (plus Norstrilia) a couple of years back.
To answer another bit of your post - the niche, for me, is fast boot (or wakeup from suspend is *damn* quick), very portable but also fully featured. It's not a mobile phone screen, it can do most of what a larger and more powerful machine can do, that's it really.
It's just another debian device...
You may wish to take into account that I very nearly bought a Sony Vaio TZ a couple of years back, so *really* small is something that appeals to me.
Email. Slashdot. Flashing Neo Freerunner with stuff. Using it as a terminal into my servers for maintenance tasks. Music & Movies (on the plane or sometimes hooked up to a big LCD)
Err...
Taking places I wouldn't take a decent laptop. Or places I wouldn't think to take a normal one, but it's small enough to throw in the bag. Seeing something on tv and wanting to look it up on wikipedia NOW and every other computer is out of reach and takes ages to boot...
I don't know if it's for everyone, but I use it all the time. To the extent I feared I'd stop using my vaio completely for a while. Then I remembered that I occasionally type letters or play games. Or do the odd bit of crypto-related programming.
I'm very happy with my eee901. I've debianised it and it's replaced my "big" 13 inch vaio for casual use. I still use the vaio for anythin cpu intensive, or if I want a bigger screen. Or for typing anything other than the odd email/slashdot post.
"Until a large percentage of phones have video calling, on a decent screen, with a usable interface video calling cell phones will only be a niche market."
They have had, for years.
Maybe not in the US, but video calling from phones with good, simple interfaces (nokia, leading brand) has been available in the EU for ages. It's just that it's expensive and, you know what, we're just not into it. Perhaps Apple can kick something off. After all, if Apple say it's great then it must be, right?
Sarcastic as I'm trying to sound, I'm actually serious, maybe apple can kick it off. Maybe the US wants video calling where Europe doesn't. Maybe it's a matter of advertising and pricing. I don't know.
Actually, that would violate LSB and good design./opt should be capable of read-only mount. It is supposed to be/etc/opt/. Small point but want to make sure people are aware this.
Really? Never heard of this before. Is it the same on the commercial UNIX's (AIX/Solaris/HPUX)?
For some reason. Like when the iPhone came out and everyone was all "ooo! a smartphone! we've never seen one before!". Now I don't know if this was due to the US market being so far behind the rest of the world or just Apple Fanboi'ism, but it was quite surprising.
Yes, Apple make great hardware designs. Yes, Apple do fantastic software interfaces. But the device capabilities have never held up to the competition.
Hell, I had a dual-cam phone a few years back that could do 3G and video calling...
"I take it you are complaining about things that would be written to '/etc' rather than things that would be written to rc files in the home directory."
Yes, exactly those sorts of things. Or even for proprietary software on UNIX it would in/opt/product/etc or some similar. Settings that are specifically not per-user but are systemwide and app specific.
That's the sort of stuff MS have made more difficult. As I say, I'd be pretty happy with a warning or a failure, it's the silence that upsets me. Took us ages to work out what was going on. (Yes, we're mostly a *nix oriented shop).
There is some sort of global app data storage area, which we probably will move to sooner or later, but it's an annoyance. We already separate out our code and config, but under the app dir rather than in system specific places. Allows for more flexibility, multiple installs and stuff.
"not breaking backward compatibility for every-single-bullshit-written-app that required Admin privileges just because the DEVELOPER was TOO LAZY to put USER settings in the PER USER "Documents and Settings" Directory(ies),"
Who said ANYTHING about user settings?
You know MS push their OS's for corporate and server use, right? And that they've got this UAC bullshit in 2k8 as well?
and instead wanted to spray files all over the SYSTEM and APPLICATION directories (which are NOT USER-SPECIFIC, of course).
Which is precisely the FUCKING point for a SYSTEMWIDE SERVER APPLICATION. Users with the correct permissions should be able to edit the file, and the process (running as a different user) should be able to read the file. NOT have it SILENTLY squirreled away somewhere else.
Spring up another warning, log an error, do whatever, but don't silently pull this shit.
"Your application is trying to be launched at startup in an fishy way. For some reason, my apps are not. HMM."
No, my application is not signed or recognised by MS, who believe they should have the final say over these things. A nice little box pops up saying "your system administrator has set policies to stop these things running at startup" and allowing you to click on them to start them up.
*I* am the system administrator and there was no way I could find to stop this behaviour, despite looking in all the UAC dialogs.
"There's no good reason for writing there,"
Says who? Why is it wrong to keep configuration files, which are changed very infrequently, in with the program? And if you feel that strongly, why not actually stop me writing there instead of mapping it somewhere else without telling me? At the moment, if I alter a file for (say) a service, I get no warning and no indication of anything other than a successful write to the file, but whichever account the service runs as sees something different. Unacceptable behaviour.
"doing so is exactly what messed up "running as an administrator" in XP"
No, what messed up "running as administrator" was "running as administrator". I don't need to write to program files to fuck up your system, if anything you run has admin privileges.
"Is it? I've seen many, many ways to reduce or even eliminate the warnings, even without turning of UAC."
Where did I complain about warnings? I don't give a crap about warnings.
"It's almost like you're being proud of being an idiot."
And it's almost like you can't read.
"if you're still on 32bit Windows, this is not even a problem."
This is all on Vista 32 bit.
But it kinda confirms my thought that you were running vague software written by Linux people for Windows.
And what *exactly* do you mean by that? WTF is wrong with software not written by a company big enough to pay MS to get things signed? Shouldn't I, as an educated power user, be able to decide to run what I want?
Why shouldn't I have the flexibility to run windows with the UAC security turned on (so I get warned about unautorised system changges), but be able to add startup exceptions of my choosing?
It's a clusterfuck, it's a bad hack which fails to leave any room for flexibility, whilst at the same time implementing dodgy compromises in the name of backward compatibility.
1) That doesn't make nearly as much of an impact as you might think. Also, tariffs, taxes and fees are what we're talking about avoiding, here. Tariffs and fees ensure that not only can other countries not sell into the US, but that the US can't sell into other countries. Depending on whether you're a net exporter or importer you might feel something about that.
2) The global economy benefits anyone with anything to sell. OTOH, I agree, we the people are getting scammed in the way it's set up at the moment, with parallel importers getting sued and as many barriers as the corps can think of getting thrown in the way of people being able to shop globally.
"Wouldn't it cost less in oil prices if we only searched globally for things we can't get stateside?"
Well, there's one of the big issues of our times. Peak oil, climate change, money to the middle east... Whatever your politics (unless you work for Exxon?) you've got to agree that cutting reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing and that we don't currently price the distance godds have to travel appropriately to the social, political and environmental costs it really inflicts, just the raw "let's get it out of the ground and refine it" costs.
But using those raw costs, it's still often cheaper to ship things half way around the planet than process them locally. You get the (ludicrous, IMHO) example that happened in the Uk a little while back. Apples, grown in the UK, were then packaged up and shipped to Malaysia for whatever processing it is apples need (polishing? sorting? taking the leaves off?) and then shipped back to the UK and sold on the domestic market.
"If the cell is so much better, then, how come nothing on the PS3 demonstrates a massive superiority over a decent, new pc?
Yes, I'm sure they aren't utilizing it completely..."
Well, in the one sense you're right, if games shops don't learn to program properly for cell in pretty short order then the PC market will get ahead again. Actually that's pretty inevitable, because consoles are never quite cutting edge when released and then sink back from there.
OTOH, look up roadrunner and other mixed Opteron/Cell supercomputers. The cell is pretty shit-hot, if you know what you're doing with it, and it's not like they released one version and stuck with it. We have faster Cell chips than are in the PS3 now.
Please, it's not just sudo, it's heap of other crap too. It's "I stopped these things from being launched at startup and there's no way to override this behaviour".
It's "I'm silently going to re-route any writes to the C:\Program Files\X directory to a virtual subdirectory under the user account, so that users can see different versions of files when looking in the same place".
It's a lot of annoying, unnecessary and unchangeable crap. That's why I switched it off anyway.
YMMV, you may not want an ext2 driver (not MS signed/approved!) launched at system startup, and you may not ever want to edit any configuration files stored in program files (or never launch processes as another user) but I consider those pretty important.
Gonna mandate that public construction be done with US steel, even if the cost is a little higher?
It'll help american companies and american jobs, sure. But then the europeans decide that if you're not playing fair then they won't buy stuff you make, they'll use their own.
Result? We lose out on the global economy, which is largely responsible for the last 20/30 years of growth, everyone pays higher prices and things are no longer done best or cheapest, they're done in isolation.
Much like heroin, we give them this tax money and in return they make their entire catalogue available to us in high quality from a reputable source (i.e. them).
That's what we're proposing right? Right?
Oh, no, wait, we're proposing that they get their money and we get... fuck all.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument also exists that they should tell the user what's going on rather than silently redirect stuff.
Tell me the program's broken, tell me there's a problem, block writes to PFs, whatever. Don't just silently squirrel stuff away somewhere else and then show different users different versions of the same file...
Just wrong.
UAC is nothing like sudo.
Sure, the prompts are, but it also restricts what can be run at startup (regardless of permissions) and messes around with various directories that MS have decided are sacred, silently redirecting write operations to other places.
It's annoying and broken.
Why the hell not?
What about applications that have system-wide (NOT per-user) configuration that is changed very infrequently? What's the problem with me, the system administrator, editing those so that when the service next reads its config it can grab them?
Silently redirecting things to a secret, non-shared location is just wrong.
I've read those. There are two books called rediscovery; the first one I got was missing those things you mention, then I found out about the bigger volume. Looks like I've got it all :(
I like 81-Q, though I'd be hard pushed to name a favourite. From Gustible's Planet is ace, as a standalone, comical short story. I think one of the things I love about his stuff is that it describes a (semi) coherent future/world/universe over a period of many thousands of years. The way it's just told in snippets of story, little pertinent episodes, leaving this feeling of a great deal that's unexplored and left to you to explore or just wonder at.
I think it might be time I read it again.
Cool, I had some trouble picking up The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (plus Norstrilia) a couple of years back.
Have I missed anything you know of?
To answer another bit of your post - the niche, for me, is fast boot (or wakeup from suspend is *damn* quick), very portable but also fully featured. It's not a mobile phone screen, it can do most of what a larger and more powerful machine can do, that's it really.
It's just another debian device...
You may wish to take into account that I very nearly bought a Sony Vaio TZ a couple of years back, so *really* small is something that appeals to me.
"Serious question: what does that leave?"
Email.
Slashdot.
Flashing Neo Freerunner with stuff.
Using it as a terminal into my servers for maintenance tasks.
Music & Movies (on the plane or sometimes hooked up to a big LCD)
Err...
Taking places I wouldn't take a decent laptop. Or places I wouldn't think to take a normal one, but it's small enough to throw in the bag.
Seeing something on tv and wanting to look it up on wikipedia NOW and every other computer is out of reach and takes ages to boot...
I don't know if it's for everyone, but I use it all the time. To the extent I feared I'd stop using my vaio completely for a while. Then I remembered that I occasionally type letters or play games. Or do the odd bit of crypto-related programming.
... that ever read the Ballad of Lost C'Mell?
Or the Dead Lady of Clown Town?
The Underpeople?
Come on slashdot...
I'm very happy with my eee901. I've debianised it and it's replaced my "big" 13 inch vaio for casual use. I still use the vaio for anythin cpu intensive, or if I want a bigger screen. Or for typing anything other than the odd email/slashdot post.
What happened to the dual core Atom chips?
If your question is "what console should I pick if I don't want to wait long to play the downloadable games for this console",
Then given the sub 1MB/s of all of them, the answer is "none".
Unfortunately.
"Until a large percentage of phones have video calling, on a decent screen, with a usable interface video calling cell phones will only be a niche market."
They have had, for years.
Maybe not in the US, but video calling from phones with good, simple interfaces (nokia, leading brand) has been available in the EU for ages. It's just that it's expensive and, you know what, we're just not into it.
Perhaps Apple can kick something off. After all, if Apple say it's great then it must be, right?
Sarcastic as I'm trying to sound, I'm actually serious, maybe apple can kick it off. Maybe the US wants video calling where Europe doesn't. Maybe it's a matter of advertising and pricing. I don't know.
Actually, that would violate LSB and good design. /opt should be capable of read-only mount. It is supposed to be /etc/opt/. Small point but want to make sure people are aware this.
Really? Never heard of this before. Is it the same on the commercial UNIX's (AIX/Solaris/HPUX)?
It's news because Apple are thinking about it.
For some reason. Like when the iPhone came out and everyone was all "ooo! a smartphone! we've never seen one before!". Now I don't know if this was due to the US market being so far behind the rest of the world or just Apple Fanboi'ism, but it was quite surprising.
Yes, Apple make great hardware designs. Yes, Apple do fantastic software interfaces. But the device capabilities have never held up to the competition.
Hell, I had a dual-cam phone a few years back that could do 3G and video calling...
"I take it you are complaining about things that would be written to '/etc' rather than things that would be written to rc files in the home directory."
Yes, exactly those sorts of things. Or even for proprietary software on UNIX it would in /opt/product/etc or some similar. Settings that are specifically not per-user but are systemwide and app specific.
That's the sort of stuff MS have made more difficult. As I say, I'd be pretty happy with a warning or a failure, it's the silence that upsets me. Took us ages to work out what was going on. (Yes, we're mostly a *nix oriented shop).
There is some sort of global app data storage area, which we probably will move to sooner or later, but it's an annoyance. We already separate out our code and config, but under the app dir rather than in system specific places. Allows for more flexibility, multiple installs and stuff.
"not breaking backward compatibility for every-single-bullshit-written-app that required Admin privileges just because the DEVELOPER was TOO LAZY to put USER settings in the PER USER "Documents and Settings" Directory(ies),"
Who said ANYTHING about user settings?
You know MS push their OS's for corporate and server use, right? And that they've got this UAC bullshit in 2k8 as well?
and instead wanted to spray files all over the SYSTEM and APPLICATION directories (which are NOT USER-SPECIFIC, of course).
Which is precisely the FUCKING point for a SYSTEMWIDE SERVER APPLICATION. Users with the correct permissions should be able to edit the file, and the process (running as a different user) should be able to read the file. NOT have it SILENTLY squirreled away somewhere else.
Spring up another warning, log an error, do whatever, but don't silently pull this shit.
"Your application is trying to be launched at startup in an fishy way. For some reason, my apps are not. HMM."
No, my application is not signed or recognised by MS, who believe they should have the final say over these things. A nice little box pops up saying "your system administrator has set policies to stop these things running at startup" and allowing you to click on them to start them up.
*I* am the system administrator and there was no way I could find to stop this behaviour, despite looking in all the UAC dialogs.
"There's no good reason for writing there,"
Says who? Why is it wrong to keep configuration files, which are changed very infrequently, in with the program? And if you feel that strongly, why not actually stop me writing there instead of mapping it somewhere else without telling me? At the moment, if I alter a file for (say) a service, I get no warning and no indication of anything other than a successful write to the file, but whichever account the service runs as sees something different. Unacceptable behaviour.
"doing so is exactly what messed up "running as an administrator" in XP"
No, what messed up "running as administrator" was "running as administrator". I don't need to write to program files to fuck up your system, if anything you run has admin privileges.
"Is it? I've seen many, many ways to reduce or even eliminate the warnings, even without turning of UAC."
Where did I complain about warnings?
I don't give a crap about warnings.
"It's almost like you're being proud of being an idiot."
And it's almost like you can't read.
"if you're still on 32bit Windows, this is not even a problem."
This is all on Vista 32 bit.
But it kinda confirms my thought that you were running vague software written by Linux people for Windows.
And what *exactly* do you mean by that? WTF is wrong with software not written by a company big enough to pay MS to get things signed? Shouldn't I, as an educated power user, be able to decide to run what I want?
Why shouldn't I have the flexibility to run windows with the UAC security turned on (so I get warned about unautorised system changges), but be able to add startup exceptions of my choosing?
It's a clusterfuck, it's a bad hack which fails to leave any room for flexibility, whilst at the same time implementing dodgy compromises in the name of backward compatibility.
1) That doesn't make nearly as much of an impact as you might think. Also, tariffs, taxes and fees are what we're talking about avoiding, here. Tariffs and fees ensure that not only can other countries not sell into the US, but that the US can't sell into other countries. Depending on whether you're a net exporter or importer you might feel something about that.
2) The global economy benefits anyone with anything to sell. OTOH, I agree, we the people are getting scammed in the way it's set up at the moment, with parallel importers getting sued and as many barriers as the corps can think of getting thrown in the way of people being able to shop globally.
"Wouldn't it cost less in oil prices if we only searched globally for things we can't get stateside?"
Well, there's one of the big issues of our times. Peak oil, climate change, money to the middle east... Whatever your politics (unless you work for Exxon?) you've got to agree that cutting reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing and that we don't currently price the distance godds have to travel appropriately to the social, political and environmental costs it really inflicts, just the raw "let's get it out of the ground and refine it" costs.
But using those raw costs, it's still often cheaper to ship things half way around the planet than process them locally. You get the (ludicrous, IMHO) example that happened in the Uk a little while back. Apples, grown in the UK, were then packaged up and shipped to Malaysia for whatever processing it is apples need (polishing? sorting? taking the leaves off?) and then shipped back to the UK and sold on the domestic market.
WTF??
"That is a bad example because it is already a protected industry"
Actually, it's a great example because it was in the news again this week. Didn't know the rest though, +1 informative.
"If the cell is so much better, then, how come nothing on the PS3 demonstrates a massive superiority over a decent, new pc?
Yes, I'm sure they aren't utilizing it completely..."
Well, in the one sense you're right, if games shops don't learn to program properly for cell in pretty short order then the PC market will get ahead again. Actually that's pretty inevitable, because consoles are never quite cutting edge when released and then sink back from there.
OTOH, look up roadrunner and other mixed Opteron/Cell supercomputers. The cell is pretty shit-hot, if you know what you're doing with it, and it's not like they released one version and stuck with it. We have faster Cell chips than are in the PS3 now.
UAC is horrible.
Please, it's not just sudo, it's heap of other crap too. It's "I stopped these things from being launched at startup and there's no way to override this behaviour".
It's "I'm silently going to re-route any writes to the C:\Program Files\X directory to a virtual subdirectory under the user account, so that users can see different versions of files when looking in the same place".
It's a lot of annoying, unnecessary and unchangeable crap. That's why I switched it off anyway.
YMMV, you may not want an ext2 driver (not MS signed/approved!) launched at system startup, and you may not ever want to edit any configuration files stored in program files (or never launch processes as another user) but I consider those pretty important.
The problem is, so does everyone else.
Gonna mandate that public construction be done with US steel, even if the cost is a little higher?
It'll help american companies and american jobs, sure. But then the europeans decide that if you're not playing fair then they won't buy stuff you make, they'll use their own.
Result? We lose out on the global economy, which is largely responsible for the last 20/30 years of growth, everyone pays higher prices and things are no longer done best or cheapest, they're done in isolation.
I just gave myself a great idea!
Much like heroin, we give them this tax money and in return they make their entire catalogue available to us in high quality from a reputable source (i.e. them).
That's what we're proposing right? Right?
Oh, no, wait, we're proposing that they get their money and we get... fuck all.
That's not a cure.
That's "stop them stealing, funding criminal networks and needlessly killing themselves by injecting god-knows-what they just bought".
Big difference.
1) Only if you smoke it
2) Only if you smoke it
3) Only if you smoke it, and if you believe some research above other papers
4) Not proven
5) You just said there's no evidence it causes any psychological problems for healthy people. This is bull.
6) Which orifice did you pull this assertion from?