I remember talking to someone who actually does some swordfighting, and felt that the lightsaber battle in Episode 3 was much better than the one in Episode 1.
I disagree.
Episode 3's fight was long, drawn out, and frankly, boring. It really looks like two kids trying to hit each other with sticks.
Episode 1's fights were all interesting, things actually happened, and you did see personalities come out, both in the actual fights, and in moments like this.
I think it was ABC News, but I really don't know. I do know there was an interview in which he was asked if he'd ever play Han Solo again, and he said he didn't think so, he'd outgrown him, or something. When asked if he'd play Indiana Jones again, he said "In a New York Minute."
Let me add that I, personally, prefer mplayer to watch movies, and usually mplayer or audacious to listen to music.
Others prefer VLC. Still others actually prefer Windows Media Player or iTunes (yuck!)... I prefer mplayer.
Now, mplayer is fundamentally incompatible with DRM, because the only way this would work is if every single configuration I want to play with is covered by your trusted computing hardware. And you can't possibly do that, because what if I want to do some kernel hacking? What if I have custom mplayer plugins?
I reject the DMCA, and I play DVDs on Linux as a matter of civil disobedience. And it's important to keep in mind that if you accept the DMCA, you are saying that anything not covered by the DRM scheme is automatically illegal, because it is illegal to circumvent the DRM scheme.
But, if you ignore the DMCA, it is wholly legal for me to play my media on whatever hardware or software I want. And for me, and others like me, it's not merely an issue of having the particular combination I like now be able to play it, with the feature set I like now. It's a matter of being able to change my mind later, or even hack it or patch it myself -- or pay someone else to do so.
Let me provide a simple example: I rent a movie. I bring it home, and pop it into my Powerbook, and rip it from there, because for some reason, my Powerbook seems to be good at ripping movies. I then copy it over a network to my Linux desktop. I return the movie. Then, sometime tomorrow, I watch the movie, then delete it.
I consider this to be a perfectly legitimate form of time shifting, yet any DRM architecture which would allow me to do that would also be so restrictive in terms of things completely unrelated to music that I would never willingly use it. We've already seen this with Windows, by the way -- pop in a Sony CD, the autorun installs a custom CD driver (or layer, or somesuch) which, if you attempt to tamper with it (or remove it), it kills your CD drive, and if you don't, you can't copy that CD, or even play it with normal software.
Now, I will say that I'm willing to make compromises, sometimes. For instance, most media (movies, music) may be played by all kinds of software, including open source -- it's not as if they ship a player with the media. However, most games must come with their own software, and so already are requiring the main thing I don't like about DRM -- being forced to use their software instead of having a choice. But, since I'm already being forced to use the Source engine to play Half-Life 2, and since that is as it should be, I'm willing to compromise here -- I don't mind that it requires Steam, and in fact, it's nice that Steam lets me do just about everything that's not infringing.
But, with music and movies, such restrictions are unnecessary, usually much worse than Steam, and even if they weren't, it's not worth it to me -- I can still rent DVDs and listen to my local radio station. And I should mention, this station runs entirely on open source (Ubuntu and FreeBSD), and stores just about all their music in Ogg Vorbis ripped from CDs, and the studios don't seem to have a problem with it.
Let me put it this way: It's like a real woman. Just because you can whip out a microscope and examine every inch of her body (every pimple, every blemish, every hair), doesn't mean you do. She's there, she's naked, presumably she wants to fuck you, so why are you counting the hairs in her landing strip?
Same thing with HD. Yes, if you pause it and zoom in, it may look much worse. But you've got a giant HDTV and some nice surround sound; again, why count the hairs in her landing strip when you can just sit back and enjoy the show?
Subject says it all... When developing for, say, the OLPC, or handheld computers (or PDAs, or smartphones, hell, even the iPhone), you either actually run everything on the device before shipping it to consumers, or (more likely) you emulate the embedded device on your desktop, so you can dig into the guts of it with a debugger, and then you test it on the device anyway.
Why is it that the iPod, hell, even my Java phone is more reliable than these aerospace things?
We could have all kinds of discussions about whether you can "securely" run a game under a limited account. I know I do on my Linux, but I also know it's talking pretty much directly to an nVidia driver, which comes in the form of a kernel module. I think it could be done securely, I realize it's kind of half-assed now, but that's not actually what TFA is talking about.
TFA is really just bitching about a guy whose business involves free demos, and it's no longer easy to download and run untrusted binaries. So he's bitching that people can't just fire up IE, click on an EXE off his website, and be in the game in a matter of seconds.
So he needs to learn some basic, basic principles of package management. Even if it ends up just being a wrapper around IE or Firefox, like Steam, at least that way the security prompt will only appear once, because there will only be the same risk once -- because if he does it right, he'll be actually verifying some sort of signature. In fact, he doesn't even have to do this himself; he can license it from Steam.
And yes, it will cost him money, but damnit, if he'd designed a secure system in the first place, Vista wouldn't be biting him in the ass now.
I haven't found that to be the case, much of the time. It certainly doesn't get the benefit of auto updates through the package manager, not the benefits of portability.
I actually have a plan for that... It's part of this grand scheme that I've set a date of sometime in March to start working on.
Being able to uninstall by dragging to the trash
Unfortunately, this doesn't entirely work... I may have given you my list, but basically, some things install menu entries, some install kernel extensions, some tweak your system in other, subtler ways -- and none of them have any kind of an uninstaller. Drag the app to the trash, and maybe the menu goes away, maybe it doesn't, either way you get ugly errors until you finally figure out which config file to edit to remove the menu.
That right there makes you an edge case. Most users use only a handful of open source programs if any at all.
True... And aside from the update strangeness, I'd say they don't know what they're missing. Among other things, MacIrssi has got to be the slickest IRC client I've ever used.
Then again, there is that update strangeness. If I were to stick entirely to Apple software, at least I'd know where all my updates are coming from.
Once you get used to the different architecture, the CLI's are very similar in the level of functionality. It is just different.
Indeed... Close, but oh so slightly off. I miss the GNU behavior. I miss being able to type "ls foo -lh", because I only remembered I wanted to see the filesize after I typed the filename. Just little things like that -- but no package manager means no good way to replace the official Apple-blessed software with some of my own.
Fink is one attempt -- but Fink can be old and out of date, and the rest of the OS knows nothing about Fink packages; it's not integrated at all. Compare that to things like virtual packages -- something says it wants a web browser, but I can choose which one I have installed. (Bad example, OS X handles web browsers well enough, but you get the idea.)
I haven't heard any complaints about kernel hacking on OS X being harder
I'd have to ask some questions about that -- like, how much would it take to write a filesystem for OS X, or port one from Linux? (I like Reiser4.)
But more relevantly, the open-ness of the kernel doesn't seem to be something we can rely on, last I checked. So, I never know when Apple may decide to close off what I was hacking on.
I remember when I had time to do that stuff. Now it is more efficient for me to buy a faster machine then sped time trying to get the most from a slow one.
True enough, to a point. Today, I went to a seminar in St. Louis, and my Powerbook backlight broke on Friday. The Apple Store in St. Louis wouldn't honor my AppleCare extended warranty, because I didn't register it -- and I don't think it was obvious that I had to, so I may not even still have the box.
So, griping aside, I didn't have any of the notes I'd been maintaining on my laptop... except that I've borrowed an HP Jornada 720 from work. I was able to get a working Debian (commandline only) on it over the weekend, and because of my habit of taking notes in vim (instead of, say, OpenOffice), I was able to copy all my notes over and work with them on a machine with around 32 megs of RAM, a 512 meg CompactFlash "hard disk", and around a 200 mhz ARM processor.
But I thought I made it a bit clearer than that -- part of it is about the computer efficiency, and to some extent, I don't care anymore. AbiWord has been known to crash for me, so now I use OpenOffice when someone's rude enough to send me a Word doc. I don't care if it uses a half gig of RAM, I've got 2 gigs, and it loads in about 5 seconds.
But part of it is about my own efficiency, hence the comment about a commandline mplayer
RAM is always an issue, but I think you're overstating the case here. Larger downloads do not necessarily mean larger RAM fingerprints. Much of the download size is because it is a FAT binary with 32 and 64 bit PPC and Intel versions of the binary.
In this case, it's not a huge deal, but it is a trend -- and it's not because of the fat binary. The universal binary is a bit over 22 megs, the Intel and PowerPC binaries are each a bit over 13 megs -- which is still more than five times that Ubuntu download I mentioned. So, yes, in a situation like this, it is wasting RAM when two apps are using two copies of the same library. Oh, true, they might be slightly different versions -- not because the apps care, but because one of the maintainers is behind a minor version or so.
Umm, what broken apps would those be?
Tell me first why something installed in the menubar should instantly go away when I remove the app, with no errors at all.
Oh you mean OS X style packages that don't come in the style of package we were talking about?
True enough.
So your problems with them are an argument against not using them?
Sorry, no. My problems with these demonstrate the need for a good package manager.
As far as I can tell, the only way for a.app-style application to register menubars and kernel extensions is to reach outside itself and touch other parts of the system. However, there's no hook for the app when it's dragged to the trash (again, as far as I can tell), so it can't uninstall them.
.mpkg just happens to be easier for most than having the.app automatically detect that there isn't a kernel extension there, and then to install said kernel extension. However, at least one of these menubars comes from a.app, I believe.
And yes, these are things that need a kernel extension. Insomnia is one. Another is a driver to give userland access to the sudden motion sensor.
Heh. If being years behind means I never have any problems while being years ahead means I regularly have to run untrusted binaries, which sometimes don't work, and which are horribly inconvenient, I'll stick with years behind.
You don't; I do. And your complaints are either unjustified, uneducated, or both: All.app means is you now regularly have to run untrusted binaries, you just run them from/Applications instead of from your desktop. Sometimes they don't work, and I personally find disk images at least as horribly inconvenient as you find EXEs.
My mother can't go to add/remove programs and hunt through a list. It is just too complex. She does know how to drag files to the trash.
In other words, she knows how to go to/Applications and hunt through a list. So obviously it's not too complex, you just have to have a better interface to the package manager.
Really, what's stopping "drag App to trash" from running a real package manager -- say, a dpkg backend?
The information necessary to run on a variety of systems would include binaries for all those systems.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Keep in mind, the majority of commercial Linux software would seem to be x86 only. I think it might be acceptable, under most circumstances, to only include one binary.
At that point, why not use OpenStep style packages?
Fat binaries still don't require everything (including libs, graphics, everything) to be bundled up in one "file". But more importantly, at least for open source software (the kind you expect to be around for awhile), you're pretty much always going to have a download mirror, so if you do want to create a fat-binary-like package on your iPod, you could have it download the binaries for other systems.
One example given was start-stop-daemon, which is just a useful little tool for init scripts. Would be absolutely mindlessly easy to replicate, but would still be annoying as hell if there were licensing issues -- practically every Gentoo init script (even on Linux) uses it.
IM'ing the name of a package is no good if it is commercial software, as hardly any is in repositories.
That much is true. However, commercial software does tend to package itself in such a way as to be usable anyway. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by the Doom 3 and Quake 4 installers...
I think OS X should integrate a package manager to allow for a single channel for updates for all software, and to handle application uninstalling where you want to delete all traces including your preference files (although this is a rare need and not hard now).
I think so, too, but for most of my software, I would still much rather said package manager break things into smaller pieces -- the shared libraries bit. There is no reason why my VLC needs to be a 20 meg download, half of which is useless on my Powerbook, as opposed to a 2 meg download on Ubuntu. It might be nice to have the package manager be able to repackage things for easy transport, and include the dependencies there, but on a live system, I don't need that cruft.
A whole lot of the functionality (like this) requires you to have in depth knowledge of the system, unlike plugging in a cable and clicking the upgrade from another computer option.
I haven't thought too hard about this, but at first glance, it looks like clicking the "upgrade" button may be too simplistic -- that there may be stuff going on behind the scenes that the user should be aware of, and that perhaps it should be handled by a professional.
That does sound like a cop-out, though, so maybe you're right.
Now, as for "my mom could do that", she certainly could do at least the part about copying a list of packages. She might have trouble copying config files over, but ideally, she won't have touched them much anyway, so she won't have to. And she can drag her home directory to an iPod, so that's not a big deal.
As for uninstalling, I think it is more important for this to be easy for novices (drag to trash) than for it to provide advanced options.
A significant amount of the software on my Mac cannot be uninstalled by dragging to trash. For instance: VPN software (menu + kernel extensions), Insomnia (kernel extension), a virtual desktop implementation, and a few other things.
Regarding encryption: I don't use it, but I imagine it works fine -- there's at least a couple of solutions which use FUSE, which makes them just simple enough to seem bulletproof to me.
Regarding PDFs, I see your point, but you just reminded me of something: Most apps do have a "print to file" option. It creates a PS file, not a PDF, but I imagine that's only a short step away. So, not there yet, but close, probably a script away.
Going to a conference and having all the mac users show up as local chat options is amazingly useful.
Fair enough. The Windows equivalent was (is?) just annoying -- net send. Haven't been to conferences, though.
Plugging a printer into the network and having it show up instantly as printable on every mac on my LAN was pretty nice too.
It's nice, but it's also not a big deal -- printers are easy to set up, and I can print over a VPN. Not that that's useful, it's just kind of cool.
But more relevantly, it's yet another issue that doesn't touch me: I don't print, ever.
Going to the coffee shop with some fiction writers and having all their machines show up for collaborative editing with no configuration was amazing.
That's starting to get scary. What kind of security is there?
Just out of curiosity, what features of Linux are missing from OS X and you can't live without?
A big one is centralized updates. Most of the software I run on my Mac is open source, and Mac support can be very strange. I have a list of maybe 20-30 apps I'd have to check -- so
so when I upgrade my laptop from 32 bit PPC to 64 bit Intel, VLC is copied over from the old machine and still works without me having to open any package manager.
When I upgraded my desktop from x86 to amd64 Linux, I had to install a new OS anyway -- and I'm assuming you would, too. I copied a few config files over from the other machine, one being a list of packages, and told my package manager to run.
Did I have to open a package manager? Yes. Was it a big deal? No. And, like you said, our internet connections are fast enough, so we may as well just have it download them.
Oh, and I thought I'd mention: I suppose you have unlimited RAM, also? VLC is a small-ish example, but just keep in mind, every library that you're not sharing for this odd kind of convenience is not just costing you disk and bandwidth, it's costing you RAM and execution speed.
OS X package management removes the need for either.
What, you never uninstall programs?
Oh, wait, you must be deluded into thinking it's just a matter of dragging the app to the trash. Sorry, but that doesn't even come close to covering it for every app. I have apps that install things into the menubar, which won't go away just by throwing away the app. I have apps that install kernel extensions... Basically, anything that comes in a.mpkg file is exactly the kind of thing which should have an uninstaller, but never does.
This puts OS X years behind Windows, by the way.
As for dependencies, I'll refer you back to VLC. Nobody, but nobody, is on such a fast connection that they don't notice the difference between 2 megs and 20 megs. 2 megs is "I want my VLC... Oh cool, it's here." 20 megs is go get some coffee. So, while you may prefer to waste everybody's resources so you can spend a half-second less time thinking, I'll stick with real package management.
So here's my question for you: why isn't a good package manager that manages Apple's OpenStep style packages better than either individually?
For the reasons I've stated above. Basically, if you have a good package manager, there isn't much of a reason for the OpenStep style package.
I mean, everyone loves to talk about how they could put an app on their iPod, get it tattooed on their ass, whatever, and bring it back five years later to run on OSX/Cell and it'd work. Fine. Great. But no one actually needs it.
Here's what I'd do -- have the package manager be able to repackage things. So, you could create an "Applications" (or whatever) folder on your iPod, specify the base system required for it (say, Ubuntu Edgy), and give it a list of packages. Even optionally have it store preferences in that Applications folder, instead of locally. That way, you still get the shared libraries among the packages you specify, but it's runnable in-place from the iPod, and it also contains all the necessary information (including signatures) to install from that to any live desktop system.
That, plus the ability to manage a list of user-installed packages (which must then be re-installed on a new machine), would be some really nice additions. Not entirely necessary right now, but nice... I'm actually thinking I'll roll my own package manager, I've got a few other ideas that just don't fit well with dpkg.
That much is true. I admit I don't usually run into things not in the repository.
I do have a plan for solving this, a kind of best-of-both-worlds -- a sort of community-maintained repository, bit like CPAN, so it's no longer the distro that's responsible for maintaining every single package. Someone actually gave me parts of this idea, can't remember who...
Not going to start writing it till at least March, though. Still, my email's displayed if people are interested, I can set up a mailing list... If people are interested, Slashdot kind of isn't the place.
Perhaps you could tell me why a 20 meg downlad of VLC for the Mac -- 10 megs of which I'll never use -- is better than a 2 meg download on Ubuntu. Or why going to a website, finding a download link, then mounting the downloaded image, dragging the file to Applications, ejecting, and throwing away the image is easier than "apt-get install vlc" or Synaptic.
Linux package management actually handles dependencies -- and has an actual uninstaller. It may leave settings around, but that's it -- whereas some OS X programs, you can drag the app to the trash as much as you want, it'll still be trying to load a menu or some kernel extension, and you have no idea where that is. You can buy software to handle it, but that just strikes me as evil -- install all the software you like, then pay to uninstall?
So tell me again what you don't like about the Linux package managers. Tell me why a self-contained folder is so much simpler and easier to use than a list of software to install and a button that says "go".
Just a couple of these, you're right about -- there are easy hacks to be able to deal with them:
Application packages: Unfortunately not as easy or thorough as you'd like. Don't handle shared libraries. However, I can IM someone the name of a package, and they can install it on their own package manager -- which is more secure, handles real dependencies, and provides an uninstall which can be more than simply deleting files.
Upgrade -- I'm not sure why this was so difficult for you; it took me maybe an hour. I did not use FireWire, I put the old hard drive in the new box temporarily, but I could've easily done it over FireWire, or Ethernet, or whatever. Copy over/home and/etc, and since it was Gentoo, I can copy over/var/lib/portage/world. Then perform a fresh Gentoo install. Needs a little manual babysitting, but by the time it's done -- again, less than an hour -- I've got everything I had before, only it can be on a new arch. Case in point, I recently migrated from an x86 box on a single hard drive to an amd64 box on a RAID in this way.
Expose, you're right, isn't there. I don't miss it much -- I've got workspaces, which also gives me a nice keyboard shortcut to switch between them. I rarely, if ever, have any window underneath another one.
Not sure what "getting in your way" means, but I can do encryption too, either on an individual account or for the entire machine.
The rest of it, I don't know of any kind of drop-in replacement, so thanks for sharing that list with me. Not many of these are things I care about -- for instance, OpenOffice can save to PDF, and that's enough, if I ever wanted PDF in the first place. Likewise, zero-conf doesn't bother me much, as actual configuration takes me no time at all. So, for me, it's a no-brainer -- Linux has features I can't live without, and OS X just doesn't have any that I'd miss -- but now I can at least see where others are in the opposite situation.
The other poster is right. And if you had Macs from around the same era -- believe me, OS 10.2 is a pain, too. And I'm sure if your corporate install was OS 9, you'd have nothing good to say about Macs.
If you want a Linux that just works, get the latest Ubuntu (edgy) or a reasonably up-to-date Debian ("testing" or "unstable").
And my Linux does work out-of-the-box, with almost everything I want. Yes, I do have to install things like Beagle to get the functionality I miss from OS X. However, on OS X, I had to install a separate app to get virtual desktops/workspaces. Yes, Apple will support that in the next version, but that's just one thing. There really is no good package manager for the Mac.
And by the way, I'd argue against including Beagle in the default install. Maybe make it an option in the install, or have a nice list of things that people might want to install -- but remember, on Tiger, you don't get a choice -- Spotlight is installed, and you get to burn a few extra CPU cycles everytime you change a file to make sure it's indexed. On Linux, I can choose not to install Beagle -- and many would argue that the default Ubuntu install is too bloated as it is.
Now, you do sort of have a point -- it would be nice if every Linux distro, even the ones that are five years old, was enough better than OS X to convince you. But you, being someone who reads up on computers, should realize that this is impossible, and that we are doing about the best we can. You have to meet us halfway.
Oh, and speaking of VLC: On the Mac, it's a Universal Binary that's about a 20 meg download. On Ubuntu, it's about a 1-2 meg download, plus dependencies -- and those dependencies can be shared with other players, like mplayer, xine, or totem. The Mac will never get better at this, as far as I can see, because their philosophy is to bundle everything needed for an application into one ".app" folder -- it's like they're allergic to third-party shared libraries -- meaning it not only wastes download space, it wastes disk space and RAM.
So, just to remind you: I can tweak Linux to do just about everything I'd miss from a Mac. I cannot tweak a Mac to do anywhere close to everything I'd miss from Linux. At the end of the day, out of the box doesn't matter nearly as much to me as the end result.
And if that's not enough, although it hasn't been written yet, it seems possible -- even easy -- to write an IMAP server with Spotlight-like responsiveness. Since IMAP allows you to search on the server, this means you'd have that lightning-fast search from anywhere, not just your Beagle-enabled Linux or Spotlight-enabled Mac.
Why does my USB key does not load in Debian while it works flawlessly on OS X (or even XP) (it's probably related to our corporate Debian installation, but it just shows Linux has rough corners).
Bullshit, you do not get to say "Linux has rough corners" on that basis. You get to say "our corporate Debian installation has rough corners".
My USB key -- in fact, damn-near any USB device -- loads flawlessly in Gentoo, but not automatically -- I have to mount it. However, plug it into a fresh Ubuntu, and it's mounted on your desktop in about the same amount of time it'd take to do in OS X. Added bonus is, it'll work for filesystems Linux supports, but OS X doesn't.
Where's the default Expose-like windows switching?
Why does it have to be default?
I mean, I like OS X's defaults, but even there, I have to tweak some things. I am not going to hit fn+f9 to use Expose (f9 is mapped to keyboard brightness on my Powerbook), so I mapped it to something else. Unfortunately, OS X forgets this keyboard mapping on every reboot.
Personally, I never used Expose much, once I got used to virtual desktops (or workspaces, or Spaces, take your pick) -- and while I did eventually find a replacement on OS X, it has plenty of glitches.
So, something like this may exist -- if it does, it's probably part of Beryl -- but I don't know about it, and I don't care much right now.
But it's not true that Linux has the perfect mix of features for all users.
Perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now.
But Linux is still missing a whole lot of features that lay the groundwork for what makes OS X my main desktop.
Care to enumerate them? Other than eye candy, the only thing I miss from OS X is the windows being grouped into an "application" -- something people tell me works on Linux under GNOME and KDE, but I've been too lazy to let go of my Fluxbox.
"Working" is relevant -- Windows 98 "works". There are just inconveniences, like having to reboot once a day, and having random crashes. Using Excel as a database "works", it'd just be pathetically slow and unmanagable if you ever had to scale your database up from "my personal spending" to "entire company's finances".
Another example: My bank does not post transactions until the next business day. That means I can walk in, deposit a check, watch them type it into their terminal, but it somehow takes a day to get onto the Web. Yes, it "works". It's also nowhere near what it could be.
Notice also, I said "and don't have to change much". If you have to actually maintain and add new features, the cost of writing the new functionality in COBOL may well be more than the cost of rewriting the whole thing -- yes, even in Java. And consider: Adding new features to a COBOL program seems much more likely to cause bugs than adding the same features to a Java program.
In fact, I have a real-life example of this, although I can't confirm it -- it's all speculation based on observation. An old 2D MMO I play, that's been around since probably '95 or '97, seems to have survived without an actual rewrite since some kid wrote it in Objective C as a college project. I say "seems to", because generally, it's rock solid, no problems at all, until they decide to change something. Those changes introduce really, really strange bugs -- they'll add a new graphic, and suddenly they have DirectDraw errors. Or they'll fix a bug in the way some armor appears, and suddenly the boards (in-game forums) don't work. Or they'll appear to do nothing at all, but suddenly the servers will start crashing.
So yes, if they left it completely alone, it would continue to work until some new version of Windows broke it. But, I suspect that rewriting it in a decent language, with some new techniques, and keeping aware of all of the lessons they've learned over the years about how not to do it, would make it much more livable.
Now, this is a small MMO, and my guess is that they simply don't have the spare resources to do it, even if it might mean more profit in the long run. However, a bank has been maintaining the cobol for 40 years, so they have many times more legacy issues -- and, being a bank, they probably actually have resources to spend on it, and the foresight to realize that they have to maintain this stuff for another 40 years, so if the COBOL is ugly and unmaintainable now, and if COBOL programmers are a rare and expensive breed now, it will be unimaginably worse down the road.
And your statement "there will be plenty of bugs" is pretty dumb, too. You obviously don't know, but there are a few software development shops that deliver code which simply doesn't have bugs, because they do things like mathematical proofs and obsessive unit tests. And before you make the obvious comment, it actually takes them about as much time and resources to develop and deploy a bug-free program as it takes other shops to develop, debug, and deploy a still-slightly-buggy version. Now, true, they do charge twice as much -- but it's worth it, when you consider the amount of money that could be lost by a bug that wasn't caught in the debug cycle of most shops.
Yes, I know how to check for it, and I know what jumbo frames are. I just doubt I'd set it unless I was doing gigabit.
And yet again, why don't routers and switches have a bit more survivability here? What you're saying means I can, in fact, ping-of-death most network hardware. Means I can take this HP Jornada 720, put Linux on it, stick the wireless card in, and drive around killing everyone's Linksys router in the area.
Why is this possible? Is it actually that much cheaper to make this kind of crap?
Slashdot Mirror
I remember talking to someone who actually does some swordfighting, and felt that the lightsaber battle in Episode 3 was much better than the one in Episode 1.
I disagree.
Episode 3's fight was long, drawn out, and frankly, boring. It really looks like two kids trying to hit each other with sticks.
Episode 1's fights were all interesting, things actually happened, and you did see personalities come out, both in the actual fights, and in moments like this.
I think it was ABC News, but I really don't know. I do know there was an interview in which he was asked if he'd ever play Han Solo again, and he said he didn't think so, he'd outgrown him, or something. When asked if he'd play Indiana Jones again, he said "In a New York Minute."
Let me add that I, personally, prefer mplayer to watch movies, and usually mplayer or audacious to listen to music.
Others prefer VLC. Still others actually prefer Windows Media Player or iTunes (yuck!)... I prefer mplayer.
Now, mplayer is fundamentally incompatible with DRM, because the only way this would work is if every single configuration I want to play with is covered by your trusted computing hardware. And you can't possibly do that, because what if I want to do some kernel hacking? What if I have custom mplayer plugins?
I reject the DMCA, and I play DVDs on Linux as a matter of civil disobedience. And it's important to keep in mind that if you accept the DMCA, you are saying that anything not covered by the DRM scheme is automatically illegal, because it is illegal to circumvent the DRM scheme.
But, if you ignore the DMCA, it is wholly legal for me to play my media on whatever hardware or software I want. And for me, and others like me, it's not merely an issue of having the particular combination I like now be able to play it, with the feature set I like now. It's a matter of being able to change my mind later, or even hack it or patch it myself -- or pay someone else to do so.
Let me provide a simple example: I rent a movie. I bring it home, and pop it into my Powerbook, and rip it from there, because for some reason, my Powerbook seems to be good at ripping movies. I then copy it over a network to my Linux desktop. I return the movie. Then, sometime tomorrow, I watch the movie, then delete it.
I consider this to be a perfectly legitimate form of time shifting, yet any DRM architecture which would allow me to do that would also be so restrictive in terms of things completely unrelated to music that I would never willingly use it. We've already seen this with Windows, by the way -- pop in a Sony CD, the autorun installs a custom CD driver (or layer, or somesuch) which, if you attempt to tamper with it (or remove it), it kills your CD drive, and if you don't, you can't copy that CD, or even play it with normal software.
Now, I will say that I'm willing to make compromises, sometimes. For instance, most media (movies, music) may be played by all kinds of software, including open source -- it's not as if they ship a player with the media. However, most games must come with their own software, and so already are requiring the main thing I don't like about DRM -- being forced to use their software instead of having a choice. But, since I'm already being forced to use the Source engine to play Half-Life 2, and since that is as it should be, I'm willing to compromise here -- I don't mind that it requires Steam, and in fact, it's nice that Steam lets me do just about everything that's not infringing.
But, with music and movies, such restrictions are unnecessary, usually much worse than Steam, and even if they weren't, it's not worth it to me -- I can still rent DVDs and listen to my local radio station. And I should mention, this station runs entirely on open source (Ubuntu and FreeBSD), and stores just about all their music in Ogg Vorbis ripped from CDs, and the studios don't seem to have a problem with it.
Yes, it's a rumor, but "troll"? Did someone give moderation points to a Sony employee or something?
You know, that was the point I was trying to make:
Has all this talk of pr0n got you too distracted to read properly?
If my social life is that bad, chances are there's no one else in the room anyway.
As to why she's there, I'm as confused as you are, but I'm not complaining!
Let me put it this way: It's like a real woman. Just because you can whip out a microscope and examine every inch of her body (every pimple, every blemish, every hair), doesn't mean you do. She's there, she's naked, presumably she wants to fuck you, so why are you counting the hairs in her landing strip?
Same thing with HD. Yes, if you pause it and zoom in, it may look much worse. But you've got a giant HDTV and some nice surround sound; again, why count the hairs in her landing strip when you can just sit back and enjoy the show?
Ok, so this is MythTV + SNMP + AFS/CODA. Which, frankly, I think the AFS/CODA would be a mistake vs traditional Samba/NFS.
Really, is there anything new and compelling, other than that nice interface? (And I'm told MythTV has a nice interface, too...)
Subject says it all... When developing for, say, the OLPC, or handheld computers (or PDAs, or smartphones, hell, even the iPhone), you either actually run everything on the device before shipping it to consumers, or (more likely) you emulate the embedded device on your desktop, so you can dig into the guts of it with a debugger, and then you test it on the device anyway.
Why is it that the iPod, hell, even my Java phone is more reliable than these aerospace things?
Anyone want to tell me why Linux isn't already up to the task?
And I imagine "ease of use" is one, but are there any other reasons, assuming I refuse to use DRM which hasn't been thoroughly cracked (DVDs)?
I heard somewhere else on Slashdot that people are actually trading PS3s for Wiis. I'm too lazy to confirm this, though.
We could have all kinds of discussions about whether you can "securely" run a game under a limited account. I know I do on my Linux, but I also know it's talking pretty much directly to an nVidia driver, which comes in the form of a kernel module. I think it could be done securely, I realize it's kind of half-assed now, but that's not actually what TFA is talking about.
TFA is really just bitching about a guy whose business involves free demos, and it's no longer easy to download and run untrusted binaries. So he's bitching that people can't just fire up IE, click on an EXE off his website, and be in the game in a matter of seconds.
So he needs to learn some basic, basic principles of package management. Even if it ends up just being a wrapper around IE or Firefox, like Steam, at least that way the security prompt will only appear once, because there will only be the same risk once -- because if he does it right, he'll be actually verifying some sort of signature. In fact, he doesn't even have to do this himself; he can license it from Steam.
And yes, it will cost him money, but damnit, if he'd designed a secure system in the first place, Vista wouldn't be biting him in the ass now.
I actually have a plan for that... It's part of this grand scheme that I've set a date of sometime in March to start working on.
Unfortunately, this doesn't entirely work... I may have given you my list, but basically, some things install menu entries, some install kernel extensions, some tweak your system in other, subtler ways -- and none of them have any kind of an uninstaller. Drag the app to the trash, and maybe the menu goes away, maybe it doesn't, either way you get ugly errors until you finally figure out which config file to edit to remove the menu.
True... And aside from the update strangeness, I'd say they don't know what they're missing. Among other things, MacIrssi has got to be the slickest IRC client I've ever used.
Then again, there is that update strangeness. If I were to stick entirely to Apple software, at least I'd know where all my updates are coming from.
Indeed... Close, but oh so slightly off. I miss the GNU behavior. I miss being able to type "ls foo -lh", because I only remembered I wanted to see the filesize after I typed the filename. Just little things like that -- but no package manager means no good way to replace the official Apple-blessed software with some of my own.
Fink is one attempt -- but Fink can be old and out of date, and the rest of the OS knows nothing about Fink packages; it's not integrated at all. Compare that to things like virtual packages -- something says it wants a web browser, but I can choose which one I have installed. (Bad example, OS X handles web browsers well enough, but you get the idea.)
I'd have to ask some questions about that -- like, how much would it take to write a filesystem for OS X, or port one from Linux? (I like Reiser4.)
But more relevantly, the open-ness of the kernel doesn't seem to be something we can rely on, last I checked. So, I never know when Apple may decide to close off what I was hacking on.
True enough, to a point. Today, I went to a seminar in St. Louis, and my Powerbook backlight broke on Friday. The Apple Store in St. Louis wouldn't honor my AppleCare extended warranty, because I didn't register it -- and I don't think it was obvious that I had to, so I may not even still have the box.
So, griping aside, I didn't have any of the notes I'd been maintaining on my laptop... except that I've borrowed an HP Jornada 720 from work. I was able to get a working Debian (commandline only) on it over the weekend, and because of my habit of taking notes in vim (instead of, say, OpenOffice), I was able to copy all my notes over and work with them on a machine with around 32 megs of RAM, a 512 meg CompactFlash "hard disk", and around a 200 mhz ARM processor.
But I thought I made it a bit clearer than that -- part of it is about the computer efficiency, and to some extent, I don't care anymore. AbiWord has been known to crash for me, so now I use OpenOffice when someone's rude enough to send me a Word doc. I don't care if it uses a half gig of RAM, I've got 2 gigs, and it loads in about 5 seconds.
But part of it is about my own efficiency, hence the comment about a commandline mplayer
In this case, it's not a huge deal, but it is a trend -- and it's not because of the fat binary. The universal binary is a bit over 22 megs, the Intel and PowerPC binaries are each a bit over 13 megs -- which is still more than five times that Ubuntu download I mentioned. So, yes, in a situation like this, it is wasting RAM when two apps are using two copies of the same library. Oh, true, they might be slightly different versions -- not because the apps care, but because one of the maintainers is behind a minor version or so.
Tell me first why something installed in the menubar should instantly go away when I remove the app, with no errors at all.
True enough.
Sorry, no. My problems with these demonstrate the need for a good package manager.
As far as I can tell, the only way for a .app-style application to register menubars and kernel extensions is to reach outside itself and touch other parts of the system. However, there's no hook for the app when it's dragged to the trash (again, as far as I can tell), so it can't uninstall them.
.mpkg just happens to be easier for most than having the .app automatically detect that there isn't a kernel extension there, and then to install said kernel extension. However, at least one of these menubars comes from a .app, I believe.
And yes, these are things that need a kernel extension. Insomnia is one. Another is a driver to give userland access to the sudden motion sensor.
You don't; I do. And your complaints are either unjustified, uneducated, or both: All .app means is you now regularly have to run untrusted binaries, you just run them from /Applications instead of from your desktop. Sometimes they don't work, and I personally find disk images at least as horribly inconvenient as you find EXEs.
In other words, she knows how to go to /Applications and hunt through a list. So obviously it's not too complex, you just have to have a better interface to the package manager.
Really, what's stopping "drag App to trash" from running a real package manager -- say, a dpkg backend?
Perhaps, perhaps not. Keep in mind, the majority of commercial Linux software would seem to be x86 only. I think it might be acceptable, under most circumstances, to only include one binary.
Fat binaries still don't require everything (including libs, graphics, everything) to be bundled up in one "file". But more importantly, at least for open source software (the kind you expect to be around for awhile), you're pretty much always going to have a download mirror, so if you do want to create a fat-binary-like package on your iPod, you could have it download the binaries for other systems.
Ho
One example given was start-stop-daemon, which is just a useful little tool for init scripts. Would be absolutely mindlessly easy to replicate, but would still be annoying as hell if there were licensing issues -- practically every Gentoo init script (even on Linux) uses it.
That much is true. However, commercial software does tend to package itself in such a way as to be usable anyway. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by the Doom 3 and Quake 4 installers...
I think so, too, but for most of my software, I would still much rather said package manager break things into smaller pieces -- the shared libraries bit. There is no reason why my VLC needs to be a 20 meg download, half of which is useless on my Powerbook, as opposed to a 2 meg download on Ubuntu. It might be nice to have the package manager be able to repackage things for easy transport, and include the dependencies there, but on a live system, I don't need that cruft.
I haven't thought too hard about this, but at first glance, it looks like clicking the "upgrade" button may be too simplistic -- that there may be stuff going on behind the scenes that the user should be aware of, and that perhaps it should be handled by a professional.
That does sound like a cop-out, though, so maybe you're right.
Now, as for "my mom could do that", she certainly could do at least the part about copying a list of packages. She might have trouble copying config files over, but ideally, she won't have touched them much anyway, so she won't have to. And she can drag her home directory to an iPod, so that's not a big deal.
A significant amount of the software on my Mac cannot be uninstalled by dragging to trash. For instance: VPN software (menu + kernel extensions), Insomnia (kernel extension), a virtual desktop implementation, and a few other things.
Regarding encryption: I don't use it, but I imagine it works fine -- there's at least a couple of solutions which use FUSE, which makes them just simple enough to seem bulletproof to me.
Regarding PDFs, I see your point, but you just reminded me of something: Most apps do have a "print to file" option. It creates a PS file, not a PDF, but I imagine that's only a short step away. So, not there yet, but close, probably a script away.
Fair enough. The Windows equivalent was (is?) just annoying -- net send. Haven't been to conferences, though.
It's nice, but it's also not a big deal -- printers are easy to set up, and I can print over a VPN. Not that that's useful, it's just kind of cool.
But more relevantly, it's yet another issue that doesn't touch me: I don't print, ever.
That's starting to get scary. What kind of security is there?
A big one is centralized updates. Most of the software I run on my Mac is open source, and Mac support can be very strange. I have a list of maybe 20-30 apps I'd have to check -- so
When I upgraded my desktop from x86 to amd64 Linux, I had to install a new OS anyway -- and I'm assuming you would, too. I copied a few config files over from the other machine, one being a list of packages, and told my package manager to run.
Did I have to open a package manager? Yes. Was it a big deal? No. And, like you said, our internet connections are fast enough, so we may as well just have it download them.
Oh, and I thought I'd mention: I suppose you have unlimited RAM, also? VLC is a small-ish example, but just keep in mind, every library that you're not sharing for this odd kind of convenience is not just costing you disk and bandwidth, it's costing you RAM and execution speed.
What, you never uninstall programs?
Oh, wait, you must be deluded into thinking it's just a matter of dragging the app to the trash. Sorry, but that doesn't even come close to covering it for every app. I have apps that install things into the menubar, which won't go away just by throwing away the app. I have apps that install kernel extensions... Basically, anything that comes in a .mpkg file is exactly the kind of thing which should have an uninstaller, but never does.
This puts OS X years behind Windows, by the way.
As for dependencies, I'll refer you back to VLC. Nobody, but nobody, is on such a fast connection that they don't notice the difference between 2 megs and 20 megs. 2 megs is "I want my VLC... Oh cool, it's here." 20 megs is go get some coffee. So, while you may prefer to waste everybody's resources so you can spend a half-second less time thinking, I'll stick with real package management.
For the reasons I've stated above. Basically, if you have a good package manager, there isn't much of a reason for the OpenStep style package.
I mean, everyone loves to talk about how they could put an app on their iPod, get it tattooed on their ass, whatever, and bring it back five years later to run on OSX/Cell and it'd work. Fine. Great. But no one actually needs it.
Here's what I'd do -- have the package manager be able to repackage things. So, you could create an "Applications" (or whatever) folder on your iPod, specify the base system required for it (say, Ubuntu Edgy), and give it a list of packages. Even optionally have it store preferences in that Applications folder, instead of locally. That way, you still get the shared libraries among the packages you specify, but it's runnable in-place from the iPod, and it also contains all the necessary information (including signatures) to install from that to any live desktop system.
That, plus the ability to manage a list of user-installed packages (which must then be re-installed on a new machine), would be some really nice additions. Not entirely necessary right now, but nice... I'm actually thinking I'll roll my own package manager, I've got a few other ideas that just don't fit well with dpkg.
That much is true. I admit I don't usually run into things not in the repository.
I do have a plan for solving this, a kind of best-of-both-worlds -- a sort of community-maintained repository, bit like CPAN, so it's no longer the distro that's responsible for maintaining every single package. Someone actually gave me parts of this idea, can't remember who...
Not going to start writing it till at least March, though. Still, my email's displayed if people are interested, I can set up a mailing list... If people are interested, Slashdot kind of isn't the place.
Perhaps you could tell me why a 20 meg downlad of VLC for the Mac -- 10 megs of which I'll never use -- is better than a 2 meg download on Ubuntu. Or why going to a website, finding a download link, then mounting the downloaded image, dragging the file to Applications, ejecting, and throwing away the image is easier than "apt-get install vlc" or Synaptic.
Linux package management actually handles dependencies -- and has an actual uninstaller. It may leave settings around, but that's it -- whereas some OS X programs, you can drag the app to the trash as much as you want, it'll still be trying to load a menu or some kernel extension, and you have no idea where that is. You can buy software to handle it, but that just strikes me as evil -- install all the software you like, then pay to uninstall?
So tell me again what you don't like about the Linux package managers. Tell me why a self-contained folder is so much simpler and easier to use than a list of software to install and a button that says "go".
Just a couple of these, you're right about -- there are easy hacks to be able to deal with them:
The rest of it, I don't know of any kind of drop-in replacement, so thanks for sharing that list with me. Not many of these are things I care about -- for instance, OpenOffice can save to PDF, and that's enough, if I ever wanted PDF in the first place. Likewise, zero-conf doesn't bother me much, as actual configuration takes me no time at all. So, for me, it's a no-brainer -- Linux has features I can't live without, and OS X just doesn't have any that I'd miss -- but now I can at least see where others are in the opposite situation.
The other poster is right. And if you had Macs from around the same era -- believe me, OS 10.2 is a pain, too. And I'm sure if your corporate install was OS 9, you'd have nothing good to say about Macs.
If you want a Linux that just works, get the latest Ubuntu (edgy) or a reasonably up-to-date Debian ("testing" or "unstable").
And my Linux does work out-of-the-box, with almost everything I want. Yes, I do have to install things like Beagle to get the functionality I miss from OS X. However, on OS X, I had to install a separate app to get virtual desktops/workspaces. Yes, Apple will support that in the next version, but that's just one thing. There really is no good package manager for the Mac.
And by the way, I'd argue against including Beagle in the default install. Maybe make it an option in the install, or have a nice list of things that people might want to install -- but remember, on Tiger, you don't get a choice -- Spotlight is installed, and you get to burn a few extra CPU cycles everytime you change a file to make sure it's indexed. On Linux, I can choose not to install Beagle -- and many would argue that the default Ubuntu install is too bloated as it is.
Now, you do sort of have a point -- it would be nice if every Linux distro, even the ones that are five years old, was enough better than OS X to convince you. But you, being someone who reads up on computers, should realize that this is impossible, and that we are doing about the best we can. You have to meet us halfway.
Oh, and speaking of VLC: On the Mac, it's a Universal Binary that's about a 20 meg download. On Ubuntu, it's about a 1-2 meg download, plus dependencies -- and those dependencies can be shared with other players, like mplayer, xine, or totem. The Mac will never get better at this, as far as I can see, because their philosophy is to bundle everything needed for an application into one ".app" folder -- it's like they're allergic to third-party shared libraries -- meaning it not only wastes download space, it wastes disk space and RAM.
So, just to remind you: I can tweak Linux to do just about everything I'd miss from a Mac. I cannot tweak a Mac to do anywhere close to everything I'd miss from Linux. At the end of the day, out of the box doesn't matter nearly as much to me as the end result.
Beagle.
Beagle can search email, and plenty more.
And if that's not enough, although it hasn't been written yet, it seems possible -- even easy -- to write an IMAP server with Spotlight-like responsiveness. Since IMAP allows you to search on the server, this means you'd have that lightning-fast search from anywhere, not just your Beagle-enabled Linux or Spotlight-enabled Mac.
Bullshit, you do not get to say "Linux has rough corners" on that basis. You get to say "our corporate Debian installation has rough corners".
My USB key -- in fact, damn-near any USB device -- loads flawlessly in Gentoo, but not automatically -- I have to mount it. However, plug it into a fresh Ubuntu, and it's mounted on your desktop in about the same amount of time it'd take to do in OS X. Added bonus is, it'll work for filesystems Linux supports, but OS X doesn't.
Why does it have to be default?
I mean, I like OS X's defaults, but even there, I have to tweak some things. I am not going to hit fn+f9 to use Expose (f9 is mapped to keyboard brightness on my Powerbook), so I mapped it to something else. Unfortunately, OS X forgets this keyboard mapping on every reboot.
Personally, I never used Expose much, once I got used to virtual desktops (or workspaces, or Spaces, take your pick) -- and while I did eventually find a replacement on OS X, it has plenty of glitches.
So, something like this may exist -- if it does, it's probably part of Beryl -- but I don't know about it, and I don't care much right now.
Perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But I do think Linux is the best we've got right now.
Care to enumerate them? Other than eye candy, the only thing I miss from OS X is the windows being grouped into an "application" -- something people tell me works on Linux under GNOME and KDE, but I've been too lazy to let go of my Fluxbox.
"Working" is relevant -- Windows 98 "works". There are just inconveniences, like having to reboot once a day, and having random crashes. Using Excel as a database "works", it'd just be pathetically slow and unmanagable if you ever had to scale your database up from "my personal spending" to "entire company's finances".
Another example: My bank does not post transactions until the next business day. That means I can walk in, deposit a check, watch them type it into their terminal, but it somehow takes a day to get onto the Web. Yes, it "works". It's also nowhere near what it could be.
Notice also, I said "and don't have to change much". If you have to actually maintain and add new features, the cost of writing the new functionality in COBOL may well be more than the cost of rewriting the whole thing -- yes, even in Java. And consider: Adding new features to a COBOL program seems much more likely to cause bugs than adding the same features to a Java program.
In fact, I have a real-life example of this, although I can't confirm it -- it's all speculation based on observation. An old 2D MMO I play, that's been around since probably '95 or '97, seems to have survived without an actual rewrite since some kid wrote it in Objective C as a college project. I say "seems to", because generally, it's rock solid, no problems at all, until they decide to change something. Those changes introduce really, really strange bugs -- they'll add a new graphic, and suddenly they have DirectDraw errors. Or they'll fix a bug in the way some armor appears, and suddenly the boards (in-game forums) don't work. Or they'll appear to do nothing at all, but suddenly the servers will start crashing.
So yes, if they left it completely alone, it would continue to work until some new version of Windows broke it. But, I suspect that rewriting it in a decent language, with some new techniques, and keeping aware of all of the lessons they've learned over the years about how not to do it, would make it much more livable.
Now, this is a small MMO, and my guess is that they simply don't have the spare resources to do it, even if it might mean more profit in the long run. However, a bank has been maintaining the cobol for 40 years, so they have many times more legacy issues -- and, being a bank, they probably actually have resources to spend on it, and the foresight to realize that they have to maintain this stuff for another 40 years, so if the COBOL is ugly and unmaintainable now, and if COBOL programmers are a rare and expensive breed now, it will be unimaginably worse down the road.
And your statement "there will be plenty of bugs" is pretty dumb, too. You obviously don't know, but there are a few software development shops that deliver code which simply doesn't have bugs, because they do things like mathematical proofs and obsessive unit tests. And before you make the obvious comment, it actually takes them about as much time and resources to develop and deploy a bug-free program as it takes other shops to develop, debug, and deploy a still-slightly-buggy version. Now, true, they do charge twice as much -- but it's worth it, when you consider the amount of money that could be lost by a bug that wasn't caught in the debug cycle of most shops.
Yes, I know how to check for it, and I know what jumbo frames are. I just doubt I'd set it unless I was doing gigabit.
And yet again, why don't routers and switches have a bit more survivability here? What you're saying means I can, in fact, ping-of-death most network hardware. Means I can take this HP Jornada 720, put Linux on it, stick the wireless card in, and drive around killing everyone's Linksys router in the area.
Why is this possible? Is it actually that much cheaper to make this kind of crap?