"Last night alone I discovered that somehow Gentoo and udev had removed my/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 link to my cdrom drive so now I couldn't mount a cdrom the same way anymore"
KDE's 'Safely Remove' option is borken; it removes all links to the device, so if you unmount something like a CD, well shit like that happens (meanwhile, ln -sf/dev/hd(letter of your cdrom)/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 would fix the problem).
"Then the copying of files to my PSP via USB failed for some unkown reason."
Unfortunately, both KDE and Gnome report that copying is done without checking the system's cache. You can copy everything over, think your done, and still have a cache to flush when you unplug the thing. Remember: always run sync and unmount before removing any drive. KDE's 'Safely Remove' doesn't do this right.
So, yes, you're right: The hotplugging is somewhat annoyingly screwy. Me, I do something about it - mostly patch and submit changes (not that they often get used), and write filler scripts to handle integrating the basics.
Well, my first attempt to get Firefox working, I missed it for a few seconds before thinking 'Hey, these things might just be akin to something like squashfs'.
Still, it seems a bit backwards for Apple. Make the user open the apps folder, and drag Firefox out of its container and into apps. Seems like more steps than they usually make the user take. I'm very surprised that the default action for a.app folder outside of Applications is not 'copy to Applications and execute'
But yeah. That's just me. I like making my system work more smoothly. (I've even got a 'Grandma Safe' mod for Slax that's coming along nicely).
It took me weeks to get this stuff working on my box. Most often, a quick 'alsaconf' will solve your sound problems, burning is easily handled by k3b, and kplayer, kaffiene, mplayer, gmplayer, etc. will handle movie watching with ease.
What bugs me about this, though, is that there are simple solutions to almost every problem with linux I've seen - yet the solutions don't quite get integrated into the distros.
Close. I don't think we'll ever see an end to the component model for computers.
I do think, however, that we're going to begin to see the end of the GP computer in the home.
More and more, the home computer, to the general consumer, represents just a few tasks: surf the internet, get your e-mail, listen to music, work on documents, and maybe a few other things. (Don't straw-man me here. I'm talking about the general consumer, not us slashdotters)
For a home kiosk, an end-to-end design would be best - and least likely to succumb to the issue of virii and spyware, if designed well. A boon to your usual "I don't play with my computer" type.
You obviously don't understand, and there's a good chance that any explanation I give is going to be tossed away as an 'arbitrary distinction'. I'll let it go, but know that the memory space (ie: kernel/user) and disposition (desktop environment component or independent shared object) of a library versus its size, use and impact is very important from a programmer's and OS-writer's POV.
I'll just put it another way: Apple could do it because they didn't have to deal with a picky community. They could just force whatever version of whateve they felt was best down their users' throats. You can't DO that in the OSS community; you can't just shove TTS capability, for example, into KDE. The Gnome users will bitch and moan and pressure Gnome into doing the same, the KDE users will bitch and moan and say TTS package X is better than this Y crap, and why aren't they using that one.
You can, of course, get away with choosing a specific package at a distribution level - and this already happens (Ubuntu and Kubuntu both have very good internationalized TTS capabilities, implemented at the shared library level) - but that doesn't make it apply to all Linuxes.
Oh, and the Magnifier in Linux is both there, made as part of X.org, and has been around for ages (since '95, at least; it's one of the crappy little programs that you mess with just 'cos it's in/usr/X11R6/bin when you're a firey new linux hacker).
I'm talking at a code level, not at a conceptual level (which is where Apple marketing always works).
Apple's accessibility features, like Microsoft's, are all at the application and common/dynamic/shared library level.
My above post was meant to show that the other places to put a library - OS and GUI/API - are not suitable if you want the library to be universally accessible, especially in an OSS environment where people don't want to be locked in to a given word processor, much less desktop environment.
actually, since OO.o already has both spelling and grammar checking, it's just a short hop to figure out which homograph is the correct one for common words.
But no, MS doesn't automatically figure out how to pronounce things, and I'm prettu sure there's no way to annotate in the way you're referring manually.
First assuming OS level, it would mean building a whole sound server (bad idea; crashes in sound system become fatal) and text-to-speech engine (bad idea; size constraints) into the OS's kernel space.
Assuming API level, we have a different set of issues. For example, say that Qt (kOffice, Konqueror, KDE) includes text-to-speech functionality for all GUI text in its API. What about GTK+ (OO.o, Firefox, the GIMP, Gnome)? Also, how do you ensure that aRts/ESounD is running?
Text to speech is generally a separated API for a reason: it ensures the lib is accessible to every program, even command line. The same is true for a lot of less-than-common libraries.
And I'll bet that by the time ODF is live, rolled out and running, some enterprising diabled human will have written a screen reading routine and added it to OO.o's sources.
Which is the point: first, it's the app, not the format that has the actual problem here. Second, it's an OSS app, so 'See a problem, fix a problem'. This is of course better than what is happining according to the article, which seems like 'See a problem, bitch about the problem in the hopes that someone will fix it for you'.
Misappropriation isn't against contract - anyone who gets the manual from a service provider has no contract with Apple. However, whether it's stolen or given, the service provider has breached whatever non-disclosure contract that was necessary to buy the book from Apple. That is, if such a contract is necessary. If not, there's not a damn thing Apple can do aside from beat its chest and be angry.
I'm... not sure that argument actually makes sense.
The certification exams should assure the quality of their service providers. Selling manuals and parts to others doesn't make them 'serivce providers', and certainly doesn't make them Apple's service providers.
Meanwhile, Apple's economic interest doesn't come into play here - they obtained a copyrighted material and used a small portion of it under fair use. They didn't republish the manual, they didn't even republish any text. They just used an image from Apple's own serivce manual to show what a sloppy QC job they do in processor installation, as a public service. It's legal, and they don't have to remove the image under any laws.
if i start up the machine from an ide disk and i get an update for the ide/ata channel driver, i should be able to update it without restarting the whole machine, just freeze the associated processes, unhook driver, attach new one, reattach hooks.
Unfortunately, almost every process would be associated. Still, this is possible in Linux. You can freeze processes, you can build the IDE drivers as modules (make sure they're in initrd!), you can modprobe/rmmod drivers that are in use. The tricky bit is detaching/reattaching the hooks. I don't know how that's done. Still, it should be possible using Linux's modular kernel.
Hell, there are a couple kernel mods that allow for writing user-space drivers... doesn't this make Linux, in fact, a hybrid kernel, rather than monolithic?
Are you gonna take that Pengu? He just called you a wet dream! Go over there and smack him around a bit!
(Pengu is a fileserver I built three years ago, turned on, and have not yet turned off or rebooted. It runs Linux 2.4.x, Samba, nmbd, dhcpcd, apache, and little else)
That's kinda the point of my post; microkernels, though 'easier' to maintain, are far more difficult to design - and almost always unbearably slow. Apple, as you said, has the exception with some dirty hackwork.
Meanwhile, VMs, and virtualization: the industry keeps touting these as ways to utilize more of your servers or some shit, and I don't buy it. Ok, theoretically by running several virtualizaed servers you can get a couple more nines of uptime (one vServ crashes, the other stays alive), but that won't stop a slashflood from bringing that server to its knees (both vServs working their hardest can still only serve roughly 90% of the requests that a fully native server could - less when you factor in shared caching and such). It's marketing hype as far as I'm concerned; paying for a VMWare license for each of a server farm could not possibly be more expensive than building the server farm with actual servers.
Driver protection: This is always a trade-off. If the drivers are in kernel space, they're faster, but it's harder to keep them from killing your kernel. If they're in userspace, it's far more stable, but you take the comms-performance hit. It's actually the same tradeoff you get in Mono vs Micro kernel.
The fact is, Microkernels will never become mass-marketed (apple aside). People want speed, and don't really go for security and stability. That's not to say L4, Mach and even Amoeba aren't the future of the server market for the very same reason - L4, for example, does the best job of isolated machine virtualization of any VM implementation I've seen - I just don't think they're going to get anywhere on the desktop. At least, not until this thing can think faster than I can.
Actually, I do. But then, in linux, browsers have no way of installing/running remote binaries on their own.
And no. I don't let the average user on my linux box with root priveliges. But I personally like to be in charge of my machine. On my windows box, I can almost smell when there's spyware near. It's seriously gotten so bad a problem that I think I've developed an extra sensory organ for it.
Except they won't. Too many useless humans buy the marketing.
"Oh, it's beautiful!"
"But, madame, it's man-made."
"So it's not real?"
"That is correct."
"Oh, I... uh... though so; it's too perfect to be a _real_ diamond"
Yeah. Nevermind that it's chemically and structurally identical, save for the lack of defects. It's worth crazy amounts of money to these people _because_ 'real' diamonds are so 'rare' (read: costly in terms of the blood and freedom of some folks out in africanistan -- meant as a slight to the useless marketing-fooled humans, not the nations of africa or any country ending in -stan).
While Mars and North Dakota are similar in that they are barren and lifeless, you must understand that the conditions to be expected in the two locations must be engineered against in completely different ways.
Mars: <14 psia, almost no humidity, almost no atmospheric movement
North Dakota: 13-15 psia, depending on the >=10% humidity, plenty of atmospheric movement (wind), precipitation is even possible.
Besides, it only takes one sharp thing carried by the wind to reduce a multi-thousand dollar space suit to a worthless punctured high-tech rag.
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely enough, it's also SEPTA's (South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) current sloagan.
Nothing's new anymore, is it?
Actually, when something doesn't work in Linux, I generally say, 'Oh. Ok. Not quite implemented. Let's see what we can do to fix that.'
But then, I'm not a sheep. Sheep.
"Last night alone I discovered that somehow Gentoo and udev had removed my /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 link to my cdrom drive so now I couldn't mount a cdrom the same way anymore"
/dev/hd(letter of your cdrom) /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 would fix the problem).
KDE's 'Safely Remove' option is borken; it removes all links to the device, so if you unmount something like a CD, well shit like that happens (meanwhile, ln -sf
"Then the copying of files to my PSP via USB failed for some unkown reason."
Unfortunately, both KDE and Gnome report that copying is done without checking the system's cache. You can copy everything over, think your done, and still have a cache to flush when you unplug the thing. Remember: always run sync and unmount before removing any drive. KDE's 'Safely Remove' doesn't do this right.
So, yes, you're right: The hotplugging is somewhat annoyingly screwy. Me, I do something about it - mostly patch and submit changes (not that they often get used), and write filler scripts to handle integrating the basics.
Well, my first attempt to get Firefox working, I missed it for a few seconds before thinking 'Hey, these things might just be akin to something like squashfs'.
.app folder outside of Applications is not 'copy to Applications and execute'
Still, it seems a bit backwards for Apple. Make the user open the apps folder, and drag Firefox out of its container and into apps. Seems like more steps than they usually make the user take. I'm very surprised that the default action for a
But yeah. That's just me. I like making my system work more smoothly. (I've even got a 'Grandma Safe' mod for Slax that's coming along nicely).
It took me weeks to get this stuff working on my box. Most often, a quick 'alsaconf' will solve your sound problems, burning is easily handled by k3b, and kplayer, kaffiene, mplayer, gmplayer, etc. will handle movie watching with ease.
What bugs me about this, though, is that there are simple solutions to almost every problem with linux I've seen - yet the solutions don't quite get integrated into the distros.
It's aggrivating.
Why? So he can get a bad impression of the GUI aspect as well as the integration aspect?
Close. I don't think we'll ever see an end to the component model for computers.
I do think, however, that we're going to begin to see the end of the GP computer in the home.
More and more, the home computer, to the general consumer, represents just a few tasks: surf the internet, get your e-mail, listen to music, work on documents, and maybe a few other things. (Don't straw-man me here. I'm talking about the general consumer, not us slashdotters)
For a home kiosk, an end-to-end design would be best - and least likely to succumb to the issue of virii and spyware, if designed well. A boon to your usual "I don't play with my computer" type.
No, I argued from point one that accessibility shouldn't be built into a free OS for sociotechnical reasons.
I fucking hate it when people don't pay attention.
*blinks*
/usr/X11R6/bin when you're a firey new linux hacker).
You obviously don't understand, and there's a good chance that any explanation I give is going to be tossed away as an 'arbitrary distinction'. I'll let it go, but know that the memory space (ie: kernel/user) and disposition (desktop environment component or independent shared object) of a library versus its size, use and impact is very important from a programmer's and OS-writer's POV.
I'll just put it another way: Apple could do it because they didn't have to deal with a picky community. They could just force whatever version of whateve they felt was best down their users' throats. You can't DO that in the OSS community; you can't just shove TTS capability, for example, into KDE. The Gnome users will bitch and moan and pressure Gnome into doing the same, the KDE users will bitch and moan and say TTS package X is better than this Y crap, and why aren't they using that one.
You can, of course, get away with choosing a specific package at a distribution level - and this already happens (Ubuntu and Kubuntu both have very good internationalized TTS capabilities, implemented at the shared library level) - but that doesn't make it apply to all Linuxes.
Oh, and the Magnifier in Linux is both there, made as part of X.org, and has been around for ages (since '95, at least; it's one of the crappy little programs that you mess with just 'cos it's in
I'm talking at a code level, not at a conceptual level (which is where Apple marketing always works).
Apple's accessibility features, like Microsoft's, are all at the application and common/dynamic/shared library level.
My above post was meant to show that the other places to put a library - OS and GUI/API - are not suitable if you want the library to be universally accessible, especially in an OSS environment where people don't want to be locked in to a given word processor, much less desktop environment.
actually, since OO.o already has both spelling and grammar checking, it's just a short hop to figure out which homograph is the correct one for common words.
But no, MS doesn't automatically figure out how to pronounce things, and I'm prettu sure there's no way to annotate in the way you're referring manually.
There are problems with that whole statement.
First assuming OS level, it would mean building a whole sound server (bad idea; crashes in sound system become fatal) and text-to-speech engine (bad idea; size constraints) into the OS's kernel space.
Assuming API level, we have a different set of issues. For example, say that Qt (kOffice, Konqueror, KDE) includes text-to-speech functionality for all GUI text in its API. What about GTK+ (OO.o, Firefox, the GIMP, Gnome)? Also, how do you ensure that aRts/ESounD is running?
Text to speech is generally a separated API for a reason: it ensures the lib is accessible to every program, even command line. The same is true for a lot of less-than-common libraries.
And I'll bet that by the time ODF is live, rolled out and running, some enterprising diabled human will have written a screen reading routine and added it to OO.o's sources.
Which is the point: first, it's the app, not the format that has the actual problem here. Second, it's an OSS app, so 'See a problem, fix a problem'. This is of course better than what is happining according to the article, which seems like 'See a problem, bitch about the problem in the hopes that someone will fix it for you'.
*blinks*
Uhh, since when did the format have anything to do with the accessibility capabilities of the app?
Ok, you want a screen reader and magnifier for OOo? Fine, ask the community for it - I promise it won't be as hard to obtain as it was from MS.
But honestly, the format just stores the data. The accesibility features are part of the software, not the data.
Misappropriation isn't against contract - anyone who gets the manual from a service provider has no contract with Apple. However, whether it's stolen or given, the service provider has breached whatever non-disclosure contract that was necessary to buy the book from Apple. That is, if such a contract is necessary. If not, there's not a damn thing Apple can do aside from beat its chest and be angry.
I'm ... not sure that argument actually makes sense.
The certification exams should assure the quality of their service providers. Selling manuals and parts to others doesn't make them 'serivce providers', and certainly doesn't make them Apple's service providers.
Meanwhile, Apple's economic interest doesn't come into play here - they obtained a copyrighted material and used a small portion of it under fair use. They didn't republish the manual, they didn't even republish any text. They just used an image from Apple's own serivce manual to show what a sloppy QC job they do in processor installation, as a public service. It's legal, and they don't have to remove the image under any laws.
if i start up the machine from an ide disk and i get an update for the ide/ata channel driver, i should be able to update it without restarting the whole machine, just freeze the associated processes, unhook driver, attach new one, reattach hooks.
Unfortunately, almost every process would be associated. Still, this is possible in Linux. You can freeze processes, you can build the IDE drivers as modules (make sure they're in initrd!), you can modprobe/rmmod drivers that are in use. The tricky bit is detaching/reattaching the hooks. I don't know how that's done. Still, it should be possible using Linux's modular kernel.
Hell, there are a couple kernel mods that allow for writing user-space drivers... doesn't this make Linux, in fact, a hybrid kernel, rather than monolithic?
Oh, if only we'd built the ship with five million and one hulls!
*raises eyebrow*
*looks at my penguin fileserver*
Are you gonna take that Pengu? He just called you a wet dream! Go over there and smack him around a bit!
(Pengu is a fileserver I built three years ago, turned on, and have not yet turned off or rebooted. It runs Linux 2.4.x, Samba, nmbd, dhcpcd, apache, and little else)
That's kinda the point of my post; microkernels, though 'easier' to maintain, are far more difficult to design - and almost always unbearably slow. Apple, as you said, has the exception with some dirty hackwork.
Meanwhile, VMs, and virtualization: the industry keeps touting these as ways to utilize more of your servers or some shit, and I don't buy it. Ok, theoretically by running several virtualizaed servers you can get a couple more nines of uptime (one vServ crashes, the other stays alive), but that won't stop a slashflood from bringing that server to its knees (both vServs working their hardest can still only serve roughly 90% of the requests that a fully native server could - less when you factor in shared caching and such). It's marketing hype as far as I'm concerned; paying for a VMWare license for each of a server farm could not possibly be more expensive than building the server farm with actual servers.
Driver protection: This is always a trade-off. If the drivers are in kernel space, they're faster, but it's harder to keep them from killing your kernel. If they're in userspace, it's far more stable, but you take the comms-performance hit. It's actually the same tradeoff you get in Mono vs Micro kernel.
The fact is, Microkernels will never become mass-marketed (apple aside). People want speed, and don't really go for security and stability. That's not to say L4, Mach and even Amoeba aren't the future of the server market for the very same reason - L4, for example, does the best job of isolated machine virtualization of any VM implementation I've seen - I just don't think they're going to get anywhere on the desktop. At least, not until this thing can think faster than I can.
Actually, I do. But then, in linux, browsers have no way of installing/running remote binaries on their own.
And no. I don't let the average user on my linux box with root priveliges. But I personally like to be in charge of my machine. On my windows box, I can almost smell when there's spyware near. It's seriously gotten so bad a problem that I think I've developed an extra sensory organ for it.
Yeah. No one else has either.
Tannenbaum has been spouting that business for the last twenty years. It holds no more true in practice today than it did when he started.
Except they won't. Too many useless humans buy the marketing.
... uh ... though so; it's too perfect to be a _real_ diamond"
"Oh, it's beautiful!"
"But, madame, it's man-made."
"So it's not real?"
"That is correct."
"Oh, I
Yeah. Nevermind that it's chemically and structurally identical, save for the lack of defects. It's worth crazy amounts of money to these people _because_ 'real' diamonds are so 'rare' (read: costly in terms of the blood and freedom of some folks out in africanistan -- meant as a slight to the useless marketing-fooled humans, not the nations of africa or any country ending in -stan).
While Mars and North Dakota are similar in that they are barren and lifeless, you must understand that the conditions to be expected in the two locations must be engineered against in completely different ways.
Mars: <14 psia, almost no humidity, almost no atmospheric movement
North Dakota: 13-15 psia, depending on the >=10% humidity, plenty of atmospheric movement (wind), precipitation is even possible.
Besides, it only takes one sharp thing carried by the wind to reduce a multi-thousand dollar space suit to a worthless punctured high-tech rag.