Let me be more precise for you. Go to a computer store and buy a computer. Install the operating system. Does it support all the devices that are ALREADY BUILD IN to the box you bought? Windows - yes. Linux - no. Not talking about add-on hardware, cameras, turners, etc. I'm talking about the vanilla hardware off the shelf that the store sold you in the first place.
Latest example: I picked out a Dell computer because Dell was supposed to be good with Linux. But it has Broadcom wireless. Worked in the pre-inistalled Windows instantly. The driver that comes with Linux (named "b42"?) doesn't work. The 'cut-and-paste" driver doesn't work. A source code driver I downloaded from the Broadcom web site doesn't work either.
Another example: A friend bought a computer and I installed Windows 98 and LinuxTLE (derived from Red Hat) on it. A few years later I bought it from him and installed Ubuntu. LinuxTLE had sound; Ubuntu has no sound. I don't know what sound card I've got, I don't know what Ubuntu uses for hardware detection, I don't know what is wrong but I have no sound.
External hardware, like scanners and cameras? Argh! Both Windows and Linux need a driver. The Windows driver comes on a CD with the unit. You have to search the Internet for a Linux driver, and often there is no working driver at all yet. Linux functions on the belief that we can reverse-engineer the new HP 4127 and make a driver for it, but by the time our driver is working HP comes out with the 4128 and we have the same problem all over agin.
Many of the computers I set up are dual-boot, Windows and Linux. Invariably, there is some hardware that works under Windows but not under Linux. Linux advocates can argue who is to blame, but I hate telling my friend "Well, to use your scanner, you have to reboot into Windows." Yes, that actually happened, and SANE is anything but "easy". Ask anyone with a dual boot computer and they'll tell you of the same pain.
Before I go much further, let me just say that Linux has come a long way and is getting very close. But it has been this way for years.
I run Linux. I've been using Linux for maybe six years. I started out as an enthusiast, but now I tell people "If you have the money, get Windows."
Why? Linux never gets finished. Application X has 10 features and works 90% of the time. A year later, Application X has 20 features - the first ten work 100% of the time and the new ten work 80% of the time. Application X will never get better than 90% reliable. It appears as though Linux users will tolerate a certain level of bugginess, and over the years old bugs are replaced with new bugs.
For another thing, since everything can be replaced in Linux, you keep getting new components with new bugs, instead of the old components with bugs fixed. Example: The KUbuntu network control GUI sucks compared to the one Red Hat had *five*years*ago*. But it's "new", it's "ours", so we have to use it. (I personally have written my own command-line scripts to control the network settings, and yes I can't do that in Windows.)
Although Linux features keep extending, expectations (i.e. Windows) keep extending and Linux never seems to catch up. Part of it is QA Testing, which appears to be non-existant in the OSS world. Part of it is a lack of hardware manufacturer cooperation. Part of it is ego-based change for the sake of change.
The foundation of the Personal Computer software industry is the archetypical "dumb user". Linux is not ready for the dumb user, and probably will never be.
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
But closed-source software is controlled by a company that wants to sell the product, whereas open source software is controlled by programmers who often just want to show off.
A classic example is XMMS. The developers took the best Linux music player, and made it into a background server - AND THREW AWAY THE USER INTERFACE! No corporation would do something that dumb.
Let's get one message through to Linux developers everywhere: USERS WILL NOT RECOMPILE. They should not recompile the kernel, or the applications, or the drivers, or anything else. If necessary make your code five times larger and do run time configuration. All modern Linux systems are controlled by a package manager. Recompilation blows the crap out of the package manager.
It's not whether Linux has a driver for a particular device. The problem is that if I buy any computer, and install (Ubuntu) Linux, SOMETHING won't work. On one it's the sound, on another it's the wireless LAN. But it's ALWAYS SOMETHING. (I am not in the USA and so can not buy one with Linux preinstalled.) I use a DELL M65 and everything works except the Broadcom wireless; I have gone through THREE generations of Linux drivers and NONE of them work.
Google is an interesting possibility. It would allow a merger of workstation and cloud that could be amazing. Imagine erasing the local/internet boundary. Imagine buying a new computer, plugging it in, and bingo, you're up and running with all your data and applications. "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our notebooks together." Imagine a Google Applications Platform for Windows which is technically a Linux simulator.
We have a simliar law in Thailand. I implemented our logging using wireshark. I may have to log the stuff for the cops but I don't have to make it easy for them to read it.
Does anyone have a list of the sites that the Australian Government wants to block. After all, I don't live in Australia so it isn't illegal for me to look at what the Oz-ies are being silly about. Indeed, it isn't illegal for an Oz-ie to look at these sites. Yet. So whom do they want to block?
The way I figure it, applications don't really do anything themselves, they just call the operating system. Since I can recompile Linux, I can make the OS lie to the application. My control over the operating system implies control over the application, which overrides the vendor's control. Yes?
He said "Windows XP probably won't even boot on any PC being produced 30 years from now." The last time I installed MS-DOS on a computer was maybe 2006. It runs. I have an image of a CP/M-86 boot disk that still runs on the latest Intel hardware, and even runs on a Qemu virtual machine. Intel is incredibly good at upward compatability, unlike everyone else I could name.
JPEG's can always be read by archiving a viewer and taking a screen shot of whatever it shows. MP3's can be read with a speaker and a microphone.
Yes, you'll have to archive the software as well as the data. Sounds like you have to read and write it every few years to keep the storage live. But it's doable, and not too expensive
In about 1985 I was able to reboot my MS-DOS computer in eight seconds. My TSR ran at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT and stored an image of all lower memeory into an L.I.M. RAM card bank. Press Ctrl+Alt+Ins and the TSR would reload lower memory from the RAM bank. Eight seconds to reboot.
Linux suggestion: save ASCII config file timestamps and corresponding kernel structures. If the ASCII config file is unchanged, then reload the internal structure without any recomputation.
With an iPhone or a BlackBerry or some such, you can write a note and e-mail it to yourself, pick it up on your big machine later. Almost nothing to carry around.
When the head of accounting left, we gave a test to the accounting clerks. None of them knew the answer to "What is 75% of 4?". We wanted to hire a programmer and I created a simple test. Many interviewees talked great B.S. but couldn't do diddly-squat when faced with real tasks such as explain what a five line C function did. One of the worst performer was a man who taught programming!
The test isn't to decide if you're great or very great - it's to tell if you're a programmer or a con artist.
One year I signed up for a sourceforge project on Open Source Missile Control Systems. I did not notice that it was April 1. The project died before it was born. I thought it was a great idea.
If you use a touch screen for an hour your arm falls off. Human arms are not muscled to hover. Mice won out because you can lay your arm on the desk and push the mouse around with minimal muscle power. Minority Report looked great but if you had to do wave your arms around all day long you'd die of cramps overnight.
Never forget that ethics arises from an individual's experience. I for one have virtually no sense of privacy. So I tend not to "respect" other people's privacy. I have strict respect for personal property, but no respect for intellectual property.
As a consequence, you may feel my actions are unethical, but that is only because they don't match your standards. I may feel your actions are unethical also. We can not even agree on what is illegal (for example, Laos has no copyright law).
"Lose your magic card? No problem, it gets invalidated just like an ATM card and the bank sends you a new one, possibly for a small fee."
Better: Bank sends you two; original and backup. Using the backup automatically invalidates the original and triggers the bank to send you a new pair. So if you're still using the original and it suddenly stops working, the backup has been stolen, call the bank immediately. If the original is stolen, just use the backup and the thief now has a worthless key. Instant replacement.
My web site contains: Email: nameexample.com. It's been up for several years and I've gotten virtually no spam. Certainly a spammer spider could recognize "mailto:" or "%40" or "@". But to do that, the spider must slow down. The spammer is better off with a high speed spider that reads ten times as many pages per hour just looking for at-signs. But I don't know for sure.
Are there open source spammer spiders? I'd like to read one.
Cold beer, warm sunshine, hot ladies. Smiles. Laid back; casual. Imagine a country where you are respected and admired. Imagine a country where 8 year olds drive motorcycles and 80 year olds live with their children. No Homeland Security, no CNN. I've lived in Thailand for sixteen years, and never regretted a minute of it.
Happens to me all the time. We call it "Magic Fingers". Some computer is having a problem, and I settle in to examine it, and it works OK. Problem generally does not come back. My best guess is that I take it easy, read the messages, wait for each step to finish before doing anything else, have patience. But I don't know for sure. All I know for sure is that I've got Magic Fingers. I do have to be there in person for it to work. When the Chinese space station computer acts up mysteriously, guys, I'm available - 24/7.
Fifteen years ago a computer ignorant friend saw that our workstation's screen was black and he called out, worried that the hardware had broken. I said "Aw, that darned thing!" and kicked the table. The screen popped back to life. Of course, the screen blanker had turned on, and kicking the table bounced the mouse and turned it off. But he didn't know that. He was terribly impressed that I could repair computer equipment just by kicking and cursing.
During the Vietnam war the Pentagon ran war games exploring the nuclear option. The result was that 'nuclear' is a psychological categorical line. Once someone crosses the non-nuclear/nuclear barrier, the size and strength of the nuclear weapons used increases steadily. You use 10 kilotons, the enemy responds with 15, you use 25, they use 50, and eventually you're talking city busters.
No one has exploded a nuclear weapon in war since 1945. Once the world crosses that threshhold, the door is opened, the stakes will rise, and you will live to see New York City obliterated.
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Let me be more precise for you. Go to a computer store and buy a computer. Install the operating system. Does it support all the devices that are ALREADY BUILD IN to the box you bought? Windows - yes. Linux - no. Not talking about add-on hardware, cameras, turners, etc. I'm talking about the vanilla hardware off the shelf that the store sold you in the first place.
Latest example: I picked out a Dell computer because Dell was supposed to be good with Linux. But it has Broadcom wireless. Worked in the pre-inistalled Windows instantly. The driver that comes with Linux (named "b42"?) doesn't work. The 'cut-and-paste" driver doesn't work. A source code driver I downloaded from the Broadcom web site doesn't work either.
Another example: A friend bought a computer and I installed Windows 98 and LinuxTLE (derived from Red Hat) on it. A few years later I bought it from him and installed Ubuntu. LinuxTLE had sound; Ubuntu has no sound. I don't know what sound card I've got, I don't know what Ubuntu uses for hardware detection, I don't know what is wrong but I have no sound.
External hardware, like scanners and cameras? Argh! Both Windows and Linux need a driver. The Windows driver comes on a CD with the unit. You have to search the Internet for a Linux driver, and often there is no working driver at all yet. Linux functions on the belief that we can reverse-engineer the new HP 4127 and make a driver for it, but by the time our driver is working HP comes out with the 4128 and we have the same problem all over agin.
Many of the computers I set up are dual-boot, Windows and Linux. Invariably, there is some hardware that works under Windows but not under Linux. Linux advocates can argue who is to blame, but I hate telling my friend "Well, to use your scanner, you have to reboot into Windows." Yes, that actually happened, and SANE is anything but "easy". Ask anyone with a dual boot computer and they'll tell you of the same pain.
I have installed MS-DOS and Windows 3 and Windows 98 and Windows XP many times and rarely, if ever, encountered something that did not work.
Fact is Linux isn't ready. Period. STILL.
Before I go much further, let me just say that Linux has come a long way and is getting very close. But it has been this way for years.
I run Linux. I've been using Linux for maybe six years. I started out as an enthusiast, but now I tell people "If you have the money, get Windows."
Why? Linux never gets finished. Application X has 10 features and works 90% of the time. A year later, Application X has 20 features - the first ten work 100% of the time and the new ten work 80% of the time. Application X will never get better than 90% reliable. It appears as though Linux users will tolerate a certain level of bugginess, and over the years old bugs are replaced with new bugs.
For another thing, since everything can be replaced in Linux, you keep getting new components with new bugs, instead of the old components with bugs fixed. Example: The KUbuntu network control GUI sucks compared to the one Red Hat had *five*years*ago*. But it's "new", it's "ours", so we have to use it. (I personally have written my own command-line scripts to control the network settings, and yes I can't do that in Windows.)
Although Linux features keep extending, expectations (i.e. Windows) keep extending and Linux never seems to catch up. Part of it is QA Testing, which appears to be non-existant in the OSS world. Part of it is a lack of hardware manufacturer cooperation. Part of it is ego-based change for the sake of change.
The foundation of the Personal Computer software industry is the archetypical "dumb user". Linux is not ready for the dumb user, and probably will never be.
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
But closed-source software is controlled by a company that wants to sell the product, whereas open source software is controlled by programmers who often just want to show off.
A classic example is XMMS. The developers took the best Linux music player, and made it into a background server - AND THREW AWAY THE USER INTERFACE! No corporation would do something that dumb.
Let's get one message through to Linux developers everywhere: USERS WILL NOT RECOMPILE. They should not recompile the kernel, or the applications, or the drivers, or anything else. If necessary make your code five times larger and do run time configuration. All modern Linux systems are controlled by a package manager. Recompilation blows the crap out of the package manager.
It's not whether Linux has a driver for a particular device. The problem is that if I buy any computer, and install (Ubuntu) Linux, SOMETHING won't work. On one it's the sound, on another it's the wireless LAN. But it's ALWAYS SOMETHING. (I am not in the USA and so can not buy one with Linux preinstalled.) I use a DELL M65 and everything works except the Broadcom wireless; I have gone through THREE generations of Linux drivers and NONE of them work.
Google is an interesting possibility. It would allow a merger of workstation and cloud that could be amazing. Imagine erasing the local/internet boundary. Imagine buying a new computer, plugging it in, and bingo, you're up and running with all your data and applications. "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our notebooks together." Imagine a Google Applications Platform for Windows which is technically a Linux simulator.
We have a simliar law in Thailand. I implemented our logging using wireshark. I may have to log the stuff for the cops but I don't have to make it easy for them to read it.
Does anyone have a list of the sites that the Australian Government wants to block. After all, I don't live in Australia so it isn't illegal for me to look at what the Oz-ies are being silly about. Indeed, it isn't illegal for an Oz-ie to look at these sites. Yet. So whom do they want to block?
The way I figure it, applications don't really do anything themselves, they just call the operating system. Since I can recompile Linux, I can make the OS lie to the application. My control over the operating system implies control over the application, which overrides the vendor's control. Yes?
All this time I believed that Linux was immune to DRM. How did they get DRM to work under Linux?
He said "Windows XP probably won't even boot on any PC being produced 30 years from now." The last time I installed MS-DOS on a computer was maybe 2006. It runs. I have an image of a CP/M-86 boot disk that still runs on the latest Intel hardware, and even runs on a Qemu virtual machine. Intel is incredibly good at upward compatability, unlike everyone else I could name.
JPEG's can always be read by archiving a viewer and taking a screen shot of whatever it shows. MP3's can be read with a speaker and a microphone.
Yes, you'll have to archive the software as well as the data. Sounds like you have to read and write it every few years to keep the storage live. But it's doable, and not too expensive
In about 1985 I was able to reboot my MS-DOS computer in eight seconds. My TSR ran at the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT and stored an image of all lower memeory into an L.I.M. RAM card bank. Press Ctrl+Alt+Ins and the TSR would reload lower memory from the RAM bank. Eight seconds to reboot.
Linux suggestion: save ASCII config file timestamps and corresponding kernel structures. If the ASCII config file is unchanged, then reload the internal structure without any recomputation.
With an iPhone or a BlackBerry or some such, you can write a note and e-mail it to yourself, pick it up on your big machine later. Almost nothing to carry around.
When the head of accounting left, we gave a test to the accounting clerks. None of them knew the answer to "What is 75% of 4?". We wanted to hire a programmer and I created a simple test. Many interviewees talked great B.S. but couldn't do diddly-squat when faced with real tasks such as explain what a five line C function did. One of the worst performer was a man who taught programming! The test isn't to decide if you're great or very great - it's to tell if you're a programmer or a con artist.
One year I signed up for a sourceforge project on Open Source Missile Control Systems. I did not notice that it was April 1. The project died before it was born. I thought it was a great idea.
If you use a touch screen for an hour your arm falls off. Human arms are not muscled to hover. Mice won out because you can lay your arm on the desk and push the mouse around with minimal muscle power. Minority Report looked great but if you had to do wave your arms around all day long you'd die of cramps overnight.
Never forget that ethics arises from an individual's experience. I for one have virtually no sense of privacy. So I tend not to "respect" other people's privacy. I have strict respect for personal property, but no respect for intellectual property.
As a consequence, you may feel my actions are unethical, but that is only because they don't match your standards. I may feel your actions are unethical also. We can not even agree on what is illegal (for example, Laos has no copyright law).
"Lose your magic card? No problem, it gets invalidated just like an ATM card and the bank sends you a new one, possibly for a small fee."
Better: Bank sends you two; original and backup. Using the backup automatically invalidates the original and triggers the bank to send you a new pair. So if you're still using the original and it suddenly stops working, the backup has been stolen, call the bank immediately. If the original is stolen, just use the backup and the thief now has a worthless key. Instant replacement.
My web site contains: Email: nameexample.com. It's been up for several years and I've gotten virtually no spam. Certainly a spammer spider could recognize "mailto:" or "%40" or "@". But to do that, the spider must slow down. The spammer is better off with a high speed spider that reads ten times as many pages per hour just looking for at-signs. But I don't know for sure.
Are there open source spammer spiders? I'd like to read one.
Cold beer, warm sunshine, hot ladies. Smiles. Laid back; casual. Imagine a country where you are respected and admired. Imagine a country where 8 year olds drive motorcycles and 80 year olds live with their children. No Homeland Security, no CNN. I've lived in Thailand for sixteen years, and never regretted a minute of it.
Happens to me all the time. We call it "Magic Fingers". Some computer is having a problem, and I settle in to examine it, and it works OK. Problem generally does not come back. My best guess is that I take it easy, read the messages, wait for each step to finish before doing anything else, have patience. But I don't know for sure. All I know for sure is that I've got Magic Fingers. I do have to be there in person for it to work. When the Chinese space station computer acts up mysteriously, guys, I'm available - 24/7.
Fifteen years ago a computer ignorant friend saw that our workstation's screen was black and he called out, worried that the hardware had broken. I said "Aw, that darned thing!" and kicked the table. The screen popped back to life. Of course, the screen blanker had turned on, and kicking the table bounced the mouse and turned it off. But he didn't know that. He was terribly impressed that I could repair computer equipment just by kicking and cursing.
No one has exploded a nuclear weapon in war since 1945. Once the world crosses that threshhold, the door is opened, the stakes will rise, and you will live to see New York City obliterated.
In Thailand, where I am, RFID tags cost about 75 cents each, whereas Barcode labels have zero unit cost. We stuck to barcodes because of the price.